A Hero Falls

How many of you knew that Alexandr Solzhenitsen (sp?) recently passed away?

How many of you know who Alexandr Solzhenitsen was?

While he was an often hard to deal with old man, one whom I no doubt would have had at least a few major differences of opinion with, he was in the end one of a tiny handful of men that I would consider to be a hero.

Solzhenitsen spent about eight years in the horrid world of the Russian Prison Camps during the 1940s and 1950s. Unlike many millions of others, he lived to tell (and write!) about it. He was released during the first supposed Communist reform era of Russia. Decades before the mid to late 80s reforms, the mid 1950s reforms of Kruchev occured. This was the first hint of "Yeah, we're a bunch of totalitarians who can not support ourselves, so we'll act like we are reforming in order to get continued Western support" that continued for decades.

After his release, Solzhenitsen eventually wrote and published (1962 I think) a small novel entitled "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisavich." This was a fictional account of one day in the life of a Soviet Political prisoner in the Gulags of Stalin. This work eventually won Solzhenitsen a Nobel Prize for Literature.

As is always the case with tyrants, eventually the communists tired of Solzhenitsen's continued critiques of their ways. They eventually exiled him. He wound up in the US - Vermont in particular. However, rather than embracing the capitalism of the west, Solzhentisen criticized it, its decadence, its consumerism, its un-reverent religion of status, just as harshly as he criticized the Soviet tyrants.

This marginalized him and his writings. The extreme liberals of the west hated him because he was so staunchly opposed to the religion of statism. The 'conservatives' (mostly modern neo-con Republicans) could not tout him too loudly because he so staunchly opposed the 'religion' of capitalism and consumerism.

However, between the release of "One Day", his exile to the US, and his eventual return to Russia in the late eighties or early nineties, Solzenhitsen published many important works. Most notably, in my opinion, were the novel Cancer Ward and the massive three volume work about life in the prison camps entitled The Gulag Archipelego.

These are literary works based on his own biography. He had himself spent time in a Russian Hospital in the Cancer ward. Gulag was a semi-fictional, semi-factual series of tales from the prison camps. These works, it was said, held a mirror up to Soviet Society. Exactly how much they influenced the eventual fall of communism is up for debate, and likely unknowable. However, they did contribute. This adds to his hero status in my book.

However his hero status actually is based not on his works alone, important though they are. To me they are based on his resiliiance, and the steadfastness of his Faith. (Even though, he as a Russian Orthodox Christian, and me as a Reformed Christian would no doubt argue over the Faith itself) Perhaps there is no more moving sentence in anything that I have ever read than one, near the end of Volume II of Gulag, where, after spending literally hundreds of pages documenting the horrors of the place, could say "Thank you prison, for having been in my life." That is, Solzhenitsen saw clearly that all things are governed by God for his ultimate purpose. This includes the tragedy of spending eight years in a place that could only be described as 'hell on earth.' Sozhentisen recognized he would not be who he was, nor who God intended him to be, without going through this seemingly meaningless madness. Faith puts meaning into both joy and suffering. In fact, it puts joy into suffering.

We would all do well to have have cuch faith!