FEBRUARY 4, 2019|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Between Two Millstones, Cold War, Henry Kissinger, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago
Solzhenitsyn in Exile
by RICHARD M. REINSCH II|2 Comments
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is mobbed by journalists on his arrival in Zurich in 1974 after being deprived of his Soviet citizenship following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. (Keystone/Getty Images)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote prose so searing to the conscience, so transcendent when spoken, so logically compelling that the only recourse of his Soviet enemies was to pull him apart limb by limb. Unable to do that because of his global status, Soviet officials used the classical tactic of exile. He had become, as the foreign policy analysts say, an existential threat to the Soviet Union. The Communist Party must have concluded that depositing him on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain would neutralize his threat. No longer would he be their tormented and harassed citizen. But that calculation only worked if Solzhenitsyn, in turn, exiled Russia from his own soul, put down his pen, and became a full-fledged national of a free country. That could not happen.
Solzhenitsyn remained a Russian patriot. His literary mission was the restoration of his homeland to a condition of liberty and flourishing that Leninist-Stalinism destroyed. This is the ultimate truth of the recently released English edition of Book 1 of Between Two Millstones, which is Solzhenitsyn's account of his forced exile in the West in 1974. Solzhenitsyn arrived first in Cologne, Germany, and then spent nearly two years in Zurich before settling in a new home in Cavendish, Vermont, where he would stay until his return to Russia three years after the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1994.
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