Wednesday, August 06, 2008 Editorials: Remembering a dark past
THE death the other day of Russian Nobel prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminds us of a dark spot in world history.
Solzhenitsyn spent many years in Soviet slave camps and wrote about the devastating experience he went through under the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
He introduced to the English dictionary the word “gulag,” which means “slave labor camp system.”
Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume “Gulag Archipelago” in the ‘70s “left readers shocked by the savagery of the Soviet state under dictator Josef Stalin.”
It was about how the author physically and spiritually survived “the soul-crushing hardship.”
Model
The Stalinist system of governance and treatment of human life became somewhat “a role model” for the rest of the nations in the world that took after the communist ideology.
It enticed other leaders, who shared the same political philosophy, to follow the same path.
At the height of the communist movement in the Philippines, Filipino nationalists and intellectual were held suspect because of the expose on the life of the people in communist countries.
In fact, Solzhenitsyn first tasted prison for making “certain disrespectful remarks” about Josef Stalin.
All he did was refer to Stalin as “the man with the mustache.”
Reality
That such life of hardship and injustice was shared by many other peoples of other nations has long been a proven reality.
The suffering and difficult life Solzhenitsyn went through was also experienced by hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of this planet who chose to follow the path of human liberty, and the exercise of free will and free expression.
Indeed, Solzhenitsyn left a legacy of “genuine devotion and selfless serving to the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism.”
Triumph
When the communist ideology that bound USSR together started to collapse during the premiership of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, political observers took it as a triumph of the human spirit over political violence and slavery.
It was a sort of liberation, too, for Filipinos.
Ironically, the Philippines is one of the remaining few countries in the world where the communist movement is still actively organized.
