Alexandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Russian: Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын, IPA: [ʌlʲɪˈksandr ɘˈsaə̟vʲə̟ʨ səlʐɘˈnʲitsən] ; born December 11, 1918) is a Russian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system, and, for these efforts, Solzhenitsyn was both awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He returned to Russia in 1994. In 1994, he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Department of Language and Literature.

While in the Soviet Union
Solzhenitsyn became something of a cause célèbre in the West, earning him the enmity of Soviet regime. He could have emigrated at any time, but always expressed the desire to stay in his motherland and work for change from within. During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
However, on February 13, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union to West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago. Less than a week later, the Soviets carried out reprisals against Yevgeny Yevtushenko for his support of Solzhenitsyn.
After a time in Switzerland, Solzhenitsyn was invited to Stanford University in the United States to "facilitate [your] work, and to accommodate you and your family." He stayed on the 11th floor of the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution. Solzhenitsyn moved to Cavendish, Vermont in 1976. He was given an honorary Literary Degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on Thursday, June 8, 1978 he gave his Commencement Address condemning modern western culture.
Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked hard on his historical cycle of the Russian Revolution of 1917 The Red Wheel, four "knots" (parts of the whole) of which had been completed by 1992, and outside of this, several shorter works.
Despite an enthusiastic welcome on his first arrival in America, followed by respect for his privacy, he had never been comfortable outside his homeland. He did not become fluent in spoken English despite spending two decades in the United States; he has read works in English since his teens however, something his mother encouraged him to do. More important, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking to fit television.
Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in conservative circles in the West, and fit very well with the toughening-up of foreign policy under Reagan. But liberals and secularists were increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian patriotism and the Russian Orthodox religion. He also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and rock music: "…the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits … by TV stupor and by intolerable music."

In the West
In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his oldest son Ermolay returned to Russia, to work for the Moscow office of a leading management consultancy firm). Since then, he has lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-Лыково) in west Moscow between the dachas of Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko.
Since returning to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn has published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, a literary memoir on his years in the West (The Grain Between the Millstones) and a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). In it, Solzhenitsyn emphatically repudiates the idea that the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were the work of a "Jewish conspiracy" (see chapters 9, 14, and 15 of that work). At the same time, he calls on both Russians and Jews to come to terms with the members of their peoples who acted in complicity with the Communist regime.
The reception of this work confirms that Solzhenitsyn remains a polarizing figure both at home and abroad. According to his critics, the book confirmed Solzhenitsyn's anti-semitic views as well as his ideas of Russian supremacy to other nations. Professor Robert Service of Oxford University has defended Solzhenitsyn as being "absolutely right", noting that Trotsky himself claimed Jews were disproportionately represented in the Soviet bureaucracy.
Another famous Russian dissident writer, Vladimir Voinovich, wrote a polemic study "A Portrait Against the Background of a Myth" ("Портрет на фоне мифа", 2002.), in which he had tried to prove Solzhenitsyn's egoism, anti-semitism and lack of writing skills. Voinovich had already mocked Solzhenitsyn in his novel Moscow 2042, portraying him by the self-centered ego-maniac Sim Simich Karnavalov, an extreme and brutal dictatorial writer who tries to destroy the Soviet Union and, eventually, to become the king of Russia. Using a more subtle line of argument, Joseph Brodsky in his essay Catastrophes in the Air (in Less than One) argued that Solzhenitsyn, while a hero in showing up the brutalities of Soviet Communism, failed to discern that the historical crimes he unearthed might be the outcome of authoritarian traits that were really part of the heritage of Old Russia and of "the severe spirit of Orthodoxy" (lionized by Solzhenitsyn) and not so much to do with political ideology.
In his recent political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998)' Solzhenitsyn has criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian 'democracy' while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet communism. He has defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to extreme nationalism), argued for the indispensability of local self-government to a free Russia, and expressed concerns for the fate of 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union. He has also sought to "protect" the national character of the Russian Orthodox church and fought against the admission of Catholic priests and Protestant pastors to Russia from other countries. For a brief period, he had his own TV show where he freely expressed his views. The show was cancelled because of low ratings, but Solzhenitsyn continued to maintain a relatively high profile in the media.
All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, has achieved acclaim as a pianist and conductor in the United States.
Since the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn is the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature.
The most complete 30-volume edition of Solzhenitsyn's selected works is soon to be published in Russia. The presentation of its first three published volumes has recently taken place in Moscow.
On June 5, 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree which conferred an award for Solzhenitsyn. President Putin personally visited the writer at his home on June 12, 2007 to give the award.

Return to Russia

Historical and political views
During his years in the west, Solzhenitsyn was very active in the historical debate, discussing the history of Russia, the Soviet Union and communism. He tried to correct what he considered to be western misconceptions.

Historical views
It is a popular view that the October revolution of 1917 resulting in a violent totalitarian regime was closely connected to Russia's earlier history of tsarism and culture, especially that of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. Solzhenitsyn claims that this is fundamentally wrong and has famously denounced the work of Richard Pipes as "the Polish version of Russian history". Solzhenitsyn argues that Tsarist Russia did not have the same violent tendencies as the Soviet Union. For instance, in Solzhenitsyn's view, Imperial Russia did not practise censorship; political prisoners were not forced into labour camps and in Tsarist Russia numbered only one ten-thousandth of those in the Soviet Union; the Tsar's secret service was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the army. The violence of the Communist regime was in no way comparable to the lesser violence of the tsars.
He considered it far fetched to blame the catastrophes of the 20th century on one 16th century and one 18th century tsar, when there were many other examples of violence that could have inspired the Bolshevik in other countries earlier in time, especially mentioning similarities with the Jacobins of the Reign of Terror of France.
Instead of blaming Russian conditions, he blamed the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, arguing that Marxism itself is violent. His conclusion is that Communism will always be totalitarian and violent, wherever it is practiced. There was nothing special in the Russian conditions that affected the outcome.
He also criticized the view that the Soviet Union was Russian in any way. He argued that Communism was international and only cared for nationalism as a tool to use when getting into power, or for fooling the people. Once in power, Communism tried to wipe clean every nation, destroying its culture and oppressing its people.
According to Solzhenitsyn, the Russian culture and people were not the ruling national culture in the Soviet Union. In fact, there was no ruling national culture. All national cultures were oppressed in favour of an atheistic Soviet culture. In Solzhenitsyn's opinion, Russian culture was even more oppressed than the smaller minority cultures, since the regime was less afraid of ethnic uprisings among these. Therefore, Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the west, but rather as allies that should be encouraged..

Communism, Russia and nationalism
Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and oppression of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the east, as long as they could end the war as quickly and painlessly for themselves in the west.

World War II
He also rejected the view that Stalin created the totalitarian state, while Lenin (and Trotsky) had been a "true communist". In proof of this, he argued that Lenin started the mass executions, wrecked the economy, founded the Cheka that would later be turned into the KGB, and started the Gulag even though it did not have the same name at that time. Solzhenitsyn's negative views of Lenin and Trotsky have been proved true by the opening of the Soviet era archives in the 1990s.

Stalinism
In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978 (A World Split Apart), Solzhenitsyn alleges that many in the U.S. did not understand the Vietnam War. He argues that although many antiwar proponents were sincere about stopping all wars as soon as possible, they "became accomplices … in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million people there." He rhetorically asks if the American antiwar proponents now realize the effects that their actions had on Vietnam by inquiring, "Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from their Vietnam?"
During his time in the West, Solzhenitsyn made a few surprising public statements: notably, he characterized Daniel Ellsberg as a traitor.

Vietnam
Solzhenitsyn has strongly condemned the 1999 NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, saying that "there is no difference between NATO and Hitler".

Kosovo War
from a BBC Address 26th March 1979

The West
He described the problems of both East and West as "a disaster" rooted in agnosticism and atheism. He referred to it as "the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness."
It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

Modern world

Mask of Sorrow
Anne Applebaum
Alexander Galich Published works and speeches