Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's death is reported in today's news media. The juxtaposition of this event with the opening of the Olympic Games in China on Friday invites comment. As with the memory of Solzhenitsyn, there seems to be a deliberately selective memory as far as China is concerned.

In my view, Sozhenitsyn is first of all a witness and a witness of towering stature. I do not think that any of his literature should be understood except alongside The Gulag Archipelago, a carefully documented and systematic history of the Soviet prison camp system. This book documents particular instances, all of them supplied to Solzhenitisyn by witnesses or participants - hundreds of them - who risked their lives to preserve the story of this terror. It also documents the experience of the camps - arrest, first cell, interrogation, transport from one camp to another, and so on. The book was written in secret, its manuscript pages hidden from the Soviet authorities, in times when samizdat was a word whose meaning was recognised in every day life in the Western world. How many of our young people now would know the meaning of this word? The brutality is in places quite raw, so much so that you have to remind yourself as you read it that it is the unadorned testimony of a witness or participant, provided to the author. And in other places - I have just re-read an account of the meeting of "The Scientific and Technical Society of Cell 75" - there is a witness to the survival of the human spirit in the most crushing of circumstances.

In this context, I recall reading One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, which describes the experience of a day in the life of a prisoner in the Gulag, and consciously inserting into it the rawness of brutality with which I was familiar from The Gulag Archipelago but which is most meticulously but discretely described in the novel.

Those in our day who criticse religion for being the cause of wars would do well to be less selective in their memories - the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a witness to the horror created by a regime that rejected and persecuted religious belief, and it is a horror on a quite unimaginable scale.

And as we turn towards China to follow the Olympic Games in the coming weeks, we might also try to be less selective in our memories.