‘A riddle, wrapped in a mystery’

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and author of the great Russian condemnation of communism and its chief villain, Josef Stalin, died Sunday in Russia at the age of 89.

"The Gulag Archipelago," the author's massive account of the snowbound Siberian slave camps in which the mass murderer Stalin starved and worked to death untold thousands of his domestic political opponents, shocked a generation of Western apologists for the "noble communist experiment," finally helping destroy the curiously long-lived sympathy in the West for a Soviet slave state that could only be sustained by geometrically more vicious repression.

Needless to say, the author could not publish his book in Russia. After the "Gulag" trilogy appeared in Paris in 1973, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was charged with treason and expelled to West Germany in handcuffs.

But that's where the tale of the irascible, bearded dissident grows so curious. While he became a symbol of courage for a new generation of dissidents back home in Russia, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was at best a grudging fan of the freedom he found in America. Settling and raising his family for 18 years in tiny Cavendish, Vt., he did express some gratitude to America for giving him asylum -- and some hefty capitalist royalties. But Mr. Solzhenitsyn seemed appalled at the way Americans "wasted" their freedom on a popular culture which he found shallow and devalued. And the grumbling Russian bear was not averse to loudly saying so.

Is it something in the Russian character that loves not just the marathon Russian novel of relentless suffering, but also -- hard as it is for most Westerners to believe -- the relentless suffering, itself?

In the end, Mr. Solzhenitsyn seemed not to reject dictatorship by "strongman," per se -- but only particular strongmen.

"Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Putin could have seemed like natural enemies -- a writer plagued by the secret police and a president who started his career with the KGB," wrote Jim Heintz of The Associated Press, Monday. "But by the time of the Nobel Prize-winning Solzhenitsyn's death at age 89 on Sunday he had warmed to Putin's vision of Russia. His death left a complex legacy -- vividly intense books standing up for human dignity and free thought, but support for a man widely criticized as pushing Russia back into repressive ways. ...

"While he was relentless in exposing the tyranny of the Stalinist era, he became a fierce critic of the West and embraced Putin-era efforts to weaken or abolish democratic institutions in the early 21st century."

"Democratic" may be the wrong word. All communist regimes claim to operate on behalf of the common man -- it's no coincidence that they call themselves "Democratic People's Republics," stressing the "economic justice" of seizing private wealth to distribute among the masses ... even though the end result of eliminating any incentive to accrue wealth can only be grinding poverty and enervation for all.

Rather, what KGB man Putin has worked to curb -- with the puzzling support of this great author, now deceased -- are freedom of the press, free inquiry and debate, institutions of the market and of private property that can stand free of and thus freely criticize coercive regimes of central planning and regulation.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn thus ended up embracing the very suppression of innovation and free competition -- even if freedom sometimes fosters topless joints and silly sitcoms and greasy fast food -- that eventually led to Stalinism.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn, a front-line artillery captain in World War II, was arrested in the war's closing weeks for calling Stalin "the man with the mustache" in a letter to a friend. He was sentenced to eight years in the labor camps.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's citizenship was restored by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990; the treason charge was dropped in 1991. He returned home with uncharacteristic fanfare in 1994.

What is his legacy? Perhaps he was, after all, the quintessential Russian, "a riddle," as Winston Churchill famously said in a radio broadcast in 1939, "wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."