Soliloquy: Communism, Solzhenitsyn and a 12-page paper

In my freshman year of high school, I took a class called U.S.– U.S.S.R. because it was the only class that my two friends and I could take together.

Mr. Lazarotti, a tall, white-haired teacher from a foreign land (we never knew which) -- lectured about communism but pronounced it “commuNEEZma.” He knew people suffering in the Soviet bloc, and he made sure we knew to be wary of deadly regimes.

All I knew about communism then was the red scare. The McCarthy hearings were before my time, but loyalty oaths were still around. My liberal parents were more concerned with authoritarian behavior of anti-communists than any danger from communists themselves.

So, thinking of communism as a threat was new.

My friends and I felt unprepared for the concepts broached in this class. We’d lived a sheltered, suburban existence and had only just finished junior high.

Mr. Lazzarotti spoke to us as if we were aged adults and could understand international relations and what authoritarian government could do to a person.

At the end of the first week, we were told that our class grade depended on the final project – a 12-page paper on anything connected to the Soviet Union.

The class greeted this news with stunned silence. He might have asked us to lug a barge, with our teeth, along the Volga River.

Twelve pages?

The most we’d ever produced in our progressive, lax, laid-back junior high was a three-page essay. I’d done mine on Alfred Nobel. I’d checked out one book from our school library and summarized it, earning an A.

I learned, through the agonizing work of writing three whole pages, that Alfred’s brother Emil was killed in a shed used to store explosives, and that Alfred’s guilt over his death may have contributed to the creation of the Nobel prize.

But 12 pages? As class let out, even the older students scoffed. Twelve pages! Crazy.

My friend Cary was a straight-A student. She, too, was a little shaken, but she was up for the challenge, and she managed to drag me with our other friend, Caroline, along on research trips to a library.

I wrote my paper on the (then 12) Russian Nobel Prize winners, hoping the topic was broad enough to fill 12 pages.

As I learned how to use card catalogs and find books on Soviet Nobel winners, I learned about Pavlov and Pasternak, Sholokhov and Prokhorov and actually enjoyed the project.

Only one of the Nobel laureates was able to claim his prize because of the oppression of the communist system.

The most interesting laureate was Solzhenitsyn who was chronologically last on the list and still alive when I wrote the paper. He’d been named a Nobel laureate only a couple of years earlier. He hadn’t yet written The Gulag Archipelago, but he’d been imprisoned for blasting Stalin (privately), so he knew firsthand how coercive the Soviet system was.

His books were huge and translations difficult to wade through. I later skimmed Cancer Ward, but I really need to read all his works. Here are a few Solzhenitsyn quotes I’ve collected over the years:

• One word of truth outweighs the world.

• A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste.

• A hard life improves vision.

• If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?

As communism’s popularity grows with the embracing of critical theory, a little skepticism is healthy. I’m glad I took the unpopular class decades ago.

I’m grateful for Mr. Lazarotti, too. His high expectations showed us respect and taught us we were more capable of study than we realized.

This article originally appeared on Aberdeen News: soliloquy column Communism, Solzhenitsyn and a 12-page paper