In one of my chapel talks I said that of all persons alive on planet earth I’d most like to meet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer, who was for me a powerful witness, revealing important truths regarding Communism, the importance of writers, and the durability of “permanent things. During the 1970s I read most of his novels as well as The Gulag Archipelago, a massive (three volume) documentation of Bolshevik brutality. Thanks to him, I discarded some of the American academy’s gilded portraits of the USSR and was better prepared to discern the Marxist themes so deftly infusing many analyses of American history. I was also prompted to re-examine America’s role in the world vis-à-vis both Communism and Islam. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, and his Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c. 1972) focused on artists. Some—infatuated with their avante garde role—engaged in rebellion and self-assertion. Others, such as Solzhenitsyn, considered art a sacred vocation that “acknowledges a higher power” and “joyfully works as a common apprentice under God’s heaven” (p. 4).
Great art, truthful art, weathers the winds of time and gives wings to our souls. Indeed, Plato’s “old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty” (p. 7) retains its ancient grandeur, and nothing rivals the importance of investing one’s life in illuminating and defending transcendent realities—the “permanent things.” Speaking personally, Solzhenitsyn noted that he survived the Gulag while thousands perished. So he had a sacred mission: to record, to explain, to imbed their story in literature. Millions died because too few believed in “fixed universal human concepts called good and justice” while the oppressors disdained them as “fluid, changing, and that therefor one must always do what will benefit one’s party” (p. 220). Sadly enough, might-makes-right philosophies forever enlist devotees; hijackers and terrorists succeed. But despite the fact that there is much “slavery to half-cocked progressive ideas” (p. 24), one must courageously seek to refute them.
This means refuting the “spirit of Munich” that spread cancerously throughout the West, becoming “dominant in the twentieth century. The intimidated civilized world has found nothing to oppose the onslaught of a sudden resurgent fang-baring barbarism, except concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a disease of the will of prosperous people; it is the daily state of those who have given themselves over to a craving for prosperity in every way, to material well-being as the chief goal of life on earth” (p. 24). He referred, of course, to the agreement Neville Chamberlain made with Adolf Hitler in 1938. The next year Germany invaded Poland. Even then, many Europeans sought to remain “neutral,” paralyzed by their pacifism. This, Churchill said, was “lamentable; and it will become much worse. . . . . Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear—I fear greatly—the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar, ever more loudly, ever more widely.”
The ghastly carnage of WWII might have been avoided had Churchill’s warnings been heeded. But neither the League of Nations nor Europe’s politicians had the courage to resist. So it’s up to writers such as himself, Solzhenitsyn said, to speak the truth to the world. Tyranny thrives by lies, so truth-tellers must expose and ultimately defeat the tyrants. Writers “can VANQUISH LIES! In the struggle against lies, art has always won and always will” (p. 33). And so, he memorably declared: “ONE WORD OF TRUTH OUTWEIGHS THE WORLD” (P. 34).
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Solzhenitsyn came to the world’s attention during the “Khruschev thaw” in the 1950s with his publication One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (a fictional depiction of his experience in Stalin’s prison camps) He was briefly a celebrity in his native land who was welcomed by its state-controlled literary establishment. Before long, however, he encountered mounting governmental opposition. So he began recording his struggles in a work entitled The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union (New York: Harper Colophon Books, c. 1975). He began by confessing: “For the writer intent on truth, life never was, never is (and never will be!) easy” (p. 1). Knowing this, Solzhenitsyn “entered into the inheritance of every modern Russian writer intent on the truth: I must write simply to ensure that it was not all forgotten, that posterity might someday come to know of it” (p. 2). He believed “the Soviet regime could certainly have been breached only by literature.” No military coup or political movement could begin to challenge Stalin’s brutal dictatorship. “Only the solitary writer would be able” to effectively oppose it, simply because “one word of truth outweighs the world.” After writing The Gulag Archipelago (first published only in the West) he was expelled from Russia in 1974. As he departed, he left behind a short, memorable message to his people: “Live Not by Lies!”
In exile Solzhenitsyn found refuge in the mountains of Vermont, Initially lionized by the American intelligentsia, he was invited to deliver Harvard’s 1978 commencement address, published as A World Split Apart (New York: Harper & Row, c. 1978). He began his speech abrasively, noting that though Harvard’s motto is Veritas graduates would find that “truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter” (p. 1). And his words proved “bitter” to many! He said, “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today,” something “particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites” (pp. 9-11). This decline—“at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood”— portended a cataclysmic cultural collapse. Then he upbraided the media. This march of evil, he thought, gained considerable impetus from the press. In the USSR the press was rigorously censored and obviously untrustworthy, whereas in the West it was “free” but irresponsible and similarly untrustworthy! Bewildered by their behavior, he thought “their fly-by-night trade” consisted mainly in trying “to outdo one another in snooping, conjecturing, and snatching at whatever they can.” Angrily he declared: “You are worse than the KGB!” Throughout his years in the U.S. he disliked its media. Rather than working hard to discover the truth, they slipped into the slothful role of circulating rumors, opinions, and “fashionable” ideas. “Hastiness and superficiality—these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else this is manifested in the press” (p. 27). Consequently, “we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters pertaining to the nation’s defense publicly revealed,” all under the “slogan ‘Everyone is entitled to know everything’” (p. 25). Equally disturbing were American economists who lionized socialism—the very ideology that had destroyed his homeland. This, Solzhenitsyn warned, “is a false and dangerous current” (p. 33). In the East, “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” (p. 55). But capitalism in itself provides no panacea. Both East and West, he said, need “spiritual” rather than “economic” development, and the spirit has been “trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West” (p. 57).
American politicians who appeased Communism elicited Solzhenitsyn’s scorn. In fact, looking at the nation’s withdrawal from Vietnam, he said: “the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam War. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that the way should be left open for national, or Communist, self-determination in Vietnam (or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity). But in fact, members of the U.S. antiwar movement became accomplices in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million people there. Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?” To Solzhenitsyn: “Your short-sighted politician who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however a hundredfold Vietnams now looms over you” (p. 41). He envisioned a future “fight of cosmic proportions,” a battle between the forces of either Goodness or Evil. Those who are morally neutral, those who exalt in their moral relativism, are the true enemies of mankind.
Cowardice explained the retreat in Southeast Asia. Democracies, Solzhenitsyn feared, lack the necessary soul-strength for sustained combat. Wealthy democracies seem especially flaccid. “To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, in this case, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal” (p. 45). More deeply, the “humanism” that has increasingly dominated the West since the Renaissance explains its weakness. When one believes ultimately only in himself, when human reason becomes the final arbiter, when human sinfulness is denied, the strength that comes only from God will dissipate. Secular humanism he thought, is almost identical with the humanism of Karl Marx, who said: “communism is naturalized humanism” (p. 53).
Consequently, Solzhenitsyn said, “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” (pp. 60-61). This speech ended Solzhenitsyn’s speaking career in the United States. The nation’s elite newspapers thenceforth ignored him. Prestigious universities closed their doors. He became something of a persona non grata and spent the last 15 years of his life in America living as a recluse, working on manuscripts devoted to Russia’s history.
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In the years immediately prior to Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech, he spoke to several American and British audiences. His speeches were published in Warning to the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c. 1976). He particularly assailed Bertrand Russell, who coined the slogan “Better Red than dead.” To Russell and his fifth-column ilk, Solzhenitsyn replied: “Better to be dead than a scoundrel. In this horrible expression of Bertrand Russell’s there is an absence of all moral criteria” (p. 119). Delivering an address over BBC in 1976, Solzhenitsyn noted that “until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined the extreme degree to which the West actually desired to blind itself to the world situation, the extreme degree to which the West has already become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it, a world oppressed above all by the need to defend its freedom” (p. 126). “There is a German proverb,” he continued, “which runs Mut verloren—alles verloren: When courage is lost, all is lost. There is another Latin one, according to which loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction. But what happens to a society in which both these losses—the loss of courage and the loss of reason—intersect? This is the picture which I found the West presents today” (pp. 126-127).
The First World War, culminating this process, virtually destroyed Europe, and in its wake the evils of socialism inundated Russia, annihilating 100 million or more of its people. Europeans, eschewing moral criteria to follow narrowly pragmatic policies, stood by silently. England’s prime minister, “Lloyd George actually said: ‘Forget about Russia. It is our job to ensure the welfare of our own society” (p. 131). So Russia’s erstwhile “allies,” ignoring her wartime sacrifices, did nothing to stop the Bolsheviks’ tyranny and terror. Even as millions were executed or sent into the Gulag Archipelago and six million peasants died in the Ukraine in the 1930s, Westerners ignored it. Sadly: “Not a single Western newspaper printed photographs or reports of the famine; indeed, your great wit George Bernard Shaw even denied its existence. ‘Famine in Russia?’ he said. ‘I’ve never dined so well or so sumptuously as when I crossed the Soviet border.’” (p. 133). Similarly, during WWII the Allies benefited from Russia’s assistance, but following the war Stalin continued to oppress his people. “Twice we helped save the freedom of Western Europe,” he said. “And twice you repaid us by abandoning us to our slavery” (p. 136). Frankly, he believed that Westerners preferred peace and security, pleasure and comfort, to demanding justice for Russia’s oppressed. So they ignored the mass deportations of “whole nations to Siberia” and the occupation of the Baltic states. Having stopped Hitler, they seared their consciences and remained untroubled with Stalin. Indeed, rather than seriously evaluating and learning from Russia’s disaster, Western intellectuals seemed willing to replicate it! “And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval” (p. 130).
Solzhenitsyn was particularly incensed by the “misty phantom of socialism” so prevalent in places like England. “Socialism has created the illusion of quenching people’s thirst for justice: Socialism has lulled their conscience into thinking that a steamroller which is about to flatten them is a blessing in disguise, a salvation. And socialism, more than anything else, has caused public hypocrisy to thrive,” enabling Europeans to ignore Soviet atrocities (p. 141). There’s actually no logic to socialism, for “it is an emotional impulse, a kind of worldly religion,” embraced and followed with blind faith (p. 142). As an ideology, it is spread and embraced by immature, sophistic believers. The British had drifted toward socialism under the post-WWII Labor leaders. Consequently, “Great Britain, the kernel of the Western world, has experienced this sapping of its strength and will to an even greater degree, perhaps, than any other country. For some twenty years Britain’s voice has not been heard in our planet; its character has gone, its freshness has faded” (p. 144). The land of Churchill had vanished! “Contemporary society in Britain is living on self-deception and illusions, both in the world of politics and in the world of ideas” (p. 144). What was true about Great Britain, he insisted, was equally true about much of the West.
As one would anticipate, Solzhenitsyn’s BBC career ended abruptly! Neither British nor American politicians, labor leaders, professors or journalists wanted to be rebuked for their failures! In the 1970s, neither the United Nations nor the European Union, neither Richard Nixon nor George McGovern, neither Gerald Ford nor Jimmy Carter had the courage to oppose Communism in Southeast Asia. Nor do numbers of their successors today seem ready to deal with the violence and injustices in the Middle East. Let us, however, never say that no one warned us about appeasement’s desserts!
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Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel novels include: August 1914, which focuses on the pivotal first month of Russia’s engagement in WWI, showing why and how the Tsarist state failed to rightly respond to the conflict; November 1916, which deals with the disintegrating home front (and is the most explicitly Christian of the novels); and March 1917, which shows the government beginning to dissolve amidst the collapse of traditional authorities. In the judgment of David Walsh: “There is no doubt that The Red Wheel is one of the masterpieces of world literature, made all the more precious by its relevance to the tragic era through which contemporary history has passed. Moreover, the impulse of revolutionary and apocalyptic violence associated with the age of ideology has still not ebbed. We remain confronted by the fragility of historical existence, in which it is possible for whole societies to choose death rather than life.”
In toto, The Red Wheel constitutes what Solzhenitsyn considered “the chief artistic design of my life.” He believed the Russian revolutions in 1917 were the crucial events of the 20th century—the cauldron of destruction still defacing the globe. Writing the novels, Solzhenitsyn said, “there is always only one right path: to tackle the main job. That job will lead you to the right path of its own accord. Tackling the job meant seeking out, for myself and for the reader, how, through our past, we can conceive of our future” (#5054). Russian history merits our attention since it provides an important lesson regarding the fatal consequences of embracing any utopian, socialist vision for society. Especially enlightening are passages such as one finds in November 1916, surveying the leftist movement that would finally prevail in the Bolsheviks’ triumph. Largely responsible for that triumph was a “hapless Russian liberalism, prostrating itself, dropping its spectacles, raising its head again, throwing up its hands, urging moderation, and generally making itself a laughingstock” (p. 59). Though feigning impartiality, Russian liberals unfailingly aligned themselves with leftist ideologies. “Educated Russian society, which had long ago ceased to forgive the regime for anything, joyfully applauded left-wing terrorists and demanded an amnesty for all of them without exception.” (p. 59). They fulminated against the Tsar and his government while refraining from any critique of “the revolutionary young” who had gained control of the universities and “knocked their lecturers down and prohibited academic activity.” Students—then and now—unleash what seems to be an effluence of adolescence—“the normal sympathy of the young for the left” (p. 495).
In a passage I’ve pondered many times—for it speaks to us today—Solzhenitsyn said: “Just as the Coriolis effect is constant over the whole of this earth’s surface, and the flow of rivers is deflected in such as way that it is always the right bank that is eroded and crumbles, while the floodwater goes leftward, so do all the forms of democratic liberalism on earth strike always to the right and caress the left. Their sympathies are always with the left, their feet are capable of shuffling only leftward, their heads bob busily as they listen to leftist arguments—but they feel disgraced if they take a set to or listen to a word from the right” (p. 59). Indeed, as Lenin as other revolutionaries realized: “The wind always blows from the far left! No Socialist in the world could afford to ignore that fact” (p. 485). In a 1979 interview Solzhenitsyn lamented the 1917 failures of liberals and moderate socialists in the Duma and the Provisional Government. They lacked the courage needed to oppose the hard left—a pattern of “weakening and self-capitulation” that would be “repeated on a world-wide scale since those days.”
It became evident with the publication of August 1914,that Solzhenitsyn was a conservative—both a Russian patriot and an Orthodox Christian—who treasured much about the “old Russia,” despite its deeply-flawed Tsarist authoritarianism. In particular he defended Pyotr Stolypin, the Russian prime minister from 1906-1911, who had sought to bring into being a “solid class of peasant proprietors,” convinced that they could support and preserve a constitutional monarchy of some sort. Unfortunately, Stolypin was assassinated in Kiev in 1911; he was probably the last hope for a “conservative liberal” regime that might have avoided the revolutionary chaos that subsequently ruined the nation. In taking this position he lost support in liberal circles in both Russia and the West. America’s Secretary of State, Henry “Kissinger for a long time prevented the Voice of America from broadcasting me, and the BBC and Radio Free Europe were also beginning to avoid me as an ‘authoritarian figure” (#4165).
Returning to Russia in 1994 and dying in 2008, Solzhenitsyn failed to much influence developments in has native land. And he is today largely ignored by most Westerners. But to those with ears to hear, he remains a lasting witness to what ought ultimately concern us. Just remember: “ONE WORD OF TRUTH OUTWEIGHS THE WORLD” (P. 34). Consequently: “LIVE NOT BY LIES!”