Escrevi aqui um post no dia 4 (Arquipélago Gulag) sobre Alexander Solzhenitsyn, que morreu um dia antes.

Esta madrugada recebo a newsletter da The Economist desta semana cuja capa (reproduzida aí em cima) é dedicada ao escritor e intelectual russo. Um trecho da reportagem que recomendo vivamente:

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Speaking truth to power

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s example—and the heirs who failed him

GEORGE KENNAN, the dean of American diplomats, called “The Gulag Archipelago”, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s account of Stalin’s terror, “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times”. By bearing witness, Solzhenitsyn certainly did as much as any artist could to bring down the Soviet system, a monstrosity that crushed millions of lives. His courage earned him imprisonment and exile. But his death on August 3rd (see article) prompts a question. Who today speaks truth to power—not only in authoritarian or semi-free countries such as Russia and China but in the West as well?

The answer in the case of Russia itself is depressing. Russia’s contemporary intelligentsia—the should-be followers of the example of Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the other dissident intellectuals of the Soviet period—is not just supine but in some ways craven (see article). Instead of defending the freedoms perilously acquired after the end of communism, many of Russia’s intellectuals have connived in Vladimir Putin’s project to neuter democracy and put a puppet-show in its place. Some may genuinely admire Mr Putin’s resurrection of a “strong” Russia (as, alas, did the elderly Solzhenitsyn himself). But others have shallower motives.

In Soviet times telling the truth required great courage and brought fearful consequences. That is why the dissidents were a tiny minority of the official intelligentsia which the Soviet Union created mainly in order to build its nuclear technology. Today it is not for the most part fear that muzzles the intellectuals. Speaking out can still be dangerous, as the murder in 2006 of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist, showed. But what lurks behind the silence of many is not fear but appetite: an appetite to recover the perks and status that most of the intelligentsia enjoyed as the Soviet system’s loyal servant (CONTINUA)

Sugiro também a leitura do texto de Owen Matthews na Spectator desta semana.

Russia’s ignorant still hate Solzhenitsyn

Owen Matthews

In Russia, writers are more than just writers. Russians look to their literary heroes not simply for beauty and entertainment, but for a philosophy of life. Writers do more than simply tell the truth to the temporal power — they are Russia’s spiritual legislators. The stern old God of Orthodoxy provides an immutable baseline of good and evil. But it is in the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Pushkin and Chekhov that Russians find their universal truths, the nuts and bolts of people wrestling with freedom and oppression.

Russians look to their writers not just to think but to live more deeply than ordinary mortals; the best ones end up crucified on crosses of their own weakness, or of the state’s disapproval. This was certainly true of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Not only did he, in the pungent Russian phrase, experience the horrors of the Russian century ‘on his own hide’, but he was possessed with an overwhelming moral imperative to record what he saw and felt. The impulse was so strong that while he was in the Gulag he memorised thousands of lines of his own poetry and prose when there was no paper to write on; the rest he scribbled on pieces of cement and scrounged scraps of paper.

When Solzhenitsyn died, Vladimir Putin came to pay his respects at his lying-in-state at the Academy of Sciences, and President Dmitry Medvedev bowed to his grave at the Donstkoi monastery. Thousands of people — many of them older members of the intelligentsia, in shabby clothes and thick glasses — had queued in pouring summer rain to see his body and lay flowers. But though Russia’s new masters had bowed their heads to Russia’s greatest dissident, in truth Solzhenitsyn was largely ignored in the new Russia when he was alive. Television has, as is now customary, taken its lead from the Kremlin’s respectful line, and Russia’s newspapers are written by the intelligentsia who respected Solzhenitsyn the most. But dig a little deeper into the hinterland of Russia’s internet and there is a deep and ugly groundswell of vitriol. On mail.ru, Russia’s most popular free email site, users posted 233 comments below a wire story about Solzhenitsyn’s death; almost every one was viciously critical. ‘Good riddance: He shouldn’t have worked for the West,’ wrote DimaM; ‘He wasn’t a writer, he was a traitor,’ wrote Vlad; ‘Glory to Stalin, Glory to the Soviet Union,’ wrote KlanZh (CONTINUA).