Solzhenitsyn opened my eyes

Phillip Adams August 12, 2008

I'M writing these words in a room crowded with Russian icons, big and little. Centuries-old paintings on wooden panels that have buckled and bent with the passage of time. Some are smudged by the soot of candles that burned beneath them during generations of worship. In others the faces of Jesus are obscured by thin sheets of silver, leaving only glimpses of his eyes. The effect is a little like Sidney Nolan's images of that Australian saint and icon Ned Kelly in his iron armour: the eyes glinting through the slit.

This atheist has long collected Russian, Greek and Balkan icons. I love the way the saviour and the saints glow and glower. These icons have a passion rarely seen in Western art, a wildness and pagan intensity that leaves polite portraiture for dead. The fierce, fanatical faces of the Russian Orthodox faith, of Mother Russia, the art of the onion-dome church, of the ancient Kremlin, of the peasant's cottage. They evoke memories of Ivan the Terrible, Dostoyevsky and Rasputin, and presage the tawdry iconography of Lenin and Stalin and the cult of the personality.

The face of old Alexander Isayevitch Solzhenitsyn, seen in the photographs taken before his death at 89, is the face of a Russian saint. The exact same beard, painted in powerful strokes, the identical desolate eyes. The mad intensity. And the zealotry that had him courageously confront power - the horrors of Stalin and his gulags - yet become a supporter of war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.

I was a teenage communist. Australian commos were reluctant to hear the truth about Joseph Stalin. We preferred to see him as the heroic figure who defeated Adolf Hitler, far more important in the war against fascism than Winston Churchill or Franklin Roosevelt. We romanticised Uncle Joe, as Australian soldiers called him, and grieved for the sufferings of the Russian people. Hitler's war machine had destroyed 10,000 villages and all but crushed Stalingrad and Leningrad. The sufferings of the Soviet people were epic. Millions dead. And we didn't want to know about the sufferings they endured because of Stalin.

But when Nikita Khrushchev denounced his former patron, the truth, the horror, could no longer be denied. That truth would destroy the communist parties in the West, though some comrades kept the foolish faith until after Moscow crushed the Hungarian revolution or sent the tanks to roll over the Prague Spring.

There were, therefore, mixed feelings about the sainted Solzhenitsyn when he published his first accounts of the gulag under the patronage of Khrushchev during a brief Moscow spring. But as the terrible stories were revealed in book after book, with Solzhenitsyn winning the Nobel Prize and the second prize of exile in the US, no one had any excuse to romanticise Stalinism. Yes, many of the very old in Russia and younger ultra-nationalists remain devoted to Stalin's memory. But thanks to the courage of writers such as Solzhenitsyn the world knows that he was as great a brute as Hitler.

In exile the proud Slav remained the angriest of men. He refused to surrender to Western society, repeatedly attacking his host for the poverty of its culture for the moral vacuum he saw and deplored in it. And when the West bombed Belgrade he saw this as an atrocity as bad as Hitler's. Hence his support of Milosevic.

In Russia he remained an angry man, his political views increasingly eccentric. But they were explicable in terms of a life story that began within a year of the Bolshevik Revolution and a childhood lived during the Russian civil war. His mother raised him in the Orthodox faith. The family farm would be collectivised in the 1930s. He would join the Red Army, command an artillery unit and be twice decorated. His conversion to Marxism would be short-lived: his criticisms of Stalin in a letter to a friend leading to his arrest, to be beaten up and interrogated in the hellish Lubyanka prison. Then came a sentence of eight years in labour camps and permanent internal exile. His life reads like a film script worthy of Sergei Eisenstein. Or a novel. Such as the novels he would write. His autobiography was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago.

Nothing should distract or can detract from his monumental achievement. Not his increasingly erratic political views. Not even his support of war crimes in the Balkans. He saw too much and suffered too deeply to be judged in conventional terms. As a young bloke I was tormented by his writings, didn't want to believe them. Now I see him as a true Russian icon. Glowing, glowering. Fierce and fanatical. Always trumpeting the truth as he saw it, straight into the face of power.

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