MOSCOW // Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was buried in Moscow today, toiled obsessively to expose the darkest secrets of Stalinist rule and ultimately dealt a crippling blow to the Soviet Union's authority. Born in 1918 amid the bloody aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Mr Solzhenitsyn was initially a loyal Communist. As an adolescent he was an ardent supporter of revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin ? yet he went on to undermine the regime's moral foundations, his works energising dissent at home and hardening Western opposition to communism.
Recognisable later in life by his flowing beard and ascetic dress, Mr Solzhenitsyn set himself in the prophetic tradition of classic Russian writers Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. First though he had to enter the living hell of the Gulag, a vast prison system that swallowed up millions arrested on the flimsiest of pretences. In 1945, while serving as an artillery officer in the Second World War, Mr Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in the camps after the secret police intercepted a letter to a friend where he criticised Joseph Stalin.
By Gulag standards, conditions at the camp near Moscow where he first worked were relatively tolerable, but in 1950 he was transferred to a much harsher forced labour camp in Kazakhstan. He was released in February 1953, a few weeks before Stalin's death. He spent three more years in internal exile in Kazakhstan, contracted and overcame cancer, before moving back to Russia as a schoolteacher. Then in 1962 he earned literary fame with "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich".
A slim volume published with official approval during the thaw under Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, it described the world of the forced labour camps and swiftly sold hundreds of thousands of copies. "Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle" followed, both appearing in the West in 1968. But at home, amid a crackdown under Mr Krushchev's successor Leonid Brezhnev, Russians could read the texts only in clandestine editions.
By 1970 Mr Solzhenitsyn's impact was so great that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He accepted the award but refused to travel to receive it for fear of not being allowed to return home. By now Mr Solzhenitsyn was sacrificing everything to his massive portrait of the camps, "The Gulag Archipelago," covertly collecting information from 227 former prisoners. In 1971 Mr Solzhenitsyn suffered a bout of "heat stroke" later revealed to have been caused by ricin, a poison administered in a KGB assassination attempt, according to one of his biographers.
Mr Solzhenitsyn was finally expelled in 1974 by the KGB chief Yury Andropov after authorities discovered manuscripts for "The Gulag Archipelago." After a spell in Switzerland he moved to a remote village in Vermont, in the United States, where he devoted himself to his "Red Wheel" cycle, a fictionalised history of the run-up to the Revolution. The world now discovered a Solzhenitsyn who was highly critical of Western ways and called for moral renewal based on Christian values.
He alienated many of his Western admirers with a 1978 commencement address at Harvard University where he condemned Western culture for being riddled with pornography and violence. The author's spectacular return to his homeland in 1994, a train ride from the east across the former Soviet Union, proved something of an anti-climax. The new Russia was as alien to Mr Solzhenitsyn as the United States had been, a finding he shared with audiences in gloomy televised harangues.
Demand for his books slumped and his 1998 essay collection "Russia in Collapse" received an initial print run of just 5,000. A 2001 book in which he singled out Jews as disproportionately involved in Soviet repression sparked controversy. Last year, then-president Vladimir Putin awarded Mr Solzhenitsyn the State Prize, Russia's highest honour, prompting criticism that the author had grown too close to the Kremlin.
It was one of Mr Solzhenitsyn's few public appearances in his final years. His biographer, DM Thomas, compared the author to another returned exile, Lenin himself, imagining "Lenin and Solzhenitsyn, staring cold-eyed at each other across the corpse-filled gorge of the 20th century." But Mr Thomas also noted that had Mr Solzhenitsyn been a gentle man like his fellow dissident Andrei Sakharov, he might never have written "The Gulag Archipelago."
*AFP