Out of the gulag: The Solzhenitsyn Saga

Strange, indeed, are the ways of history and fate. The reversals they can come up with can be nothing short of revolutionary. Take the case of the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his epic The Gulag Archipelago. Time was when the book was banned in the Soviet Union, the writer himself hounded out of the country and even stripped of his citizenship. Now, news is that an abridged version of the celebrated book will be made required reading for Russian schoolchildren. For what it is worth, it could well be called an attempt at showing that Russia is ready to at least acknowledge some of the ills that attend its past as the mainstay of the Soviet Union. But there’s still this official ambiguity about Stalin. Sure, the ‘Kremlin peasant-slayer’ as another dissident and gulaged writer Osip Mandelstam called him, was famously denounced, though ‘secretly’ at the famous Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 — a turning point for much of the European Left. But while the belated rehabilitation of Solzhenitsyn’s book could be called an opening up about Stalinist crimes, the person himself isn’t quite portrayed as the evil-doer in official Russian history.

Is there, then, a curious reluctance among former communist states or current political parties holding roughly the same ideological position to take a real in-depth look at past mistakes and positions? Or is there a gleeful quality to writers who seek to pounce on the Left, ready with the charge of outdated ideologies, et al? Witness the recent minor fracas over the alleged statements by Prakash Karat at Cambridge. A few newspapers went to town saying that Mr Karat had finally spoken of outdated ‘1940s-style’ politics. But then Mr Karat immediately sent a rejoinder, saying he’s been wildly misquoted. So, where does Russia stand on Stalin? And the Indian Left on past or current mistakes? We don’t quite know yet. For, maybe like Mao famously said of the French revolution, a few score years afterwards, it’s too soon to tell.