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Eric Lai

This week: Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn - who won the Nobel Prize for literature for his work about life in slave labour camps under Stalinism - announced by his son Stepan on Monday made me reflect on his work.
His books not only reminded the world of the horrors  inflicted by the repressive Stalinist regime, but also epitomised bravery of the highest order for daring to speak the damning truth in the face of certain unreasonable punishment.
It was 15 years ago when I first came across his work  in the form of his first short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  In Australia at the time, it was  an intriguing book that described the semi-fictional life of an inmate's suffering in a Soviet  gulag. The book stirred up the nominally imagined horrors of  life as a slave  imprisoned with very slim  hopes of being released. But the real backdrop for the story brings a spine-chilling reminder of life under the  Stalinist regime. As I read,  I thought  how cocooned, comfortable and safe my life was  and how lucky that society as it existed in Australia or our urban jungle is so far removed from what was  in the book.
Even though I had read the book all those years ago, the direct and unpretentious language used and the topic made it very memorable. Life in the camp was freezing and frequently dropped below minus-20 degrees Celsius.  When it dropped below minus-40 degrees it was a gulag rule that outdoor labour would cease for the day, like our typhoon 8 warnings. It is sadly amusing the implication that minus-39 degrees was  safer than minus-40 degrees. The clothes issued were scanty and worn out or  tore easily; the conditions must have been atrocious and millions of people died. The labour  often entailed bricklaying work, but due to the sub-zero conditions it had to be done quickly as the mortar would freeze rapidly. The theme of the book is the inhuman, spiteful treatment of man against man and camp survival.
The book was inspired by  Solzhenitsyn's own imprisonment in a Soviet gulag between 1945 and 1953. He was sent to the gulag for letters written to a friend near the end of the second world war intercepted by the authorities. In the letters he had written some disrespectful remarks of Stalin, calling him 'Old Man Whiskers', which was considered derogatory at the time. For that, a soldier who risked life and limb for the Soviet Union and ranked captain was sent to spend eight years in a gulag.  Most  didn't survive long,  so the length of the sentence was mostly not relevant and was usually  almost invariably a death sentence.
When he was released from the gulag,  he returned to literary life and  submitted his manuscript One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to a Soviet literary magazine; the editor was very impressed  and immediately sent it to the central censoring authority for publication. The climate of the Soviet political system had changed when power was handed to Nikita Khrushchev, who wanted to discredit the previous Stalinist regimes, and he ordered the novel published in 1962.
If the path to publishing One Day wasn't difficult enough with the first-hand incidental research by actual imprisonment in a gulag, the story continues with the ousting of Khrushchev. The subsequent  regime  expelled Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Writers Union, arrested him and sent him to internal exile in Kazakhstan. These events  inspired the book Cancer Ward, which used cancer as a metaphor for the Soviet system. It followed the case of a cancer patient whose malignant tumour grew so large that it killed the patient and, in the case of the Soviet Union, it was the prison camps and exile that did the same thing to people. He was quoted  as saying that many men more talented than himself  were lost in the gulags, and what a  loss that must have been.
In 1970, he received news that he was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature; the Soviet government banned him from going to Stockholm to receive the prize, which the authorities saw as an insult to the Soviet Union. In 1971, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and expelled to West Germany.
He moved to America where he lived in Vermont in seclusion,  and he wrote The Red Wheel, a book that he considered the culmination of his life's work. He was surprisingly critical of the western way of life and considered it wasteful and decadent.  He felt that the western pressure on other countries that didn't follow  the American democratic model was wrong. And  after the fall of the Soviet Union, he found a sympathiser in Vladimir Putin, who also felt that Russia had to form its own version of democracy that took into account  its own  culture and history.
In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev welcomed Solzhenitsyn back to his homeland.  His death  not only marks the loss of one of the  greatest writers of the 20th century, but a very brave soul. A true hero.



Urban Jungle