TRIBUTES were paid this week to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident, Nobel laureate, and Templeton Prize-winner, who died on Sunday, aged 89.
He was imprisoned in the Gulag for eight years for anti-Soviet activities, after he wrote a letter critical of Stalin in 1945. The novella that came out of that experience, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, exposed the secret network of Soviet labour camps, and the regime endured by millions incarcerated as “enemies of the people”. It was published in 1962.
Canon Michael Bourdeaux, the founder in 1969 of the Keston Institute for the Study of Religion and Communism, lived in the Soviet Union during the years immediately before the publication of Solzenitsyn’s book, and later came to know him well.
He described the book as a turning-point in Russian literature, and in the self-understanding of Soviet society. Anyone who had a complaint, or was even mildly dissident, now had a rallying point. Its impact was so powerful that the history of modern Russia could be classified as “before Ivan Denisovich and after Ivan Denisovich. The Soviet Union could never be the same again,” Canon Bourdeaux said on Tuesday.
The book was personally authorised by Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party, who had denounced Stalin in 1956. Under pressure to back-pedal on reform, he had seized on the book as “a magnificent literary work, which underscored what he had said about the prison camps”, Canon Bourdeaux said.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was exiled to Kazakhstan after his release from the Gulag. He won the Nobel Prize in 1970, but was not allowed to go to Stockholm to receive it. The first volume of The Gulag Archipelago was published in 1974, when he was stripped of his citizenship and expelled from the USSR. He completed the three-volume work from his new home in Vermont.
His citizenship was restored in 1990 by the then President, Mikhail Gorbachev, and he returned to Russia in 1994, two years after the collapse of Communism. He refused a state award from Boris Yeltsin, whom he blamed for the parlous state of the economy, but accepted one from Vladimir Putin, whom he credited with beginning the country’s recovery. In 2001, he published Two Hundred Years Together, about the Jews in Russian society.
Solzhenitsyn dined at Lambeth Palace as a guest of Robert Runcie in 1983, when he came to England to receive the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Canon Bordeaux, who acted as his interpreter, contradicts suggestions that he was unapproachable.
“I found him exactly the opposite. He was a most wonderful, warm, and enthusiastic man, who absolutely charmed that group of people. Once you got him as a friend, you had him for life,” he said.
Obituaries had mentioned that Solzhenitsyn was an Orthodox Christian, but had not mentioned the extent to which he had bolstered Orthodox spirituality by standing as a Christian educated under the Communist system, Canon Bourdeaux said.
“As far as we know, he was taught the Christian faith at his grandmother’s knee. That went by the board because he went through the Soviet education system and became, in effect, an atheist, although not a practising one. He rediscovered his Christian roots in prison,” he said. “If you read Ivan Denisovich carefully, in the prison camp he met a Baptist prisoner who taught him how to pray.
“That was autobiographical. It is an astonishing moment. It gave Christians in Moscow the most incredible feeling of faithful triumph over persecution under Communism.” For Solzhenitsyn, an Orthodox Christian, to be inspired by Baptists — “nobody had ever written about that in Russia,” Canon Bourdeaux said.
The high moral stance that Solzhenitsyn later took included criticism of the Moscow Patriarchate for not taking a tough enough stand against Communism.