People who influenced me: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

The man who saw it all and then came to warn all...

Russia hold a fascination for any one from Kerala at least those from my generation and before. Russia or the Soviet Union was a formidable power, in fact the only formidable power to balance the US. Russia came into our homes through a publication called the Soviet Union in the seventies as I remember. It was published on rather good paper but slightly lesser in quality than SPAN, the American counterpart.

Even people who had no reading habit like my uncle subscribed to it because it was cheap or even free and probably a part of the soviet propaganda. Besides it was known that India though non-aligned had a bent towards USSR with the Nehruvian Socialism still lurking around.

So the pictures of USSR were vivid in my mind and in those days 70s and early 80s I used to tune in for programmes in Malayalam on the Short wave and voila there was Moscow Radio with about 15 minutes in Malayalam apart from other broadcasters like FEBA radio which was mainly on religious themes. Another one of the Malayalam programmes was by the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation with mostly entertainment from film songs and Vatican Radio mostly on Catholic news.

Here I was sitting in one corner of Kerala listening to pure propaganda of the Soviet era. Whatever news we used to receive from Malayalam and English newspapers back home had a fine twist when heard from Moscow Radio. Thus what was happening in Diego Garcia an island nation was actually American Imperialism in full swing. What was happening in Afghanistan then occupied by the USSR was purely uplifting and so on.

I have often wondered about living in a country where there was a dictatorship of some kind and having to hear one sided news. Will I know it is one sided ? Or will they clothe it so cleverly as to illusion the listener that he was listening to unbiased news? What if the populace was immersed in semi truths and lies? Will they ever know? Will the fish know the water until it is taken out ?

Amidst such unchildlike thoughts I grew until some time later I read about Alexandr Solzhenitsyn mostly from TIME magazine. The cuddliness of MISHA the mascot of MOscow Olympics, the cute pictures of happy people and scientists that we saw in SOVIET UNION, the magazine were all gone. Stalin's excesses were known from C. P. Snow though as a personal quirk.

Here was a man from the dead exile in Siberia. Much like Benhur coming back from the galleys to tell the story. In one go the totalitarian tendencies of the dictatorship had a sudden exposure and appearance in this bearded frail man who survived only because he had an inner spark that no gulag could bend or break.

But what is this man's greatness. Though he suffered the extreme he liked his country. He was in a way the country in essense with the accumulation of all the harsh winter and hardships meted out by fellow men. Who else could condemn the materialsim of the west in the same breath after suffering the brutality of the East ?

From wikipedia I gathered more. Here indeed is a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet his publication had been officially permitted. He warned about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West. He 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. He praised the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of western democratic societies. He 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.

Who better than him who has suffered all and survived to tell!

While faulting Soviet society for denying fair legal treatment of people, he also faulted the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher, is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities."

And then comes the triumph. 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. Solzhenitsyn gradually turned into a philosophically-minded Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. Suffering indeed is uplifting in his case.

He remembered all those who preceded him. Men who saw a time when moral fiber was stronger than the material harshness and when material progress did come, saw sadly, that men forgot the fibre.

And cried thus:-

"Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."
"Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

Here is to me the greatness of this man raised and encouraged by a widowed mother. That amidst the gloom he survived and came back, his moral fibre in tact to criticise both mundane blocs in the same breath and enlighten humanity in the process....