WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA !?

Thirty seven years ago today, on the 13th February 1974, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was kicked out of the Soviet Union and stripped of his Soviet Citizenship. He had already been awarded, in 1970, the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Between 1958 and 1967 he had been working on The Gulag Archipelago, which followed from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Both are based on his own experiences.

The Gulag Archipelago was also informed by his own researches and the testimony of 256 former prisoners about the history of the penal system in the Soviet Union. He discusses the origins, from the beginnings of the Communist Government in Russia in 1918, alleging Lenin himself had responsibility, detailing interrogation techniques, prisoner transport, prison camp culture, uprisings and revolts, and the question of internal exile. None of this easy stuff for the Soviet Government to live with, considering the impact it was having in the west.

Of course he ended up for some time in the United States, being feted as the prime witness to the horrors of what President Reagan referred to as 'the evil empire'. Whilst in the United Sates and travelling through Europe, he made a couple of comments about the West:

"...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer that those offered by today's mass living habits...by TV stupor and by intolerable music."

In a speech to the international Academy of Philosophy he implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law - a hard won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen". But he later added a caveat. "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities"

The Berlin wall came down in 1989 and his Soviet citizenship was restored. He subsequently returned to Russian in 1994. He lived in a dacha to the west of Moscow until his death , aged 89, on 3rd August 2008, the same day in 1914 that Germany declared war on France. He was born a the end of the first world war in December of 1918.

Like all of us he had his problems. He was anti-Semitic. He was a vocal supporter of the Vietnam War, yet condemned the bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, comparing NATO to Hitler. There were a number of inconsistencies which do not make sense to me. He was clearly very conservative in his views, particularly about western culture - television and their intolerable music. He admired the principle of the rule of law, and was right about the West not losing its sense of values, but didn't quite understand the letter of the law. He had no idea of the imagination lawyers have of human possibilities in understanding and applying the letter of the law. Perhaps Russian Orthodoxy didn't allow for that.

He had little idea of the law in relation to his initial arrest in 1945 for writing derogatory comments about the conduct of the War by Stalin. But that was not surprising at the time; however, as a result, the Gulag, Stalin and Soviet Communism, became for him, like Captain Ahab, his white whale. He spent most of the rest of his working/writing life trying to harpoon it.

I must confess feeling a bit like Ishmael watching the Pequod going under "...at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar." and I ask myself "So what's the big idea?"