SOLZHENITSYN LEAVES TROUBLED LEGACY ACROSS FORMER SOVIET UNION
By Claire Bigg
UNIAN News Agency
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Aug 6 2008
Ukraine
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident writer who exposed the
horrors of Soviet prison camps, was laid to rest today at a lavish
ceremony in Moscow`s Donskoi monastery.
Hundreds of mourners, including Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
and other top officials, gathered under a gray sky to pay their
tribute to Solzhenitsyn`s literary talent and unwavering crusade
against totalitarianism.
But Solzhenitsyn leaves a complex legacy throughout the former
communist bloc.
While the world widely admired his courage in exposing the
atrocities of the Soviet prison camps, many, too, frowned on the
ardent nationalism he espoused in his later years. His warm ties with
former Russian President Putin, a retired KGB officer, drove a wedge
with many of his fellow Soviet-era dissidents.
Russia`s ethnic and religious minorities, too, took a dim view of
Solzhenitsyn`s calls for a Slavic revival based on Russian Orthodoxy.
"It isn`t customary in such moments to express anything but praise
about the deceased, but some of his articles did have an element of
xenophobia," says Armenian writer Vahram Martirosian. "Against the
backdrop of a strongly negative attitude towards migrants, including
Armenians, this only poured oil on the flames of Russian chauvinism
in today`s Russia."
`Rebuilding Russia`
Aydar Khalim, a prominent Tatar author, describes Solzhenitsyn`s
death as a "heavy loss for humanity." But he agrees that the dissident
failed the millions of non-Slavic Russians.
"On the one hand, he was considered one of the main defeaters of
Stalinist tyranny in Russia. On the other hand, for us he was a
guardian of the Russian Empire. His power to criticize and denounce
put Solzhenitsyn on par with Lev Tolstoi, but in his famous work
`Rebuilding Russia,` for example, he strove to preserve Russia as an
empire. With the fame he enjoyed, he could have tried to defend not
only Russians but other ethnic groups as well," Khalim said.
In "Rebuilding Russia," an essay first published in 1990 in
"Komsomolskaya pravda" — then one of the Soviet Union`s most popular
dailies — Solzhenitsyn urged Russia to cast off all non-Slav
republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation. The
Nobel Peace laureate called for the creation of a new Slavic state
bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan
that he considered to be Russified.
This united Slavic state built on Russian Orthodox faith, he wrote,
would provide an alternative to the West`s decadent liberalism. The
essay drew the ire of both those who hoped to salvage the Soviet Union
and those who wished for its break-up into sovereign republics. It
offended many in Central Asia, which Solzhenitsyn described as Russia`s
"underbelly, the thoughtless conquest of Alexander II."
Kazat Akmatov, a prominent Kyrgyz writer who co-chaired the Kyrgyzstan
Democratic Movement party in the 1990s, says his literature was
heavily politicized.
"He wrote a long article saying that Russia has to be a separate
state, that it has to kick out the other 14 republics. He wrote that
the republics were Russia`s `underbelly,` meaning that Russia was
feeding them and would prosper if they were discarded," Akmatovs says.
Even long after the Soviet Union`s collapse, Solzhenitsyn remained
adamant about forming a united Slavic state.
In May 1996, a group of respected Kazakh writers attacked
"Komsomolskaya pravda" for publishing an interview with Solzhenitsyn in
which he called for northern Kazakhstan to be incorporated into Russia.
They demanded that the newspaper be banned in Kazakhstan, accusing
it of violating their country`s territorial integrity — a charge
backed by the Kazakh prosecutor-general, who described Solzhenitsyn`s
statement as a "gross intervention in the internal affairs of an
independent state."
"Komsomolskaya pravda" was eventually forced to publish an apology.
Nationalist Rhetoric
Solzhenitsyn`s nationalist leanings also earned him much criticism
in Belarus and Ukraine, both eager to steer away from their former
imperial master after gaining independence in 1991.
Ales Antsipenka, a Belarusian philosopher, says that after the
essay "Rebuilding Russia," "I realized that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was a
common Russian imperialist, despite the fact that he had lashed out
at the totalitarian system with such force. I saw it as a terrible
contradiction because any imperialistic system is, to a certain extent,
totalitarian. I saw that Solzhenitsyn was hugely contradictory in
denying Belarusians and Ukrainians the right to determine their fate."
Such sentiments are widely echoed in Ukraine, despite enduring
admiration for the man who shook the foundations of Soviet rule with
his stinging indictment of Josef Stalin`s gulag camps.
Yevhen Sverstiuk, a Ukrainian writer and poet who was jailed as a
political prisoner in the 1970s, says Solzhenitsyn played a key role
in bolstering the opposition throughout the former Soviet Union,
including Ukraine. But Sverstiuk says the author`s political views
took a turn for the worse in the mid-1970s.
"After receiving the Nobel Prize, Solzhenitsyn deteriorated —
he switched from the great challenge of combating the evil empire
to Russian imperial issues. He fell not only in our esteem, his
international image also deteriorated. Each of his words was closely
monitored and sparked disenchantment after disenchantment,"
Disappointment at Solzhenitsyn`s mounting nationalist rhetoric,
says Sverstiuk, was all the deeper in Ukraine due to Solzhenitsyn`s
Ukrainian origin.
"Ukraine is a separate topic since Solzhenitsyn, whose mother was
Ukrainian, had a particular attitude toward Ukraine. He sought
to reject his Ukrainian half and uphold his Russian nationalist
half. In this sense, he lost his stature. He joined the very narrow,
reactionary, and primitive world of Russian imperial ideology. His
speeches on Ukraine were horrid. They were wrong, they were full of
false information, the kind of information that Russian society is
being fed," Sverstiuk says.
Solzhenitsyn also angered Ukrainians by denying the country had been
the victim of genocide during the 1932-33 famine. In April this year,
the 89-year-old wrote that the famine had killed millions across the
entire Soviet Union, adding that many of the communist officials who
had helped orchestrate it were Ukrainian.
His article, in which he scolded the West for backing what he called a
"loony fable," came as U.S. President George W. Bush laid a wreath in
Kyiv to honor the memory of the famine`s victims. It also coincided
with a State Duma resolution rejecting Ukraine`s claims of genocide.