Daniel J. Mahoney: The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014.
Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 52, Number 2, March/April 2015.
Wide-ranging in one sense, Daniel J. Mahoney also has a specialty. He appreciates under-appreciated and much-abused great men, persuading us that we have misunderstood them, and that we can learn more from them than their critics suppose. From the acute, sober intelligence of Raymond Aron—bane of the European Left—to the magnanimous statesmanship of Charles de Gaulle—object of derision and scorn from all sides of the political spectrum, French and foreign—and now the spiritual grandeur of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—reviled as authoritarian and bigoted—Mahoney seeks to vindicate his defendants not as an attorney would do, with facts artfully selected and arguments cleverly slanted, but as a scholar who insists that we pay attention to what thinkers and statesmen actually say. By following their own words unprejudiced by the tendentious charges against them, he guides his readers to understand these men as they understood themselves.
Regarding Solzhenitsyn, Mahoney avails himself of a signal advantage over most English-speaking readers: He didn’t stop reading him with the last volume of The Gulag Archipelago. He calls attention to the equally impressive works of Solzhenitsyn’s later years: The Red Wheel, that vast and tragic historical novel-as-tapestry which shows how the Bolshevik Revolution was possible, and how it might have been avoided; Two Hundred Years Together, a massive, original, and intellectually courageous account of the tortured relationship between ethnic Russians and Russian Jews, and the ways in which Soviet Communism wounded them both; Apricot Jam and Other Stories, which stands as a refutation of critics who regard Solzhenitsyn as a literarily naïve successor of the literary giantism of the nineteenth century; and “The Russian Question” at the End of the Twentieth Century, his most careful statement of what he means by Russian nationality. Mahoney defends Solzhenitsyn by showing him whole.
That’s a lot do, as Solzhenitsyn was indeed a writer of Dostoyevskian and Tolstoyan proportions, weaving historical research, philosophic reflection, and spiritual mediation into majestic literary narratives that (paradoxically) begin with the depiction of one of the ugliest tyrannies ever conceived. To discuss such a capacious body of work whole in a book of ordinary length requires an extraordinary combination of comprehensiveness—the ability to see that vast, deep Russian forest—along with the judicious selection of the telling example—the selection of right specimen trees.
Mahoney divides his study into nine chapters, each bringing out a largely unnoticed dimension of Solzhenitsyn’s thought. The first addresses Solzhenitsyn’s patriotism, routinely misunderstood as nationalism. But Solzhenitsyn’s love of his country is Christian or agapic love, never an uncritical love of one’s own, let alone an excrescence of racial triumphalism. “Patriotism,” Solzhenitsyn writes, “means unqualified and unswerving love for the nation,” but this entails “frank assessment of its virtues and vices.” Or, as Mahoney puts it, Solzhenitsyn replies with an “intransigent double ‘No’ to those who sever freedom from love of country and to those who recognize nothing above the self-assertion of the nation,” and he did so consistently “during the last forty years of his life.” Solzhenitsyn “held Russia to the same demanding standards of ‘repentance and self-limitation’ to which he held all great nations and peoples.” A Ukrainian on his mother’s side, he hoped for “voluntary federation between these two peoples,” and disapproved of Western support for the Orange Revolution. But this did not prevent him from “lament[ing] the absence of true democracy and self-government in contemporary Russia.” “The preeminent political theme of Solzhenitsyn’s during the last twenty-five years of his life was precisely the need to patiently build institutions and habits of self-government from the bottom up.”
This need to balance patience and resistance in the face of tyranny leads to the second dimension of Mahoney’s reply to Solzhenitsyn’s critics, who assume that Christianity must either be too passive/pacifistic to resist evil effectively in this world or that it must fight back with a spirit of fanaticism to match the excesses of its ideological enemies. A moral and political life animated by Christian love must acknowledge the profundity of anti-Christian ire or hatred. To oppose “radical evil” with “simple decency” will not do. “Radical evil…is not reducible to madness or stupidity. It has… ‘a dense nucleus or core’ which has the capacity to strike out in every direction. Given its power, nothing less than ‘an active struggle’ is necessary to combat it.” Like his political hero, the pre-revolutionary Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, Solzhenitsyn “reject[s] the twin extremes of pietistic fatalism and unfounded confidence in the ability of human beings to remake human society without reliance on God’s justice.” Yes, suffering can be redemptive—as Solzhenitsyn so memorable showed in his novelistic portrayals of his own life in Stalin’s prisons—but “radical evil must be resisted for the sake of the integrity of the human soul.” This is no self-contradiction, Mahoney argues, but “a tension rooted in the structure of moral reality itself”: “Humility and magnanimity, redemptive suffering and ‘the struggle against evil’ are twin manifestations of the soul’s efforts to defend itself against the dehumanizing temptation to choose ‘survival at any price'”—exactly the temptation that modern, ideological tyranny sets before its victims. Vaclav Havel’s justly celebrated claims for “the power of the powerless” reflect the opportunities presented by the rather dispirited, post-Stalinist Marxist-Leninist regimes of 1970s Europe, but against the greater vigilance of Stalin (and before him, Lenin) one might need to choose martyrdom, confident that self-sacrifice under conditions of ‘totalitarian’ tyranny will never quite go unnoticed by those who witness it, and that for the sake of their spirits as well as you own you must resist the tyrant’s temptation.
It would have been better not to have arried at this extreme. Although moral considerations come before considerations of political regimes, regimes matter, too. It is for the defense of human moral integrity that good regimes are founded. Could the old Russian monarchy have prevented the Bolshevik Revolution? The fault was not so much with the regime ‘in the abstract’ as with the generation of men who ran the government—beginning at the top, with Nicholas II, “a better man and better Christian than almost all his predecessors as Tsar,” but devoid of firmness and prudence, and backed desultorily by the “lethargic class of hereditary nobles” who behaved even worse than he did. The result was the folly of the Russo-Japanese War, in which the most industrially underdeveloped major European power took it upon itself to provoke the most industrially developed major Asian power. Having done unnecessary injury to the prestige of his regime in losing that war, Nicholas went on to display the opposite defect on the domestic front—”avoid[ing] bloodshed at all costs” in his feeble attempts to save his family by sacrificing those “subjects who remained loyal to the monarchical principle.” Nicholas stands as the example of the ineffectual Christian, the opposite of Stolypin, a decidedly effectual one up until his assassination in 1911.
How then to become an effectual Christian, a living refutation of Machiavelli’s well-known jibes? Mahoney turns to the lessons taught in Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle, the early version of which was published in 1968 but appeared in its full form in English only in 2009, a year after the novelist’s death. Under conditions of modern or “totalitarian” tyranny, the first step is to break the monologue imposed by the tyrant; as Jews and Christians know, even God does not engage in monologue only. Solzhenitsyn does this by the form of the novel itself: the “polyphonic” form, which combines third-person narrative or “objective” monologue with dialogue and first-person or “subjective” monologue. “Novelistic polyphony respects pluralism—the variety of perspectives and voices—while inviting readers to join in the search for the truth.” The novel thus uses a genre familiar to students of Platonic political philosophy to address the question of the regime, the principal topic of Plato’s dialogue of the same name. In response to the Soviet regime, the main character, Volodin, learns first how to withdraw spiritually from the regime while secretly keeping the truth about the regime alive—concealing accurate records of events. He sees that materialism cannot provide an adequate philosophic account of moral life—one free of contradiction because the moral end of materialism, pleasure, equally supports his desire for comfort and the tyrant Stalin’s desire to kill those who would prefer a continued life of comfort. But a being capable of identifying contradictions must have something about it more profound than the desire for pleasure. The good for such a being cannot be satisfied by material pleasure alone. It might be added that Orthodox Christianity enjoys roughly the same relation to Platonism or Neo-Platonism as Catholic Christianity enjoys toward Aristotelianism. Both invite souls to what Mahoney calls “a philosophical Christianity”—one that does not foreclose the life of the mind or openness to the Holy Spirit. Being Christian, this stance also alerts Nerzhin, the second hero of The First Circle, to the dangers of dialectical materialism, “the modern ideology of progress.” Progressivism “conflates moral and technical progress and turns a blind eye to the human capacity for evil”—always a real spiritual force in Christian thought, never a mere excess or deficiency.
Mahoney’s fifth and central chapter probes this evil more carefully, discussing “Our Muzzled Freedom,” a chapter in The Gulag Archipelago which records Solzhenitsyn’s own encounter with the evil of modern tyranny in Stalin’s prison camp. “The tradition of political philosophy from Plato to Kant and Montesquieu could not adequately account for the strange novelty of totalitarianism,” Mahoney writes, agreeing with Hannah Arendt. The goal of the most characteristic feature of that regime was “to replace the distinction between fact and fiction and truth and falsehood” with an all-encompassing sur-reality designed by the tyrant. And even outside the camps, “Man is supposed to live in an imaginary eschatological time, i.e., the world of socialism, but the nature and needs of real human beings still persist”—human nature has not been overcome, after all. One isn’t supposed to notice that, but does anyway. “‘Our Muzzled Freedom’ is the closest we have to an exact description of the soul of man under ideological despotism”—a sort of “phenomenology” of the new tyranny. Whereas “social science tends to flatten and homogenize the world it theorizes, emphasizing commonalities between ‘systems’ where differences abound,” The Gulag Archipelago shows how this unique “system” affected individual souls. “This was no ordinary regime“—social or political science cannot quite capture it. “Not only did it abolish political life, but it warred on what was most humane and valuable in the Russian past”: “condemn[ing] personhood and the very possibility of moral and political responsibility and accountability”; “abolishing civic friendship and trust and pos[ing] a deadly threat to the integrity of the human soul by imposing a ubiquitous and constant fear on everyone, a mistrust reaching down even into family relations; inviting complicity with this “web of repression” and thus making betrayal routine; making corruption the new nobility and the all-encompassing lie (“The Lie,” Solzhenitsyn calls it) the new categorical imperative; and simultaneously celebrating cruelty against putative “class enemies” while instilling a “slave psychology” that would valorize actions and claims of the real tormentor, the tyrant himself. Crucially, “Solzhenitsyn emphasizes”—speaking from the authority granted him by his own experience—”that we are not totally determined by our political and economic circumstances even under the worst regime.” He bears witness to acts of self-sacrifice in the very prisons and prison camps that are structured on the assumption that human beings are made of nothing but matter. “Only those who have renounced self-preservation as the highest end of human existence can live well in light of the truth”: Both Athens and Jerusalem saw such men, and Solzhenitsyn shows that they existed even under a tyranny worse than any hitherto seen on earth.
If Solzhenitsyn represents a man of “Jerusalem” who philosophizes, Raymond Aron represents a man of “Athens”—perhaps more precisely of Paris, symbol of what Mahoney calls “the moderate enlightenment” of Montesquieu and Tocqueville—who admires Jerusalem as seen in Solzhenitsyn. Mahoney devotes a chapter to Aron’s response to Solzhenitsyn, contrasting it with Aron’s response to that Parisian enthusiast of what might be described as decidedly immoderate enlightenment or secularism, Jean-Paul Sartre. Aron sided with Solzhenitsyn, not Sartre, on exactly those points contested by the regimes of liberty against the regimes of tyranny: that human nature exists and does not change; that that nature ought not to be obscured by, much less subordinated to ideologies; that Marxism-Leninism did not merely cloak the Politburo’s self-interest but rather underpinned its moral and intellectual outlook, preventing it from understanding the realities it wanted to manipulate; that Sartre’s justification of violence “as a liberating end in itself” played into such malignant fantasies; that Communism did not express the Russian character but perverted it; and finally, that philosophic theories positing historical determinism were mistaken and debasing. “With no other criterion than the truth of History or the pretenses of an ideological part, the militant, whether, Marxist, existentialist, or Christian progressive, had succumbed to nihilism.” Aron and Solzhenitsyn both “affirmed the free will and moral responsibility of human beings.”
Himself a secularized Jew, Aron never believed charges that Solzhenitsyn partook of the anti-Judaism of some on the Russian ‘Right.’ Solzhenitsyn’s two-volume study of Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years of Living Together, published in 2001, “carefully chronicles the deeds and misdeeds of Russians and Russian Jews alike, and pleads for mutual understanding and repentance on the part of both parties.” Respecting mutual understanding, both sides need—in the sense of moral necessity—to make distinctions between those who actually committed crimes and the group that included the criminals. Unlike the anti-Jewish ‘Right,’ Solzhenitsyn rejects the canard that Jews conspired “to bring Marxism to Russia.” Jews “were in no way” the “instigators or architects” of either the Menshevik or the Bolshevik revolutions. Russians “were the authors of this shipwreck,” Solzhenitsyn writes. What is more, such Jewish Bolsheviks as Trotsky “had limitless contempt for the traditions and faith of their fathers.” He observes that the notion of a “small Jewish minority” driving a nation into Bolshevism defies not only the facts but elementary common sense. But (and here is where Solzhenitsyn does criticize some Russian Jews) the younger generation of Russian Jews did play a role in the tyranny that followed a role disproportionate to their numbers. “Nothing is served by ignoring this fact,” Mahoney observes, and further, to do so would be to override the need for repentance on both sides—repentance not only for crimes committed, which were atrocious enough, but also repentance for scorning the wisdom and goodness to be found in abundance in both Orthodox Judaism and Orthodox Christianity. Solzhenitsyn calls for repentance not only by the descendants of Jews who lent a bloody hand to Stalinist repression but by the Russian Orthodox ‘Whites’ who rejected Jewish support in the struggle against Bolshevism; “the anti-Semitic violence tolerate or carried out by White forces during the Russian Civil War fatally undermined the ability of men such as Churchill to rally international support for the White cause” while “driv[ing] non-communist Jews into the arms of the Bolsheviks.” And finally there was Stalin—in the wake of Hitler’s “War against the Jews,” no less—who hatched the pogroms of the early 1950s. No wonder that so many Russian Jews participated in the dissident movement that helped to undermine the Soviet empire in its last years.
In telling the story of these parallel lives of Russian Gentiles and Russian Jews, Solzhenitsyn distinguishes two groups of people in order to help them understand one another, and to acknowledge the moral principles they share. He gives this procedure of moral reasoning a literary form in Apricot Jam and Other Stories, a late work of what he called “binary tales.” There, he tells two-part stories whose moral content consists of the problem of moral choice itself “in the most difficult of circumstances”—that is, when one must choose between one way of life and another. These are among Solzhenitsyn’s most hopeful writings because in them he takes care to show that even after one has made the wrong choice (as an individual or as a nation) there is still chance for repentance, for moral progress and return to the right way. Solzhenitsyn “never lost hope in his beloved Russia or in the capacity of human beings to renew the human adventure in accord with realities of the spirit.”
In his final chapter Mahoney returns to the topic of his first chapter, addressing the much-disputed question of Solzhenitsyn’s views of post-Communist Russia, the Russia of Yeltsin and then of Putin. Solzhenitsyn deplored Western (especially American) inability to appreciate Russia’s legitimate interest in the condition of ethnic Russians—the descendants of the Soviet Union’s planned imperial diaspora into the various captive nations—and also its understandable geopolitical concerns about NATO advances into its “near abroad.” However, “he has never been a pan-Slavist” or imperialist himself. While applauding Vladimir Putin’s attempts to strengthen Russian self-respect and his campaign against Yeltsin-era corruption (he didn’t live long enough to witness the now-obvious corruption of Putin’s own cronies), Solzhenitsyn also objected to the tendency to conflate Russia with the Soviet Union, to cater to the political equivalent of nostalgie de la boue. Solzhenitsyn, too, wanted Russian self-respect, but with repentance as its precondition; “a proud patriot,” he found the soul of patriotism in moral responsibility and self-government. Far from endorsing some form of political ‘authoritarianism,’ Solzhenitsyn faulted the Russia of the early 2000s as insufficiently democratic, but insufficiently democratic precisely because its rulers had not yet restored the nation via the path of repentance. He was, it seems, too optimistic about Putin’s sincerity, but as for himself, he never wavered in his admiration for what he called the “highly effective self-governance systems in Switzerland and New England, both of which I saw first-hand.” Self-government “could only really be developed from the bottom up,” and Russian history reminded him of the institutional means of doing so: the provincial councils seen in the nineteenth century. He vigorously opposed tendencies to inhibit vigorous political competition in Russia. Above all as he argued in his 1998 book, Russia in Collapse, for the regime of democracy to prevail anywhere “there has to be a demos, a people, a nation.” But the moral and civic bonds that constitute a people were precisely what the Communists had deliberately severed in their attempts to construct “Soviet Man.” Binding up this nation’s wounds would require statesmanship of Lincolnesque dimensions. It would require a recovery of the very Orthodox Church that the Soviets had decimated and corrupted, a church that served God and neighbor, not the criminal ambitions of tyrants or oligarchs.
Exactly the book needed on Solzhenitsyn at this moment, The Other Solzhenitsyn will also last, providing as it does an illuminating overview and introduction to his thought first of all by clearing away the formidable load of rubbish that blocks our path to that thought.
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