Solzhenitsyn

My mother says he was married to a Jew, which is interesting, given that he is generally regarded as anti-semitic. He claimed to be a Zionist, in that he sympathized with the Jewish people's desire for a state, but wrote exhaustively, later in life, on the role that Jews played in the Revolution and Red Terror, in particular their massively disproportionate representation in both the upper echelons and mid-level administrators. While acknowledging that many Jews were victims, he persists in asserting certain facts - such as that 3/4ths of the Cheka was Jewish - which leave no doubt in the mind of an average Russian who was the real culprit in establishing and enforcing a state of violent repression and totalitarianism.

Solzhenitsyn was a master at purging the Russian soul. The bitter Tzarist era he compares favorably to the brutality of the revolution. Stalinist purges are divorced of their innumerable enforcers, as the enforcers are then purged, and who can blame the dead, or name them. In all, he levies charges against an organism of state organs, but not the armies of nameless bureaucrats and paperpushers that fed the meat grinder, and oiled its many moving parts. There has never been a single prosecution since the collapse of Communism - not one, and Solzhenitsyn never called on the state to open its files. New gulags would then have to be built to contain the millions who did the work of the people, less with efficiency than with earnest zeal.

Perhaps it is the final irony that his parting legacy to a new Russia - absolution - is borne on the backs of those who suffered not less, but proportionally more. Surely he must have realized that a nation cannot forge ahead, with vigor, mired in its ghosts. This it the Russia Solzhenitsyn wanted - strong, enduring, poetic. It is a strange love affair of Russians and Russia. We define our civilization by the people who inhabit it - America is the people of America. Devoid of Americans, America has no meaning, no purpose. Russia is a distinct entity, a romance for its people to enter into; a romance that is real, and often tragic, yet Russia itself persists, timeless.