Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books exposed and chronicled the vast network of Stalin’s slave labor camps, has died of heart failure at age 89, his family said.
Solzhenitsyn’s unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union’s gulags riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he helped expose. They earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.
And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could help defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.
The author’s son, Stepan Solzhenitsyn, said his father died late on Sunday of heart failure. His death inspired many tributes, none more important, perhaps, than from the man who dismantled the last of the Gulag camps in the 1980s, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.
“Solzhenitsyn’s fate, as well as the fate of millions of the country’s citizens, was befallen by severe trials,” Gorbachev said, according to Interfax. “He was one of the first who spoke aloud about the inhuman Stalinist regime and about the people who experienced it but were not broken.”
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a veteran of the Soviet KGB, nevertheless forged a close relationship with the fiercely patriotic Solzhenitsyn, who in a late interview in April last year accused NATO of trying to encircle Russia and strip it of its sovereignty. It is a charge frequently raised by Putin and his successor, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
Solzhenitsyn’s literary achievements, as well as “the entire thorny path of his life,” Putin said in a statement, “will remain for us an example of genuine devotion and selfless serving to the people, fatherland and the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism.”
Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human “meat grinder” that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.
His Gulag Archipelago trilogy of the 1970s left readers shocked by the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin.
But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.
The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to bend despite enormous pressure also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.
After a triumphant return that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn’t read his books.
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