In his titanic struggle against the Stalinist state, Solzhenitsyn was victorious. Then the truths he had so heroically, and single-handedly, revealed to the world, became commonplace…. [L]overs of the truth will always salute him. The First Circle ends with some of the prisoners being transferred to labour camps in vans labelled “Bread” or “Meat”. The correspondent of a French newspaper, Liberation, seeing the vans pass down a Moscow street, writes, “One must admit that the city’s food supplies are admirably well-organised.”
We in the West were as blind as that reporter until Solzhenitsyn started to write. We owe it to him, and to ourselves, and to those who suffered, not to forget.3
On April 2, Solzhenitsyn was again causing controversy, this time by accusing the Ukrainian government of “historical revisionism”. In an interview with the Russian daily newspaper Izvestia, Solzhenitsyn condemned efforts in the Ukraine to have the great famine of 1932-1933 recognized internationally as Russian genocide against the Ukrainian people. Against such “revisionism”, Solzhenitsyn countered that the famine was caused by the corrupt ideals of the communist regime, under which all suffered equally, Russians and Ukrainians alike. The suggestion that it was genocide was a bizarre “fable” that had “surpassed the wild suggestions of the Bolshevik propaganda machine”: “Still, defamation is easy to insinuate into Westerners’ minds. They have never understood our history: You can sell them any old fairy story, even one as mindless as this.” Three days later, and to its great credit, the Boston Globe published a good translation of the full text of Solzhenitsyn’s words in Izvestia, under the headline “Ukrainian Famine Not a Genocide”. Rarely had Solzhenitsyn’s words been treated so objectively and fairly in the Western media.
It was perhaps fitting that Solzhenitsyn’s final public statement should incorporate three of the prevailing passions of his life: the condemnation of communism, the defense of historical truth, and the love of Russia. He died of heart failure on August 3, 2008, at his home outside Moscow, after a life of dauntless and unswerving service to the cause of justice and truth. Few indeed could claim as justly, in the words and with the spirit of St. Paul, that he had fought the good fight, that he had finished the race, and that he had kept the faith (see 2 Tim 4:7). It might even be decorous to compare Solzhenitsyn not merely with St. Paul, but with Christ Himself. Few had lived their lives nailed to the cross of suffering and crowned with the thorns of scorn as had Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and few could utter with their final breath the final words of Christ, consummatum est, so worthily.
The funeral service and committal was held in the cathedral of the Donskoi Monastery on August 6. Solzhenitsyn scholar and translator Michael Nicholson, who attended the service, described it as “extremely intense and moving” and described how the graveside was mobbed for long after the service as people tried to leave flowers and kiss the temporary wooden cross.4 Less than two weeks later, Solzhenitsyn received a further victory over his communist foes, this time posthumously, when it was announced that Moscow’s Great Communist Street (ulitsa Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya) was to be re-named “Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street”.5 In order to bestow this honor, which had been sanctioned by a decree from President Putin, the city officials had to amend an existing rule stipulating that only people dead for at least ten years could be honored with a street name. “Life has shown that there are cases when you don’t need to wait ten years to evaluate a person’s contribution to the history of Russia and Moscow”, said Moscow City Assembly Chairman Vladimir Platonov.6 The irony implicit in the secular canonization of a man who had spent most of his life condemning secularism and the secularization of political life was all part of the grim humor surrounding the Divine “comedy” of his life.
And the comedy continued. On September 11, on the eve of the fortieth day after Solzhenitsyn’s death, when Russian Orthodox custom calls for commemoration of the dead, Vladimir Lakeyev, a Communist Party leader in Moscow, read a statement saying that Great Communist Street was named after the Bolsheviks who fell in battle there in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Renaming the street, one of the most prestigious thoroughfares in Moscow, after Solzhenitsyn was “inadmissible”, said Lakeyev, because the current name “reflects the feat of communists who gave their lives for freedom, the happiness of the people and the strengthening of the state”. By contrast, Solzhenitsyn was “a public figure who devoted his life to fighting the Soviet people’s state and spoke out with anti-communist and anti-state positions”.7 Shortly afterward, the website of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party declared that “citizens across the country continue to express their displeasure with the campaign of canonization of the false prophet”.8
On September 23, in spite of the communist protests, the Moscow government gave preliminary approval to amendments to the law that would fully legalize the name change, thereby ratifying the presidential decree, dated August 12, stating that a plaque in honor of Solzhenitsyn should be erected on the street and that the new street signs and the plaque should be in place by January 1, 2009. Intriguingly, the presidential decree specified the text of the plaque, identifying Solzhenitsyn as a Nobel Prize winner and a winner of the State Prize of Russia but making no mention of the Gulag. Meanwhile, in a further darkly comedic coup de theatre, a small group of communists and residents of Great Communist Street demonstrated with placards blazoned with the slogan “Don’t Live a Lie”. It was all so bizarrely surreal that it would not have been out of place in Orwell’s dystopia.
As if to call the bemused observer back to some sense of sanity, the priests at St. Martin the Confessor, a beautiful Orthodox church on Great Communist Street, erected a sign outside the church with its pre-1917 address, 15 Bolshaya Alekseyevskaya, which honors the church of St. Aleksy, a medieval Orthodox saint. Explaining their decision to erect the sign, the Reverend Valery Stepanov, who serves at the church and hosts a television show about Moscow, said that “we shouldn’t be like the communists, who went around renaming everything. But”, he added, “Solzhenitsyn Street is better than Great Communist Street.”9
Meanwhile, far from the confusions and contradictions aroused on the streets of Moscow by Solzhenitsyn’s death and emerging legacy, writers in the West were queuing up to pay their tributes to one of the giants of the twentieth century. In death, if not in life, Solzhenitsyn could be forgiven and even praised, albeit grudgingly, by those who had long since ostracized him for his devastating critique of the West’s liberal ascendency.
One year after Solzhenitsyn’s death, on August 3, 2009, Vladimir Putin sent a telegram to Solzhenitsyn’s widow in which he described Solzhenitsyn as “a global individual, whose creative and ideological heritage will always hold a special place in the history of Russian literature and in the chronicles of our country”.10 On the same day, Dmitry Medvedev, who had succeeded Putin as Russian President, also sent a telegram to Alya Solzhenitsyn. Its contents seemed to suggest that perhaps, at last, her husband’s deepest aspirations were being heeded even by his country’s politicians. The telegram is, in any event, a fitting tribute by the President of Russia to his nation’s greatest modern hero: