Intimate Strangers by Andreea Deciu Ritivoi

Author:Andreea Deciu Ritivoi [Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI019000, PHILOSOPHY / Political, POL010000, POLITICAL SCIENCE / History and Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

4

COLD WAR PROPHESIES

Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mythological America

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN arrived in America in 1974 after being expelled from the Soviet Union for his anticommunist dissident activity. The plane charged to execute the deportation took him to West Germany where he spent a short time before leaving for Switzerland. Europe impressed him with its institutions and especially the mechanisms of grass-roots democracy, but in the end he opted for the United States as the Tomi of his exile. Like Ovid, who spent his banishment complaining bitterly about the land to which he had been forced to go, Solzhenitsyn frequently expressed his disappointment in America. Yet, while the Roman poet was unhappy to be in a barbarian province that he perceived as inferior to his native empire, Solzhenitsyn had left behind a world of prison camps and food shortages. Many like him, struggling in the Eastern bloc countries, dreamed of reaching American shores. All America offered him, it would seem, was a familiar climate in Vermont and the opportunity to do research for his books in well-equipped libraries at major academic institutions. In 1992, excited to return to post-Soviet Russia, he thanked his Vermont neighbors for giving him peace to pursue his endeavors, in an abrupt and somewhat awkward farewell. He was satisfied: “I have done all that I wanted to do.”1 Indeed, he had managed to complete his work and lived to see the demise of communism. He might have also hoped that his presence in America had accomplished one more thing: to urge American intellectuals to restore the greatness of their nation—moral, political, and cultural—at a time of ideological crisis and power shifts throughout the world.

Solzhenitsyn had served as a Red Army commander during World War II and was twice decorated for his service. He was the son of a World War I widow and grew up in the provincial town of Rostov. Too poor to go to Moscow to pursue his dream of a literary education at the university, he graduated with a degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Rostov, a specialization that saved him later when he was sent to a work camp where he worked as a mathematician in a so-called sharashia.2 In February 1945, he was arrested on the basis of critical comments about Stalin, which were found by the Soviet censorship in his correspondence and in his literary manuscripts. He was sentenced to eight years in a work camp. Upon completing his sentence, he received another one, “exiled for life.” He was sent to southern Kazakhstan, but the second sentence was lifted in 1956. In his samizdat writing, Solzhenitsyn was an opponent of the entire Soviet system and of Marxism in general. His anticommunist views were well known to the KGB and eventually led to deportation. When he arrived in America, he had witnessed and survived the crimes of a totalitarian regime. Yet the United States did not seem to impress him much even just by comparison. Solzhenitsyn’s negative view of America became the core of all of his public interventions in the United States.

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