Alexander Solzhenitsyn, RIP

Solzhenitsyn as a prisoner in 1945

Aleksander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Александр Исаевич Солженицын) is dead at 89 years old. That was a long life for a man who saw combat in the Soviet Army in WWII, was branded an enemy of the state for his criticism of Josef Stalin after the war, spent 8 years in Soviet labor camps, and was hit with a severe bout of cancer. He later wrote many books on the subject of abuses in the Soviet system, the most famous of which was probably Gulag Archipelago. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, and was forced to leave the Soviet Union in 1974.

In 1978, while discussing the Vietnam war at Harvard University, he said:

"But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"

Maybe, for a little while at least, the press will put things back in perspective on what the real gulags were. Just for an example of how skewed the term has become, a simple Google search of "gulag united states" turns up 869,000 hits. A search of "gulag soviet union" turns up only 617,000. Speaks for itself.