In his editorial marking the triumph of Fethullah Gülen in our global intellectuals poll a month ago, David Goodhart described the attempt by Turkey’s chief prosecutor to get the country’s ruling AK party banned as “the most important conflict in Europe.”
Well, the conflict is over and AK has survived. Yet the party’s—and Turkey’s—troubles are far from over, says Nicholas Birch in a web exclusive for Prospect. The old coercive system, which has led to modern Turkey’s history of parties being banned and military coups, may be over, but it is not at all clear what will replace it.
Also this week: Lesley Chamberlain marks the death of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. His accounts of life in the gulag killed off any lingering affection for the Soviet system among European leftists, says Chamberlain, but his own relationship with the motherland was complex and nuanced.
A good article so it seems a shame to nit-pick - but it is important to emphasise that there were sections of the left that did not “hold a long cherished dream” of Soviet-style communism but were opposed to it. Indeed most of the early criticism of Bolshevism came from the anarchists and the left-communists, who were consequently among the first victims of the regime.
One of the reasons for mentioning this is that Solzhenitsyn himself documented some of the anarchist opponents to Leninism and Stalinism, and describes how the black anarchist flag of revolt was raised in the very heart of the Gulag at Vortuka.
Dear Sir:
Lesley Chamberlain’s piece is timely though as something of the last communist among my peers, I should tell you without rancour that Solzhenitsyn’s Tales from the Gulag did not “kill off any lingering affection among leftists” in capitalist Europe for the old soviet system.
This was never done and still to this day there are many western intellectuals in many history faculties in old Europe chiefly who maintain a discreet attachment to the old soviet ideals and the old communism. Solzhenitsyn was simply not accepted or believed as an objective reporter. Even the damage done by Grossman did but dent our enthusiasm for Lenin worker medals, Sholokov, Nabokov and the rural happiness that soviet communism produced in its prime.
So it is a case of till we meet again rather than fare thee well.
Grossman has come and gone and even samizdat Solzhenitsyn has now had his day without too much long-term damage to the old ideals.
Dosvidanye Tavarichev,
Alexander de Lorenzo
Solzhenitsyn, like George Orwell, had a puritan ascetic streak. His noted (notorious) Harvard commencement address of 1978 shows that unlike Orwell he was not a socialist, indeed believed that socialist ideas had led to western decadence and tyrannical ideologies on the extreme left and right. Other points in that address pose a challenge to western liberals (called socialists outside America) and I feel that it could serve as a suitable touchstone for academic seminars and debates about the state of western society. People who consider themselves to be on the left will always be uncomfortable about the writings and social critique of Solzhenitsyn. His patriarchal stance on radio and otherwise in post-1991 Russia seems stiltedly masculine to westerners. In other ways, people who consider themselves to be champions of unfettered capitalist materialism will baulk at his religious moralisations. I prefer Orwell as a prose stylist. Orwell’s succinct subtle animal fable about stalinist Russia will be read more widely than the longer, graver novels of Solzhenitsyn.