A life spent fighting evil

RUSSIAN books are often dismissed because they are too long and contain far too many difficult names and, hey, who cares what happens beyond those seas which girt us?

Well, wake up. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died this week - and if you think that's unimportant, you should think again. Solzhenitsyn, who was 89, may not have rocked your boat with his writings, but they were among the most important of our times. Not only did the Russian writer devastatingly chronicle the horrors of Stalin's sprawling system of slave labour camps, where political prisoners were locked up to rot to death; not only did he force Soviet sympathisers across the West to address the reality that their simplistic, idealistic view of Soviet-style Communism was grotesquely misplaced; not only was he lionised in the Soviet Union (briefly) before falling foul of the KGB (again) after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature; he also held up a critical mirror to Western culture, compelling many to examine the soft complacency in our own society. After being imprisoned for writing a letter critical of Joseph Stalin in 1945, he survived eight years in the camps he wrote about in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he survived stomach cancer, which he wrote about in Cancer Ward, and after Ivan Denisovich was published in Russia during a short period when then Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev was trying to undermine his predecessor Stalin's cult of personality, he was lauded by some in the Party elite. It didn't last, of course. His 1970 Nobel Prize was seen as a reward from the decadent West, even though the author used his acceptance speech to warn the world that the "spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not merely a brief episode". He continued: "I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich prevails in the 20th century. The timid civilised world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. "The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material wellbeing as the chief goal of earthly existence. "Such people - and there are many in today's world - elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today - and tomorrow, you'll see, it will all be all right. "(But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.)" KGB chief Yuri Andropov, a future leader of the USSR, said in a secret memo: "If Solzhenitsyn continues to reside in the country after receiving the Nobel Prize, it will strengthen his position and allow him to propaganda his views more actively." The author was even then smuggling to the West sections of his three-volume work The Gulag Archipelago, compiled from notes and first-hand accounts he had kept secretly while in the prison camps. The first volume appeared in 1973 and he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He did not return to his beloved Mother Russia for 20 years. He hated the system, not the nation. Importantly, he didn't fawn over the West when he lived first in Switzerland, then in Vermont in the US. He was as sharply critical of what he saw of Western materialism and the loss of spiritual and moral values as he had been of the Soviet system. In 1978, in a speech at Harvard, he took to task US intellectual George Kennan, a former diplomat and adviser who had initially preached a policy of containment towards the USSR and later one of rapprochement, in which negotiations should occur. Solzhenitsyn, who knew the Soviet system, thought otherwise. Kennan, he reminded his audience, had said: "We cannot apply moral criteria to politics." According to the Russian, this meant: "We mix good and evil, right and wrong, and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world." He said only moral criteria could help the West against Communism's world strategy and he was scathing of those in the West, like Kennan, who recommended unilateral disarmament and the US intelligentsia who pushed for the betrayal of 30 million South Vietnamese. Today the West watches helplessly as China assists rogue regimes in North Korea, Iran, Darfur and Zimbabwe. We daily breathe the "atmosphere of moral mediocrity" that Solzhenitsyn warned would paralyse "man's noblest impulses" and are subjected to lectures from those driven "primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature". And we regard those who remind us of moral values as out of touch, too preachy, too hardline. We do so at our own peril and at the risk of losing the essence of Western culture.