Lesson from Solzhenitsyn:
Catalog evil's many sins

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Almost 20 years ago in Moscow, a cellmate of Alexander Solzhenitsyn told me a revealing anecdote about this extraordinary person. It happened in 1945, shortly before the end of World War II, in which the future Nobel laureate in literature had participated as a gunner. Despite his merits as a soldier and his condition as a Communist, he had been imprisoned for mocking Stalin in a personal letter sent to a friend. It was not an ideological criticism, but almost a juvenile gibe about ''The Little Father's'' appearance.

At that time, Solzhenitsyn was still a believer in the virtues of the system. When he was led into his cell -- a festering, foul-smelling place without ventilation, where about 20 political prisoners were freezing to death -- he asked where he could urinate and defecate. His jailers pointed to a bucket in a corner of the room. ''And how do you eliminate the waste?'' he asked. They told him the task was done by a man named Vladimir. ''Vladimir? That cannot be,'' shouted Solzhenitsyn. ''The man who performs that humiliating job cannot bear Lenin's glorious name,'' and he offered to do the job himself, so the memory of the founder of the Russian state could no longer be soiled.

The man who told me the story, a former Communist who became a dissident and a democrat, smiled wryly and made a curious observation: ``It was all very strange. In one week we became Communists, reading slogans and other nonsense, but then that filthy ideological crud (which was totally irrational) multiplied by itself in our brains, so we had to spend years extracting foolishness and theoretical detritus from them, until we could be totally clean and cured.''

Prison cleaned and cured Solzhenitzyn of communism. All his important works revolve around that experience: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward, The First Circle, and, of course, his monumental The Gulag Archipelago. Prison turned him into a great man forged by his and other people's pain and into a renowned writer.

Perhaps if he had not gone through the horror of the Soviet concentration camps he might have become a more-or-less eccentric professor of mathematics or physics, disciplines he studied at the university. What transformed him into a true apostle of the fight for freedom were the beatings, the abuse and the doctor who told the guards to continue torturing a prisoner ``because he can still withstand a little more pain.''

Of all the documents written against the Communist madness, the most demolishing is TheGulag Archipelago. It is not a great literary work. Because it is very long, it can even be tedious, but that enormous catalog of atrocities inflicted upon prisoners for so long, written down with notarial cold-bloodedness, wipes out any vestige of sympathy that a sensible and reasonable person might have for Marxism-Leninism.

For that reason, shortly after the book was published, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union, deprived of his Soviet citizenship and subjected to a ferocious international attack inflicted by all the pawns the KGB could muster. Leonid Brezhnev, the then-dictator in Moscow, realized that the Russian writer had struck below the system's flotation line.

Some months ago, someone wisely suggested that a group of historians write The Black Book of Latin American Communism. It would be a country-by-country account of the crimes and misdeeds committed in the name of Marxism by the gunmen who were seduced by that ideology. All of us democrats know about and repudiate the monstrous excesses of the right-wing dictatorships on the continent -- Somoza, Pinochet, the Argentine generals and a repugnant etcetera -- but what's needed is an orderly and detailed catalog of the barbarities committed by this frenzied sect of the rabid Left.

All the barbarities: from Trotsky's murder in Mexico, the genocide of the Misquitos in Nicaragua, the Cuban firing squads and the stories about the FARC narcoterrorists' cruelty, to the odious assassinations and kidnappings committed by the ERP in Argentina and the Tupamaros in Uruguay.

When the project was proposed, someone asked to whom the book should be dedicated. No question about it: to Alexander Solzhenitzyn. He pointed the way.

August 10, 2008

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