Solzhenitsyn and His Critics

August 6, 2008

The world justly celebrates the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a great man whose work and witness seems most aptly summed up in a single word: prophetic. But, as prophets are in a habit of doing, he made some people feel the needle who were sure they didn’t deserve it. This was especially so for Western liberals who, in the eyes of Solzhenitsyn, were indifferent to -- if not supportive of -- communist oppression.

Indeed, there was something in Solzhenitsyn to offend just about anyone, East or West, liberal or conservative, who denied or avoided spiritual realities and moral truths in favor of comfort, worldly success and a too easy accommodation with anything that smacked of lies. The writer died on Aug. 3 in Moscow at the age of 89.

Solzhenitsyn had a reputation as “a prophet of freedom,” according to the Rutland (Vt.) Herald, published not far from where Solzhenitsyn took up residence after his banishment from the Soviet Union. But the paper drily observed that "interest in his work and his pronouncements fell off, and though the Russian people celebrated his return in 1994, the severity of his moral judgments about his homeland and about the West caused his influence to wane." The New York Times obituary, citing Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard address, said the writer’s “rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads.” The Los Angeles Times, without offering evidence, decreed that Solzhenitsyn’s reputation “dimmed after his repatriation and his diatribes on the denigration of his nation that were at times tainted with paranoia, anti-Semitism and bigotry.”

What, exactly, was the content of these “diatribes” and “jeremiads”? At Harvard, Solzhenitsyn denounced the “the Western way of life” for its shallowness and mass produced culture, and heaped scorn on an epidemic of “TV stupor and … intolerable music.” (Post-communist Russia has enthusiastically embraced this culture.) But he reserved his sharpest criticism for Western political culture and its secularized intelligentsia, a word of Russian coinage that with Solzhenitsyn carried associations of an effete, self-serving and mediocre subculture. He charged that Western society “has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.”

Solzhenitsyn accused the American anti-war movement of complicity in the genocides that followed in Southeast Asia after the U.S. military withdrew from Vietnam. He asked: “If a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?” And he laid a heavy charge: "The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes."

Writing in 1985, Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz said this accusation “was a species of treason that the liberal intellectuals of the West were not quite so ready to forgive.” And what of the charges of bigotry leveled at Solzhenitsyn? Podhoretz asserted that “the charge of anti-Semitism rests almost entirely on negative evidence. That is, while there is no clear sign of positive hostility toward Jews in Solzhenitsyn’s books, neither is there much sympathy.” Yet, this was also a man who wrote, in defense of the virtues of the nation-state, that “the miraculous birth and consolidation of Israel after two thousand years of dispersal is only the most striking of a multitude of examples.”

Solzhenitsyn’s mission to expose the horrors of Soviet totalitarianism did not lead to support for other forms of government that he believed were unsuited to Russia, with its long experience of autocracy. This non-conversion to Western democracy also earned him the enmity of progressive elites and not a few conservatives. But Solzhenitsyn was never bound by ideology.

What is ideology? It is defined by French historian Alain Besancon as “a doctrine that, in exchange for conversion, promises a temporal salvation that … requires a political practice aimed at radically transforming society.” This definition holds equally true for the two most destructive political ideologies of the 20th century: fascism and communism.

Solzhenitsyn’s critique of modern societies went much deeper than ideology. He drew from a Christian moral tradition, not a political platform. He yearned for a “moral doctrine of the value of the individual as the key to the solution of the social problems.”

The solution for Russia, he wrote in 1974, lay in its willingness to take on a “deliberate, voluntary sacrifice,” not in the name of a collective society but by each and every person, uniquely made in the image of God.

A society so vicious and polluted, implicated in so many of the crimes of these last fifty years -- by its lies, by its servility either willingly or enforced, by its eagerness to assist or its cowardly restraint -- such a society can only be cured and purified by passing through a spiritual filter. And this filter is a terrible one, with holes as fine as the eye of a needle, each big enough for only one person.

Solzhenitsyn understood this as a national spiritual renewal -- even spiritual battle. This, he believed, was how a sick society gained the path to moral soundness. Material well-being, intellectual accomplishments, technological breakthroughs, captivating new ideologies would not cure the sickness.

In some quarters, Solzhenitsyn’s uncompromising vision didn’t win him any friends. But he had often laid his life on the line for what he believed, and the carping of the intelligentsia was a small thing. Anyway, prophets aren’t interested in popularity contests.

Comments

cecil: cbohanon@bsu.edu

In an interview with Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn indicated a great deal of tolerance for non-Christian faiths:

"one cannot declare that only my faith is correct and all other faiths are not. Of course God is endlessly multi dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God. One must not have any negative attitude to any religion but nonetheless the depth of understanding God and the depth of applying God's commandments is different in different religions"

I view Solzhenitsyn as first and foremost an Orthodox Christian. Although the title belies that point see my "Economics of Solzhenitsyn" at http://fce.ufm.edu/Publicaciones/LaissezFaire/22-23/LF-22.4_(Bohanon).pdf

LaVon:

I strongly recommend The Solzhenitsyn Reader. In spite of his flaws, this man was a rare and inspiring human being. It is very unfortunate that so many of us, not only spoiled by the "comforts" of life in the 21st Century but also rendered impoverished by it, can be so quick to comdemn the life of a man who walked through Hell and lived to offer the world some insight into the suffering found there. I can only say that anyone having gone through his experiences would likely feel empasssioned to speak out in warning. Yes, he was capable of being opinionated and intolerant (a massive character flaw in today's world), but I would imagine that being lockedup in a Gulag and suffering unbelievably cruel treatment might affect a person's personality to some degree. Solzhenitsyn felt deeply and comtemplated the reason behind emotion. His "Miniatures" illustrate this characteristic beautifully. Before we judge too harshly, consider the artistry and wisdom of the man who while living in unspeakable circumstances, could see beauty and God given individuality in a small yellow duckling, "What keeps body and soul together in this tiny creature?....with all our atomic might, never, never shall we be able to synthesize in our retorts, nor even assemble from bones and feathers ready-made a weightless, puny, and pathetic yellow duckling!" Thank you, Mr. Solzhenitsyn!

John Couretas: jcouretas@acton.org

Chris: Are you channeling Noam Chomsky again? Take two aspirin and go to bed. The fever will subside. John

John Couretas: jcouretas@acton.org

Kishore:

This is from the Solzhenitsyn Reader (Ericson and Mahoney) on Solzhenitsyn's 1993 address to the International Academy of Philosophy in Lichtenstein, in front of an audience of "conservative-minded" Catholics. The editors say that the address "can even be read as a salutary self-correction. While Solzhenitsyn could not recommend the West as a model for Russia in every respect, he emphatically praises 'its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law.' This speech is strikingly more restrained than its 1978 (Harvard) predecessor. Solzhenitsyn fixes his gaze more intently on 'eternal questions' such as the problem of death and the underlying purpose of things that have lost none of their importance our contemporary world."

Here's Solzhenitsyn from the Lichtenstein speech:

"Moral criteria applicable to the behavior of individuals, families, and small circles certainly cannot be transferred on a one-to-one basis to the behavior of states and politicians; there is no exact equivalence, as the scale, the momentum, and the tasks of governmental structures introduce a certain deformation. States, however, are led by politicians, and politicians are ordinary people, whose actions have an impact on other ordinary people. Moreover, the fluctuations of political behavior are often quite removed from the imperatives of State. Therefore, any moral demands we impose on individuals, such as understanding the difference between honesty, baseness, and deception, between magnanimity, goodness, avarice, and evil, must to a large degree be applied to the politics of countries, governments, parliaments, and parties.

In fact, if state, party, and social policy are not based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of.

... even at the murky end of the nineteenth century, the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov insisted that, from a Christian point of view, moral and political activity are tightly linked, that political activity must a priori be moral service, whereas politics motivated by the mere pursuit of interests lacks any Christian content whatsoever.

Alas, in my homeland today, these moral axes have fallen into even greater disuse than in the West, and I recognize the present vulnerability of my position in passing such judgments. When, in what had been the USSR, seven decades of appalling pressure were followed by the sudden and wide-open unchecked freedom to act, in circumstances of all-around poverty, the result was that many were swept down the path of shamelessness, unrestrainedly adopting the worst features of human behavior. It must be noted here that, for seventy years, annihilation was visited upon people in our country not in a purely random fashion but was directed at those with outstanding mental and moral qualities. And so the picture of Russia today is bleaker and more savage than if it were simply the result of the general shortcomings of our human nature.

But let us not partition the misfortune between countries and nations: The misfortune is for all of us to share, as we stand at the end of Christianity's second millennium. Moreover, should we so lightly fling about this term -- morality?"

Does the Russian Orthodox Church, and Orthodox Christianity, speak out against what it sees as "base" influences in the culture? Yes. This is something Western Christianity also does with, of course, mixed results. But to the question of whether Solzhenitsyn sees Christian morality as a necessary companion to political morality, then it's clear the answer is yes.

Chris Manes: lokicsm@aol.com

Solzhenitsyn was a great writer but hardly a great man. He bemoaned the fact that the didn't "win" the war in Vietnam (whatever winning means in that context, after we had killed 2 million Vietnamese and totally alienated the population against us). He blamed peace activists for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, at a time when the CIA was supporting the war criminals (because people in the state department hated Vietnam so much for being "communist" that they prefered criminals to a real government). He thought the "freedom fighters" (i.e., the moslem extremists who beheaded women for seeking medical care) in Afghanistan were just peachy, since after all they were fighting "godless" communism.

He was a Tzarist and longed for the days of anti-democratic monarchy in Russia. He mixed nostalgia with politics, which is always a bad thing.

Please get your facts straight and stop idolizing personalities just because they were anti-Soviet.

Kishore: kjayabalan@acton.org

John,

Do we know much about Solzhenitsyn's particular religious beliefs? Did he think the Russian Orthodox Church could serve as a bulwark against liberal materialism, tv, rock music, etc.?

Kishore

tom Faranda: tgfar@aol.com

Lovely essay.

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