The Dissident

By Stephen Brown
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, August 05, 2008 Not the least of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s achievements was lexicographical: he introduced the word “gulag” to the free world. One of the last century’s most important writers, he survived Hitler’s army, Stalin’s death camps and a bout with cancer, before succumbing to heart failure earlier this week at the age of 89. Still, the stark fact about his life remains: tyranny could not silence him.

Arguably the greatest of the anti-Soviet dissidents, and certainly the best known, Solzhenitsyn strode across the world at the height of the Cold War, urging presidents and prime ministers to stand up to the communist menace. Armed only with a pen, he defied one of history’s most brutal tyrannies and revealed its horrors to a world that was not always ready to believe.

His monumental and best-known work, The Gulag Archipelago, documented the massive destruction of human life in Soviet concentration camps – a destruction that rivaled the Nazi genocide. (According to conservative estimates, between 20 and 30 million perished in the gulag.) The damning indictment put the lie to the idea – still in vogue among some left-leaning revisionists – that the Soviet experiment was a success until corrupted by Stalin and his system of forced labor camps, the notorious gulag. Reaching further back into the Soviet past, Solzhenitsyn was able to show that, on the contrary, the death camps actually began with Lenin. To Solzhenitsyn himself, what was most important was that his work served as a memorial to the gulag’s millions of voiceless victims, to whom it is dedicated. He described it as being written “with the blood of millions of human beings.”

front page mag