Used and Abused: Solzhenitsyn Joins Pawn Pantheon

Don't believe the gushing obituaries. Like Orwell and Sakharov before him, Alexander Solzhenitsyn had outlived his usefulness. Long since his art was sacrificed on the West's ideological altar, the courageous anti-Soviet dissident had become an embarassment; a Putin-friendly, anti-Semitic pan-Slavist with a Tolstoy complex.

As a philistine, I’ve only ever read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. That book was stark, honest and left the reader to make up his own mind; unfortunately, I can't judge whether or not his later works were indeed repositories of moralistic, self-aggrandising flatulence.

It's all well and good for people like Zinovy Zinik to attack the Solzhenitsyn of today as man unable to “comprehend the political value of the right to disagree, of agreeing to disagree”, someone “whose views on patriotism, morality and religion attracted the most reactionary elements of Russian society , from top to bottom”.

Yet I can't help feeling bad for the guy. In the 1970s, when he was the darling of the west for writing about Soviet labour camps, his revulsion against liberalism, alleged suspicion of Jews and Orthodox intolerances were ignored in polite company, like his ugly and spurious denunciations of Soviet dissidents with whom he disagreed as KGB stooges.

In 1974, when Solzhenitsyn first came to the US, he was already all those things he was at his death: brave fighter for justice, wrongly convicted war-hero and great literary talent, as much as a prejudiced, obnoxious anti-liberal Russophile. You don't need to be Walt Whitman to understand that people can be funny like that.

While America only had use for Solzhenitsyn the rabid anti-Soviet (dismissing his savage indictments of ‘our son of a bitch’ Yeltsin, no matter that they came from a man seen as an authoritative moral compass when he’d been ditching dirt on the USSR) Putin eagerly tried to cozy up to Solzhenitsyn the statist, right wing mystic (with variable success).

There was always something laughable and pathetic in the Soviet Union's attemps to frame thinkers, some of whom had pre-dated socialism by whole epochs, as communist visionaries in order to make them acceptable. Pushkin? A proto-Marxist! Remember his support of the Decembrists, right? Er, the fact that he was a high society playboy was just a convenient cover. And look at Tolstoy! Look at the tender sympathy he had for peasants! And look how dialectical War and Peace was? And Anna Karenina, what a stunning expose of bourgeois decline!

Good to see we weren't alone! In 1954, as an animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm came out in cinemas, bankrolled by the CIA in order to indoctrinate young Western audiences about the dangers of Communism, the book's author was himself under surveillance for…Communist sympathies. Thus, in a series of events not unlike having one's face mauled by rats, a secretive intelligence service singlehandedly reduces a lifetime of dissent, conscience, artistry and intellectual ambiguity into a 2 hour mind-control feature, made in Hollywood, and bleating: West good, East bad.

And what of Andrei Sakharov? He was a big man on campus all through the 80s, when his message embarrassed the Soviet leadership and preached nuclear disarmament. However, his warnings of the perils of an anti-Ballistic missile shield didn't quite fit in with the plot. Sakharov was against Soviet weapons, went the story line, not Star Wars.

Such was the fate of the intellectual, on either side of the Iron Curtain. Let's hope that Solzhenitsyn's death serves as a stark reminder of the dangers and gracelessness of using ideas and their thinkers as procrustean pawns against the enemy du jour.