in bringing the Soviet Union to its knees any more than any other of its great artists, even if he was Tolstoy returned.

The Soviet Union brought itself to its own knees, ironically fulfilling the communist doctrine of historic inevitability, then slowly toppled.

Solzhenitsyn merely, fearlessly reported the truth about the lie, which is, perhaps, a better thing than being an instrument.

Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the USSR and came to the U.S. during the Gerald Ford Administration. Ford had the opportunity to honor Solzhenitsyn with a reception at the White House.

Ford refused to do so. He was afraid that such an act would offend the Kremlin.

This act of cowardice and hypocrisy on the part of Gerald Ford was typical of republican politicians--then and now.

As much as I admire and respect what Solzhenitsyn wrote, I do not think any biographical study, no matter how short, would be complete without mention that he was an avid monarchist. That's right folks, he wanted a return of the Tsar.

Great writer (I enjoyed "August 1914" as much or more than I did "Denisovich"), tremendously influential (I would not say instrumental, though) but a world class kook.

Ultimately, his life story gives us hope. Look at how a paranoid, repressive regime tripped itself up in some many ways, not the least of which was its gross over-reaction to a passing comment in a letter which led to Solzhenitsyn's arrest. Prior to his arrest he was at worst a harmless eccentric. Then look what happened.

... prior to World War II and also during. He was really no different from thousands of other socialists who saw through the Stalinists' behavior before and during the war. Except he could remember - and write. A dangerous thing. Trotskyists, right oppositionists and even many Stalinists died or were imprisioned, not just Russian Orthodox priests, or anarchists or peasants.

Another pro-revolutionary intellectual and writer that grew to understand bureaucratism and Stalinism during the war was Vassily Grossman, who wrote the wonderful, Tolstoyan "Life and Fate" about the USSR during the war. While Solzhenitsyn was a great observer, he did not have the literary scope that Grossman could muster. Grossman was a reporter for the Soviet military's "Red Star" and was the first reporter to discover a death camp in Poland.

Grossman, however, was never jailed. While he wrote about the incarceration of old Bolsheviks and bourgeois, he never had the scope of experience in the camps that Solshenitzyn did.

He's an anachronism already. To me he showed the value of timing. His work had little value as literature other than the story he told and when he told it.

It's difficult to convey what it was like to make sure you kept the water fresh in the fruit-cellar-bomb-shelter, but it did something to a tender mind. Russia was the home of red beef-cheeked table-banging Khruschev and his spies. The fear mongers had done their job and little if anything was really known about the pipe dream that was the USSR.

Bingo. Along comes the S-man and the world ate it up. The wonder was that it was actually true given how perfectly it fit the times and the mood. The Ruskies couldn't have made themselves into the bad guys any better if it was their original and only intention.

I wonder if things have really changed. America is still by and large the most ignorant "advanced" nation and it is supposedly the leader of the "free world..." I've never really been able to figure it out. Today we are more ambiguous toward our leaders, but when they pull out the fear card no questions are welcomed, and few are asked.

Maybe it was the fundamentalism that led Solzhnitsyn to take the risk he did. Russia still impresses with the authority of its literati--which is what makes its leaders so nervous and authoritarian. The French provided the model but not the revolution. In this country a writer is one more opinion looked at askance if he or she is looked at at all, and mostly by a bunch of bean heads who nobody listens to.

Ah, those were the days.

He continued to be a harsh and vocal critic of the western nations and non communist states as well. On more than one occasion he used public speeches at universities in the US to excoriate the US, generally and specifically. In fact his criticism of the west was not in most ways materially different from the criticism of the west foisted by the Soviet regime he left behind. So in the end, it's hard to understand what kind of 'truth and beauty' he was aspiring to. Maybe it was just anger.

As long as there are people unjustly imprisoned by tyrannical governments, Solzhenitsyn's magnificent body of work will remain relevant. Just re-read the first few pages of "Gulag Archipelago" for a vivid sense of the utter hopelessness that arrest in a totalitarian society would conjure in its victim. Now magnify that by millions, and you can at least begin to understand the experience of living in Stalin's - or even Brezhnev's - Soviet Union.

More importantly for our times, with the advent of Guantanamo and "extraordinary rendition," the U.S. has now adopted the police methods of dictatorship. Shouldn't we suppose there are at least a few Ivan Denisoviches rotting away in Cuba - not under Castro's boot but our own?

There are many people who write history. There are very few who make history through their writings. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died this week at the age of 89, was one of them. In many ways, Solzhenitsyn laid the intellectual foundations for the fall of Soviet communism. That is well known. But Solzhenitsyn also laid the intellectual foundation for the Russia that is now emerging. That is less well known, and in some ways more important.

Solzhenitsyn’s role in the Soviet Union was simple. His writings, and in particular his book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” laid bare the nature of the Soviet regime. The book described a day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet concentration camp, where the guilty and innocent alike were sent to have their lives squeezed out of them in endless and hopeless labor. It was a topic Solzhenitsyn knew well, having been a prisoner in such a camp following service in World War II.

The book was published in the Soviet Union during the reign of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev had turned on his patron, Joseph Stalin, after taking control of the Communist Party apparatus following Stalin’s death. In a famous secret speech delivered to the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his murderous ways. Allowing Solzhenitsyn’s book to be published suited Khrushchev. Khrushchev wanted to detail Stalin’s crimes graphically, and Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of life in a labor camp served his purposes.

It also served a dramatic purpose in the West when it was translated and distributed there. Ever since its founding, the Soviet Union had been mythologized. This was particularly true among Western intellectuals, who had been taken by not only the romance of socialism, but also by the image of intellectuals staging a revolution. Vladimir Lenin, after all, had been the author of works such as “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.” The vision of intellectuals as revolutionaries gripped many European and American intellectuals.

These intellectuals had missed not only that the Soviet Union was a social catastrophe, but that, far from being ruled by intellectuals, it was being ruled by thugs. For an extraordinarily long time, in spite of ample testimony by emigres from the Soviet regime, Western intellectuals simply denied this reality. When Western intellectuals wrote that they had “seen the future and it worked,” they were writing at a time when the Soviet terror was already well under way. They simply couldn’t see it.

One of the most important things about “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was not only that it was so powerful, but that it had been released under the aegis of the Soviet state, meaning it could not simply be ignored. Solzhenitsyn was critical in breaking the intellectual and moral logjam among intellectuals in the West. You had to be extraordinarily dense or dishonest to continue denying the obvious, which was that the state that Lenin and Stalin had created was a moral monstrosity.

Khrushchev’s intentions were not Solzhenitsyn’s. Khrushchev wanted to demonstrate the evils of Stalinism while demonstrating that the regime could reform itself and, more important, that communism was not invalidated by Stalin’s crimes. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, held the view that the labor camps were not incidental to communism, but at its heart. He argued in his “Gulag Archipelago” that the systemic exploitation of labor was essential to the regime not only because it provided a pool of free labor, but because it imposed a systematic terror on those not in the gulag that stabilized the regime. His most telling point was that while Khrushchev had condemned Stalin, he did not dismantle the gulag; the gulag remained in operation until the end.

Though Solzhenitsyn served the regime’s purposes in the 1960s, his usefulness had waned by the 1970s. By then, Solzhenitsyn was properly perceived by the Soviet regime as a threat. In the West, he was seen as a hero by all parties. Conservatives saw him as an enemy of communism. Liberals saw him as a champion of human rights. Each invented Solzhenitsyn in their own image. He was given the Noble Prize for Literature, which immunized him against arrest and certified him as a great writer. Instead of arresting him, the Soviets expelled him, sending him into exile in the United States.

When he reached Vermont, the reality of who Solzhenitsyn was slowly sank in. Conservatives realized that while he certainly was an enemy of communism and despised Western liberals who made apologies for the Soviets, he also despised Western capitalism just as much. Liberals realized that Solzhenitsyn hated Soviet oppression, but that he also despised their obsession with individual rights, such as the right to unlimited free expression. Solzhenitsyn was nothing like anyone had thought, and he went from being the heroic intellectual to a tiresome crank in no time. Solzhenitsyn attacked the idea that the alternative to communism had to be secular, individualist humanism. He had a much different alternative in mind.

Solzhenitsyn saw the basic problem that humanity faced as being rooted in the French Enlightenment and modern science. Both identify the world with nature, and nature with matter. If humans are part of nature, they themselves are material. If humans are material, then what is the realm of God and of spirit? And if there is no room for God and spirituality, then what keeps humans from sinking into bestiality? For Solzhenitsyn, Stalin was impossible without Lenin’s praise of materialism, and Lenin was impossible without the Enlightenment.