Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, RIP
We have lost a remarkable man.
We should give thanks for his words and courage.
With the passing of Solzhenitsyn we lose a great soul, and a great figure of history.
I don’t know that he was more responsible than Reagan, John Paul II, Gorbachev, or Yeltsin for the fall of the evil empire. But he was certainly braver than all of them. Reagan led the rival superpower, the Pope led a great church, Gorbachev and Yeltsin were powerful insiders. Solzhenitsyn had a few loyal friends, and his words.
He was like Milton’s seraph Abdiel, who rebels against the rebel angels in Paradise Lost.
UPDATE:
Stefan Beck looks at Solzhenitsyn the author.
Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekhov.
UPDATE II:
In 1975, Ronald Reagan was debating whether he should challenge the incumbent president Jerry Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. A turning point for Reagan was Ford’s refusal in July 1975 to meet with Solzhenitsyn.
Reagan ridiculed the reasons given: Ford had to attend a party for his daughter; the Russian dissident had not formally requested a meeting; it was not clear to the White House “what [the president] would gain by a meeting with Solzhenitsyn.”
Reagan made it clear that a President Reagan would be honored to sit down with and learn from the famed survivor and chronicler of the Gulag Archipelago.