SOLZHENITSYN’S POWER OF WORDS

Days after this newspaper began publication, now nearly a half century ago, editor Bill Dorvillier wrote a hard editorial about a traffic accident on Munoz Rivera Avenue. Two nuns on their way to Old San Juan were hurt when their car, in heavy rain, slid off the avenue and down a bank.

The next day, a rookie reporter on assignment, I saw government workers putting up a protective rail at the site of the accident. So this is the power of the press, I said to myself with satisfaction and pride. The power of Dorvillier’s editorial.

A decade and a half later, I had a similar sensation – on a much grander, global, historic scale – when I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago.” This one man, a writer, had taken on the fearful colossus, the indestructible Soviet Empire. Considered in the Kremlin a “dangerous man”, in 1974 the Soviet secret police broke into his Moscow home, arrested him. But he was now too famous -- awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature-- to be sent again to a Gulag, a Soviet slave labor camp. He was sent into exile.

When the “The Gulag Archipelago” appeared in Paris in 1973 and in English in the U.S. in 1974, it had an enormous immediate impact. But no one could dream the eventual impact. Yes, there were cracks in the Soviet Empire, and between the communist giants, the USSR and China. But in critical Cold War battlegrounds, the communist fought the U.S.to a stalemate in Korea, humiliated and defeated the U.S. in Vietnam. The Soviet satellite, Castro’s Cuba, taunted the U.S. just off the Florida coast. A good part of the world map was still red – from East Germany to East Europe to Russia, China, now Indochina as Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos went communist.

And many democrats in the West had a problem opposing communism. Simply put, that communism as an ideology was “morally right” and capitalism “morally wrong.” That the goal of communism was social justice, a classless society free of exploitation. That the goal of capitalism was profit, based precisely on class exploitation. Yes, Lenin and Stalin did bad things to their people. But as one prominent leftist English politician put it, they in fact “deformed” communism. And in the 1950’s, the vicious demagoguery of McCarthyism made “anti-communism” synonymous to “reactionary capitalist propaganda.”

Add to this ideological mindset the reality of the Cold War. In the nuclear age, “detent” with the Soviet Union seemed the only sane policy for the U.S. and the West. If the goal was “co-existence,” to frontally attack the very foundations of the Soviet Union seemed to many a dangerous policy.

This is precisely what Solzhenitsyn did and he was seen as “dangerous” not only in the Kremlin, but in the West. As a Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out this week, Sweden refused to give him the Nobel Prize at its embassy in Moscow. Once in exile in the U.S., President Ford initially refused to receive him in the White House.

Through the decades, of course, thousands of others had denounced the Soviet Union and communism. But what made Solzhenitsyn “dangerous” was precisely the power of his words. The three-volume “The Gulag Archipelago” is the true story of his eight years in a Gulag slave camp, a loyal communist, a World War II Red Army officer now accused of having slandered Stalin – and the true stories of hundreds of other victims. Soviet leaders and others, including European intellectuals, tried, but could not dismiss him as just another “anti-communist tool of capitalism.”

As the August 5th Washington Post editorial put it: Solzhenitsyn “with his writings and dauntless moral courage shook Soviet power as no other individual had done… Who again could doubt the rot that was at the system’s core or the sinister cynicism of its leadership?”

How essential the 476 Gulag complexes (some consisted of hundreds of camps) were to the Soviet system, from the very beginning of Lenin’s Russian Revolution until Mikhail Gorbachev began Dissolving then in 1987, is described in detail by the journalist Anne Applebaum, in her important 2003 book, “Gulag: A History.” And how devastating they were. Her extensive research leads her to the “conservative” estimate that 28.7 million people were Gulag victims, and that at the very least, 2,749,163 died.

In the 1970’s it seemed impossible but today we know that Solzhenitsyn’s words changed history. “The books impact on the moral legitimacy of the Soviet regime,” the Post writes, “was so corrosive, and so irrefutable, that it can be said to have sown the first seeds of the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse.”

In July, 1980, I had the opportunity to publish one of his long articles in the first issue of a new daily newspaper, El Reportero. A small token of gratitude in Puerto Rico to a big, great man. Two full pages of words, the first part of a series. Here again were his powerful words, as he did often in the 20 years he lived as a virtual hermit in the U.S., chastising the U.S. and the West for not understanding the irremediable evil nature of the Soviet Union and communism.
#Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow last Sunday at the age 89. In the second half of his life he decried the superficiality of Western culture as much as he had the Soviet system. And today there is indeed reason to wonder about the future of the power of words. Especially when I see children with their eyes glued endlessly to moving images on those small computer gadgets.

I wonder about the power of words to change things -- the words of a Dorvillier editorial to get a protective rail built in San Juan, the power of Solzhenitsyn’s words to change history and bring down an evil empire.