by Bernard Besserglik
PARIS, Dec 8 (AFP)
For two decades Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who celebrates his 80th birthday on Friday, ranked with Nelson Mandela as a figure of towering moral authority who embodied his people’s hopes for a liveable future.
With the passing of the Soviet Union, it is difficult now to appreciate the explosive impact of Solzhenitsyn’s revelation of the forced labour camps, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, published with official approval during the brief thaw under Nikita Khrushchev. “There are three atom bombs in the world,” one of his friends told him, weeping over the manuscript of his short novel. “Kennedy has one, Khrushchev has another, and you have the third.” In his self-appointed role as the memory of the gulag, Solzhenitsyn was — in the words of the dissident writer Lydia Chukovskaya — “a reborn Dante who brought the living word from the nether regions.”
Crowned with the Nobel prize for literature in 1970, driven into exile by Leonid Brezhnev’s neo-Stalinist regime, Solzhenitsyn became the banished prophet, the voice of rectitude sapping the Soviet regime’s moral foundations and helping indirectly to bring about its collapse.
Since his return to his homeland in 1994 he has been a prophet in his own country, issuing jeremiads that remain largely unheeded among his sorely pressed countrymen, particularly the young, for whom the world of Ivan Denisovich is as remote as that of Racine or Goethe.
A pure product of the October revolution, Solzhenitsyn devoted his life with ruthless dedication to giving voice to Russia’s conscience, whether against the totalitariansm of the Soviet Union or the mafia-and-McDonald’s materialism of the post-communist era.
Born into the turmoil of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power, he became an ardent Leninist and remained so until the day in 1945 when he was arrested for criticising Stalin in a letter to a colleague. He was released in 1953, spent three more years in internal exile, contracted and overcame cancer, became a humble schoolteacher at Ryazan, and in 1961 burst onto the world of literature with his devastating account of life in the gulag.
“Cancer Ward” and “The First Circle” followed, appearing in English in 1968, although for 20 years Russians could read the texts only in samizdat. By now, Solzhenitsyn was sacrificing everything, including his marriage, to his massive “literary-historical investigation” of the camps, “The Gulag Archipelago”, painstakingly (and covertly) collecting information from other former prisoners.
His three-volume memorial, a vast testament to the millions of lives wasted and broken in the nightmare anti-world created by Stalin, was published in Paris between 1973 and 1976.
The Soviet authorities, committed to at least the outward forms of legal process, were at a loss to know what to do about him. In 1971 the writer suffered a bout of “heat stroke” later revealed by those involved to have been caused by ricin, a poison administered surreptitiously in a crowded shop, and intended to be fatal.
Deported to the West, Solzhenitsyn took up residence in a remote village in Vermont, in the United States, where he devoted himself to his epic “Red Wheel” cycle, a fictionalised history of the events leading up to the Russian Revolution. The world then discovered another Solzhenitsyn, one who inveighed against western ways and institutions, prophesying doom from detente, and calling for moral renewal based on Christian values. His romantic Slavophilism won him few friends on either side of the East-West divide, and he withdrew into the life of a recluse.
He found the new Russia as alien to him as the United States had been, delivering gloomy harangues daily on television until the national broadcaster ORF pulled the plug on him.
He has continued to travel around provincial Russia, speaking to small audiences, still making occasional appearances on television, but otherwise retreating from the national stage.
His latest collection of essays “Russia in Collapse” received an initial print run of just 5,000 copies. One of Solzhenitsyn’s biographers, D.M. Thomas, convincingly compared the writer with another returned exile, Lenin himself, imagining them, “Lenin and Solzhenitsyn, staring cold-eyed at each other across the corpse-filled gorge of the 20th century.” Others before Thomas had seen them as Russian “doubles”, with their several temperamental similiarities: the relentless urge to work, making immense demands on the women in their lives, the same suspicion and short temper, and the absolute conviction in the historial necessity of their projects.
But then, Thomas noted, had Solzhenitsyn been gentle, friendly and kind like his fellow dissident and Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov, he could never have written “The Gulag Archipelago”.
by Pierre Glachant
WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (AFP)
Terrorized by the technological Y2K bug, certain Americans see the upcoming year 2000 as a milestone shrouded with visions of apocalypse, chaos and famine.
This belief is widespread enough that some authorities are appealing for calm.
Because any older computer programs can only read the last two digits of the year and may process the year 2000 as if it were 1900, some predict widespread disruption of functions such as air traffic control, electric power grids, banking and other tasks handled by computer.
Hundreds of Internet sites are handing out advice on what kinds of precautions people can take on December 31, 1999, so they can tackle, as best they can, the leap into the unknown.
One site recommends Americans to stock up on food against the inevitable famine, which, the authors say, will sweep the cities.
The countryside, they claim, will not want to supply cities with food, preferring to keep the harvests at home during this uncertain period.
Another site is asking Americans to spend the new year in the countryside, in case the country wakes up the next morning to total paralysis.
Business ventures, however, are never far from this apocalyptic language: the site also sells a guide on how to “survive” the millennium.
Some advice is based in common sense, like photocopying bank statements or stock certificates.
Some also echoes calls by authorities, such as Bob Bennett, Chairman of the Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem, whose advice is: “Don’t panic, but don’t spend a lot of time sleeping either.”
Aggravating the problem is a fear among some religious adherents that the new millennium may portend apocalypse for other reasons.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ECLA), with 5.2 million members, decided it was a good idea to review millennium theories about imminent upheaval.
“The coming of the end of the second millennium fills some people in our society with fear (and) continues to spawn all kinds of wild prophecies about the end of the world,” the ECLA said in a pastoral letter.
“The coming of the third millennium should not fill us with fear or dread,” the letter said.
James Glassman, of the American Enterprise Institute, was recently quoted in the Washington Post as deploring the fact that Y2K “has also caused worries that are now blossoming into full-blown, completely unwarranted hysteria.”
Some are going well out of their way to calm people down. A Connecticut-based consulting company, Gartner Group, which specializes on the Y2K problem, recently published a report to put the bug’s dangers into proportion.
“People are suggesting that everyone take money out of banks and convert it into gold or liquidate stocks. We’ve heard people say “you”d better get a gun, because if you don’t people are going to break into your house and steal your food’,” Gartner Group’s Jim Cassell said.
These “irresponsible statements” could lead to people committing “unnatural acts” he warned.
by Patrisia Prakarsa
JAKARTA, Dec 9 (AFP)
Former Indonesian strongman Suharto was questioned by three deputy attorney generals amid tight security here Wednesday on allegations of corruption during his 32 years in power.
Dressed in a traditional black cap and a brown Batik shirt, the 77-year-old ex-president arrived at the Jakarta high prosecutors’ office at 7:20 a.m. (0020 GMT), smiling to the some 50 journalists awaiting him there. He was accompanied by eight lawyers who arrived in a separate van, an AFP reporter said.
The venue of the questioning and the time of his arrival both differed from those named in the summons issued by Attorney General Andi Ghalib, a three-star general.
The unexpected changes were believed to have been taken for security reasons, and a convoy of cars including a Mercedes jeep owned by Suharto went to the attorney general’s office in an apparent decoy move.
Suharto had been scheduled for questioning at the attorney general’s office, some three kilometres (1.9 miles) to the west, at 9:00 a.m. (0200 GMT) officials said.
It was the third time the former president has met with officials from the attorney general’s office since he stepped down under pressure in May.
Ghalib went to his residence on September 6 to seek information on his bank accounts, and 15 days later Suharto went to Ghalib’s office to hand over documents regarding his wealth.
Heavy security measures were in place at both the attorney general’s office and the high prosecutor’s office with the avenues in front of the two complexes closed off to traffic.
But while hundreds of soldiers and policemen were apparent at the sprawling attorney general’s office, only about 100 mostly policemen and military police were guarding the high prosecutor’s office, AFP reporters said.
Several avenues passing through state buildings, such as that in front of the Merdeka palace, were also closed to traffic with heavy cordons of soldiers guarding the access routes, witnesses said.
The closures, left hundreds of people searching for public transport, stranded on the sides of the streets. Military trucks shuttled along the closed roads to help transport the stranded commuters.
The security move was believed to have been taken in anticipation of student demonstrations demanding Suharto’s trial, which in the past few days have targetted the attorney general’s office, Suharto’s residence and Merdeka palace.
Three deputy attorney generals — Antonius Sujata from the special crimes unit, Ramelan (eds: one name) from general crimes and Syamsu Jalal from intelligence affairs — and the head of the centre of operations to maintain order, Sudibyo Saleh, were on hand to question the former president.
At the attorney general’s office, Suharto’s key business associate and former trade and industry minister, Bob Hassan, was under separate questioning over the funds of several foundations chaired by the former president.
As Hasan arrived, children standing on the balconies of a nearby school, screamed “Thief, Thief,” an AFP correspondent reported.
On Tuesday, the spokesman at the attorney general’s office, Barman Zahir, said Suharto would be quizzed on his pet national car project.
Under the national car program, a company controlled by Suharto’s youngest son Hutomo “Tommy” Mandala Putra was given huge tax breaks to produce the Timor national car as well as a multi-million dollar soft loan from a consortium of 16 banks, including state banks.
An attorney general’s document distributed Monday said the 1996 presidential decree Suharto issued to authorize the project was designed solely to promote family interests.