Alexander Solzhenitsyn

He is dead now and will always be one of those odd figures who with nothing much behind him at all may have swayed history. I'll leave that for history to reveal that truth, or not. For now, simply because it is one of my favorite ballads, here is a long, positively epic, song about Solzhenitsyn's experience in World War II. He was certainly no Russian everyman: in fact in some ways this song simply stands for the Russian nation. And I think he would have liked this song too, though for complex reasons of deep seated civilizational love (I don't say nationalism because that is too pale a word for what Solzhenitsyn talked about). In any case, I love both songs, so here they are.

And a little anecdote. I used to work in a history department where Michael J., one of the grads, was a veteran of the gulag just like Solzhenitsyn. Michael spent 15 years there, from age 15 to age 30. He came of age there and told me once that his nation, his homeland, was the gulag. Like Solzhenitsyn he ended up at the Hoover Institute where he worked on his own history of the Soviet gulag.

I asked him once if he didn't think that Solzhenitsyn has already done it, what with his three vol. Gulag Archipelago, each at over 1000 pages.

He thought about it for a few seconds.

"Too superficial."

The Great Patriotic War

When I teach the second semester of world civ, I barely make it to World War II, my father's war. I always make sure I have time to tell the students that it was the Soviet peoples who broke the back of the Nazi war machine. Most are quite surprised. Last time I showed them the first fifteen minutes of "Enemy at the Gates" - it gives them a graphic taste of the fighting and what it would take for the Soviets to defeat this enemy. I particularly like Bob Hoskin's scene as Nikita Khruschev taking command.

Hence, last night when I read this post over on Catanima I felt compelled to try to answer Jack's question about why the Russian losses where so huge - perhaps as many as 20-25 million human beings. I was still sick, and tired, but I think my comment made sense.

Then this morning, when I am doing my morning reading while my coffee brews, almost the first paragraph I read (in Tony Judt's Postwar) is this about 1945:

The Red Army marched on foot and hauled its weapons and supplies on carts powered by draught animals; its soldiers were granted no leave and, if they hesitated, no quarter; 157,593 of them had been executed for 'cowardice' in 1941
and 1942 alone. But after a halting start, the USSR had out-produced and out-fought the Nazi colossus, ripping the heart from the magnificent German military machine .... But the Soviet victory had been bought at a uniquely high price. Of all the victors in World War Two - indeed of all the participant countries, victors and vanquished alike - the USSR was the only one to suffer permanent economic damage.

Russians called the war 'The Great Patriotic War' - 'The Patriotic War' in Russian means the war against Napoleon in 1812. Perhaps the Soviet army and peoples were our Spartans.