As we all know Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn has died. With his passing we all have opportunity to comment on Gulags and the mechanisms of state terror & control used to create and maintain the Soviet system & also a duty to apply such criticisms to the mechanisms of state terror & control used to create and maintain Western hegemonies.
The best way to do that in my opinion is not to wax overly lyrical in phrase or wade needlessly deep in intellectual erudition. All we need do is cast a quick eye over how today the West as Russia prepares to lay Solzhenitsyn to rest.
The best way to do that in my opinion is not to wax overly lyrical in phrase or wade needlessly deep in intellectual erudition. All we need do is cast a quick eye over how today the West as Russia prepares to lay Solzhenitsyn to rest.
"think about it"
“At a good Russian prison in Solzhenitsyn's day, you could be sure of meeting the most interesting people in society. For in the former USSR, where most prisoners were despatched to slave labour camps, it was only a handful of the most brilliant thinkers who had the right to internment in a better order of prison” :
Daily Telegraph obituary of Alexander Solzhenitsyn –“voice-of-the-gulag.”– 4/8/08
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2495704/Alexander-Solzhenitsyn-voice-of-the-gulag.html
The Telegraph chose to illustrate its obituary with a photograph taken of Solzhenitsyn with Thatcher in 1983. He wore a long beard of the slavic faith-healer type whilst she wore a blue flower patterned frock with twinset pearl necklace. Solzhenistyn's second son, first by his second marriage, Yermolai Solzhenistyn had just been awarded an international scholarship to Eton College. Thus we can surmise that Thatcher & Solzhenistyn spoke more about political prisoners and camps and less about school fees. Although She was in her election year which see her ideology of free market sell-offs hand a share bonanza to speculators of all classes and types save none, she had only finished the Irish Hunger Strikes with their pretensions to political status a mere 2 years before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Irish_hunger_strike
‘Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western
World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One
would like to ask: by whom has it been elected, and to whom is it
responsible?’
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The above quotation appeared in one of the first printed pamphlets encouraging people to activism and IMC stuff for Manchester. It was sandwiched between a quote from an editor of the NYT in 1953 "......There is no such thing as an independent press... If you express an honest opinion, you know beforehand it would never appear in print. The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the
truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon; to
sell his race and his country for his daily bread. We are tools and vassals of
rich men behind the scenes. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
- John Swinton, Former Chief of Staff of the New York Times, to the New York
Press Association, 1953 and a quote from a former director of the CIA "‘The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the
major media.’ - William Colby, former CIA Director.
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2004/03/286795.pdf
So let's look at the former "manchester" Guardian for their "other take" on Mr Solzhenitsyn "Praise his critique of the Soviet system certainly, but remember that it was informed by a deeply reactionary pan-Slavism" writes William Harrison. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/04/solzhenitsyn.russia
For just as the younger Solzhenitsyn left Eton when the scholarship ran out, the elder returned to his motherland as soon as the possibility became a comfortable one. & like his friend Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich would steer a singular voice through the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet unlike Rostropovich would not play such a crucial role in the choice of Yeltsin as succesor to Gorbachev during the attempted coup of 1991. The return of Solzhenitsyn would wait till 1994 and within 5 years he would compare NATO and the west to Hitler for their bombing of the former Yugoslavia :-
"Hurling aside the United Nations and trampling its Charter, NATO proclaimed to the whole world and to the next century an ancient law -- the law of the jungle: he who is mighty is completely right. If you are technically superior, excel your condemned opponent in violence a hundredfold. And they want us to live in a world like this from now on. In the sight of humanity a beautiful country is being destroyed while civilized governments applaud. And desperate people leave bomb shelters and come out as living targets to die for the salvation of Danube bridges... Is this not antiquity? I do not see why Clinton, Blair, and Solana would not tomorrow burn and drown them........................I don't see any difference in the behavior of NATO and of Hitler,''"
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, April 8, 1999 http://www.aeronautics.ru/nws001/solzh001.htm
Eton had just employed its first Russian, Peter Reznikov, who was chosen to head up the Russian department. Odd to think they never had Russian classes before. Perhaps they did extra woodwork hours?
All the former prisoners & oppressed of the "very best class and order" would take their piece of bread and drink a cup of tea with Putin. Thus Rostropovich got his medal “For Merits to the Fatherland” (First Class) and house visit in March 2007 & then "On June 5, 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree conferring the State Prize of the Russian Federation for the humanitarian work of Solzhenitsyn. President Putin personally visited the writer at his home on June 12, 2007, to give him the award."
(re Solshenitsyn http://www.aeronautics.ru/nws001/solzh001.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn re: Rostropovich and the Moscow Coup http://www.indymedia.ie/article/82207 http://itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=11479074&PageNum=0 )
Gulags of the USSR http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gulag_camps
Gulags of the USA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_prisoners_of_the_United_States
______________________________________________________________________
& so without labouring the point for this is no task at which we need work long -
what does Gulag mean to you today?
what does the forced movement of peoples and workers mean today?
what does forced exile and the fetishised legalistic disruption of workers' families mean today?
what and where are the prisons of which we find no official sign post, to which we may address no food parcel and to which we are told unknown flights go?
Are they still out east?...........................................................the mysterious east?
Who shall follow Solzhentsyn's imperative of conscience mixed so sagiciously with political expediency in telling us where those prisoners are?
Will they be of the Telegraph's class?
_______________________________________________________________________
last obituary in the series marked the passing of the quite famous Swiss chemist who discovered LSD “Albert Hofman has died at 102 years & 4 months”
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/04/397892.html
Daily Telegraph obituary of Alexander Solzhenitsyn –“voice-of-the-gulag.”– 4/8/08
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2495704/Alexander-Solzhenitsyn-voice-of-the-gulag.html The Telegraph chose to illustrate its obituary with a photograph taken of Solzhenitsyn with Thatcher in 1983. He wore a long beard of the slavic faith-healer type whilst she wore a blue flower patterned frock with twinset pearl necklace. Solzhenistyn's second son, first by his second marriage, Yermolai Solzhenistyn had just been awarded an international scholarship to Eton College. Thus we can surmise that Thatcher & Solzhenistyn spoke more about political prisoners and camps and less about school fees. Although She was in her election year which see her ideology of free market sell-offs hand a share bonanza to speculators of all classes and types save none, she had only finished the Irish Hunger Strikes with their pretensions to political status a mere 2 years before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Irish_hunger_strike ‘Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western
World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One
would like to ask: by whom has it been elected, and to whom is it
responsible?’
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The above quotation appeared in one of the first printed pamphlets encouraging people to activism and IMC stuff for Manchester. It was sandwiched between a quote from an editor of the NYT in 1953 "......There is no such thing as an independent press... If you express an honest opinion, you know beforehand it would never appear in print. The business of the New York journalist is to destroy the
truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon; to
sell his race and his country for his daily bread. We are tools and vassals of
rich men behind the scenes. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
- John Swinton, Former Chief of Staff of the New York Times, to the New York
Press Association, 1953 and a quote from a former director of the CIA "‘The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the
major media.’ - William Colby, former CIA Director.
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2004/03/286795.pdf So let's look at the former "manchester" Guardian for their "other take" on Mr Solzhenitsyn "Praise his critique of the Soviet system certainly, but remember that it was informed by a deeply reactionary pan-Slavism" writes William Harrison.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/04/solzhenitsyn.russia For just as the younger Solzhenitsyn left Eton when the scholarship ran out, the elder returned to his motherland as soon as the possibility became a comfortable one. & like his friend Mstislav Leopoldovich Rostropovich would steer a singular voice through the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet unlike Rostropovich would not play such a crucial role in the choice of Yeltsin as succesor to Gorbachev during the attempted coup of 1991. The return of Solzhenitsyn would wait till 1994 and within 5 years he would compare NATO and the west to Hitler for their bombing of the former Yugoslavia :-
"Hurling aside the United Nations and trampling its Charter, NATO proclaimed to the whole world and to the next century an ancient law -- the law of the jungle: he who is mighty is completely right. If you are technically superior, excel your condemned opponent in violence a hundredfold. And they want us to live in a world like this from now on. In the sight of humanity a beautiful country is being destroyed while civilized governments applaud. And desperate people leave bomb shelters and come out as living targets to die for the salvation of Danube bridges... Is this not antiquity? I do not see why Clinton, Blair, and Solana would not tomorrow burn and drown them........................I don't see any difference in the behavior of NATO and of Hitler,''"
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, April 8, 1999
http://www.aeronautics.ru/nws001/solzh001.htm Eton had just employed its first Russian, Peter Reznikov, who was chosen to head up the Russian department. Odd to think they never had Russian classes before. Perhaps they did extra woodwork hours?
All the former prisoners & oppressed of the "very best class and order" would take their piece of bread and drink a cup of tea with Putin. Thus Rostropovich got his medal “For Merits to the Fatherland” (First Class) and house visit in March 2007 & then "On June 5, 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree conferring the State Prize of the Russian Federation for the humanitarian work of Solzhenitsyn. President Putin personally visited the writer at his home on June 12, 2007, to give him the award."
(re Solshenitsyn
http://www.aeronautics.ru/nws001/solzh001.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn re: Rostropovich and the Moscow Coup http://www.indymedia.ie/article/82207 http://itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=11479074&PageNum=0 ) Gulags of the USSR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gulag_camps Gulags of the USA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_prisoners_of_the_United_States ______________________________________________________________________
& so without labouring the point for this is no task at which we need work long -
what does Gulag mean to you today?
what does the forced movement of peoples and workers mean today?
what does forced exile and the fetishised legalistic disruption of workers' families mean today?
what and where are the prisons of which we find no official sign post, to which we may address no food parcel and to which we are told unknown flights go?
Are they still out east?...........................................................the mysterious east?
Who shall follow Solzhentsyn's imperative of conscience mixed so sagiciously with political expediency in telling us where those prisoners are?
Will they be of the Telegraph's class?
_______________________________________________________________________
last obituary in the series marked the passing of the quite famous Swiss chemist who discovered LSD “Albert Hofman has died at 102 years & 4 months”
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/04/397892.html 
Comments
Hide the following 5 comments
Hanging out with Thatcher...
05.08.2008 02:06
"I can't say that I wrote my books in order to open the eyes of the West to what had been going on in the East. Above all, I wrote all my books for the benefit of my own people, for the Russians, because [we] ourselves don't know our own history.
It's not just the West that doesn't know our history; we ourselves have lost it. Recent events, both pre- and post-Revolutionary, have been wiped out. The documents have been burnt, the witnesses killed. So I have been working to reconstruct the truth, all the truth about my own country, and this is what I have done primarily for our own people's benefit."
speaking to the BBC in 1974
You infer that by hanging out with Thatcher and sending his kid to a posh school he was not 'one of us'. He was fortunate to have been able to receive a Western audience, and today there is no 'East' that we in the 'West' can interest with our Guantanamo concerns. I think we can forgive him for his temporary embrace of capitalism and all of its problems due to the latter stuff he said about NATO encroaching on Russia.
Brutal Dictator
Extraordinary Rendition of the Truth...
05.08.2008 08:39
You can take my headline in different ways but one is obviously the rather "extraordinary" way in which the media "renders" the "truth", whether it's about a great Russian writer (IMO), the true causes of hunger and poverty or climate change, etc. It's time that we reappropriated our language, our media and our world, not just for the obvious gulags but for us all.
Peace
A.
I didn't mean to imply he was not one of us rather : He was not one of them.
05.08.2008 12:37
Anyway. I hope some others read what I wrote & understood what I meant.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn RIP
obit (iosaf)
a false dichotomy...
05.08.2008 16:20
I don't think it's so much a question of them and us/east vs. west, etc. as a political fallacy; while Communism and Capitalism were and are presented as two opposite extremes of the political spectrum, Solzhenitsyn and other writers and intellectuals who got to experience both sides of the Curtain realised that the foundations of both systems/ways of life/ideologies was the same: materialism and the failure to acknowledge or address the spiritual side of humans or, more basically, humanity.
Prisons/the prison system/globalisation/the world as we know it is a form of captivation - we're all held hostage by the system in one way or the other (and I'm not being a pessimist here) and the globalised system is geared up to set up false barriers and bars between communities and people and is designed to dehumanise us all as is the more "conventional" prison system.
Solzhenitsyn, until he returned to Russia, was also living in exile and that's an important factor to consider in what you've said. Words and the experience of exile have a very close relationship...perhaps it is one of the few modes of expression left and one in which you do not have to pick sides...
A.
I thought I had encapsulated such "false dichotomies" in my illustration A.
06.08.2008 16:25
think about it - would a swastika on a US flag provoke more or less?
Curiously, the lesser well known son whom I mentioned in the piece hoping to bring some "class conflict" issues to the understanding of his work and life and significance - only played one public role of note after his scholarship at Eton. He was attributed as co-authoring a book with his father on the Soviet Question as seen and as to be read, by those who shaped our local past with slogans of "evil empire". I refer of course to the Thatcher / Reagan axis. "The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century: Toward the End of the Twentieth Century by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn and Yermolai Solzhenitsyn (Hardcover - Sep 1995)"
As a book of the genre of "anti-Sovietism" it belongs on the shelf with the works of another "son prominent perhaps only by merit of his father", the series published in the 1960's by Randolph Hearst junior for an American audience which hoped to "explain" the emergence of Kruschev and the reality of life in his USSR. That was a crucial period. We need go no further than the music of Shostakovitch, in particular his string quartets to hear the relief which the news that "Stalin's heart had ceased to beat" was greeted with. Though the west had to await the expose journalism of R. Hearst jr to put the significance of the XX Communist party speech on Stalinism by Kruschev in a context it could understand. Whilst at the same time it (the west) was content to shelter brutal dictatorships globally. At that crucial stage, did the Russians themselves first hear official word of what they always knew was the truth - that the Gulags existed and that Stalin had systematically purged. Solzhenistyn is now credited with explaining how that oppression had not only followed Stalinism (again obvious) but predated it and was an inseperable part of the creation of Lenin's USSR. Again, if only the anarchist writers Goldman and Zamiatin had won Nobel Prizes - that knowledge would belong on a different shelf in our canon of literature. Of course the Gulags and internal exile and enforced labour predated Stalin. IT was from those camps in Czarist Russia often in the very same geographic locations that the revolution had sprung.
It did not come in a sealed train carriage from Switzerland.
At end, I agree in great scope with what you've said. But I also think the possibilities to reflect on why the 20th century was the darkest yet for human existence and the most bereft of a sense of global ethical imperative beyond the length of a human life are very limited in the comments and suffices to anything I write to mark Solzhenistyn's death. Yes, undoubtedly the global movements of conscienceness which emerged in the 20th century saw problems in a materialist way and with the need to improve humanity's condition. But as I write - in the length of one human life. It is only now that a global awareness of the finite nature of our civilisation and use of resources, of the existence of merely poor or rich humans as opposed to poor, rich and enhanced humans - can help pitch revolutionary thought and will in terms which go beyond the materialistic.
The dichotomies are many. One I believe provokes much thought is expressed not verbally but visually in the paradox of the semiotics I mixed in the illustration, which is why I repeat it. Does that provoke as much or as little as a swastika on a US flag?
sincere regards!
Let's hope people read Solzhenistyn.
obit (iosaf)