Solzhenitsyn, and The Death of Free Speech in Russia

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“To stand up for truth is nothing. For truth, you must sit in jail.” So said Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the best writers of the last century and a 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, a man who spent eight years in prison camps just for criticising Stalin, the leader at the time. Sound familiar? Well that is again the choice Russian people have now, if they want to act against the war. Criticize the leader, or speak out against the war, and have livelihoods and careers and university places taken away as punishment, or spend up to 15 nonsensical years in jail.

But what use really, is anyone in jail? With your phone taken away, and your voice silenced. Who could you really help or what changes could you make? And a Russian jail, is not a place you want to be at all. Most are decaying and overcrowded, with poor infrastructure and at least fifty years old. Conditions are awful and stories of mistreatment are common. Some of the things that happen are too barbaric to be described, but the most evil forms of torture are often reported. Imagine anything, and it is probably being done in a Russian jail. The authorities, and the meatheads who stand for prison officers, and riled-up inmates, won’t particularly care what you are in for. Whether political protest, murder, or stealing a loaf of bread.

If it is pointless being in jail, and you can’t speak out or make a difference in your own country, and you can’t protest because the police shut them down too quickly, and there is no way to communicate because all forms of social media are shut down, then what are you to do? There aren’t many options left, and most of those choices involve…leaving, and getting out. Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, anywhere they can still go where visas are not as difficult to obtain. And so that is what many Russians have done, and are trying to do. These include journalists who are trying to influence things in the only way they feel they can, which is now doing YouTube videos for the Russians in Russia to find out the truth.

All the free media has been shut down, including all the free newspapers and radio stations. But a few are still operating outside the country, often in clandestine operations or scaled down undercover pursuits, so family members that are still in the country will not get punished. But some still do.

It is astonishing in many ways, as well as utterly deflating, that not a lot has changed since the days of the Gulag and Solzhenitsyn, when he was marched off to Siberia and forced to conduct manual labour, and all only for expressing an opinion. A Russian filmmaker I met outside the country says much the same thing. “It’s a cycle, and history is repeating itself. Hundreds of thousands escaped the Soviets one hundred years ago, and now it is happening again.

“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty,” Solzhenitsyn also said, in his most famous work, The Gulag Archipelago, a book that enraged the Russian authorities and led to him also having to flee the country in order to be able to have his voice heard. And all the power in Russia now resides with one man, and one man alone, and the war is showing some of the worst cruelty imaginable.