My discovery of Solzhenitsyn

The actual first contact didn't connect. I think it was sometime in high school, I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I may have finished it, I may not have. Anyway I was not very impressed. Not much happened in the story, and at that time of life I wasn't someone to read behind the lines to see what the story was really about -- a political system that could send millions of ordinary Ivan Denisoviches to those kind of conditions.

I started college in 1972. And in my sophomore year I was in a dorm named after Dag Hammarskjold, with the UN logo painted beside the entrance doors, and part of the internationalist appeals was we had a flag locker with maybe 50 flags of different countries. And being the kind of person who would become a computer geek as soon as technology gave me the chance, I gravitated to the task of putting up the flags in the morning -- it was something I could do by myself that was noticed. There were more flags than we had flag stands, so I could choose different flags for different days -- no one set out a schedule to make sure we flew all the flags an equal amount. And the first time I brought out the USSR flag, there was a thrill of the forbidden about it, a thrill of going beyond the conventional, perhaps also an awareness that the USSR had a revolutionary ideology, so I was a dramatic figure, waving the red banner of Revolution. Oh souls of zeks departed, my silliness was dancing on your graves! I am sorry, I knew it not.

In February of that year was when the KGB found a copy of Gulag Archipelago and Aleksandr Solzhenitysn was expelled from the Soviet Union. He was on the cover of Time magazine, and my buddy on the floor above me cut out the Time coverand pasted it on his wall. This buddy, his roommate and I used to get together to pray for each other every week, so for the last four months of that year, Solzhenitsyn looked at me every week in our prayer times. And as that year ended, the English translation of the first volume of Gulag Archipelago appeared. I went to the bookstore, purchased Gulag, First Circle and Cancer Ward, and read them over the next few months. And while it took a while to understand (when I finished First Circle, I thought the moral was something like "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we all die"). But one thing died forever, the thinking that the USSR was just another country, and right-wingers were paranoid fools for worrying about communism taking over. No, I saw that the USSR was a murderous oppressive system, and in many ways it was being appeased by the west, like the western powers did in the 30's to Nazi Germany.