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Author Loved Russia, Hated Communism

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By CAROL J. WILLIAMS

Los Angeles Times

Published: August 4, 2008

Updated: 08/04/2008 12:22 am

MOSCOW - Nobel laureate Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the reclusive icon of the Russian intelligentsia and chronicler of Communist repression, died Sunday. He was 89.

His son, Stephan Solzhenitsyn, told The Associated Press that his father died of heart failure in Moscow.

The soulful writer and spiritual father of Russia's nationalist patriotic movement lived to be reunited with his beloved homeland after two decades of exile - only to be as distressed by communism's damage to the Russian character as he was by his earlier forced estrangement from the land and people he loved.

Solzhenitsyn returned from his Vermont refuge to a dramatically changed Russia in 1994 but deemed it a moral ruin after a monthslong odyssey to become reacquainted with the country that had denounced him, stripped him of citizenship and expelled him in 1974.

Solzhenitsyn's labor, loves and politics mirrored the tumultuous history of his country in the past century.

That he persevered was a wonder to many; the bearded author with piercing blue eyes and a diffident manner had weathered cancer, prison, labor camps, controversy and condemnation.

Hailed as Russia's greatest living writer, the author of more than two dozen books - in addition to commentaries, poems, plays and film scripts - won back his citizenship and the respect of his fellow Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although his books were best-sellers in the West, only "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was published first in his homeland.

Other major works include a memoir, "The Oak and the Calf," and "August 1914," the first volume of a monumental history of 20th-century Russia.

With his masterwork, "The Gulag Archipelago," he gave a name to the brutal network of labor camps that spread across the Soviet Union during dictator Josef Stalin's frenzied industrialization drive. Tens of millions of men, women and children died in the effort.

Solzhenitsyn spent the last decade of his life in failing health and seclusion at his rural estate outside Moscow, editing his life's work for a 30-volume anthology that he predicted he would not live to see completed. When the first three volumes were finished in 2006, he observed that publication would run through 2010 and "continue after my death."

Despite his bitter experiences and gloomy view of the world, Solzhenitsyn was, according to biographer Michael Scammell, an "optimist ... a firm believer in the force of willpower with an unquenchable thirst for life and incredible powers of concentration." Yet at the same time, "He felt positively uncomfortable without a hair shirt of some kind."

He saw the Soviet Union as cruel and suffocating "under the malevolent and unyielding nature of communism." He even attacked the revered god of the Soviet Union - its founder, V.I. Lenin.

At times, Solzhenitsyn was courteous and attentive, with an outpouring of good humor. But he was also stubborn and abrasive, and developed a consuming hatred of communism that dismayed even those in the West who admired him.

He denounced the East-West detente of the 1970s and called the 1975 Helsinki Accord - the charter of the Conference of Security and Cooperation in Europe - the West's capitulation to Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe.

Never hesitant to criticize his adopted country during 20 years in exile, he viewed the United States and the West in general as morally weak, cravenly materialistic and suffering from "the spiritual impotence that comes from living a life of ease."

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