Solzhenitsyn dead!

saggio

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn dead at 89


I really can't believe this, but the greatest Russian novelist and dissident of the 20th century died Sunday, at the ripe old age of 89. He wrote some of the most amazing Soviet-era literature, the most famous of his works being The Gulag Archipeligo and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - both works which were highly critical of the Soviet regime. He himself spent a number of years as a political prisoner in exile in the Siberia gulag:



But he was eventually released, and was able to continue with his writing. In 1970, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974, he was expelled from the Soviet Union for writing The Gulag Archipeligo. He would only return to Russia after the end of the USSR and fall of Communism in Europe, in 1994.

Links: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jeVYeBxHYWfaTLJPs3J48Jt8bbdQ
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hOCBXp8R4DbXpx4cbI_oHOomRX3wD92BIS380
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/24c7f888-6238-11dd-9ff9-000077b07658,dwp_uuid=70662e7c-3027-11da-ba9f-00000e2511c8.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7540821.stm
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/08/solzhenitsyns_literary_legacy.html

Posters of D&D, what do you all think of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn?

DarkCrawler

Wasn't all that familiar with him, but still, he did a lot of good. Glad that he lived a long life.

PeekingDuck

I think if people paid attention to him, we wouldn't have the failing America that we have today. Seems like we're losing something lately in literature.

Hamju

"One Day..." is an amazing book. I first read it in one day throughout the day while I was doing other things and it was a great experience.

Incenjucar

Never even heard of him, but glad he led a long life.

Randall_Flagg

saggio wrote: »

hey, why the long face?

(too soon?)

but seriously, I am sad that he's gone. He was definitely a great writer.

Trevor

I always feel bad when someone I've never heard of who may be great dies. I'm gonna look around and see if I can find some of his stuff to read.

saggio

Incenjucar wrote: »

Never even heard of him, but glad he led a long life.

Never? Really? That's quite unfortunate. Many consider him the greatest Russian novelist of the 20th Century. The saying goes that the Tsar had Tolstoy and that Stalin had Solzhenitsyn. The guy was just amazing in just about everyway. Except for his strident nationalism after his exile.

There's a story of how there was a warrant out for Solzhenitsyn, and the KGB were looking for him - but he had sought refuge in Rostropovich's house. Now Rostropovich was of course a very famous cello virtuoso, and no one from the KGB would dare enter his house or do anything to him. His celebrity protected him in a big way. So, with Rostropovich at the front door berating the KGB agents for disturbing his privacy and practice time, Solzhenitsyn was in the kitchen finishing the manuscript for The Gulag Archipeligo. Which was then published internationally, and then smuggled back into the Soviet Union in fake cans of paint and boxes of soap.

yakul

His only work that I've read is The First Circle, which besides being way too long, is quite good.

Bad Kitty

The only thing I've read of his was One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich which I enjoyed greatly.

TychoCelchuuu

Incenjucar wrote: »

Never even heard of him, but glad he led a long life.

I think my brother killed him, by the way. He read One Day in the Life... and on the day he finished it Solzehnitsyn died.

moniker

I've never heard of him either, so which book of his should I read (first), The Gulag Archipelago or One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich?

Ayulin

One Day is a really good book. I read it back in 9th Grade (English teacher then recommended it to me), and so I was ecstatic when we had to do it as an exam text for 11/12th.

saggio

moniker wrote: »

I've never heard of him either, so which book of his should I read (first), The Gulag Archipelago or One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich?

The Gulag Archipelago is about three volumes, is non-fiction, and is depressing and powerful as hell. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is short, easy to read fiction that gives you a brief but accurate glimpse into the life of a political prisoner in Siberia. I'd start with that one.

Then maybe Cancer Ward. Which is another great one by ol' Alexandr, but isn't as expansive or as hard to read as the Archipelago.

Elki

GEORGE KENNAN, the dean of American diplomats, called “The Gulag Archipelago”, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of Stalin’s terror, “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times”. By bearing witness, Solzhenitsyn certainly did as much as any artist could to bring down the Soviet system, a monstrosity that crushed millions of lives. His courage earned him imprisonment and exile. But his death on August 3rd (see article (elki edit: below)) prompts a question. Who today speaks truth to power—not only in authoritarian or semi-free countries such as Russia and China but in the West as well?

The answer in the case of Russia itself is depressing. Russia’s contemporary intelligentsia—the should-be followers of the example of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the other dissident intellectuals of the Soviet period—is not just supine but in some ways craven (see article (elki edit: also below)). Instead of defending the freedoms perilously acquired after the end of communism, many of Russia’s intellectuals have connived in Vladimir Putin’s project to neuter democracy and put a puppet-show in its place. Some may genuinely admire Mr Putin’s resurrection of a “strong” Russia (as, alas, did the elderly Solzhenitsyn himself). But others have shallower motives.

In Soviet times telling the truth required great courage and brought fearful consequences. That is why the dissidents were a tiny minority of the official intelligentsia which the Soviet Union created mainly in order to build its nuclear technology. Today it is not for the most part fear that muzzles the intellectuals. Speaking out can still be dangerous, as the murder in 2006 of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist, showed. But what lurks behind the silence of many is not fear but appetite: an appetite to recover the perks and status that most of the intelligentsia enjoyed as the Soviet system’s loyal servant.

The problem of authoritarianism

In China the intellectuals’ silence is easier to forgive because voicing dissent is still sharply controlled. For all its new openness, China has created few opportunities for Solzhenitsyn-type greats to emerge. It has tolerated a modicum of writing about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, but then the government too now says the Cultural Revolution was horrific. You would search in vain in China itself for literature about the misery of the 1950s after the communists took over, or the deaths of tens of millions in the famine of the early 1960s. The window opened a bit in the 1980s, but the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 banished free thinking well into the 1990s.

The emergence of the internet and a market-driven publishing industry has changed China less than it should. Several intellectuals post critical views of the party online. A good example is Hu Xingdou, an academic who lays into the party at every opportunity. But not even he goes as far as to call for the end of one-party rule. In 2004 a Chinese newspaper caused a stir by publishing a list of 50 public intellectuals. They included Gao Yaojie, who helped expose an AIDS epidemic in Henan, Wen Tiejun, who has written about the suffering of peasants, and He Weifang, a law professor who has spoken out about the rights of the marginalised, such as migrant workers.

These are impressive people, to whom China will one day be grateful. But the voices of the dissidents count for less than they did in the 1980s. China then, like the Soviet Union, was a bleak place with little other intellectual stimulation. People yearned for provocative ideas. Now access to information is freer, the economy is flourishing and for a lot of intellectuals life is good. China has its bold thinkers, but in its present mood it is hard to imagine one of them galvanising an entire class the way Solzhenitsyn did.

It is a bit too easy for people in the West to deplore the failure of intellectuals living in unfree societies to follow the example of a Solzhenitsyn. Such stories are rare. His arose from an unusual confluence: a great crime, a great silence, a receptive audience and personal courage well above the ordinary. There are parts of the Islamic world where secular thinkers, such as Egypt’s Nobel novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, have faced violence for daring to prick a suffocating conformity. The Western intellectual, by contrast, enjoys a charmed existence. In France, which pampers its men of ideas, De Gaulle is reputed to have ordered the release of the inflammatory Jean-Paul Sartre in 1968 by remarking, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” Most democracies have pulled off the remarkable feat of creating in the universities a class of tenured academics whose salaries are paid by the state but who are free, and often inclined, to savage the hand that feeds them. Nice work, if you can get it.

The problem of democracy

The West has printed a lorryload of angst-ridden books about the demise of the intellectual. Political correctness and academic over-specialisation have indeed hurt the quality of much that is said in the media and taught in the universities. But at the root of most complaints is the supposed problem of surplus. Authoritarian places nurture a class of recognised intellectuals whose utterances are both carefully listened to and strictly controlled. Democracies produce a cacophony, in which each voice complains that its own urgent message is being drowned in a sea of pap. “Repressive tolerance”, one ungrateful 1960s radical called it. It would cause not a ripple if MIT’s famous intellectual subversive, Noam Chomsky, were invited to speak to the annual capitalist jamboree in Davos.

The cacophony is the lesser evil. Ideas should not be suppressed, but nor should they be worshipped. Kennan was right to call “Gulag” a powerful indictment of a regime. Remember, though, that in 1848 two well-meaning intellectuals published another powerful indictment of a system, and their “Communist Manifesto” went on to enslave half mankind. There is no sure defence against bad ideas, but one place to start is with a well-educated and sceptical citizenry that is free to listen to the notions of the intellectuals but is not in thrall to them—and, yes, may prefer the sports channel instead. The patrician in Solzhenitsyn hated this lack of deference in the West. That is one respect in which the great man was wrong.

PEOPLE knew it was there: the vast amazing country of Gulag which, “though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country.” Trains went in, and people were sent to administer it from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But until Alexander Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years there, laying bricks and smelting metal in the intensest heat and cold, hearing fellow-inmates, like rats, stealing his food in the dark, wearing wrist-crushing handcuffs for the least infraction, this land was not fully revealed to the outside world. “The Gulag Archipelago” was a book carried out of the camps “on the skin of my back”, to bear witness on behalf of everyone still inside.

Its appearance, in 1973, immediately led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. But his work was done. He had exposed the fissures in the system, a truth-telling that had begun, 11 years earlier during the Khrushchev thaw, with the publication in Novy Mir of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. That tale began with the cacophony of reveille for the prisoners, “sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail” through windows coated in frost two fingers thick. With that banging, even through their imperviousness, the Russian people began to stir to the evils of the cult of personality under which they had lived for too long; after this, though with desperate slowness, the disintegration of the Soviet state was only a matter of time.

He was not another Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Often the characters in Mr Solzhenitsyn’s books were one-dimensional, the tone sardonic, the detail turgid. But his indestructibility gave him, over the years, a prophet’s voice. He survived the war, the camps and abdominal cancer that was carelessly treated. He was told he would never have children, but had three sons. He believed he would never return to Russia after his exile, but in 1994 was welcomed back to the post-Soviet state. Each miracle increased his sense of mission. He was not simply a writer, but a visionary who would mend Russia; and, as such, he believed he was on equal terms with Soviet leaders. In 1973, in a letter to them, he laid out his proposals. There was nothing wrong with a Soviet empire; but they had to cast off “this filthy sweaty shirt” of Marxist ideology, all these “arsenals of lies”. Socialism, he wrote, “prevents the living body of the nation from breathing.”

Behind his impassive kulak’s face lay intense self-scrutiny, adamantine moral and physical courage and a sometimes unsettling disregard for the smaller and softer things in life. But he did not necessarily think he was better, or wiser, than other men. Only a fluke, he said, had kept him out of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, when they came recruiting at his university. As for the war, though the Nazis had unleashed atrocities on Russia, “I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder-straps and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: ‘So were we any better?’” In one poem, “Prussian Nights”, he wrote:

The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Dead. How many have been on it
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse

Salvo after salvo rattled from the Solzhenitsyn typewriter, always interleaved with carbon copies for fear that the secret police would seize the manuscript. Some fell on deaf ears—wilfully deaf, in the case of the European left. The notion that Stalin was a great wartime leader, for example, should never have survived the devastating portrait of sickly paranoia in “The First Circle” (1969). Yet it has persisted to this day.

Though supporters in the West lumped Mr Solzhenitsyn with the rest of the intelligentsia, he stood monumentally alone. A friendship with an Estonian prisoner, Arnold Susi, had exploded his lingering belief in Marxism; but he detested the self-regarding and snooty Russian intellectuals, the “well-read ones”, as he referred to them. Unlike Andrei Sakharov, he had no belief in liberalism or human-rights campaigns. The fact that scientists might be deprived of visas left him unmoved. He cared about the fate of peasants and the general citizenry, Russians in the mass. Ivan Denisovich was not an intellectual: he was a peasant who was horrified to discover, in a letter from his wife, that the farmers in his village were now working in factories rather than haymaking. The creation of Soviet man was the horror Mr Solzhenitsyn chiefly wished to reverse.

Neither East nor West

Yet he had little time for the West either. Bundled on to a plane to West Germany in 1974, he turned his fire on other targets, thundering against materialism, shallowness and the silliness of popular Western culture. He would be no cold-war figurehead against the Kremlin and all its works; he was, to the core, a Russian nationalist. As communism fell he came to loathe Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s leader, seeing him as the author of chaos and humiliation. But bitterness and envy may have played a part, too. Bitterness because his hero’s welcome had turned into indifference to this dishevelled, hectoring, old-fashioned figure. And envy because Yeltsin stood in the place he should, he believed, have occupied himself.

Economist wrote:

THEY did not like each other much, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Russia’s liberal intelligentsia. Solzhenitsyn, who in the West was considered its paramount flower, was as rude about it as he was about almost everything else. He refused to use the word intelligentsia, engineering instead the ugly and pejorative obrazovanshchina, roughly “educatedness”. The intelligentsia responded in kind: it paid tribute to his courage, read his works in samizdat but was spooked by his anti-Western attitude and refused to recognise him as one of their number.

His main charge was that the intelligentsia had failed in its most vital task—to speak on behalf of the people suppressed by an authoritarian state. Members had become part of the system, allowing themselves to get comfortable in its nooks and crannies. “A hundred years ago,” he wrote in 1974, “the Russian intelligentsia considered a death sentence to be a sacrifice. Today an administrative reprimand is considered a sacrifice.” He spelt out his commandments in capital letters: “DON’T LIE! DON’T PARTICIPATE IN LIES, DON’T SUPPORT A LIE!”

When Solzhenitsyn wrote in this way, few dared to argue publicly with the great Russian writer-in-exile. But when he returned to Russia in 1994 he became a figure from the past. Few famous writers or artists came to pay respect as he lay in state. The most prominent faces were those of Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Gorbachev.

“The Gulag Archipelago”, published in 1973, had shaken the very foundations of the Soviet system, but it did not make the country immune from the restoration of Soviet symbols and elements. Russia today is ruled by the KGB elite, has a Soviet anthem, servile media, corrupt courts and a rubber-stamping parliament. A new history textbook proclaims that the Soviet Union, although not a democracy, was “an example for millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society”. Mr Putin bears a large share of responsibility for all this, but that does not exempt the Russian intelligentsia from its share. Putinism was made strong by the absence of resistance from the part of society that was meant to provide intellectual opposition.

Shortly before Mr Putin was due to stand down as Russia’s president, Nikita Mikhalkov, a prominent Russian film director, together with a couple of Mr Putin’s other fans, wrote a letter “on behalf of Russian artists” pleading with him to stay in power. The letter provoked indignation and an open letter from an opposing camp, telling Mr Putin to go. The two letters were a blip on the intelligentsia’s cardiogram, which had been showing few signs of life. The death of its greatest intellectual is likely to become another blip on the same largely dormant machine.

The very word intelligentsia is a Russian invention. In the West it usually evokes the image of a talented intellectual, otherworldly, harassed by the state, soulful and conscientious. But the Soviet intelligentsia was different. It was summoned into being by the state for a particular purpose, one that had little in common with its 19th-century antecedents.

In Tom Stoppard’s trilogy about 19th-century Russian intellectuals (“The Coast of Utopia”), Alexander Herzen laments that Russia has made no contribution to philosophy and political discourse. “Yes, one! The intelligentsia,” retorts one of his friends. “Well, it’s a horrible word,” comments another. “What does it mean?” asks Herzen. “It means us. A unique Russian phenomenon, the intellectual opposition considered as a social force.”

Mr Stoppard’s characters are strangers in today’s Russia. Their hatred of autocracy, their lacerating criticism and their ability to articulate the concerns of the oppressed seem naive and out of date. Has the Russian intelligentsia lost its social force or its intellectual power? Or does the phenomenon exist only in an authoritarian society with no functioning parliament? Was Solzhenitsyn right in his diagnosis of the Russian intelligentsia, that it amounted to no more than people with diplomas and good jobs?

Solzhenitsyn was certainly not the first Russian intellectual to criticise the intelligentsia. Self-criticism and repentance have long been part of its identity. In “Vekhi”, an important self-reflecting book written in 1909, Sergei Bulgakov describes the sorry state of the intelligentsia, its conceit towards its own people, its lack of discipline and decency. “Russian society, exhausted by preceding tension and failures, is in a state of some numbness and apathy, spiritual disjunction and depression…Russian literature is flooded by a muddy wave of pornography and sensationalism.”

Bolshevik Russia had no need for reflective thinkers like Bulgakov. He was among the first Russian philosophers to be expelled by Lenin in 1922. Many of his readers vanished into prison camps.

Come into my parlour

Lenin and Stalin wiped out the old Russian intelligentsia as a political force. Yet, as culture-centric dictators, they bribed and remoulded the finest examples to their own needs. For example the Moscow Art Theatre, which embodied the Chekhovian intelligentsia, was gradually converted into a Soviet institution. Its actors were showered with privileges and comforts, were allowed to travel abroad and could rest in government sanitariums for as long as they could lend their art to the purposes of the Bolshevik state. In the late 1920s the Soviet government started to give out large plots of land to selected artists, scientists and engineers in a special compound.

Vasily Kachalov was a Moscow Art Theatre actor who played Chekhovian parts. According to his son, he dealt with the ambiguity of his new position by heavy drinking. And when drunk he cursed himself for allowing the state to see him as a symbol of continuity between the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia.

In fact it was scientists, physicists particularly, who were at the core of the Soviet intelligentsia as a social phenomenon. Andrei Zorin, a historian at Oxford, argues that the intelligentsia was largely the product of nuclear research. Stalin needed a nuclear bomb and realised that scientists’ brains do not work unless you allow them a certain amount of freedom. The conditions created for the scientists were close to ideal: they had status, money, equipment and no distractions. “Science was the favourite child in the hands of the government,” says Vladimir Fortov, a member of Russia’s Academy of Science. “It was prestigious and well paid. We could do our research and not concern ourselves with anything else.”

Russian nuclear physicists were settled in closed or semi-closed towns and housed not in barracks but in attractive cottages, which resembled Swiss chalets or small Russian mansions, amid forests. The best Russian scientists were exempted from joining the Communist Party and had direct access to the Kremlin. The fact that Andrei Sakharov was one of Russia’s top nuclear physicists, the father of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb, and a man who had direct contact with Lavrenty Beria, the security chief, gave special power and meaning to his dissent.

The scientific colonies were well supplied not only with food but also with culture. The political clout which scientists possessed allowed them to invite artists who were not allowed to perform before larger audiences. Vladimir Vysotsky, an iconic Russian poet, singer and rebel, gave one of his first public concerts in Dubna, a nuclear-research town.

Russia’s military needs led to an overproduction of all kinds of scientists, matched by a hyper-production of culture, says Mr Zorin. The consumers of this culture were the millions of engineers and scientists who worked in research institutes and construction offices with a postbox number for an address. In reality, the Soviet economy could not accommodate them all: as the Soviet joke had it, they “pretended to work and the state pretended to pay”.

A large number of educated, intelligent and underemployed people in their 30s and 40s with little prospect of moving up the career ladder provided a perfect milieu for brewing liberal ideas. With time, they formed a political class. They were not dissidents and they relied on the state for provisions, but they were fed up with the restrictions imposed by Soviet ideology and they were critical of the system.

They wanted to live “like people do in a civilised world”, they wanted to travel abroad, get food without queuing and have access to information. But they neither anticipated nor desired the dismembering of the Soviet Union.


It was this political class of intelligentsia that prepared for perestroika and became the main support base for Mikhail Gorbachev. Perestroika offered everything that the intelligentsia desired while still keeping the Soviet Union in place. The late 1980s were, perhaps, the happiest years for the intelligentsia, combining a degree of freedom of expression with continuing state support. When in August 1991 Communist and KGB hardliners mounted a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, hundreds of thousands of the Russian intelligentsia gathered in front of parliament to defend the achievements of perestroika.

“I think of August 1991 with great tenderness and nostalgia. I thought then it was one of the highest moments in Russian history, that it would become a national holiday,” says Lev Dodin, the artistic director of the celebrated Maly Drama Theatre. Boris Yeltsin, tall, handsome, with a shock of white hair, standing on a tank and speaking on Mr Gorbachev’s behalf, was an image made for canonisation.

Beginning of the end

But the day when the KGB-inspired coup was defeated has not become a national holiday, and its tenth anniversary was celebrated with the restoration of the Soviet national anthem. The paradox was that the intelligentsia’s triumph—which led to the collapse of the Soviet empire—was also the beginning of its end. Soviet intelligentsia and the state were joined at the hip. When the state went, so did the intelligentsia. The defeat of the coup did not become an ideological watershed; it was not celebrated as the birth of a new nation, only as the collapse of the old one.

Having smashed the bell jar which it inhabited, the intelligentsia felt disoriented. The contract—under which the intelligentsia barked at the state and the state occasionally hit back but continued to provide support—was broken. The state no longer needed intellectuals. It needed managers and businessmen able to avert starvation and total economic collapse. The intelligentsia had nurtured the cult of the persecuted and consecrated its own heroic struggle (a censor’s ban was a badge of honour). But it was caught unprepared for the practical and mundane tasks of building state institutions.

A large number of scientists left the country. Some went into business (most Russian oligarchs of the Yeltsin era, including Boris Berezovsky, were scientists in previous lives). A few took jobs in government. Some intellectuals dedicated themselves to human rights. But, as a class, the intelligentsia did not create lasting democratic institutions or solidify the freedoms granted in 1991.

Russia’s media engaged in an exercise of self-deprecation and sneering. Almost nobody was prepared systematically to study the country’s history. According to Mr Dodin, one of Russia’s most thoughtful and influential theatre directors, “When we read ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ in samizdat, we thought that if ever this book gets printed, everything will change, for ever.” And then the unthinkable happened: the book was printed—and largely ignored. Russian liberals sneered at Solzhenitsyn, though none managed to offer anything comparable to his work.

Hard times for intellectuals

The country which had bloodlessly freed itself of communist ideology and had ended the cold war was experiencing a collective inferiority complex. The end of the Soviet Union did not produce anything resembling the artistic energy created by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 or the years that followed. Russian writers failed to fill a linguistic vacuum left by several decades of the devaluation of serious language. The country still lacks the words to describe the scale of events that have taken place over the past 20 years.

Ideological and economic collapse deprived Russia’s intelligentsia of status, money and exclusivity. The very concept began to fall apart. “Capitalism was alien to the intelligentsia. Intelligentsia is a function of monarchy—normal bourgeois societies do not have it,” says Sergei Kapitsa, a respected scientist. It was no surprise that most of Russia’s intelligentsia did not recognise Yeltsin as one of “theirs”. For many scientists, Yeltsin’s were the “lost years”.

This may help to explain why a large part of Russia’s scientific and artistic elite welcomed Mr Putin with open arms. Solzhenitsyn himself refused to receive an award from Yeltsin—whom he saw as a man who had humiliated Russia—but accepted one from Mr Putin, seeing in him a symbol of national resurgence (although he found many aspects of Putin’s Russia unpalatable).

The Putin years have split the Russian intelligentsia. Dissidents and other sharp critics still exist in Russia today, but they have diverged from the country’s cultural establishment, which does not see Mr Putin as alien to their interests. It is not just financial handouts that have made him attractive—although they have helped. The centralisation of the state with an added measure of nationalism has created a new sense of the return of status plus the flattery of the state’s attention.

Mr Putin’s unexpected visits to Moscow theatres and impromptu remarks on productions leave artistic directors, who once symbolised the intelligentsia, mesmerised. When a famous scientist received a medal from Mr Putin’s hands he was astonished by how down-to-earth the former president was.

The Kremlin pays due attention to science and culture these days. Although it bashes non-governmental organisations, it has created a public chamber of approved and loyal members of the intelligentsia, which includes scientists, artists and lawyers. One of the first public appearances of Dmitry Medvedev as Russia’s newly elected president was as a trustee of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.

The sense of success and inclusion is harder to resist than the wrath of the state. Carrots are more corrupting than sticks. This phenomenon is powerfully described in Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate” (1960). One of its central characters is Viktor, a talented physicist who stoically defends his science in the face of likely arrest, but becomes weak and submissive when Stalin calls him to wish him success. “Viktor had found the strength to renounce life itself—but now he seemed unable to refuse candies and cookies.”

The adaptation of “Life and Fate” for the stage was put on recently by Mr Dodin in the Gulag town of Norilsk. When the powerful production came to Moscow it was played in a richly decorated new theatre built by a famous Russian actor who had signed a letter defending the shambolic and shameful trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil magnate who fell foul of the Kremlin. Unlike Mr Grossman’s character, few people in the audience had experienced the burning shame of Viktor’s choice. The moral qualities of the Soviet intelligentsia have always been exaggerated, says Mr Fortov. He says that scientists and artists happily informed on each other even when nobody demanded it. “They did so of their own volition.” By the same token, nobody had made Mr Fortov sign the letter about Mr Khodorkovsky’s trial or hang Mr Putin’s portrait on his wall.

Russia still produces brave individuals, independent and conscientious enough to speak the truth to the state. But they remain individual voices. The murder of Anna Politkovskaya, an outspoken Russian journalist, raised a few sighs and lamentations—but not street protests. Her funeral, which produced a massive outpouring of sentiment in Europe, was a muted and depressing affair in Moscow. It did not bring journalists together, but exposed the gap between those who serve the state and those who serve the public. Mr Putin callously said at the time that Politkovskaya’s work had minimal impact in Russia. Worse still, he was right. The country was almost deaf to her voice.

See no evil, speak no evil

Russia today is much freer than it was for most of the Soviet era. However undemocratic it may be, it is not a totalitarian state. The room for honest speaking is far greater than Russian intellectuals make use of. As Marietta Chudakova, a historian of Russian literature and courageous public figure, puts it, “Nobody has been commanded to lie down—and everyone is already on the ground.” The media is suffocated by self-censorship more than by the Kremlin’s pressure. Nikolai Svanidze, a Russian journalist who works for a state TV channel, admits: “There is no person who tells [me] what you can and what you can’t do. It is in the air. If you know what is permitted and what is not, you’re in the right place. If you don’t, you are not.”

Yet, as Russia struggles with corruption and abuse of state power, the need for a spiky intelligentsia is greater than ever. As Sergei Bulgakov wrote in 1909, “Russia cannot renew itself without renewing, among other things, its intelligentsia”.

zeeny

saggio wrote: »

moniker wrote: »

I've never heard of him either, so which book of his should I read (first), The Gulag Archipelago or One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich?

The Gulag Archipelago is about three volumes, is non-fiction, and is depressing and powerful as hell.

It's pretty much the only book where I've laughed when I should be crying. Way too often it's surreal.
I read "Архипелаг ГУЛАГ" first and I didn't enjoy his two other novels as much as it.

Variable

Bad Kitty wrote: »

The only thing I've read of his was One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich which I enjoyed greatly.

same, but it managed to get through the wall of ignorance I had around me for so many books in high school. I really liked that one. It was, ya know... good.

djklay

Bad Kitty wrote: »

The only thing I've read of his was One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich which I enjoyed greatly.

I remember reading this in grade 9 or so, and only read through it the once but I still remember the general jist of the day/story. I know you can't parallel your current life to what the character went through but if you ever thought about some of your worst days compared to what happened in this book you'd feel a bit of guilt for thinking how bad you had it. I didn't even realize that this was the author when I clicked the link but remember the novel fairly well even 15ish years later. From what I recall from 15 years ago, I highly recommend this novel.

As for the author, dead at 89, sure most of us hope we make it that long in our lives.