Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Igor Shafarevich, eds.: . From Under the Rubble. Translations under the direction of Michael Scammell. Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1981 [1974].
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Warning to the West. Harris L. Coulter and Nataly Martin translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.
To understand the political atmosphere contributing to these volumes, it’s almost necessary to have lived through the lugubrious mid-seventies, when they were published. Those too young to have experienced the American Congress’s abandonment of South Vietnam to the Communist regime in Hanoi, the implementation of the policy of ‘détente’ with the Soviet Union, the hapless Ford Administration, Soviet advances in Africa, and indeed the vacuous pop music and hideous clothes of the period may rightly count themselves fortunate to have missed witnessing how the Sixties went to seed. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s pessimism may seem odd to those who know that the Soviet regime he loathed was only some fifteen years away from implosion—not America, not the West—but it seemed, and in many ways was, quite reasonable at the time.
As that distinguished translator of Russian texts, Max Hayward, remarks in his introduction, the authors of the essays in Under the Rubble look back collections published before and after the Russian and Bolshevik revolutions: Landmarks, which appeared in 1909, and De Profundis, in 1918, featured writers criticizing the uncritical adoption of nineteenth-century European philosophic doctrines by the Russian intelligentsia; of these writers, the best known in the West today is Nicholas Berdyaev, the brilliant Russian Orthodox essayist who, with his collaborators, defended the spiritual and intellectual legacy of Christianity against the secularists, provoking the wrath of no less (and no better) the polemicist, then tyrant, Vladimir Lenin, who somewhat comically fulminated at the authors’ “apostasy.” Presumably a deviation from the teachings of the Church of Dialectical Materialism.
Co-editor and main contributor to Under the Rubble Alesksandr Solzhenitsyn does indeed reject Marxist-Leninist dogma, insisting that “History is us”; consequently, “there is no alternative but to shoulder the burden of what we so passionately desire and bear it out of the depths,” de profundis. In the penultimate essay, he recurs to Landmarks, listing the faults of Russia’s pre-revolutionary secularists as identified by the contributors: a clannish, unnatural disengagement from the life of the nation; intense opposition to the Czarist regime as a matter of principle; moral cowardice in the face of “public opinion” (largely as they imagined it, given their isolation from the public); centrally, dogmatic egalitarianism; ideological intolerance; fanaticism and conceit; atheism. Although these “smatterers” did continue the Russian intelligentsia’s tradition of moral seriousness (secularists, yes; Voltaireans, no), they displayed “a fanatical willingness” to sacrifice themselves that harder souls like Lenin would readily satisfy, once their usefulness faded. They shared with the Bolsheviks an “expectation of a social miracle” and “a religion of self-deification,” both following from an ideology of “religionless” humanism. By 1917, “the intelligentsia had succeeded in rocking Russia with a cosmic explosion, but was unable to handle the debris.” Despite their belated to conversion to regnant Marxist-Leninist ‘line,’ the new regime discarded them, preferring a scientistic/technocratic and bureaucratic ‘intelligentsia’ to the old gaggle of dreamers.” “Communism was its own offspring,” but Communism had decidedly Oedipal inclinations toward its fathers.
In the 1970s, the ‘intellectual’ who combined the scientism of the regime’s intelligentsia with the vacuous optimism of the pre-revolutionary humanist was Andrei Sakharov. Solzhenitsyn replies to the argument Sakharov advanced in his 1968 tract, Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, wherein he predicted a “convergence” of the Soviet and American regimes. Sakharov predicted (or rather hoped) that the Soviets would democratize its political institutions and the Americans would ‘democratize’ their political economy by adopting socialism. With the two (then) major world powers comfortably in the camp of social democracy, peace would rule the planet.
Solzhenitsyn neither wanted nor expected any such Aquarian thing. For Russians, “the way back” from Communism will “prove difficult and slow,” “just as painful” as the transition from the relative freedom of czarism to Communism had proved; a “gulf of utter incomprehension… will suddenly yawn between fellow-countrymen” because under tyranny no one dared to speak frankly with anyone else. Russians “lost touch with each other, never learned to know each other, ceased to check and correct each other”—lost the habits of mind and heart that any genuine politics, any life of ruling and being ruled, reciprocally, instills. While praising Sakharov for his courage in publishing his argument, for having “broken out of the deep, untroubled, cozy torpor in which Soviet scientists get on with their scientific work, are rewarded with a life of plenty and pay for it by keeping their thoughts on the level of their test tubes,” Solzhenitsyn finds that he has left the conditions prevailing under the Soviet regime “dangerously underlit.” While condemning fascism, racism, militarism, Stalinism, and Maoism, Sakharov gives Marxism-Leninism a pass. Similarly, in his “Secret Speech” of 1956, Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev had condemned Stalinism; yet Stalinism only differed from Leninism in Stalin’s purges of the Communist Party. The condemnation of Stalinism amounts to an attempt to shift the blame for the mass murder perpetrated by the Communist Party regime onto a particular ruler, rather than admitting the regime itself, and the ideology underpinning it, inherently push rulers to mass murder.
Therefore, when Sakharov calls “the high ideals of socialism” and the “ethical character of the socialist path” he has described nothing; he has only expressed a “pious wish.” “Nowhere on earth have we been shown ethical socialism in being.” “But in the great expanses of our collectivized countryside, where people always and only lived by labor and had no other interest in life but labor, it is only under ‘socialism’ that labor has become an accursed burden from which men flee.” (It might be added that the usual good regime cited as the model of ‘democratic socialism’—Sweden—has never been socialist at all; it has been at most a capitalist country offering substantial ‘welfare benefits,’ with a social-democratic party enjoying a parliamentary majority, as it was in Solzhenitsyn’s time under the premiership of Olaf Palme).
Similarly, Sakharov’s condemnation of ‘nationalism’ fails to see what Nietzsche saw, decades earlier, and what de Gaulle had insisted on, in Sakharov’s generation: that nationalism has been “a tough nut… for the millstones of internationalism to crack.” “In spite of Marxism, the twentieth century has revealed to us the inexhaustible strength and vitality of national feelings,” requiring any honest person to “think more deeply about this riddle: why is the nation a no less sharply defined and irreducible human entity than the individual?” Just as socialism break on the rock of human personality, human individuality, the human soul, so does internationalism, whether ‘liberal’ or socialist, break on the rock of the nation. Solzhenitsyn rejects Sakharov’s claim that historical “progress” will overcome individuality or nationhood, pointing to Sakharov’s hope for the “creation of an artificial superbrain” which could “control and direct all vital processes at the level of the individual organism” and “of society as a whole” (“including psychological processes and heredity”) as prospects that “come close to our idea of hell on earth.”
“In all the history of science, has scientific foresight ever saved us from anything?” Not yet. Sakharov’s “convergence” hypothesis being a case in point: Why would a historicist synthesis of Communist tyranny and commercial republicanism or democratic capitalism necessarily combine the best of both regimes, instead of the worst? Or some mediocre combination of the elements? What Sakharov really wants is world government (assisted or even ruled by the artificial superbrain), not the intellectual freedom he lauds in the title of his book.
Solzhenitsyn also gazes critically at Western freedoms. Intellectual and other freedoms, legally protected, are often “very desirable,” but only if understood as means to a worthy end, some “higher goal” than the freedoms themselves. A “multiparty parliamentary system” amounts only to “yet another idol” if “no extraparty or strictly nonparty paths of national development” exist within the regime of free political-party competition. For Russia, Solzhenitsyn is thinking primarily of a revivified Russian Orthodox Church, and also, on the material level, an esteem for and protection of landed property for peasants, a right peasants often had under the czarist regime. In the United States, thriving churches and farms also underpinned a republican regime dedicated to securing the natural rights of human persons in accordance with the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God; for Solzhenitsyn, this would be the American parallel to what he wants for Russia, but not the model for Russia, which has its own national character and needs its own civil and political institutions. Having abandoned many of their founding principles, “the Western democracies today are in a state of political crisis and spiritual confusion.” It therefore “ill becomes us to see our country’s only what out in the Western parliamentary system”—a system recently rejected by that staunch republican, Charles de Gaulle. This is “especially” true, “since Russia’s readiness for such a system, which was very doubtful in 1917, can only have declined still further in the half century since.”
Under the “authoritarian” regimes of previous centuries, Russia “existed for many centuries,” “preserv[ing] itself and its health,” avoiding such “episodes of self-destruction” as were visited upon it by Lenin and Stalin. “Authoritarian regimes as such are not frightening—only those which are answerable to no one and nothing,” to “God and their own consciences.” “The state structure is of secondary importance.” Therefore, “the absolutely essential task is not political liberation, but the liberation of our souls from participation in the lie forced upon us,” a liberation that each individual Russian can undertake here and now, despite the vile regime of Communism. “If mud and dung cling to any of us it is of his own free will, and no man’s mind is made any the less black by the mud of his neighbors.”
Demonstrating that rigorous and exact intellectual training does not necessarily lend itself to Sakharov-like optimism for the prospect of the worldwide rule of a socialist superbrain, Solzhenitsyn’s next two essayists turn out to be a mathematician and a cyberneticist, respectively. Igor Shafarevich asks the scientific (and also the Socratic) question, What is socialism? He classifies modern socialism as “not just an economic system, as is capitalism, but also—and perhaps above all—as an ideology.” This ideology typically yields “hatred of religion in socialist states,” being itself a substitute for religion. Marx, for example, “regards socialism as the highest level of atheism,” affirming the centrality of man, not God, in the universe. The abolition of private property, the destruction of religion, the destruction of the family—all indispensable elements of Marxism and of the regimes animated by Marxism—deny human personality or soulfulness in the service of impersonality, of ‘scientific’ socialism. Ancient and medieval communalisms were not impersonal (the Cathars were hardly ‘scientific’ socialists) and, although corrosive of families and of property, they never extended over large territories or populations. It was only in modernity that socialism “threw off its mystical and religious form and based itself on a materialistic and rationalist view of the world.”
Modern socialism, Shafarevich sees, rests on a fundamental demand, “the demand for equality,” not in the sense of equal natural rights but as the demand for “the destruction of the hierarchy into which society has arranged itself,” the “negation of the existence of any genuine differences between individuals.” In this “‘equality’ has turned into ‘equivalence.'” Whereas “the idea of equality is also fundamental to religion,” there “it is achieved in contact with God, that is, in the highest sphere of human existence.” Modern socialism denies any such contact, in principle. “Such a revolution would amount to the destruction of Man,” not his apotheosis, as seen when indigenous peoples who lose the “way of life” which had been “arranged to give meaning to their existence.” In contact not with God, or even with ‘the gods,’ but rather in contact with foreign men, they lose “their will to live.” “It seems obvious that a way of life which fully embodies socialist ideals must have the same result,” as indeed it had, in listless, alcoholic Russia. Freud was right about one thing, at least: human nature carries within it a death-wish. Socialism plays to the human “urge to self-destruction, the human death instinct.”
Cyberneticist Mikhail Agursky points to an underlying similarity of capitalism and socialism of the 1970s, industrialism. The vast production industrialism makes possible concurrently requires the stimulation of demand in order to induce people to consume the vast quantities of stuff. Advertising and ‘fashion’ stimulate the natural desire to acquire to new intensity. This is why both capitalism and socialism “are rapacious plunderers” of “natural resources.” Both also tend toward political instability—in capitalist countries, economic boom and bust destabilize governments, while in socialist countries the quest for ‘raw materials’ tempts stronger states to invade and loot smaller ones. Further, capitalists in republics do not want trade disrupted, and so push politicians to appease the tyrannies that aim at destroying both republicanism and capitalism. “These were the roots of the Munich agreement in 1938,” and of détente with Communist regimes now. While “democracy’s faults pale into insignificance beside the enormities of totalitarianism, such as the deaths of tens of millions of people in Soviet and German death camps and prisons,” these lesser faults make that regime vulnerable to those regimes. “The only reason, indeed, why democratic societies still exist is that their populations have not yet altogether lost their self-control,” the moral foundation of political self-government. Merely to make socialism democratic won’t solve that problem.
A critique of socialism is never hard to make, partly because socialism is an ideology, well-defined and therefore readily examined. Nationality, even when made into an ideology, nationalism, needs more analytical work, as nationalities number in the hundreds, even the thousands, whereas political economies fall into only a few recognizable ‘types.’ In the first of several essays on this topic, Shefarevich returns to consider the nationalities question in Soviet Russia. “Whenever great empires have crumbled” (as the Russian empire did, during the First World War, and as the Soviet Union would do, in the opinion of the writers here), “national consciousness has always sharpened in the separate nations composing them and ethnic groups have separated out and aspired to independent status.” One danger in this is the combination of national sentiments with socialism, yielding “an intolerant, radical nationalism”; this can also occur when a proud nation experiences conquest, as Germany did in that same war. In Russia, however, “all the problems of the non-Russian peoples are due in the long run to Russian oppression and the drive for Russification,” which leads the peoples in those territories to desire “to rid themselves of Russian colonial domination.” At the same time, the socialist ideology in the name of which that domination was re-imposed has suppressed Russian national culture, as well. “This ideology is the enemy of every nation, just as it is hostile to individual human personality,” and “the Russians no less than others are its victims; indeed, they were the first to come under fire.”
To borrow a Leninist phrase, what is to be done? Solzhenitsyn proposes a solution simple to state, hard to practice. A nation by definition ‘sees’ differences between itself and other nations, between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ citizens (or even subjects) and foreigners. Individual persons and individual families experience the same self-defining idea, and indeed social reality, feeling the sentiments that go with it. This being so, can we not limit our (equally human) libido dominandi to ourselves, to those ‘units’ of human life—individual, family, nation—which make sense as ‘objects’ of self-government? This will require “not the embittered strife of parties or nations, not the struggle to win some delusive victory” over persons, families or clans, and nations that will ceaselessly try to get out from under our oppression, but “simply repentance and the search for our own errors and sins. We must stop blaming everybody else” put “that first firm ground underfoot.”
Individuals can of course repent. What about nations? Solzhenitsyn thinks so. Nations resemble individuals in one way, what he calls the “mystical nature of their ‘givenness,'” their sense of intergenerational connectedness. The individual is never simply an individual; he knows himself as a being with parents, brothers and sisters, ‘relatives’ of all sorts. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, along with their blessings, and each human person needs to come to terms with those inheritances. Although a nation obviously lacks the biological integrity of a single person, the persons who comprise it nonetheless inherit both the good and the evil deeds of the previous generations. If neither an individual nor a nation can repent from the misdeeds of their ancestors in the simple and direct way they can repent from their own, they can surely repent in a secondary way, to understand their responsibility for acknowledging and correcting the effects of those misdeeds. “The nation is mystically welded together in a community of guilt, and its inescapable destiny is common repentance.” Rather grand language, that, but Solzhenitsyn likely means “mystical” in the Orthodox Christian sense, that of a spiritual and intellectual noesis. For the Orthodox there is nothing misty about mysticism, even if one instance of it, the acknowledgment of God, requires the intervention of the Holy Spirit.
“Patriotism,” Solzhenitsyn writes, “means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them.” This closely resembles the agapic love of Christianity, although one needn’t necessarily be a Christian to feel it. It does require of a nation “the level of its inner development” needed to perceive its own failures and its own evil actions, an “unarmed moral steadfastness” seen in 1968 when the Czechs and Slovaks confronted Russian tanks, “troubling [Europe’s] conscience”—”briefly.” Such repentance can lead a nation to the renunciation of force in any but defensive wars (and not to confuse self-defense with a strong ‘offense’).
Solzhenitsyn understands the difficulties. “Self-limitation on the part of individuals has often been observed and described, and is well known to us all,” but “as far as I know, no state has ever carried through a deliberate policy of self-limitation or set itself such a task in general form.” For this to take hold generally, it would signal “a great turning point in the history of mankind, comparable to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance,” a series of “moral revolutions, requiring both courage and sacrifice, though not cruelty.” Solzhenitsyn in effect challenges Russians to abandon its failing attempt to embody the ‘cutting edge’ of ‘historical dialectic’—of the Absolute Spirit’s progressive march, to put it in Hegelian terms, or the iron laws of History, as Marxists say—and to use both its more than harsh national experience of modern tyranny and its geopolitical circumstance of having no serious enemies on its borders—to turn inward, to recover its moral, spiritual, and even its physical strength. “A family which has suffered a great misfortune or disgrace tries to withdraw into itself for a time to get over its grief by itself. This is what the Russian people must do.” In so doing, it will need to re-create its “whole public educational system,” spending the billions of rubles it now wastes in “vainglorious and unnecessary foreign expenditure” on its children. To obtain the revenues needed for such an enterprise, Russians should “turn our national and political zeal toward the untamed expanses of the Northeast,” toward Siberia, a land rich in natural resources and challenging in the rigors of its climate. This, not incidentally, would turn Russia away from threatening Europe and toward defending a vulnerable border against China (or, as Solzhenitsyn more discreetly puts it, toward the development of a region “whose emptiness is becoming intolerable to our neighbors now that life on earth is so tightly packed.” “Our ocean is the Arctic, not the Indian Ocean,” not the Mediterranean nor Africa” (“we have no business there!”). Repentance isn’t only a matter of spiritual renewal but also a matter of giving oneself something to do. Siberia offers “us plenty of room in which to correct all our idiocies in building town, industrial enterprises, power stations and roads,” and, more importantly, “signify that Russia has resolutely opted for self-limitation, for turning inward rather than outward.” Especially, one might add, if Russians do not accompany such settlement with offensive weapons systems.
Historian Vadim Borisov contributes one of the collection’s best essays, also on this topic of nationality. Today, “the ideological monolith that has weighed for long years on Russian life and thought has done its work: Russian consciousness is scrambling out from under it toward an unknown future which is fragmented as never before,” as the “unresolved dilemmas” of 1917 resurface, now “intensified, complicated, and distorted” by more than fifty years of tyranny. In the years before the revolutions of 1917, Russia’s secularist intelligentsia had failed to distinguish ‘national’ from ‘nationalist.’ This mistake flowed from the historicist/progressive inclination to think of “the freedom of individuals and their unification in mankind” as “the alpha and omega” of philosophy—a philosophy that overlooks political philosophy, dismissing the nation, and therefore politics, the activity of a political community (as distinguished from nations, families, and mankind) in its characteristic modern form, the nation. Without an appreciation of politics, of the human capacity for ruling and being ruled, of ‘talking things over,’ a philosopher will mis-answer the central question of human society, What is justice? We may assert human rights, natural justice, social contract, but our supposedly rational assertion will have no discernable rational basis. “The American Founding Fathers who many years ago first propounded the “eternal rights of man and the citizen” [here he confuses a phrase from the French Revolution with the “unalienable rights” of the Declaration of Independence, but in this case the error is merely verbal] postulated that every human being bears the form and likeness of God; he therefore has an absolute value, and consequently also the right to be respected by his fellows.” But rationalism (in the sense of atheism), positivism, and materialism “successively destroyed the memory of this absolute source of human rights. The unconditional equality of persons before God was replaced by the conditional equality of human individuals before the law.” This leads to arbitrary government, the government of fallible human beings ruling without any standard beyond their own wills. But “if the human personality is not absolute but conditional, then the call to respect it is only a pious wish, which we may obey or disregard.”
Modern tyranny is ‘totalitarian’ because it is atheistic, denying the existence of God as the standard-setter for nature, and, not incidentally, denying that nature itself has any purposes beyond those human beings impose on it. “Rhinocerouslike,” ‘totalistic’ modern tyranny is “humanism put into practice,” having “forgotten what the human personality is.” Christianity “gave birth to the very concept of the human personality.” [1]
But does Christianity not also obviate nationality, contending that in the eyes of God there is neither Jew nor Greek, but only saved and unsaved? Yes, in that critical sense, but not in all respects. After all, the same Jesus also tells his fellow Jews to continue obeying the Law, without telling the Apostles to bring to the Gentiles anything more than the Spirit of that Law. Go and teach all nations,” He tells them. The universal Kingdom awaits its Founder, and He won’t be a successor of V. I. Lenin. Meanwhile, we have individuals as God created them: with one nature but many personalities, just as God has one “nature” but three Persons “or personalities,” and as mankind consists of one entity featuring many nations. The Christian Church itself “was born not in a single world language but in the different tongues of the apostles, reaffirming the plurality of national paths to a single goal.”
History didn’t make nations; God did. “The nation’s personality realizes itself through [its] history or, to put it another way, the people in their history fulfill God’s design for them.” This givenness, and this purpose, distinguish a nation from “the empirical people.” Even in empirical terms, a human being has a biological heritage, a genetically given structure; beyond this biological code, however, the human being also is born into a family and a nation, into a qualitative identity in addition to his biological identity. This fact “does not violate or diminish the gift of human freedom” because one can “evade the fulfillment of his personal destiny,” “reject God’s design for him,” “forget the roots of his being.” But those roots cannot be destroyed by that man. Christianity teaches each man to become a new man, teaches humanity to “transform itself entirely,” to become Christlike, through the given national ways of life each person has, by birth if not by biology. The new man does not replace the old one, but perfects him, always with the indispensable help of the Holy Spirit, without Whom he would never answer the call to Christlikeness in the first place.
“The beginning of the collapse of Russia’s integral, Christian national awareness was unusually stormy, thanks to the brutal reforms of Peter the Great.” Subsequent Russian ‘Enlighteners’ “substituted the social image of the people for the face of the people, since the people as a whole cannot be comprehended rationalistically and materialistically,” and so do not ‘register’ in the calculations of modern rationalists. When the people (mostly God-fearing peasants) rejected their formulas, the intelligentsia deemed them a ‘reactionary mass’—’unpersons,’ as the later Stalinists would menacingly label them. “Since man appears to have reached the ultimate in bestiality this century, we must ask the question: what is it that is developing progressively? It should be formulated as a question about human nature, about the instinct of evil in man and the conditions in which it comes to the surface,” but for the most part it hasn’t been so formulated, for a very long time. Instead, the supposed pragmatism of the intelligentsia works toward an “impersonal, unstructured, formless existence”—precisely for the impractical, indeed the utopian. In the modern context, ‘nihilism’ means the negation of the personal, the structured, the formal, the negation of what human beings, in their nature and in their personalities, are. Secularist suppose that ‘History’ will cause that nature to be utterly transformed, but it never quite does so, except for the worse. “The fulfillment of this utopia does not raise the standard of existence, as its adherents believe, but lowers it, bringing disintegration and finally destruction.”
As distinguished from nationality, nationalism is “above all an ideology,” based upon “the concept of the exclusive value of the tribal characteristics of a given race, and the doctrine of its superiority to all others.” Like the alleged ‘laws of History’ endorsed by the ‘historical science’ of historicists, nationalism distorts a given reality with racism or racial naturalism, biological pseudo-laws (often resembling the ‘laws’ posited by historicists in being evolutionary, a matter of the survival and indeed the triumph of the biologically ‘fit’). “Nationalism confuses the concepts of personality and nature, ascribing to nature the attributes of personality. As a result, the absoluteness of national personalities is transmogrified into the absoluteness of national nature,” much to the detriment of those national personalities that believe such rubbish, and of those which collide with nations under such delusions. Such a nation cannot do what Borisov and Solzhenitsyn alike commend; it cannot set limits to itself, but rather will have limits set for it, whether by internal collapse or defeat in war.
Both nationalism and (as remarked by previous essayists) socialist internationalism have recourse to the modern state. Alternatively, one might suspect that the modern state has recourse to ideologies of nationalism and socialism to dragoon the peoples it rules into its ‘projects.’ Be that as it may, or be it some malign interdependence between statism and ideology, the whole effort amounts to nihilism, to self-destruction.
It is in the volume’s sixth, central essay that Solzhenitsyn elaborates an alternative path. “The path of reason and cognition, based on the gradual exercise of thought and the accumulation of judgments logically arrived at”—the rationalism of modern science, misapplied as the means toward a full understanding of political life—”is not the only one possible either for society or for the individual, and it is not the most important.” “There is also the path of lived spiritual experience, the path of integral intuitive perception.” It is well to recall that Orthodox Christianity integrates Platonism or perhaps more accurately Neo-Platonism into Christianity; its ‘mystic’ insight, mentioned previously, is really a noetic perception of the teachings of all three Persons of God brought by the Holy Spirit.
The perception of God, and of God’s teachings, have always occurred to certain persons, within a certain nation, at certain times, all of them chosen by God. To be so chosen, those persons must have opened their souls to God, must have readied themselves to listen to Him. Solzhenitsyn proposes that just as his own soul had been opened to God’s teachings by the apparently calamitous experiences of imprisonment in the Gulag and confinement to a cancer ward, so Russians as a nation “have experiences such utter exhaustion of human resources [italics added] that we have learned to see the ‘one essential’ that cannot be taken from man, and have learned not to look to human resources for succor.” Christianity as a regime, as “a way of life,” now makes sense to Russians in a way it did not to Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a way it still does not to such intellectuals as Sakharov and Roy Medvedev (author of a tome titled, typically, Let History Judge). If ‘History’ (as distinguished from history) is an illusion, an excrescence of an ideology, and if human nature is tainted by sin, then Christianity beckons us to a liberation from ideology and from our own natural deformities, aiming at the perfection of human nature by the only realistic means possible, God’s grace. Nothing less will do. Let God judge, and let God redeem.
Since persons in the West also now sense that progressivism and democracy don’t quite fulfill the claims made on their behalf, a more intelligent ‘convergence’ hypothesis than that offered by Sakharov might become possible. “Perhaps if we can assimilate our experience and somehow put it to use, it may serve to complement Europe’s experience.” Each ‘side’ in the Cold War might learn something from the other. The story goes that de Gaulle sent a message to the Soviet Union’s then-premier, Aleksei Kosygin: “Come, let us build Europe together.” The startled aging Bolshevik preferred to cling to his illusions. But if Russians now abandon those illusions, they may yet prove a nation carrying a prophecy, a ‘new Rome.’
The pseudonymous contributor “F. Korsakov” recalls the prediction of Russian Orthodox priest Pavel Florensky, victim of Lenin’s labor camps, who wrote (with sharp irony, appropriating the language of his jailers), “As the end of History draws nearer, the domes of the Holy Church begin to reflect the new, almost imperceptible, rosy light of the approaching Undying Day.” The subsequent crimes committed by ideologically-motivated tyrants and their collaborators have subjected Russians to the trials of Job, imposed not by God directly but by those tyrants and collaborators. They may yet turn out to have been instruments of God, returning the Job-nation to God. And the historian Evgeny Barabanov adds, “The problem lies in how we define our attitude to this bondage, how we manage to accommodate both it and the triumphant paschal strength and joy.” Insofar as the Orthodox East profited from its contact with the learning, the law, and “the concept of the state” developed by the Roman Catholic and Protestant West, it did so “in Christianity,” not outside it. Insofar as the Orthodox East has appropriated the later secularism and rationalism of the West, it has done anything but profit. Even before that, “in Byzantium and Russia ideas about the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar too often merged and became interchangeable,” with Church too often subjected to State. In the eyes of the monarchs, “it has always been desirable to have a ‘tame Orthodoxy’ which would serve the ends of autocratic power.” But at least those emperors “regarded themselves as the instruments of God’s will,” even as they foolishly and wrongly made a prophetic religion into a civil religion by subordinating God’s Church to themselves. This has made the Russian Church in one sense too ‘worldly,’ too sycophantic, but in another sense to ‘otherworldly,’ too willing to give up the attempt to evangelize, the put Russians more firmly on the Christian path, to rule themselves according to the Christian regime or way of life and thereby to liberate themselves from the pseudo-religious pretensions of statists. God’s Kingdom is not of this world, but it is most assuredly in this world, and the task of God’s people is to advance that Kingdom without demolishing the still-needed fabric of ordinary political rule, in some decent regime whether republican, kingly, aristocratic, or ‘mixed.’ The task of God’s people is not to indulge themselves in Christian Platonism wrongly understood, Christian Platonism that attempts “to fix life in lasting forms.” Plato’s Socrates never supposes that life itself can be so fixed; hence his famous irony, so annoying to rulers who want to conserve what cannot and should not necessarily be conserved. Today, in Russia, it has been Christianity that has stagnated, losing its life, forgetting that the Holy Spirit “goeth where He listeth” and not always where political rulers want it to go. “We must speak,” Borisov urges, “beyond modernism and conservatism alike, of what is eternally living and absolute in this world of the relative, of what is simultaneously both eternally old and eternally young. Our historicism must be metahistorical, it must mean not only a breakthrough into eternity but the presence of eternity in our own time, metahistory in history,” in each of our own unique individual, familial, and national personalities. Under current conditions in what he rightly takes to be the waning years of the Soviet regime, this will mean sacrifice. But without it, without having “your education and life… disrupted,” “damage to the soul and corruption of the soul” will inevitably follow—sacrifices “far more irreparable” than even the consequences of a sentence in the Soviet Gulag.
Solzhenitsyn gives the final essay to Sheparevich. Against the claim of the secular intellectual, Andrei Amalrik—whose pessimism counterbalanced Sakharov’s optimism—that Russia had no future, Sheparevich joins Solzhenitsyn in affirming that it can have one. To see a Russian future, intellectuals will need to sacrifice their dearest idol, secular ideology, whether Marxist, nationalist, or liberal-progressive. The iron laws of history aren’t really made of iron. “Even in quantum mechanics it is considered theoretically impossible to eliminate the influence of the observer on what is observed.” Testimony for personality, indeed! “History’s laws must… take account for a fundamental element—the influence of human beings and their free will.” In this taking of accounts, regimes count: “The hierarchy of human society reflect that society’s outlook on life. The people most skilled in the activities that are highly regarded by society possess the greatest authority.” Christianity proposed a new regime, one unknown in antiquity, with saints replacing heroes, freedom under God replacing mythological nature-deities. When Russians followed Nietzsche’s (and Europe’s?) proclamation, “God is dead,” they committed not deicide (which is after all impossible) but suicide. As one of Malraux’s characters observes, “Man is dead, following God, and you are struggling with the consequences of this strange inheritance.”
What Russians have done, a new generation of Russians cannot so much undo as respond to, work against, in a sense redeem in much the way a human person, having experienced evil inside and outside his soul, can turn away from it and turn toward something, Someone, better. “One reason why the revolution in our country succeeded was undoubtedly the fact that only in revolutionary activity could the intelligentsia find an outlet for their yearning for great deeds and sacrifice.” Such sacrifice, and not a grasping toward power for the sake of the all-too-human ambition to rule for the sake of the pleasure of commanding and enforcing those commands in accordance to one’s own will, remains the only true way of ruling, as Jesus showed on the Cross, sacrificing His human life but winning the minds and hearts of those He freed. “This is now,” in the 1970s, “Russia’s position. She has passed through death and may”—may—”hear the voice of God.” “Or, of course, we may not hear it.”
Turning Westward
Soon after publishing this book for Russians, Solzhenitsyn published one for Western democrats, primarily Americans, in whose country he had then settled. He collected five lectures, three delivered to American, two to British audiences. He found his most receptive listeners among the workers, members of the AFL-CIO, not among capitalists either corporate or ‘small-town.’ “Workers of the world, unite!” he exclaimed, doubtless relishing the thought that real workers in a free country preferred to hear him than any commissar or Marxist professor.
Solzhenitsyn denied that the Bolsheviks ever really wanted the workers of the world to unite. The only “genuine worker” among the top Bolsheviks, Alexander Shliapnikov, “disappeared from sight” in 1921, after “charg[ing] that the Communist leadership had betrayed the interests of the workers” by “crushing and oppressing the proletariat” and “degenerat[ing] into a bureaucracy.” “Since the Revolution, there has never been such a thing as a free trade union” in the Soviet Union; it was left to the American labor movement to publish a map of the concentration camps, the Gulag Archipelago, in 1947—rather to the discomfiture not only of American communists but also of some American capitalists, who had been financing Soviet industry and trading with the regime for decades.
During its (then) nearly six decades in power, the Soviet regime had achieved several noteworthy ‘firsts’: “the first concentration camps in the world”; the first to exterminate all rival political parties; the first to undertake genocide of the peasantry (murdering some fifteen million); the first to reintroduce serfdom after its abolition under the monarchy; the first to induce a famine (six million died in Ukraine in the years 1932-1933). But Solzhenitsyn’s theme isn’t so much a citation of Soviet crimes as a critique of and warning to the Western republics.
Some of his criticisms are too severe, or at least open to question. “World democracy could have defeated one totalitarian regime after another, the German, then the Soviet. Instead, it strengthened Soviet totalitarianism, consented to the birth of a third totalitarianism, that of China, and all this finally precipitated the present world situation.” While it might have been physically possible for American and allied armies to roll back the Red Army after defeating the Nazis (General Patton wanted to), it would have been hard for Allied statesmen to justify this, given the ongoing war with the Empire of Japan and the fact that the Soviet Union hadn’t attacked the Allied countries. The Allies had futilely attempted to crush Bolshevism in the aftermath of the First World War, and were reluctant to try again.
Solzhenitsyn is on much firmer ground in excoriating the Allies willingness to return Soviet expatriates in territories controlled by the Allies, after the war. While it is true that some of these persons had fought with the fascists, most had not; all faced death or long-term imprisonment upon their return to the Soviet Union. [2] Solzhenitsyn was correct in predicting the murder of America’s allies in South Vietnam, now that the country had been ceded to the Communists.
As for the policy of détente, initiated by the Nixon Administration and continued under President Gerald Ford, Solzhenitsyn rightly insists that true détente would require another revolution in Russia, with the installation of a liberal, if not necessarily republican, regime there. Contrary to many American politicians and pundits, the Soviets have not given up Marxist-Leninist ideology, nor has the Politburo split into rival factions of ‘Left’ and ‘Right.’ The regime still intends to destroy commercial republicanism, to do what it can to hasten that destruction. For the Soviets, détente is only a cloak for pursuing geopolitical advantages elsewhere, establishing ‘friendly’ regimes that will afford access to natural resources and to strategically-placed military bases. “The Communist leaders respect only firmness and have contempt for persons who continually give in to them.”
More profoundly, Solzhenitsyn criticizes the West for abandoning the moral language, the moral ideas, that would strengthen souls to resist Soviet encroachment. “In the twentieth century it is almost a joke in the Western world to use words like ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ They have become old-fashioned concepts, yet they are very real and genuine.” And the evil forces now father strength: “We must recognize that a concentration of evil and a tremendous force of hatred is spreading in the world.” Russians know this firsthand, and there “a liberation of the human spirit is occurring.” But will the West respond? The Westphalian principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of foreign countries should no longer hold. “On our crowded planet there are no longer any ‘internal affairs.'” Russian dissidents need Western support. “The Communist leaders say, ‘Don’t interfere in our internal affairs. Let us strangle our citizens in peace and quiet.’ But I tell you: Interfere more and more. Interfere as much as you can. We beg you to come and interfere.”
It isn’t as if Communists have not announced their intentions. But “Communism has been writing about itself in the most open way, in black and white, for 125 years, and even more openly, more openly, in the beginning,” with the Communist Manifesto. While it is “hard to believe that people could actually plan such things”—destruction of the family, merciless class warfare, forced confiscation of private property, the dictatorship of the proletariat ‘led’ by a party ‘vanguard’—”and carry them out,” they could and they have. Elsewhere, Marx and Engels wrote, “Democracy is more to be feared than monarchy and aristocracy,” that “political liberty is false liberty, worse than the most abject slavery,” and that terror would be “necessary” year after year after the Communist Party took power. As for Lenin, in his book The Lessons of the Paris Commune, he concluded that “the Commune had not shot, had not killed, enough of its enemies,” that “it was necessary to kill entire classes and groups,” which indeed he did, upon taking power in Russia. “Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality,” Solzhenitsyn tells the American workers. It lauds and denounces thoughts and actions only insofar as they conform to, or deviate from, the Party’s judgment of what will advance the Party’s claim to rule and to expand its rule.
Solzhenitsyn also remarks, tellingly, that the contemporary admiration for Mao Zedong, and for China as “a sort of purified, puritanical type of Communism, one which has not degenerated,” is equally absurd as the claim that the Soviet regime had become amenable to peaceful coexistence with the West. “China is simply a delayed phase of that so-called War Communism established by Lenin in Russia but which remained in force only until 1921.” When socialism sputtered, Lenin then shifted to the New Economic Policy, whereby he invited capitalists to invest in the country, under highly controlled conditions. China, in the mid-seventies, hadn’t felt the economic pinch of socialist economic incompetence—or, what is more likely, Mao didn’t care. After Mao’s death, the Chinese Communist Party did indeed go to their own equivalent of the NEP, which it has attempted to continue by the time of this writing.
As for the Soviets, American invention of the atomic bomb turned their attention to the manipulation of ‘peace’ sentiments in the West. “But the goal, the ideology, remained the same: to destroy your system, to destroy the way of life known in the West” by indirect means, including terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and support for allies overt and covert. The goal “has never changed; only the methods have changed a little.” Solzhenitsyn told a British interviewer, “the most important aspect of détente today is that there is no ideological détente.” To Bertrand Russell’s infamous line, “Better Red than dead,” Solzhenitsyn replied, “Better to be dead than a scoundrel.”
“The principal argument of the advocates of détente is well known: all of this must be done to avoid a nuclear war.” Solzhenitsyn rightly dismisses the prospect. “There will not be any nuclear war. What for? Why should there be a nuclear war if for the last thirty years they have been breaking off as much of the West as they wanted—piece by piece, country after country, and the process keeps going on.” While “the American heartland is healthy, strong, and broad in its outlook,” the men who run American foreign policy on the East Coast are none of those things, and neither is the milieu in which they live. Solzhenitsyn calls upon them to cut off economic support from the Soviet regime. They need America more than America needs them. As we now know, the economic squeeze placed on that regime by the Reagan Administration would indeed induce the collapse of the Soviet empire (along with an unanswerable military buildup; moreover, the only time nuclear was seriously discussed by the Politburo was when the Party ‘vanguard’ saw what Reagan was doing, and nearly panicked.
Finally, the West has “become hopelessly enmeshed in our way of slavish worship of all that is pleasant, all that is material,” worshipping “things” and “products.” The effect of this materialism has been to weaken our souls. Whether in these essays, speeches, and interviews, or in his monumental histories, historical novels, and memoirs, Solzhenitsyn unfailingly attempted to strengthen the souls of his countrymen first of all, and of those who might more consistently oppose the enemies of his countrymen, the tyrants and oligarchs who arise wherever Marxist-Leninist ideology takes hold.
Notes
- Borisov is incorrect. Like Christians, such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle clearly point to a nature shared in common by all individuals along with differentiations among individual souls. It is hard to suppose that the observer of Socrates could not tell that he had a ‘personality’ or individual character.
- For a concise discussion of the repatriation controversy, see Mark Elliott: “The United States and Forced Repatriation of Soviet Citizens, 1944-47,” Political Science Quarterly, Volume 88, Number 2 (June 1973), 253-275. On the basis of primary source documents then available, Elliott accounts for the policy of forced repatriation on two main grounds: American and British negotiators were concerned about the return of their own citizens (Elliott calls this “the overriding motive behind the West’s signing the repatriation agreement”); and “the climate of opinion prevailing in the West in 1944-45,” propagated by the overselling of the ties between the republics of the West and the Soviet tyranny and by “the nagging fear of a future German renaissance,” such as had occurred in the 1930s. “In reality the Grand Alliance of Britain, America, and Russia was a tenuous marriage of convenience united only by opposition to Hitler, the West heralded it as a harbinger of the millennium,” Elliott writes. Further, “the United States was more susceptible to this myth than Britain,” since “President Roosevelt helped create it.” This soon changed, as Americans reawakened, or in some cases awakened, to the malign character of the Soviet regime in the months following the war; by 1947 the United States refused “the use of force in repatriation under any circumstances and in all cases.” But by that time much of the damage had been done.
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