The White House said President Bush’s primary purpose while in Beijing for the start of the Olympics was to “show respect” to the Chinese people.
He demonstrated this “respect” by avoiding dissidents and by not attending any worship services by faith denominations that suffer persecution by that country’s Communist government. Like many other tourists, he was there to watch the athletes and lend the good name of the American republic to the whitewashing of a despotic regime – still the world’s largest tyranny – whose innumerable crimes have become a footnote to its successful pursuit of Western cash.
Bush once seemed to base the entire foreign policy of his presidency on the notion of democracy promotion. But by kowtowing to the Beijing regime, he revisited a role once played with gusto by two other Republican presidents a generation ago, when Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford embraced détente with the Soviet Union and similarly avoided meetings with that evil empire’s internal critics.
While the two situations are not completely analogous, the recent death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian literary giant and symbol of resistance to communism, makes such comparisons unavoidable.
Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, few young people had even heard of the 89-year-old writer. And for those who had, the image that many retained was that of the cranky old man who raged against the materialism of the West, as well as that of the Russia that emerged from the nightmare of communism. His books, while famous, are, with one exception, largely unread.
As Norman Podhoretz wrote in Commentary magazine in 1985, when Solzhenitsyn’s anti-communism was still deeply relevant to contemporary politics, “The Gulag Archipelago is one of the most famous books ever written,” but few had actually read it. He allowed that A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was widely read, but that in general Solzhenitsyn’s works were generally “more reviewed than read.”
And yet Solzhenitsyn remains one of the most important persons of the 20th century. His books did as much to bring down the most murderous regime of the modern age as the work of any other person or nation.
The publication of Ivan Denisovich made the suffering of the tens of millions imprisoned in Soviet slave labor camps real for a world that had denied they existed. The Gulag Archipelago documented in his unique style one of the greatest crimes in history and gave a voice to its hitherto silenced victims.
Even more dangerously, it pinned the blame for this evil not just on one man – Josef Stalin – as many liberals and Soviet sympathizers tried to do, but on his predecessor Vladimir Lenin and the entire belief system of socialism.
Having survived a long sentence in such a camp himself, Solzhenitsyn wrote Ivan Denisovich from his own memories, and then gathered the testimony of others to write Gulag and other important works.
Despite the constant threat of imprisonment and a return to the torture of the camps, he defied the Kremlin and the KGB and spoke out against censorship. When he won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature, his acceptance address (delivered in absentia) warned an indifferent world that the duty of the artist was “not to participate in lies,” and that even more, they had the power “to defeat the lie!”
Though it may not have seemed likely at the time, that is exactly what he, along with a generation of fellow dissidents and refuseniks that he helped inspire, did. Without his books, it is simply impossible to imagine that the struggle against the Communists, both inside and outside the country, would have succeeded as it eventually did. As much as any man ever has, Solzhenitsyn changed the world.
As with many great individuals, the writer had his faults. He did not understand the United States and made no attempt to do so in two decades on our shores after being forced into exile in 1974. While rightly calling for Americans to reject the moral relativism of the left and to resist the “spirit of Munich” that urged appeasement of Moscow, his cultural isolation also led him to denounce rock music and Western culture with as much bitterness as he did the gulag.