When the doorbell to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Moscow apartment rang on February 12, 1974, his wife, Natalia, cracked open the door to see who was outside. Realizing it was the KGB, she immediately attempted to shut the door but found it wouldn't budge. An agent had already slid his shoe inside the doorframe.
Eight men then piled inside the apartment, some surrounding Solzhenitsyn to ensure he could not dart off to slash his wrists. In the melee that followed, the great author made the sign of the cross over his wife before being led away, calling for her to "look after the children."
Fifty years later, one of those children, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the middle of Aleksandr's three sons, recognizes that very door in the background of a photograph made shortly before the 1974 arrest.
"It was a very tense time," Ignat told RFE/RL by telephone, looking over the image of himself with his brother Yermolai and their late father in a moment of calm before the storm that would engulf their family and shake the foundations of the Soviet Union.
In September 1973, Yelizaveta Voronyanskaya, an associate of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, had either killed herself or been murdered after the KGB uncovered her hidden manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus laid bare the extent of the U.S.S.R.'s vast network of prison camps and detailed the realities of life inside.
Following Voronyanskaya's death, Solzhenitsyn sent out a signal through a network of "invisible allies" to pull the trigger on publishing The Gulag Archipelago. Rolls of film containing photos of the manuscript's pages had earlier been smuggled out of the Soviet Union and lay with confidants in the West waiting to proceed with publication.
The Gulag Archipelago was first printed in Paris in December 1973. The book landed, as Ignat describes it, like a "bomb," exploding all remaining arguments for the Marxism that had destroyed countless millions of lives since Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks stormed to power in Russia in 1917.
Ignat, who is now a famed conductor and pianist living in New York, says The Gulag Archipelago "has never stopped being relevant," for its "meditation on the nature of evil, and on the true nature of Marxism and communism."
His father's great insight, Ignat believes, was that evil exists not within any group that can be marked out, but as a kernel within every ordinary person, waiting for the climate and dark soil to sprout.
"People say, 'We will destroy the wicked people, whether it's our autocratic rulers, or the evil fat-cat capitalists, or whoever is oppressing us,'" Ignat said, masquerading as a naive champion for social justice. "The wrong race, the wrong color.... We'll destroy them and then we'll have heaven on Earth, or whatever is the secular version of that."
"The problem is, of course," he continued, "evil with a capital E doesn't go away. Those people, even if they deserved to die, were just, or are just bearers of evil. But the evil itself continues. And so when we fight, hate the sin, not the sinner. That is what is missing."
Following Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's February 1974 arrest, the Nobel Prize-winning author was expelled from the Soviet Union but was soon able to reunite with his family in the West. The Solzhenitsyns eventually settled into comfortable exile on a rural property in Vermont. But the writer retained an arm's length relationship with America, praising some aspects of the country while excoriating what he viewed as its moral decline, and the groupthink and deceit of its media. The writer longed to return to Russia.
"Some people, I guess, find that strange," Ignat said, "but it's only people who don't understand what Russia means to Russians, and for that matter, what home means to any person."
Ignat was around 11 when he first read The Gulag Archipelago. His father never talked extensively to his sons about his time in the labor camps, nor of serving in the Soviet Army. Consequently, Ignat's first reading of the book came as the same slap of reality faced by most other readers.
"I think probably your experience wasn't really -- despite our different backgrounds -- that different from mine, as a reader coming face-to-face with the totality of depravity that is portrayed there," Ignat said, before referencing passages in which his father detailed the unbreakable moral strength of some gulag prisoners. "And also, so important not to forget, the human potential for dignity" detailed in the book. "The possibility that the spirit will not be extinguished, even in those most wicked circumstances."
Exile for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was "a major tragedy in his life," Ignat said. The author lived, in many ways, the American dream, but "it was always his choice to be with his people, even if that sounds grand," Ignat said. "He just wanted to be home, and always strove and wished and dreamed that it would happen, and it did happen."
The post-Soviet Russia Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to in May 1994 was a deeply damaged nation. The author appeared to be taken aback by the condition of its hinterland as he traveled slowly by train from the Far Eastern city of Vladivostok toward Moscow.
In an October 1994 speech to the Russian parliament, Solzhenitsyn slammed Russia's new generation of politicians as "nomenklatura turncoats disguised as democrats" and described Russia's emergence from communism as a "twisted, painful, and awkward" path.
Years later, the author would align himself closely with Vladimir Putin. Ignat declined to comment on questions of current politics, and Solzhenitsyn's views of the direction Russia has been steered by Putin will never be known. In 1990, the author, who was of mixed Russian and Ukrainian ethnicity, called for revanchist Russian dreams of empire that were "hastening our demise" to be forgotten. Other writings, however, echo the same historical grievances used by the Kremlin attempting to justify seizing regions of Ukraine by force.
In 1981, Solzhenitsyn wrote, "In my heart's perception there is no room for a Russian-Ukrainian conflict and should, God forbid, the issue ever come to a head I can safely affirm: never, under any circumstances, shall I take part in a Russian-Ukrainian clash or allow my sons to do so -- no matter what reckless hotheads might try to drag us there."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in 2008 in Moscow. His wife and oldest and youngest son today live in Moscow. For Russian-American Ignat Solzhenitsyn, the lessons of his father's life are a simple, yet limitless, task.
"Perhaps our greatest challenge," the conductor said, "is to not only self-improve, which is ultimately what each of us can do, but, as my father put it, to leave life better than when we entered it."
