Early years Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in
Kislovodsk (now in
Stavropol Krai, Russia). His father, Isaakiy Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn, was of
Russian descent, and his mother, Taisiya Zakharovna (née Shcherbak), was of
Ukrainian descent. Taisiya's father had risen from humble beginnings to become a wealthy landowner, acquiring a large estate in the
Kuban region in the northern foothills of the
Caucasus and during
World War I, Taisiya had gone to
Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy, a young officer in the
Imperial Russian Army of
Cossack origin and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of
August 1914, and in the later
Red Wheel novels. In 1918, Taisiya became pregnant with Aleksandr. On 15 June, shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was raised by his widowed mother and his aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the
Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a
collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the
Russian Orthodox faith; she died in 1944 having never remarried. As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn began developing the characters and concepts for planned epic work on World War I and the
Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel
August 1914; some of the chapters he wrote then still survive. Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics and physics at
Rostov State University. At the same time, he took correspondence courses from the , which by this time were heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he was sentenced to time in the camps.
World War II During the war, Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a
sound-ranging battery in the
Red Army, was involved in major action at the front, and was twice decorated. He was awarded the
Order of the Red Star on 8 July 1944 for sound-ranging two German
artillery batteries and adjusting
counterbattery fire onto them, resulting in their destruction. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel
Love the Revolution!, chronicle his wartime experience and growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime. While serving as an artillery officer in
East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed
war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "You know very well that we've come to Germany to take our revenge" for
Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The
noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and
women and girls were gang-raped. A few years later, in the
forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled "
Prussian Nights" about a woman raped to death in
East Prussia. In this poem, which describes the gang-rape of a Polish woman whom the
Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German, the first-person narrator comments on the events with sarcasm and refers to the responsibility of official Soviet writers like
Ilya Ehrenburg. In
The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one's own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were
we any better?'"
Imprisonment In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by
SMERSH. The cause of the arrest were nineteen months of correspondence with a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, in which they criticized the Soviet state and the conduct of the war by
Joseph Stalin, whom Solzhenitsyn called
hozyain ('the boss'), and
balabos (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew
baal ha-bayit for 'master of the house') for the purpose of concealing the political content of the letters, and called for the creation of an organization that would topple the Soviet regime. They had composed a sketch of a political program titled "Resolution No. 1", which was confiscated by the authorities at the time of Solzhenitsyn's arrest and later served as the basis for his conviction, along with his and Vitkevich's correspondence. Solzhenitsyn was convicted of anti-Soviet propaganda under
Article 58, paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11. a village in
Baidibek District of
South Kazakhstan. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. In 1954, Solzhenitsyn was permitted to be treated in a hospital in
Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel
Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The Right Hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag. His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of
The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem
The Trail (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labour camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.
Marriages and children On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya. They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release because the wives of Gulag prisoners faced the loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957, divorcing a second time in 1972. Reshetovskaya wrote negatively of Solzhenitsyn in her memoirs, accusing him of having affairs, and said of the relationship that "[Solzhenitsyn]'s despotism ... would crush my independence and would not permit my personality to develop." In her 1974 memoir,
Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, she wrote that she was "perplexed" that the West had accepted
The Gulag Archipelago as "the solemn, ultimate truth", saying its significance had been "overestimated and wrongly appraised". Pointing out that the book's subtitle is "An Experiment in Literary Investigation", she said that her husband did not regard the work as "historical research, or scientific research". She contended that it was, rather, a collection of "camp folklore", containing "raw material" which her husband was planning to use in his future productions. In 1973, Solzhenitsyn married his second wife,
Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a
mathematician who had a son, Dmitri Turin, from a brief prior marriage. He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970),
Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973). Dmitri Turin died on 18 March 1994, aged 32, at his home in New York City.
After prison After
Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and
exonerated. Following his return from exile, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his
Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known." In 1960, aged 42, Solzhenitsyn approached
Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the
Novy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of
Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publication, and added: "There's a
Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil." The book quickly sold out and became an instant hit. In the 1960s, while Solzhenitsyn was publicly known to be writing
Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously writing
The Gulag Archipelago. During Khrushchev's tenure,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union, as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his short story "
Matryona's Home", published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candour, but also because it was the first major piece of
Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. However, after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw, exposing works came to an end. After Khrushchev's removal in 1964, the cultural climate again became more repressive. Publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the
KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of
In The First Circle. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work on the most well-known of his writings,
The Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, a status which had become familiar but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant. After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, in the years 1965 to 1967, the preparatory drafts of
The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in
Soviet Estonia. Solzhenitsyn had befriended
Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Minister of Education of
Estonia in a
Lubyanka Building prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the
KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter
Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution because such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Swedish-Soviet relations. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been expelled from the Soviet Union. In 1973, another manuscript written by Solzhenitsyn was confiscated by the KGB after his friend Elizaveta Voronyanskaya was questioned non-stop for five days until she revealed its location, according to a statement by Solzhenitsyn to Western reporters on September 6, 1973. According to Solzhenitsyn, "When she returned home, she hanged herself."
The Gulag Archipelago was composed from 1958 to 1967, and has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was a three-volume, seven-part work on the Soviet prison camp system, which drew from Solzhenitsyn's experiences and the testimony of 256 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the Russian penal system. It discusses the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with
Vladimir Lenin having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts such as the
Kengir uprising, and the practice of internal
exile.
Soviet and Communist studies historian and archival researcher
Stephen G. Wheatcroft wrote that the book was essentially a "literary and political work", and "never claimed to place the camps in a historical or social-scientific quantitative perspective" but that in the case of qualitative estimates, Solzhenitsyn gave his high estimate as he wanted to challenge the Soviet authorities to show that "the scale of the camps was less than this." Historian
J. Arch Getty wrote of Solzhenitsyn's methodology that "such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history", which gives priority to vague hearsay and leads towards selective bias. According to journalist
Anne Applebaum, who has made extensive research on the Gulag,
The Gulag Archipelago's rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of Communist ideology made it one of the most influential books of the 20th century. (left) at the celebration of Solzhenitsyn's 80th birthday On 8 August 1971, the KGB allegedly attempted to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown chemical agent (most likely
ricin) with an experimental gel-based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill, but he survived. Although
The Gulag Archipelago was not published in the Soviet Union, it was extensively criticized by the Party-controlled Soviet press. An editorial in
Pravda on 14 January 1974 accused Solzhenitsyn of supporting "Hitlerites" and making "excuses for the crimes of the
Vlasovites and
Bandera gangs." According to the editorial, Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people." During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist
Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.
Expulsion from the Soviet Union In a discussion of its options in dealing with Solzhenitsyn, the members of the Politburo considered his arrest and imprisonment and his expulsion to a capitalist country willing to take him. Guided by KGB chief
Yuri Andropov, and following a statement from West German Chancellor
Willy Brandt that Solzhenitsyn could live and work freely in
West Germany, it was decided to deport the writer directly to that country.
In the West in
Langenbroich, West Germany, 1974 On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the Soviet Union to
Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. Solzhenitsyn also received an honorary degree from the
College of the Holy Cross in 1984. On 19 September 1974,
Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with
Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by
Vladimir Kryuchkov,
Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates). The
residencies in
Geneva,
London, Paris,
Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three
StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem
Prussian Nights), keeping the KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn. prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by US President
Ronald Reagan. At the same time,
liberals and
secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for
Russian nationalism and the
Russian Orthodox religion. Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant
pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits... by TV stupor and by intolerable music." Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of Western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in
Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn 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." In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local
self-government he had witnessed first hand in
Switzerland and
New England. He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of
grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'" Solzhenitsyn's patriotism was inward-looking. He called for Russia to "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful long, long long period of recuperation," as he put it in a 1979 BBC interview with Latvian-born BBC journalist Janis Sapiets.
Return to Russia , summer 1994, before departing on a journey across Russia. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after nearly 20 years in exile. In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his eldest son Yermolai returned to Russia). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a
dacha in Troitse-Lykovo in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders
Mikhail Suslov and
Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional
Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia in works such as ''
, and called for the establishment of a strong presidential republic balanced by vigorous institutions of local self-government. The latter would remain his major political theme. Solzhenitsyn also published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, and a literary memoir on his years in the West The Grain Between the Millstones'', translated and released as two works by the
University of Notre Dame as part of the
Kennan Institute's Solzhenitsyn Initiative. The first,
Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile (1974–1978), was translated by Peter Constantine and published in October 2018, the second,
Book 2: Exile in America (1978–1994) translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore and published in October 2020. Once back in Russia, Solzhenitsyn hosted a television
talk show program. Its eventual format was Solzhenitsyn delivering a 15-minute
monologue twice a month; it was discontinued in 1995. Solzhenitsyn became a supporter of
Vladimir Putin, who said he shared Solzhenitsyn's critical view towards the
Russian Revolution. All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One,
Ignat, is a
pianist and conductor. Another Solzhenitsyn son, Yermolai, works for the Moscow office of
McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, where he is a senior partner.
Death and many Russian public figures attended Solzhenitsyn's funeral ceremony, 6 August 2008. Solzhenitsyn died of
heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89. A burial service was held at
Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on 6 August 2008. He was buried on the same day in the monastery, in a spot he had chosen. Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death. == Views on history and politics ==