Russian historian/novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn died in Moscow at the age of 89. A great man has passed on to what, if there is any justice in the universe, is a great reward. In his book The Case For Democracy, fellow Soviet dissident and refusnik Natan Sharansky listed Solzhenitsyn, along with Ronald Reagan and Washington Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, as the three people most responsible for the fall of the Soviet dictatorship. Senator Jackson compelled the United States government to require that the thugs in the Kremlin live up to their obligations to human rights and linked trade and diplomatic relations with America to that regime’s human rights efforts. Reagan spent the thugs to death. Solzhenitsyn proved that the pen is mightier than the sword, Arctic cold, brutal treatment, injustice, guns, exile and absolute power. He wielded no other weapon, nor did he need to.

His best-known work, The Gulag Archipelago, is described in the western press as a shocking expose of Stalin’s brutal labor camps. Ripping the lid off … Well, you get the point. Leave it to the news media to trivialize a work whose tremendous power will outlive all their scribblings. Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn stated flatly that the labor camps were not Stalin’s creation, but his legacy from Lenin. Nor was he an anomaly of Soviet history. Stalin and the Gulag were as predictable as the dawn once the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 and began to put their monstrous ideology into play.

Ideology is crucial to absolute tyranny. Recent history is replete with run-of-the-mill tyrants; Franco, Pinochet, Marcos, Saddam Hussein. Brutal as they were, these mutts were strictly minor league dictators for they lacked a coherent ideology which could knit up their tattered hatreds and delusions into a semi-coherent system. The Bigs, of course, were Marxism and Nazism (with Fascism as a kind of despotic AAA League). The Nazis held that everything depended on blood and race. Marx disagreed and placed social class in the driver’s seat. With ideology firmly in place, both were able to wreak slaughter on innocent people around the world. Nazism suffered an early defeat and it was left to the heirs of Marx; Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot to demonstrate the innate brutality of entrenched ideology.

Solzhenitsyn was an incredibly prolific writer. My library contains seven volumes from his pen and that is a mere sampling of the man’s oeuvre. He wrote in the style of the great Russian masters like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Gorky – which is to say that the text is dense, compacted and must be followed almost word-by-word. For those with a taste for this style – admittedly an acquired one – I heartily recommend August, 1914 and November, 1916. These are the only completed volumes of a projected four-volume work called The Red Wheel, which attempts to place the events up to and including the October Revolution in an historical perspective long denied by Communists. True Slavophiles will especially enjoy his defense of Pyotr Stolypin, Emperor Nicholas II’s Prime Minister during and immediately after the revolution of 1905-06.

For most of his life, Solzhenitsyn was an ardent advocate of Russian nationalism – not to say nativism. The Soviets found him intolerable and the West deemed him insufferable for he rejected both social models. For him, the soul of Russia has always been in the dirt, the soil of the Rodina (Motherland). Moving forward from the fecund loam of his native land, Solzhenitsyn argued for a Russia that would embrace God, Christ and the eternal essence of the Rus, firmly rooted in the fixed land.

ABC’s World News Tonight reported the man’s death twenty-two minutes into their broadcast on Monday, August 4, 2008. I tuned in just in time to see the brief story preceding it – an account of actor Morgan Freeman’s condition following a car accident in northern Mississippi. What stories led the news up to that point – gas prices, celebrity antics and fast-food calories, perhaps – I cannot say. Its placement was an accurate reflection of America’s appreciation of a towering literary figure whose impact on history will be equaled by very few.