Solzhenitsyn: My Murdered Grandfather’s Voice

Solzhenitsyn's persecutors, like my grandfather's, were often driven by the same motivations as their victims. When people become the building- blocks of history, intelligent men can abdicate moral responsibility. Indeed the Purge—in Russian, 'chistka' or 'cleaning' —was something heroic to those who made it, just as the building of the great factory was heroic to Bibikov. The difference was that my grandfather made his personal Revolution in physical bricks and concrete, whereas the Secret Police's bricks were class enemies, every one sent to the execution chamber another building-block in the great edifice of socialism.

The men drawn to serve in the Soviet secret police, in the famous phrase of its founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, could either be saints or scoundrels—and clearly the service attracted more than its fair share of sadists and psychopaths. But they were not aliens, not foreigners, but men, Russian men, made of the same tissue and fed by the same blood as their victims. "Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own people?" asked Solzhenitsyn. "Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is ours."

This was the true, dark genius behind Stalinism—a genius that Solzhenitsyn describes in devastating detail. Not simply to put two strangers into a room, one a victim, one an executioner, and convince the one to kill the other, but to convince both that this murder served some higher purpose. This can happen only when a man becomes a political commodity, a unit in a cold calculation, his life and death to be planned and disposed of just like a ton of steel or a truckload of bricks.

Yet Solzhenitsyn's moral compass, so steady in the black-and-white world of Stalin's Russia, began to waver after the collapse of Communism. He returned to Russia in 1994 after two decades in exile in America and was feted as a nearly messianic figure. But Solzhenitsyn had no love for capitalist Russia and refused to accept a State prize from Boris Yeltsin because he had brought "so much suffering on the Russian people." And when Vladimir Putin—a former KGB officer—began to prune away the anarchic freedoms which Yeltsin had won, Solzhenitsyn hailed his "strong leadership" and brushed aside Putin's KGB past, saying that "every country needs an intelligence service." Yesterday Putin returned the compliment, lamenting Solzhenitsyn's passing as a "heavy loss for Russia." Both Putin and Russia's new president Dmitry Medvedev are expected to attend Solzhenitsyn's funeral at Moscow's Donskoi Monastery on Wednesday.

The strangeness of a former KGB officer paying tribute to Russia's greatest dissident is a reflection of just how conflicted Russia remains about its recent past—and in particular the legacy of Stalin. He was the greatest mass murderer of the last century, starving millions in man-made famines and creating a prison system which claimed more lives than the Nazi death camps. Yet recent polls have shown that Stalin is one of Russians' most respected historical figures, and, with the Kremlin's blessing, school history books are being revised to show the 'Great Leader' in a more positive light. And Putin described the fall of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the century." Solzhenitsyn, for all his cordial relations with Putin, could not have disagreed more strongly.

For decades, the Soviet Communist Party claimed to be the "mind, honor and conscience of the people." But the truth was that the Party was the agent of unimaginable human suffering, lies and deception. The true conscience of Russia was Alexander Solzhenitsyn—the man who dared to speak out against the regime and chronicled its crimes in painstaking detail. And in insisting that the Russian people "live not by lies," Solzhenitsyn made a tiny but deep fissure in the wall of hypocrisy which in time was, in time, to crack the whole rotten system apart.