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Jewish World Review August 6, 2008 / 5 Menachem-Av 5768 Speak the Truth; Defeat the Lies By Jonathan Tobin
Solzhenitsyn's example ought to remind us of the perils of indifference to tyranny
He will demonstrate this "respect" by avoiding dissidents and by not
attending any worship services by faith denominations that suffer
persecution by that country's Communist government. Rather than use his
time to spotlight those struggling for freedom, he will be allowing
himself to be part of a propaganda show.
Like many other tourists, he will be there to watch the athletes and to
lend the good name of the American republic to the whitewashing of a
despotic regime — still the world's largest tyranny — whose innumerable
crimes have become a footnote to its successful pursuit of Western cash.
His behavior is proof that support for a belief that the cause of human
rights ought to trump the conventional wisdom of the day about
realpolitik and commerce is at a new low.
UNAVOIDABLE COMPARISON
While the two situations are not completely analogous, the death this
past weekend of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian literary giant and
symbol of resistance to communism, makes such comparisons unavoidable.
Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, few young people had
even heard of the 89-year-old writer. And for those that do, the image
that many retain is that of the cranky old man who raged against the
materialism of the West, as well as that of the Russia that emerged
from the nightmare of communism. His books, while famous, are, with one
exception, largely unread.
As Norman Podhoretz wrote in Commentary magazine in 1985, when
Solzhenitsyn's anti-communism was still deeply relevant to contemporary
politics, "The Gulag Archipelago is one of the most famous books ever
written," but said few had actually read it. He allowed that A Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich was widely read, but that the readership of
Solzhenitsyn's works were, he said, generally "more reviewed than read."
And yet, Solzhenitsyn remains one of the most important persons of the
20th century. His courage ought to inform the behavior of decent
persons in the 21st and all those centuries that will follow. His books
did as much to bring down the most murderous regime of the modern age
as the work of any other person or nation.
The publication of Ivan Denisovich made the suffering of the tens of
millions imprisoned in Soviet slave labor camps real for a world that
had denied they existed. The Gulag Archipelago documented in his unique
style one of the greatest crimes in history and gave a voice to its
hitherto silenced victims.
Even more dangerously, it pinned the blame for this evil not just on
one man — Josef Stalin — as many liberals and Soviet sympathizers tried
to do, but on his predecessor Vladimir Lenin and the entire belief
system of socialism.
Having survived a long sentence in such a camp himself, Solzhenitsyn
wrote Ivan Denisovich from his own memories, and then gathered the
testimony of others to write Gulag and other important works.
Despite the constant threat of imprisonment and a return to the torture
of the camps, he defied the Kremlin and the KGB, and spoke out against
censorship. When he won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, his
acceptance address (delivered in absentia) warned an indifferent world
that the duty of the artist was "not to participate in lies," and that
even more, they had the power "to defeat the lie!"
Though it may not have seemed likely at the time, that is exactly what
he, along with a generation of fellow dissidents and refuseniks that he
helped inspire, did. Without his books, it is simply impossible to
imagine that the struggle against the Communists, both inside and
outside the country, would have succeeded as it eventually did. As much
as any man ever has, Solzhenitsyn changed the world.
As with many great individuals, the writer had his faults. He did not
understand the United States and made no attempt to do so in two
decades on our shores after being forced into exile in 1974. While
rightly calling for Americans to reject the moral relativism of the
left and to resist the "spirit of Munich" that urged appeasement of
Moscow, his cultural isolation also led him to denounce rock music and
Western culture with as much bitterness as he did the gulag.
He morphed into a proponent of the values of tsarist Russia,
authoritarian Russian nationalism and Orthodoxy, a stance that led him
into indefensible stands on Serbian atrocities.
In exile, he also faced charges of anti-Semitism. Some critics rightly
discerned an indifference and a lack of understanding of Jewish
concerns, and a tendency to reflect the unpleasant traditions of
Slavophile Russia, in which Jews were unfairly blamed for the rise of
the Bolsheviks.
Yet, on the charge of Jew-hatred, most scholars and commentators have
declared him not guilty, not least because he spent his whole life
actively denying the accusation and was a steadfast supporter of the
State of Israel. This question must also not be taken out of the
context of the triumph of a movement for freedom for Soviet Jewry that
his books and activism influenced and aided in an era when détente with
the masters of the gulag was considered the most prudent course for the
West.
ANOTHER GULAG
Despite the Olympics and the growth of capitalism in that nation, the
laogai, the Chinese version of the Gulag Archipelago, still exists. Its
prisoners — political dissidents, religious believers and others who
earned the disfavor of Beijing — continue to suffer even as President
Bush and other Americans spend their time there cheering at basketball
games. The laogai has been documented, but sadly, it has yet to enter
the lexicon or the conscience of the West the way Solzhenitsyn did with
the gulag.
The legacy of the author of The Gulag Archipelago is that Bush and
others who look away when confronted with the truth about places such
as China, Tibet, Sudan and Iran cannot be allowed to do so without
shame.
As Podhoretz wrote in 1985, the Russian forced everyone to confront
"the terrible question" of our apathy in the face of evil by his
example of being a lone, powerless man who stood up to the
totalitarians and faced them down. So long as there are tyrants among
us, that is an example we will need to honor and remember.
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JWR contributor Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
Let him know what you think by clicking here.
© 2007, Jonathan Tobin
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