"Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evil doing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How then do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
WOV 89 God of eternity. Origin of the tune: The Russian Imperial Hymn: Composed by Alexei Fyodorovich Lvov
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place: sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. Socrates taught us: Know thyself!"
The Gulag Achipelago p 168.
In October 1917 "a sealed train" smuggled the exiled Vladimir Lenin across war-torn Europe into St. Petersburg, launching the Bolshevik revolution and the country's ultimately doomed experiment with Communism.
Seventy seven years later, another historic train crossed Russia headed for the nation's capital. In contrast to Lenin's train, this one travelled slowly from East to West making frequent stops. The passenger Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, exiled from the country of his birth 20 years earlier had come home.. He arrived from the east in Magadan, a northern city at the centre of the most brutal chain of camps. He bowed to touch the earth in a tribute to the millions who perished in the camps. He went on to the Pacific port of Vladivostok where he was mobbed by thousands and from there, with his family, took the trans-Siberia railway back to Moscow - a journey 55 days.
He said: "I return to a Russia tortured, stunned, altered beyond recognition, convulsively searching for itself, for its own true identity to search with you for ways to get out of our quagmire." Solzhenitsyn spent more than 40 years working in secrecy, in fear and finally in exile as he chiselled away at the lies that supported the Soviet system. And in the end he, as much perhaps as any individual helped to bring it down.
He was born on December 11th, 1918, a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, and raised by a solo mother in Southern Russia. As a ten year old he had already read Tolstoy's War and Peace and was trying his hand at writing poems and stories. He studied Physics and Mathematics until Hitler's Forces attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 and he became a front line Artillery Captain, twice decorated for bravery.
In 1945 Military censors found letters to a friend in which he criticised Stalin. That cost him eight years' detention in the Gulag camps, where tens of millions people perished. Because of his background in mathematics he was moved to a secret research institute and in 1950 to labour camps on the Kazakhstan steppes.
GULAG is the Russian acronym for The Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies: the "human meat grinder" for processing what the dictator Joseph Stalin sneered at as "Vermin and enemies of the people". There were at least 476 separate camp complexes, each comprising hundreds, even thousands of camps with an estimated 7 million prisoners at a given time.
He described how the prisoners formed a secret army of slave labourers who built railroads, worked in mines and cleared forests in some of the world's most inhospitable terrain. In the end, it is estimated that the Gulag systematically destroyed the lives of some 29 million people. He used the word Archipelago as a metaphor for the camps, spread throughout the Soviet Union like a chain of islands.
The majority of the Gulag camps were set in extremely remote areas of north-eastern Siberia and on the steppes of Kazakhstan. - Probably the worst camp complexes were the three built north of the Arctic Circle - these were vast and sparsely inhabited regions with no roads. Escape was prevented by the harsh elements, as well as tracker dogs that were assigned to each camp. Camps were spread throughout the entire Soviet Union including the European part of Russia, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, Czechoslavakia, Hungary, Poland and Mongolia.
The swing toward public denunciation of Stalin's crimes in 1961, initiated by Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev, saw the unknown 43-year-old author admitted to the Writers' Union.
"How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it-but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they've never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of any one of its innumerable islands Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centres. And those who, like you and me dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and Compulsorily via arrest.
Arrests rolled through the streets and apartment houses like an epidemic. Just as people transmit an epidemic infection from one to another without knowing it, by such innocent means as a handshake, a breath, handing someone something, so, too, they passed on the infection of inevitable arrest by a handshake, by a breath, by a chance meeting on the street."
Pages 3 and 75 Gulag Archipelago.
Prison begins with the "Box", in other words what amounts to a closet or packing case. The human being who has just been taken from freedom, still in a state of inner turmoil, ready to explain, to argue, to struggle, is when he first sets foot in prison, clapped into a "box" which sometimes has a lamp and a place where he can sit down, but which sometimes is dark and constructed in such a way that he can only stand up and even then is squeezed against the door. And he is held there for several hours, or for half a day. During those hours he knows absolutely nothing!
Will he perhaps be confined for life? He has never encountered anything like this and he cannot guess at the outcome. Those first hours are passing when everything inside him is still ablaze from the unstilled storm in his heart. Some become despondent – and that's the time to subject them to their first interrogation."
Page109 Gulag Archipelago
"Men of religion were an inevitable part of every annual "catch" and their silver locks gleamed in every cell and in every prisoner transport en route to the Solovetsky Islands.
From the early 20's on, arrests were also made among groups of theosophists, mystics, spiritualists. Also, religious societies and philosophers. –..ordinary Roman Catholics – Polish Catholic Priests etc – were arrested, too, as the normal course of events.
However, the most destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the Soviet Secret Police, could be realised only by mass arrests of Orthodox Believers. Monks and Nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile.
They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called "Nuns" in transit prisons and in camps. True they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. One author received a ten year sentence for writing the words: You can pray freely, but just so God alone can hear."
Gulag Archipelago pages 36/37
Then in 1962, as part of Khrushchev's anti-Stalin drive, Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", a novel based on his camp experiences. A literary and political bombshell, it made the author a household name overnight. His name was erased from the history of Soviet literature and even the distribution of his works became a criminal offence. In this book Solzhenitsyn paints an unforgettable picture of life in a penal work-camp, and the first part of his Gulag Archipelago chronicles how individuals, families and whole companies of people were sucked into what he called "our sewage disposal system" the terrors of which hung over every ordinary citizen.
"Sukhov found a place for his padded trousers, on the edge of a wooden mound, and leaned back against the wall. And then he leaned back, his coat and jacket tightened, and on the left side of his chest, near this heart, he felt something hard pressing against him. It was the corner of the hunk of bread, in his inside pocket, half of his ration that morning which he had taken with him for his dinner. He always took the same amount with him to work and never touched it until dinnertime. But he usually ate the other half at breakfast, and today he hadn't. And Shukhov realised that he had not really economised. He had a great yearning to eat the bread now, in this warm spot. It was five hours to dinner, and that was a long time.
The pain he had felt in his back had now moved, to his legs, and they began to feel quite week. If only he could get them near the stove.
Shukhov placed his mittens on his knees, undid his coat, untied his frozen face cloth from his neck, folded it several times and put it in his pocket. Then he reached for the hunk of bread in a little white cloth and holding the cloth against his chest inside his coat so as not to allow a crumb to fall, he began ever so slowly to nibble and chew at the bread. He had carried the bread under two layers of clothes and had warmed it with his own body so it was not in the least frozen.
In camps Shukhov had often remembered how they used to eat in the village, potatoes by the saucepan full, masses of porridge, and big chunks of meat in the old days. And milk enough to make you burst.
Shukhov had learned in camps that that was not the way to eat. You should eat with all your thoughts concentrated on your food, just as now he was nibbling the little pieces of bread, rolling them with his tongue and sucking them into his cheeks and then it tasted good, this moist, black bread."
Page 44 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
As we walked through the doors of this Church today,
somewhere in the world, doors closed behind other people in a different situation.
We entered joyfully to express our love and to pray together.
They entered to begin a long period of confinement,
sometimes of terror.
Let us pray for victims of oppression, for their families and friends,
and ask forgiveness if we have failed them in our prayers and our work for justice.
We thank you Lord for all who work for human rights
and the dignity and worth of all human beings
For Amnesty International
all Churches and organizations of all religions and none
who work for fundamental freedoms.
Help them to maintain their compassion
and to overcome the many difficulties that lie in their path.
may we never rest contented and comfortable in the freedom we enjoy
but play our part in the struggle for freedom throughout the world.
Liturgy Commission.
Solzhenitsyn was sensitive to the sufferings of wives and families of those who disappeared into the prison system and often never heard from again.
"And then had you failed to let your family know in the hurry of leaving and they thought you were in another camp? If you were nervous about this and inventive, you might find someone with a piece of pencil lead half an inch long and a piece of crumbled paper.
Making sure the convoy doesn't see you from the corridor … hunched over and facing in the opposite direction, you write to your family, between lurches of the carriage, that you have suddenly been taken from where you were and are being sent somewhere else, and you might be able to send only one letter a year from your new destination.
You have to fold your letter into a triangle and carry it to the toilet in the hope of a lucky break: they might just take you there while approaching a station, and the convoy guard on the carriage platform might get careless, and you can quickly press down on the flush pedal and using your body as a shield, throw the letter into the hole.
It will get wet, but it might fall right through and land between the rails. Or it might even get through dry, and the draft beneath the car will catch and whirl it, and it will fall under the wheels or miss them and land on the downward slope of the embankment.
Perhaps it will lie there until it rains, until it snows, until it disintegrates, but perhaps a human hand will pick it up. And if this person isn't a stickler for the Party line, he will make the address legible, he will straighten out the letters, or perhaps put it in an envelope, and perhaps the letter will even reach its destination. Sometimes such letters do arrive – postage due, half blurred, washed out, crumpled but carrying a clearly defined splash of grief."
Gulag Archipelago p 514
This was in the Kuibyshev Transit Prison in 1950. The prison was situated in a low-lying area ….And right above the prison, bordering it on the east, rose a high, long, grassy hill. It was outside the camp compound and above it: and from the inside and down below we couldn't see the approach to it. Very rarely did anyone ever appear up there, although sometimes goats were pastured there or children played.
And one cloudy summer day a city woman appeared on the ridge. Shading her eyes with her hand and barely moving, she began to scan our compound from above. At the time, three heavily populated cells were taking their outdoor walk in three separate exercise yards – and there in the abyss among those three hundred depersonalised ants she hoped to catch sight of her man!
Did she hope that her heart would tell her which one he was? In all probability they had refused to allow her a visit with him and so she had climbed that hill. Everyone noticed her from the courtyards and everyone stared at her. Down below in the hollow there was no wind, but it was blowing hard up above. It made her long dress, her jacket, and her long hair stream out and billow, expressing all that love and anxiety that possessed her.
I think that a statue of such a woman, right there on that spot, on the hill overlooking the transit prison, with her face to the Zhiguli Gates, just as she actually stood, might explain at least a little something to our grandchildren.
Page 550 The Gulag Archipelago
In 1970, still hounded by the communist authorities, he won the Nobel Prize for literature.
After his book the "Gulag Archipelago was published in 1973 he was stripped of his citizenship and exiled from the Soviet Union. He spent 20 years of unhappy and forced exile in the West, whose materialistic values he never ceased to denounce. He settled in Vermont because it reminded him of Russia. When he gained access to the records in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University he found that the information available in Russia on which he had based his writings was inaccurate so was forced to rewrite much of his material.
By the time he made a hero's return to Russia in 1994, it was to a challenging new country that - to his regret - was espousing those same values and which he barely recognised. He served notice he would continue to act as Russia's conscience and be as critical of the new capitalist Russia, in the grip of turbulent economic reforms, social hardship and violent crime, as of the old totalitarian system it replaced.
From his new home near Moscow he called for spiritual and moral regeneration in his homeland. He lamented the plight of Russians in other ex-Soviet republics, attacked the Government for policies that he said drove the nation to poverty and scolded his compatriots for greed and venality.
But the man, who as an outcast under communism had been a beacon for thousands of marginalised people, failed to touch the same nerve in the new Russia. As a moral force, he sits alongside of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Desmund Tutu as a great moral force of the mid-late 20th century. He died on August 3rd 2008.
Solzhenitsyn, a veteran of the Red Army, was buried with Military Honours including a gun salute. There were no eulogies. His was buried in the 16th century Donskoi Monastery in Moscow, the resting place of some of Russia's leading writers and philosophers. The burial took place after the solemn Russian Orthodox Service during which the Cantor led the chant containing the names of the deceased followed by the choir singing "Eternal Memory". The Russian President and Prime Minister laid a bunch of dark red roses at the foot of the coffin.
Ekaterina Markova, a writer and friend of Solzhenitsyn, said: "Solzhenitsyn served only God. Not the Government, not democracy, not even America. Only God, that's why he was a free person."
Russian Phoenix: the story of Russian Christians AD 988 – 1988 Francis House.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn. We never make mistakes.1972; One day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch 1971; The Gulag Archipelago 1974
"Jeremiah at Harvard." Charles Colson. Christianity Today August 5, 2008.
A Russian call to repenteance. Alesksandr Solzhenitsyn returns from exile to point a way out of the Soviet Quagmire". 8/15/1994
The Statesman. The writer who shook the Soviet Empire. 5/08/08
Washington Post. "Mourners pay respects to Solzhenistyn"
AFP: Russian writer Solzhenitsybn laid to rest in Moscow.
BBC News. Obituary: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Forced labor camps: Open Society Archives 23 Sept. 2003
GULAG: Soviet Forced Labour Camps and the struggle for freedom
Gulag: from Wikipedia
Ghulag: A history Anne Applebaum
BBC News: Russia pays Solzhenitsyn respects.
A tribute to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Paul Weyrich.
"Religion is undoubtedly necessary, but it must not be forcibly implanted and even must not be intensively propagandised, it is passed from man to man as an intimate gift."