Unqualified Candor

CHICAGO, IL, USA - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn died last weekend. He was the author of two books that I was forced to read but was ultimately changed by and grateful for having read; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Gulag Archipelago.

I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in high school. Larry Lonard, my high school Russian teacher required that I read it. My sophomore year, I had just turned 16, I was about to travel to the former Soviet Union - to Russia and Ukraine, as an exchange student. I was going to live in Kharkov, Ukraine, attend high school, and live with the Yakovlev family. Mr. Lonard, I think, was doubtful about my readiness to embark on such an adventure. With good reason - I was young, my Russian language skills were mediocre and I still didn’t have a full appreciation for the political, economic and social issues that Ukrainians were confronting - nor did I have a great sense of the historical context. So, of all the amazing Russian literature he could have prescribed - he made me read One Day in the Life… The story, which is truly one day in the life of the central character - one day spent at one of Stalin’s infamous Siberian labor camps, or gulags - was very centrally focussed on surviving. Its a world in which to live just one more day is an achievement. Although it was fiction, it was based upon Solzhenitsyn’s experience in a gulag following World War II. The book prepared me, not for the modern issues that faced the country (a country I would continue to study - language, literature and history - for years to come) but for understanding the history of oppression that lead to modern issues facing the people I would meet and befriend. As a sixteen year old, this book allowed me to take very seriously the largeness of my first adventure to Russia and Ukraine.

Years later, in college, I would read Gulag Archipelago as an assignment for a Russian History course I was taking. I was preparing to return to the former Soviet Union for the third time the following semester. This time, I would spend an academic year in St. Petersburg, Russia. My Russian language had vastly improved - as did my knowledge of Russian history, literature and political/social current events. It was not an easy read - contextually and physically - it’s very long. But in it, you could clearly understand the urgency that was felt by Solzhenitsyn as he told the true accounts. Although he lived for decades after its publication, he could not have predicted his long life and knew that he, alone, had to put the stories on paper. So he worked urgently to document the truth so that history would have a record of what happened to tens of millions of people. The result was a narrative of over 200 living survivors of the gulag system - their own truths along with a history of the system itself, stemming from Lenin himself. Had he waited, had he not collected the stories and published them, the truth may not have ever been told - or at least not to this indisputable degree. The accomplishment of this book was in his method for presenting the information in such a way, and volume, that the Soviet apparatus could not deny the truth that it told. I found that aspect of it remarkable - just how close this history came to never having been told, and how the cumulative voice of millions of souls who suffered and died in the gulags may have never been heard.

So, with the death of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn last weekend, I was particularly reflective. His writings gave me needed insight at critical times when, otherwise, I may have missed an opportunity to understand the historic oppression faced by a culture which hosted me and treated me very kindly. Oppression, of any kind, is important to recognize - its ramifications last for generations. It also seems to be something that is often prematurely and mistakenly said to have ended long before it actually has - with limited progress being mistaken for eradication, often by the oppressor or an indifferent and impatient public. Even in the U.S. we’ve celebrated the end of oppression which is still on-going, only with more subtlety.