Remembering a Veteran: Isaakii Solzhenitsyn, Russian Army Grenadier Artillery Brigade

Isaakii Solzhenitsyn

Isaakii Semyonovich Solzhenitsyn (11 June 1891–15 June 1918) was an officer in the Imperial Russian Army and the father of Russian novelist,  historian, and heroic critic of Communism and atheism Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Isaakii was born in the Stavropol Governorate, the son of Semyon Solzhenitsyn, a wealthy farmer and landholder, and Pelageya Solzhenitsyna. Solzhenitsyn volunteered for an artillery brigade in the Imperial Russian Army in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War. He fought against the Germans in East Prussia and Belorussia and was awarded the Cross of St. George as well as the Order of Saint Anna for bravery. Once when his battery was set afire, he saved some munitions boxes himself.  His son Aleksandr would later write about his service: 

The three officer’s decorations that he left from World War I—which in my childhood were considered the mark of a dangerous criminal—were buried by my mother and me out of fear of a search. When the whole front was collapsing, my father’s battery remained on the front lines until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Isaaki married Taisiya Solzhenitsyna, née Shcherbak, in Belorussia in February or March 1918, shortly before the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty. They were married at the front by a brigade priest. Solzhenitsyn was discharged from the army after the signing and the couple moved to Georgiyevsk in the North Caucasus. On 15 June 1918, Isaakii Solzhenitsyn died of blood poisoning in a hospital in Georgiyevsk following a hunting accident, six months before his son Aleksandr was born,

Sources:  Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life; The Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center