Bob_Grip's Blog

It was an unusual project for a seventh grader.

During my first year in junior high school, we had to do book reports and, in conjunction with our art teacher, had to produce a cover for the report that illustrated the theme of the book.  I chose a book at that been in the news a lot back then.  It was called, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Russian survivor of Stalin's death camps.

The book was Solzhenitsyn's first-hand account of living and nearly dying in a labor camp.  He was sent there because of an innocuous comment he made about Josef Stalin in a letter.  The book was a rare look behind the "Iron Curtain" as it was called then, and took the wind out of the sails of anyone who still had a romantic vision of life in Soviet society.

I had always enjoyed History class, so the book was a natural for me. I used construction paper to make a brown building for the cover that was surrounded by thin, copper wire which I had knotted in places to resemble barbed wire.  I got an A.

I kept reading Solzhenitsyn and following his career, including his expulsion from the Soviet Union, his exile in the United States and, after the fall of Communism, his return to Russia.

During graduate school, Solzhenitsyn became a topic, not of a book report, but of a research paper based on the author's "hero" status in the United States.  My premise was that, if most Americans actually read his books instead of just buying them and storing them on a bookshelf, they might be shocked.  Solzhenitsyn did not believe the Soviet Union would readily adjust to western-style democracy, because it simply wasn't in Russian tradition.  They went from being ruled by the Czars to ruled by the Soviets.  Democracy, as we knew it, was simply not in their DNA.

Secondly, Solzhenitsyn condemned the western-style business model that required higher and higher profits, year after year.  He believed an expectation of infinite growth was not sustainable, and could lead to its collapse.

His death this past weekend was his ultimate triumph.  He outlasted the regime that did its best to humiliate and destroy him.