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THEODORE DALRYMPLE:
Solzhenitsyn’s achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked. With a mixture of literary talent, iron integrity, bravery, and determination of a kind very rarely encountered, he made it impossible to deny the world-historical scale of the Soviet evil. After Solzhenitsyn, not to recognize Soviet Communism for what it was and what it had always been was to join those who denied that the earth was round or who believed in abduction by aliens. Because of his clear-sightedness about Lenin’s true nature, it was no longer permissible for intellectuals who had been pro-Soviet to hide behind the myth that Stalin perverted the noble ideal that Lenin had started to put into practice. Lenin was, if such a thing be possible, more of a monster than Stalin, not so much inhumane as anti-human. Solzhenitsyn was always uncompromising—and, of course, quite right—on this point: no Lenin, no Stalin. Insofar as Solzhenitsyn finally destroyed the possibility in the West of intellectual sympathy for the Soviet Union (which inhibited the prosecution of the Cold War), he helped bring about the demise of the revolutionary, ideological state, and for that he will be remembered as long as history is written.

...the Russian satirical writer Vladimir Voinovich satirized Solzhenitsyn’s Russian nationalism by depicting someone resembling him having his employees flogged in Vermont. This satirical scene, in fact, made a profound criticism of Solzhenitsyn’s political thought. Voinovich was alluding to the fact that, were it not for the horrors of Bolshevism, the pre-revolutionary Russian political tradition would be regarded as so brutal that no sensitive person of good will could be a Russian nationalist. As it was, the Bolsheviks regularly killed in a few minutes more people than the Romanovs managed in a century, giving pre-revolutionary Russian history the retrospective luster of decency, wisdom, and compassion that it did not in the least deserve. For Voinovich—and the distinguished historian of Russia Richard Pipes—Leninism had its roots in the Russian tradition as well as the Marxist one. This meant that Solzhenitsyn, while absolutely right in his uncompromising attitude to Marxist-Leninism and all its works, belonged in the category of Dostoevsky: a brilliant seer who would nevertheless have made a very bad guide.

Still, a man of Solzhenitsyn’s enormous stature deserves to be remembered for his greatest achievements. His efforts to memorize, and memorialize, what he had experienced in the harshest circumstances are sufficient on their own to render the rest of us humble. No writer of the second half of the twentieth century has had so profound an effect on history, and that effect was overwhelmingly beneficial. And when he reminded us that the line dividing good from evil passes through every human heart, he said something that no human being should ever forget.

DAVID PRYCE-JONES:
"Perhaps I shall die forgotten in Siberia," says one of the characters in that astonishing novel The First Circle, "But if you die knowing that you are not a swine, that's something, isn't it?" The Soviet authorities did their best to make sure that Alexander Solzhenitsyn died forgotten in Siberia along with the millions of the lost. They failed. The Germans had also failed to kill him as a wartime artillery officer. Unexpectedly, he even survived cancer, to die rightly celebrated in Moscow in the fullness of age.

Solzhenitsyn is far and away the most influential writer to have emerged in my lifetime. You have to search history very thoroughly to think of any one man who changed the intellectual climate as dramatically as he did. By and large, people really believed the propaganda that the Soviet Union represented peace, and Communism was progress. A.J.P. Taylor, my Oxford tutor, to give a personal example, had the widest reputation as a historian, but he insisted that the Soviet Union did not have concentration camps and Gulag was a fiction put about by White Russian exiles in Riga. I doubt he knew that he was in danger of dying as a swine, and pretty well the entire academic and journalistic and social elite were equally perverse. To give the Soviet Union approval, or at least the benefit of doubt, was far, far more acceptable than to criticize it. The few who were openly anti-communist, why, my dear chap, we can't possibly invite them even to a drink, we don't want to know them.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich broke through to the truth. One who had had first-hand experience of the Soviet secret police state was conveying the horror of it. But of course, it was The Gulag Archipelago that really rocked the world. Here was the evidence of hundreds and maybe thousands of fates, their stories painstakingly collected, the material marvelously organized, the author's moral judgment clear without the least shadow. Dostoevsky's masterpiece, The House of the Dead, had recorded Czarist injustice, but the scale of Soviet inhumanity, and the wantonness of it, gave Solzhenitsyn the opening to document something new and worse than anything a Czar had ever done: Communism was state-controlled murder machinery, and its progressive image a lie from top to bottom.

To give another personal example, at the time when Gulag Archipelago was rocking the world's conscience, I was taken to a smart literary party in Paris. And there I heard Agnès Varda, a filmmaker with a fashionable reputation, declare, "No, I don't read Solzhenitsyn, he's a writer on the Right." Ah, and didn't Solzhenitsyn become a Russian Orthodox believer, and wasn't he also a Russian nationalist, and didn't he accuse the West of becoming a feckless moral slum? Swarms of like-minded idiots tried to write him off in this style. It doesn't work. The pen really has proved mightier than the sword. Solzhenitsyn's writings will inform posterity's view of the twentieth century.

[from National Review]

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
Solzhenitsyn's life was a roadmap of the horrific 20th century — the grainy picture of an enfeebled Solzhenitsyn with his Gulag-issue will forever haunt millions of his readers. It is hard to imagine how anyone other than Solzhenitsyn could have survived the Great Terror, World War II on the Eastern Front, the Gulag, cancer in the Soviet medical system, exile, the best efforts of Pravda, the KGB, and the Kremlin to destroy him, and scorn and abuse from those liberals who once proclaimed him a genius — or have written about it all any more brilliantly in fiction, narrative history, and poetry for over 60 years.

In the end, his epitaph is that no one in the 20th-century did more than he to bring down a horrific and bloodthirsty system that sought at any price to destroy the free mind and all that it entails.

[from National Review Online]

EDITORIAL BOARD of THE NEW YORK SUN:
It was his steadfast belief in good and evil, and his conviction that he was destined to play a part in the struggle between them, that made Solzhenitsyn's one of the emblematic lives of the 20th century. With his passing, we have lost one of our last links to the era of Soviet tyranny and the struggle to defeat it. Solzhenitsyn did not play the same kind of political role in that struggle as some of the other giants of the 20th century with whom his name should be remembered — Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher. But as a writer and witness, his contribution was no less crucial.

[from The New York Sun]

THE EDITORS OF NATIONAL REVIEW:
When 1999 turned into 2000, a lot of people asked, “Who was the Man of the Century?” And many answered, “Solzhenitsyn.” That was a very solid choice.

Born in 1918, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn became the voice and conscience of the Russian people. There was no greater or more effective foe of Communism, or of totalitarianism in general. His Gulag Archipelago was a crushing blow to the Soviet Union — after its publication in the mid-1970s, the USSR had no standing, morally.

...Malcolm Muggeridge called him “the noblest human being alive.” After passing away yesterday, he is now one of the noblest human beings on earth or in heaven. He is one of the greatest witnesses in all history. And, like all great witnesses, he was inspired by love, the crowning quality of his work and life.

[from National Review]

PAUL KENGOR:
The Gulag Archipelago, plus other Solzhenitsyn masterpieces such as A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, may get a half-day-news-cycle worth of attention from our superficial media. That’s too bad, since Solzhenitsyn’s unfiltered voice in our press frequently exploded like cannon fire at the Iron Curtain.

The Soviets recoiled each time Solzhenitsyn’s words were broadcast in the West. A striking case that enraged them twice over was when his words were (spiritually) employed inside the USSR by the visiting American president. This occurred on May 30, 1988 at the Moscow Summit, when President Ronald Reagan — who had been quoting Solzhenitsyn since the 1970s — met with Soviet religious leaders at the 700-year-old Danilov Monastery. Reagan said:

There is a beautiful passage that I’d just like to read, if I may. It’s from one of this country’s great writers and believers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, about the faith that is as elemental to this land as the dark and fertile soil. He wrote: “When you travel the byroads of central Russia, you begin to understand the secret of the pacifying Russian countryside. It is in the churches. They lift their bell-towers — graceful, shapely, all different — high over mundane timber and thatch. From villages that are cut off and invisible to each other, they soar to the same heaven…. [T]he evening chimes used to ring out, floating over the villages, fields, and woods, reminding men that they must abandon trivial concerns of this world and give time and thought to eternity.”

In our prayers we may keep that image in mind: the thought that the bells may ring again, sounding through Moscow and across the countryside, clamoring for joy in their new-found freedom.

The Soviets hated this. For Reagan to invoke Solzhenitsyn inside the USSR was bad enough, but to do so in behalf of religious liberty was galling. They wasted no time blasting this passage in editorials in their government-controlled newspapers. Reagan had dared cite Solzhenitsyn in the House of Lenin, an unacceptable blasphemy to the Gospel of Marx.

If a man’s achievements can be measured by the vicious un-holiness of his persecutors, then Alexander Solzhenitsyn will now enjoy a lifetime of heavenly rewards. Spared the martyrdom of the dead Russian believers who could not live to blow the whistle, it was left to him to witness to the outside world. It was a job that this faithful servant did better than any other zek. May he rest in peace, free from pain and elevated high above his tormentors.

[from National Review]

RICH LOWRY:
In his suffering, he gained insight into the twistedness of the human heart. “Gradually it was disclosed to me,” he writes, “that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.”

This deeply humane understanding of evil is anathema to a political ideology like communism that draws bright, artificial lines between the chosen people and their enemies, thus justifying unimaginable acts of sadism. “Thanks to ideology,” Solzhenitsyn writes, “the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.”

Solzhenitsyn’s suffering in the camps saved him from ideology: “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.” And for that, he made the astonishing exclamation, “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”

Such a man wouldn’t bend to any party or fashion. Soon after his exile, he gave the commencement speech at Harvard. He began by noting that “truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter,” then proceeded to scourge the West for its moral decadence. He was right about much, even if he underestimated the reserves of resolve in a West about to see the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

[from National Review]

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. [1976]:
Solzhenitsyn is not advocating nuclear war. Nor is he advocating policies that would lead to a nuclear war. He is advocating policies that would save the west from the attrition of its power and prestige. As regards nuclear arms, Solzhenitsyn states specifically that he doubts they would ever be used by the Soviet Union. Because the “Soviet Union does not even need nuclear arms; you an be taken with bare hands.”

...Solzhenitsyn does not believe one should refuse to communicate with the USSR, as it is being suggested. He believes that these communications ought not to encourage the Soviet Unions in its growing obsession to dominate the world, and obliterate dissent.

[from National Review]

LEE EDWARDS:
The Russian author and Nobel Laureate also played a pivotal role in American politics in the mid-seventies shortly after he had been exiled from his homeland.

In 1975, Ronald Reagan was debating whether he should challenge the incumbent president Jerry Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. A turning point for Reagan was Ford’s refusal in July 1975 to meet with Solzhenitsyn.

Reagan ridiculed the reasons given: Ford had to attend a party for his daughter; the Russian dissident had not formally requested a meeting; it was not clear to the White House “what [the president] would gain by a meeting with Solzhenitsyn.”

Reagan made it clear that a President Reagan would be honored to sit down with and learn from the famed survivor and chronicler of the Gulag Archipelago.

Four months later, Reagan announced his candidacy and began a quest that although thwarted the following year ended in his capturing the presidency in 1980. A core idea of his 1980 campaign and his presidency can be found in the platform of the 1976 Republican National Convention, drafted by Reagan and his supporters, which read: “We recognize and commend that great beacon of human courage and morality, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for his compelling message that we must face the world with no illusions about the nature of tyranny.”

[from National Review Online]

ERICA WAGNER:
Yet prizes don't make great writers; what makes a great writer is a willingness to speak the truth at any cost, and to that Solzhenitysn had a lifelong dedication - and his life was long. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, he quoted a Russian proverb: One word of truth shall outweigh the whole word.

We can only hope that he is right.

[from The Times Of London] 

OWEN MATTHEWS:
...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.

Why do the users of mail.ru hate Solzhenitsyn so much? Simple: they associate him, rightly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, even Mikhail Gorbachev said that his writing ‘showed the truth of the regime to the world’, and ‘helped make our country freer and more democratic’. Solzhenitsyn’s classics on life in the Gulag showed Russians the truth of the Soviet Union’s greatest crimes — a system of state repression which was to kill nearly 60 million Soviet citizens in man-made famines, deportations, forced labour and executions. Solzhenitsyn’s prose was briefly published in Russia under Khrushchev, personally approved by the General Secretary because the editor of the Novy Mir literary journal, Alexander Tvardovsky, persuaded him that it would help his attack on Stalin’s cult of personality. But the regime was never able to limit the damage to just Stalin’s legacy; for millions of Soviet citizens who first glimpsed the world of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn’s fictional Gulag inmate, the legitimacy of communism itself was demolished.

...Anna Akhmatova, the great poetess who also suffered unimaginably under Stalin, described Solzhenitsyn as ‘a bearer of light’ and said his story should be read by ‘every one of the 200 million citizens of the Soviet Union’. She was right, because she shared Solzhenitsyn’s fundamental belief that a society must learn from its history. ‘It’s not just the West that doesn’t know our history; we ourselves have lost it,’ he told the BBC in 1974, just after being bundled on to a plane and forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union. ‘Events have been wiped out. The documents have been burnt, the witnesses killed. So I have been working to reconstruct the truth, all the truth about my own country and this is what I have done primarily for our own people’s benefit.’ In today’s Russia, where schoolbooks are being rewritten — with the Kremlin’s blessing — to gloss over Stalin’s legacy, Russia has never needed its literary prophet more.

[from The London Spectator]

ANNE APPLEBAUM:
Even Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from Russia in 1974 only increased his notoriety, as well as the impact of "The Gulag Archipelago." Though it was based on "reports, memoirs and letters by 227 witnesses," the book was not quite a straight history -- obviously, Solzhenitsyn did not have access to then-secret archives -- but, rather, an interpretation of history. Partly polemical, partly autobiographical, both emotional and judgmental, it aimed to show that, contrary to what many believed, the mass arrests and concentration camps were not an incidental phenomenon but an essential part of the Soviet system -- and had been from the very beginning.

...In the week of his death, though, what stands out is not who Solzhenitsyn was but what he wrote. It is very easy, in a world where news is instant and photographs travel as quickly as they are taken, to forget how powerful, still, are written words. And Solzhenitsyn was, in the end, a writer: A man who gathered facts, sorted through them, tested them against his own experience, composed them into paragraphs and chapters. It was not his personality but his language that forced people to think more deeply about their values, their assumptions, their societies. It was not his television appearances that affected history but his words.

[from The Washington Post]

DANIEL J. MAHONEY [2005]:
Unlike the conventional analyses of academic historians and political scientists, Solzhenitsyn’s understanding never treated the Soviet Union as merely one tyranny among others. Rather, it was an ideological regime built upon the twin pillars of violence and lies. It was “thanks to ideology” that the 20th century experienced “evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.” Ideology allowed tyrants and intellectuals alike to justify the unjustifiable and to amplify violence to nearly unimaginable levels.

This central focus of Solzhenitsyn’s work made it much more difficult to blame the Soviet tragedy on Stalin’s “cult of personality” or on local conditions that were somehow peculiar to an “authoritarian” Russia. As the late Martin Malia argued in an analysis profoundly indebted to Solzhenitsyn, every Communist regime has manifested a nearly identical “genetic code.” Despite important cultural differences between Russian, Asian, and Caribbean Communism, every Communist experiment has been marked by a single-party regime based on a mendacious ideology that demonizes real or imagined enemies of socialism. Solzhenitsyn’s insight was to highlight the insidious nature of ideology, and to make its absurdities fully visible to the Western imagination.

Gulag takes aim at the Manicheanism inherent in every project for the revolutionary transformation of man and society. The ideologist denies the permanence of the imperfection inherent in the human condition. Using the full force of his artistry Solzhenitsyn defends the timeless distinction between good and evil against its pernicious replacement by the ideological dichotomy between Progress and Reaction. The bitter experience of the Soviet camps led Solzhenitsyn to recover the age-old insight that “the line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.” More broadly, Solzhenitsyn returned to the wisdom of philosophical Christianity through reflection on his personal experience of human nature in extremis.

[from National Review]

QUIN HILLYER:
It was for his witness to the evils of socialism/communism that American conservatives treasured the great Russian writer. Nobody wrote against the Evil Empire with more courage or more moral force. Nobody spoke more boldly. And nobody other than Ronald Reagan did more to scold American elites for their cowardly kowtowing to the communist menace. It was instructive that when Solzhenitsyn finally made it to the United States, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger refused to give him an audience at the White house -- something about "detente" and "realpolitik," more correctly known as sniveling flapdoodle -- but Reagan wrote columns welcoming the great Russian and North Carolina's Jesse Helms welcomed him to the Senate. It was American conservatives who recognized moral imperatives, while the supposedly sensible centrists were mired in cynicism.

In his Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn condemned the Ford approach (without referring to Ford by name) by describing it as the attitude that "the world situation should stay as it is at any cost, there should be no changes." But, he warned in the very next sentence, "This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development."

[from The American Spectator]

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN'S TRIBUTE TO RONALD REAGAN:
In July 1975, I concluded my remarks in the reception room of the U.S. Senate with these words: "Very soon, all too soon, your government will need not just extraordinary men — but men of greatness. Find them in your souls. Find them in your hearts. Find them within the breadth and depth of your homeland." Five years later, I was overjoyed when just such a man came to the White House. May the soft earth be a cushion to his present rest.

[from National Review]