A World Split Apart
Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University, June 1978
By Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008)
I am sincerely happy to be here with you on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and illustrious university. My congratulations and best wishes to all of today’s graduates.
Harvard’s motto is “VERITAS.” Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary.
Three years ago in the United States I said certain things that were rejected and appeared unacceptable. Today, however, many people agree with what I said …
The split in today’s world is perceptible even to a hasty glance. Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of destroying each other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. These deep manifold splits bear the danger of equally manifold disaster for all of us, in accordance with the ancient truth that a kingdom – in this case, our Earth – divided against itself cannot stand.
Contemporary Worlds
There is the concept of the Third World: thus, we already have three worlds. Undoubtedly, however, the number is even greater; we are just too far away to see. Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. As a minimum, we must include in this China, India, the Muslim world, and Africa, if indeed we accept the approximation of viewing the latter two as uniform.
For one thousand years Russia belonged to such a category, although Western thinking systematically committed the mistake of denying its special character and therefore never understood it, just as today the West does not understand Russia in Communist captivity. And while it may be that in past years Japan has increasingly become, in effect, a Far West, drawing ever closer to Western ways (I am no judge here), Israel, I think, should not be reckoned as part of the West, if only because of the decisive circumstance that its state system is fundamentally linked to its religion.
How short a time ago, relatively, the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe, not only without anticipating any real resistance, but usually with contempt for any possible values in the conquered people’s approach to life. It all seemed an overwhelming success, with no geographic limits. Western society expanded in a triumph of human independence and power. And all of a sudden the twentieth century brought the clear realization of this society’s fragility.
We now see that the conquests proved to be short lived and precarious (and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests). Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.
Convergence
But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this.
The anguish of a divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence between the leading Western countries and the Soviet Union. It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence. Besides, convergence inevitably means acceptance of the other side’s defects, too. and this can hardly suit anyone.
If I were today addressing an audience in my country, in my examination of the overall pattern of the world’s rifts I would have concentrated on the calamities of the East. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the contemporary West, such as I see them.
A Decline In Courage
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.
Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood, is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.
Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first symptom of the end?
Well-Being
When the modern Western states were being formed, it was proclaimed as a principle that governments are meant to serve man and that man lives in order to be free and pursue happiness. (See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence.) Now at last during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state.
Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and in such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness, in the debased sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. (In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to this end imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to carefully conceal such feelings. This active and tense competition comes to dominate all human thought and does not in the least open a way to free spiritual development.)
The individual’s independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed; the majority of the people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them toward physical bloom, happiness, and leisure, the possession of material goods, money, and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as yet distant land?
Even biology tells us that a high degree of habitual well-being is not advantageous to a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to take off its pernicious mask.
Legalistic Life
Western society has chosen for itself the organization best suited to its purposes and one I might call legalistic. The limits of human rights and rightness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting, and manipulating law (though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert). Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution.
If one is risen from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be right, and urge self-restraint or a renunciation of these rights, call for sacrifice and selfless risk: this would simply sound absurd. Voluntary self-restraint is almost unheard of: everybody strives toward further expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames. (An oil company is legally blameless when it buys up an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to purchase it.)
I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take full advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.
And it will be simply impossible to bear up to the trials of this threatening century with nothing but the supports of a legalistic structure.
The Direction of Freedom
Today’s Western society has revealed the inequality between the freedom for good deeds and the freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints.
It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and it has in fact been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
On the other hand, destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society has turned out to have scarce defense against the abyss of human decadence, for example against the misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. This is all considered to be part of freedom and to be counterbalanced, in theory, by the young people’s right not to look and not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.
And what shall we say about the dark realms of overt criminality? Legal limits (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also some misuse of such freedom. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency – all with the support of thousands of defenders in the society. When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights. There is quite a number of such cases.
This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man – the master of the world – does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected. Yet strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still remains a great deal of crime; there even is considerably more of it than in the destitute and lawless Soviet society. (There is a multitude of prisoners in our camps who are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state by resorting to means outside the legal framework.)
The Direction of the Press
The press, too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word “press” to include all the media.) But what use does it make of it?
Here again, the overriding concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for distortion or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to the readership or to history? If they have misled public opinion by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, even if they have contributed to mistakes on a state level, do we know of any case of open regret voiced by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No; this would damage sales. A nation may be the worse for such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. It is most likely that he will start writing the exact opposite to his previous statements with renewed aplomb.
Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed everyday, confusing readers, and then left hanging?
The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.)
Hastiness and superficiality – these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.
Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Yet one would like to ask: According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?
There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the totalitarian East with its rigorously unified press: One discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole (the spirit of the time), generally accepted patterns of judgment, and maybe common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Unrestrained freedom exists for the press, but not for readership, because newspapers mostly transmit in a forceful and emphatic way those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and that general trend.
A Fashion in Thinking
Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block dangerous herd development.
In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons – maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. An example is the self-deluding interpretation of the state of affairs in the contemporary world that functions as a sort of petrified armor around people’s minds, to such a degree that human voices from seventeen countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will be broken only by the inexorable crowbar of events.
I have mentioned a few traits of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world . The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a survey, in particular to look into the impact of these characteristics on important aspects of a nation’s life, such as elementary education, advanced education in the humanities, and art.
Socialism
It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world the way to successful economic development, even though in past years it has been sharply offset by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of no longer being up to the level of maturity by mankind. And this causes many to sway toward socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.
I hope that no one present will suspect me of expressing my partial criticism of the Western system in order to suggest socialism as an alternative. No; with the experience of a country where socialism has been realized, I shall not speak for such an alternative. The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich’s book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in English in the U.S.
Not a Model
But should I be asked, instead, whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our own country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just enumerated are extremely saddening.
A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human personality in the West while in the East it has become firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being. Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant points.
Of course, a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to stay on such a soulless and smooth plane of legalism, as is the case in yours. After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.
All this is visible to numerous observers from all the worlds of our planet. The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.
There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.
But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive. You can feel their pressure, yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?
Humanism and its Consequences
How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.
This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the pro-claimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.
The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: the Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man’s physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.
Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.
And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted on the ground that man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.
Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.
An Unexpected Kinship
As humanism in its development was becoming more and more materialistic, it also increasingly allowed concepts to be used first by socialism and then by communism, so that Karl Marx was able to say, in 1844, that “communism is naturalized humanism.”
This statement has proved to be not entirely unreasonable. One does not see the same stones in the foundations of an eroded humanism and of any type of socialism: boundless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility (which under Communist regimes attains the stage of antireligious dictatorship); concentration on social structures with an allegedly scientific approach. (This last is typical of both the Age of Enlightenment and of Marxism.) It is no accident that all of communism’s rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today’s West and today’s East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.
The interrelationship is such, moreover, that the current of materialism which is farthest to the left, and is hence the most consistent, always proves to be stronger, more attractive, and victorious. Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition. Thus during the past centuries and especially in recent decades, as the process became more acute, the alignment of forces was as follows: Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism.
The communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes. The problem persists: In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. And yet Western intellectuals still look at it with considerable interest and empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.
Before the Turn
I am not examining the case of a disaster brought on by a world war and the changes which it would produce in society. But as long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we must lead an everyday life. Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.
It has made man the measure of all things on earth – imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.
We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.
If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.
It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism.
Today it would be retrogressive to hold on to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Such social dogmatism leaves us helpless before the trials of our times.
Even if we are spared destruction by war, life will have to change in order not to perish on its own. We cannot avoid reassessing the fundamental definitions of human life and society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities should be ruled by material expansion above all? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our integral spiritual life?
If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.
The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but – upward.
“Here is the one whose church and whose services I would like to attend.”
For 20 years Fr. Schmemann, the dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, has broadcast weekly religious sermons into the Soviet Union over the powerful facilities of Radio Liberty to an invisible but spiritually receptive flock.
Solzhenitsyn expresses his joy at the realization that the sermons by a “Father Alexander”, which he said he had long listened to, were by the Fr. Schmemann whose article about his works had reached and encouraged the writer. That article, “On Solzhenitsyn,” appeared in the winter, 1971, issue of “Concern.”
“…For a long time, with spiritual delight I have been listening on Sunday evenings, whenever possible, to the sermons of Father Alexander (his surname was never given) over Radio Liberty,” wrote the novelist. “And I was amazed how genuine, how truly contemporary and of what high order is his art of preaching.
“Never a note of falsehood, not an iota of rhetoric, without empty recourse to obligatory form and ritual which causes a listener discomfort and embarrassment for the preacher or for himself. Always a deep thought and profound feeling….
“And then, quite recently, it was ‘deciphered’ to me that this is Father Schmemann!… His article about me … explained me to myself and also explained Pushkin and why I always felt such an affinity with him….”
Fr. Schmemann’s latest article about the novelist, “A Lucid Love,” deals with Solzhenitsyn’s current best-selling book “August, 1914.” Fr. Schmemann describes the novel as “a new feast in Russian literature” in his important critique.
The Orthodox Church, January 1973, p. 1.
Solzhenitsyn and Russia’s Golgotha
by John Couretas
The Solzhenitsyn Reader
Edited by Ericson, Edward E./ Mahoney, Daniel J.
Itercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006
650 pp. $30.00
In the “Ascent,” one of the autobiographical sections of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, you will find the justly famous assertion that “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties—but right through every human heart.”
And read just a little further and you come to these words, not so well known but just as true, which describe the evil that roots itself not in the personal, but in the political:
… I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.
Solzhenitsyn was a writer whose vast body of work, beginning with the great artistic achievement of the stories and novels, but also of course the essays and speeches, was guided by a great moral imagination. The writer who took the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath as his great theme and life’s work, could only understand what happened to Russia in terms of good and evil. Those who engineered and imposed the Bolshevik and Soviet nightmare were not merely ideologues, they were evildoers.
In The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings 1947-2005 (2006, ISI Books), editors E. Ericson, Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney have assembled, in one volume, a new collection of the author’s work that provides a broad sweep of his prodigious talent: history, autobiography, political writing, speeches, fiction, and poetry. Ericson and Mahoney place Solzhenitsyn— who always first and foremost considered himself a writer and artist—in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, “a moralist who defends age-old distinctions between good and evil and truth and falsehood.”
With this excellent new reader, the editors also hope to provide a corrective to the many misstatements and misinterpretations of Solzhenitsyn’s work and life. These misreadings—which lately seem more based on disinterest or neglect—come from both the left, which could not forgive Solzhenitsyn for so devastatingly exposing the violence and the lies of Soviet totalitarianism, and the right, which suspected that the writer was no friend of liberty.
In their illuminating introduction, Ericson and Mahoney state simply that, “Solzhenitsyn was the most eloquent scourge of ideology in the twentieth century.” The editors are right to remind us of that. And any news account, biography or political history of the twentieth Century that talks about who “won” the Cold War—a complicated historical reality for sure—and does not include Solzhenitsyn with Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II is not only incomplete but wrong. Solzhenitsyn was the inside man.
Ericson and Mahoney tell us that The Gulag Archipelago, perhaps Solzhenitsyn’s best known work, was written to “help readers imagine the unimaginable.” The author was successful. The book got Solzhenitsyn kicked out of the Soviet Union and sold more than 30 million copies worldwide in three dozen languages. “By discrediting Soviet communism at home and abroad, this single book played an undeniable – perhaps a decisive – role in ending the Soviet Union and thus the Cold War,” the editors say.
Solzhenitsyn accomplished this as a true artist, not a propagandist. He understood the artist as one who “recognizes above himself a higher power and joyfully works as a humble apprentice under God’s heaven.” That humility also involves reverence for the mystical depths of faith.
Solzhenitsyn’s deeply religious view of things is everywhere evident in Ericson and Mahoney’s new volume. It is there explicitly in the poem “Acathistus” with its intensely personal, hymn-like theme of repentance in the face of “purpose-from-on-High’s steady fire.” There is the short story “Easter Procession,” in which a gang of young hoodlums threatens a solemn procession of believers on the holiest day of the Orthodox Christian calendar. Or the slow, wrenching torment of Zinaida, the young woman in The Red Wheel, whose selfish rendezvous with a lover has led, she believes, to the neglectful death of her infant son. Transfixed before an icon of Christ, deaf to a church service going on around her, Zinaida perceives that “Christ was suffering acutely, suffering yet not complaining. His compassion was for all those who approached him—and so at that moment for her.”
Solzhenitsyn follows God, and it is not so hard to imagine why the writer has been ignored or dismissed by Western secular progressives and much of the media. While some may be able to tolerate his decorative Russian Orthodox pieties, it is the stark morality behind it, and the perfectly orthodox understanding of the Christian faith, that cannot be ignored. Says Ericson and Mahoney: “Solzhenitsyn accepts the validity of a classical Christian cosmology and anthropology, one that has nothing in common with facile modern (and postmodern) belief that that universe is indifferent or even hostile to human purposes.”
This new volume includes Solzhenitsyn’s famous 1978 commencement address at Harvard (deserving to be read at least annually), where he catalogued the West’s failings, including rampant materialism, the superficiality of the media, and the moral cowardice of intellectuals. (A prophet tends to speak his mind, even when invited to the most exclusive parties.) At Harvard, before the cream of the Cambridge intelligentsia, Solzhenitsyn accused the West of leaving behind “the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.” He took the political and intellectual elites to task for cowardice, a “lack of manhood” in its dealings with international aggressors and terrorists. He lamented the “boundless space” that the West had provided for human freedom but without making any distinctions for human decadence. “The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer,” Solzhenitsyn told the Harvard crowd.
As a boy, Solzhenitsyn was deeply influenced by his Aunt Irina who instilled in him a love of literature and of Russian Orthodoxy. But he drifted away from the Christian faith under the spell of state indoctrination in Marxist-Leninism. It was his experience with the realities of the Soviet system that brought him to his metanoia, the change of mind that put him on the road to repentance. “He returned with adult thoughtfulness to the Christian worldview of his rearing,” the editors write. “Solzhenitsyn’s mature articulation of Christian truths was deeply informed by his experience in the prison camps. There he witnessed human nature in extremis and learned about the heights and depths of the human soul.”
Solzhenitsyn reserved his harshest condemnation for his own, particularly the Soviet leadership, and could not forgive what he saw as passivity in so many Russians during the long terror. The political problem was, again for the author, not so much a matter of sorting out competing political systems, but a question of evil.
In a chapter of the Gulag Archipelago that looks at the history of the Soviet political police, one of the interrogators tells a condemned man: “Interrogation and trial are merely judicial corroboration. They cannot alter your fate, which was previously decided. If it is necessary to shoot you, then you will be shot even if you are altogether innocent. If it is necessary to acquit you, then no matter how guilty you are you will be cleared and acquitted.”
The chapter closes with the narrator discussing the just punishment for evildoers. He talks about the vigorous prosecution of Nazi war criminals in West Germany—by one count some 86,000 convicted by 1966. And he compares that with the almost total lack of any justice served for the architects of Soviet terror: “Someday our descendents will describe our several generations as generations of driveling do-nothings. First we submissively allowed them to massacre us by the millions, and then with devoted concern we tended the murderers in their prosperous old age.”
But for those descendents to come to conclusions about “driveling do-nothings” they will first need moral criteria. And that is what worries Solzhenitsyn. In a 1993 address in New York, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the author observed that “for a post-modernist, the world does not possess values that have reality.” Perhaps it is the moral reality provided by true faith that most threatens revolutionaries and totalitarians, and explains why the Church, which stands in the way of these utopian fantasies, receives so much of their fury.
Russian historian George Vernadsky estimated that between the years 1917-1920 “several hundred bishops, priests, and monks were either shot or starved to death in prisons.” In 1922, the Soviets confiscated religious art and liturgical items, citing the need to raise funds to combat a famine, and in the process, Vernadsky wrote, “many priests were arrested and a number executed, among them the bishop of Petrograd, Benjamin.” To this day, the Russian Orthodox Church holds an annual memorial service in Butovo, the location of a former secret police camp now known as Russia’s Golgotha. No one knows exactly how many died at the “shooting field” in 1937-38, although the official number tops 20,000 people. Among them were more than 1,000 clergymen, including seven bishops. Witnesses said “enemies of the people” were brought to the shooting range in food vans marked “MEAT.” Shootings went on non-stop day and night in the later stages.
The Russian exile theologian Vladimir Lossky defined evil as “nothing other than an attraction of the will towards nothing, a negation of being, of creation, and above all of God, a furious hatred of grace against which the rebellious will puts up an implacable resistance.”
Solzhenitsyn, now eighty-eight and for a long time back in his native land, understands this. If he had only written history, his contribution to our understanding of political terror and totalitarianism would be incalculably great. But he also gave us the artist’s moral vision. And that is something that Russia—and the West—need now more than ever.
Solzhenitsyn broke taboos, shook Soviet empire
Solzhenitsyn, Russian patriot, whose conscience and integrity helped destroy the Soviet empire
By Douglas Birch, Associated Press, August 4, 2008
When Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the thick monthly literary magazine Novy Mir back in November of 1962, taboos were shattered. Buried secrets were unearthed. And the Soviet Union was shaken to its foundations.
Solzhenitsyn’s short novel described a single day in the life of a carpenter caught up in the Soviet Union’s secret network of slave labor camps, where starvation, bitter cold and punishing work regimes were the rule and, it has been said, the average life expectancy was one winter.
The author was working as a provincial math teacher, and his greatest work, The Gulag Archipelago, was still to come. But “One Day” was to shock the U.S.S.R. and the world.
Some of the crimes of the dictator Josef Stalin were exposed and denounced following a secret speech by Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, as part of his short-lived campaign to reform the brutal Soviet system.
But Solzhenitsyn’s novel, based on the seven years he spent as a prisoner, was the first real expose of the gulag — a word derived from the Russian Glavnoe Upravelenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration.
Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature but was exiled from his homeland because of his work, died of heart failure Sunday at age 89, his son, Stepan Solzhenitsyn, told The Associated Press on Monday.
The gulag was, Solzhenitsyn wrote, the “human meat grinder” for processing what Stalin sneered at as “wreckers,” vermin and “enemies of the people” who allegedly sabotaged Soviet progress to the workers’ paradise. The grim process started, typically, with a knock on the door late at night, an arrest on charges of trivial or imaginary crimes, condemnation by a secret tribunal, transportation by unheated rail car and finally incarceration in the camps.
The prisoners formed a secret army of slave laborers who built railroads, worked in mines and cleared forests in some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain. In the end, by the most authoritative estimate, the gulag systematically ground down some 29 million souls.
Armed with his literary talent and prodigious memory, Solzhenitsyn spent more than 40 years working in secrecy, in fear and finally in exile as he chiseled away at the lies that supported the Soviet system. And in the end he, as much perhaps as any individual, helped to bring it down.
“One Day” was the critical beginning of this work.
“If the Soviet Union’s elite were to accept that the portrait of Ivan Denisovich was authentic, that meant admitting that innocent people had endured pointless suffering,” wrote Anne Applebaum in her book, “Gulag: A History.” “If the camps had really been stupid and wasteful and tragic, that meant that the Soviet Union was stupid and wasteful and tragic too.”
After the book appeared, readers of Novyi Mir responded with an outpouring of letters describing their anguish and grief. “Now I read and weep, but when I was imprisoned in Ukhta for ten years I did not shed a tear,” one reader said in letter to the magazine.
Solzhenitsyn’s novel would never have been published if Khrushchev hadn’t hoped it would undermine support in the Kremlin for neo-Stalinist policies. But perhaps in part because of the novel’s publication, Khrushchev was ousted by Communist Party leaders in 1964. The gulag, meanwhile, continued to incarcerate enemies of the people until two years before the Soviet collapse.
When Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in 1970, Soviet authorities refused to let him go to Stockholm to accept the award. In the text of the speech he could not deliver to the Swedish Academy, smuggled out of the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn recalled an old Russian proverb: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”
But Solzhenitsyn was not a storybook hero for his admirers in Europe and the United States. Many, especially in the West, found his political judgments as distressing as his literature was inspiring.
After he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and expelled from the U.S.S.R. in 1974, he settled in bucolic Cavendish, Vt. There, he became frustrated with what he regarded as the West’s shallow obsession with individualism and liberty — which, in his view, had degenerated into narcissism and license. Democracy had brought paralysis, he believed, affluence decadence.
In a 1978 speech at Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn — who with his beard and dour demeanor resembled a figure from an Orthodox icon — denounced the Western view that liberal democracy was fated to triumph in non-Western civilizations, which he called “worlds” unto themselves.
“There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life,” Solzhenitsyn said.
“It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all developing into similarity; neither one can be transformed into the other without the use of violence.”
After his return to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn was outraged by what he found — a Kremlin, in his view, unable to stop the looting of Russia’s vast resources by politically connected tycoons and unwilling to stand up against what he saw as the encroaching threat of NATO and other Western institutions.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the Communist reformer, restored Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet citizenship in 1990 and dropped treason charges against him. President Boris Yeltsin, who dismantled the Soviet system, tried to woo the author.
Solzhenitsyn blamed Gorbachev and Yeltsin for Russia’s economic crisis, its military weakness and what he regarded as subservience to the West.
When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia’s highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, in 1998 the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.
“I feel that Yeltsin permitted an enormous devastation of Russia,” Solzhenitsyn told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in 2001.
In the 1990s, Solzhenitsyn’s views were regarded by Moscow’s political elites and some disillusioned Western supporters as old-fashioned, out of step with Russia’s march toward integration with the West. In time, however Solzhenitsyn’s views would be echoed in the halls of the Kremlin.
The author at first seemed wary of President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer. But he gradually warmed to Putin, as the Russian president reigned in the oligarchs, reclaimed state control of some of Russia’s natural resources and adopted a more assertive — at times confrontational — relationship with the United States and the West.
Solzhenitsyn, meanwhile, did not quarrel with the Kremlin’s drive to eliminate voices of dissent from the media, marginalize the political opposition and restore its role as the unchallenged center of Russian power.
Russian liberals are careful to draw the distinction between Solzhenitsyn the writer and Solzhenitsyn the political figure. They cherish the former, and are reluctant to criticize the latter.
“He wrote the ‘Gulag Archipelago,’” Andre Mironov, who was sentenced to a term in a prison camp in the 1980s for possession of unauthorized books, told the Associated Press. “This was above all.”
Some Western critics, meanwhile, have been harsher, accusing Solzhenitsyn of becoming an apologist for Putin’s authoritarian rule.
Last year, after three years in relative obscurity, Solzhenitsyn granted a rare interview to the liberal weekly Moscow News, in which he warned that Russia risked a Ukrainian-style revolt because of Western interference. He also accused the United States of the “occupation” of Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Putin’s assertive foreign policy, he was quoted as saying, was “forward thinking,” while blaming the Russian president’s predecessors for the gulf separating Russia’s ultra-wealthy elites and its millions of poor.
On June 12, during the Day of Russia holiday celebrations in the Kremlin, Putin presented Solzhenitsyn with a state prize for his “humanitarian” contribution to the nation. The author, apparently too frail to attend, was represented by his wife, Natalya.
“Millions of people associate the name and work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn with Russia’s fate,” Putin said at the ceremony. “His academic research, outstanding literary work and, in fact, his entire life have been dedicated to the Fatherland.”
In a taped message, Solzhenitsyn said he hoped Russians’ experience during the “cruel and troubled years” of the Soviet era would help avert more suffering. “It will forewarn and protect us from destructive breakdowns,” he said, looking pale and thin in a gray suit and tie.
Solzhenitsyn had become, once again, a symbol of Russia: a nation caught between its tragic past and its uncertain future; between its faith in state power and its fear of new repression.
His journey was, after all, Russia’s bitter journey through the 20th century. And if the West sometimes had a hard time understanding Solzhenitsyn and his country, well, perhaps that’s because of Russia’s singular history.
“How can you expect a man who is warm to understand a man who is cold?” he wrote in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.
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