In many ways, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who passed away this week, was the perfect personification of Russia itself, which Winston Churchill once famously called a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.
Solzhenitsyn was indisputably Soviet Russias most prominent and outspoken dissident, whose book The Gulag Archipelago was no less instrumental in pulling down the Soviet Union than the work of Lech Walesa, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II or Anatoly Scharansky.
Yet, despite his defiance of and opposition to the Marxist ideology he championed as a young man, Solzhenitsyn was equally unimpressed by its democratic and capitalist opposite. After his expulsion from the USSR in 1974, he loudly condemned the materialism and decadence of the West, particularly America. His bitterness about it was so great that it eventually led him to return to post-Soviet Russia, where he spent his final years.
As an author, Solzhenitsyn stands among literatures greatest advocates of basic human rights and opponents of oppression, yet he was not immune to the influences of classical Russian anti-Semitism. Although he refuted the charge, traces of his mistrust of Jews as early champions of the Bolshevik revolution crept into his writing, as did other references to Jews that hearken back to czarist thinking.
But if Solzhenitsyn was indeed a misanthrope, unable to accommodate Jews, Russians, Europeans or Americans alike even, perhaps, if he was occasionally subject to anti-Semitic prejudices he was also a man who suffered a great deal in the course of his life. He was a Red Army officer on the front lines opposing the Germans in WW II, a prisoner for eight years in the brutal gulag which he made infamous as an author, a writer first celebrated and later condemned by and expelled from his native land.
Is it difficult to understand how such a life might leave traces, or even large unavoidable streaks, of human bitterness in its wake?
And has Solzhenitsyn not already made up for whatever prejudice he might have expressed?
The Gulag Archipelago, a book which could only be the product of amazing personal courage and steadfast moral clarity, did a great deal to weaken and topple the system of oppression that inspired it. The book, and others from Solzhenitsyns pen, is sure to live on, inspiring others with the courage to face different oppressors in the future.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was far from a perfect man, but there is no doubt that he was a brave man, a brilliant man and a compassionate man. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that he was one of the greatest voices of freedom in his time.
On that, there is no mystery.
