Solzhenitsyn’s One Word of Truth

The Russian anti-totalitarian writer and moral witness Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn looms large over the confused Western modern mind. At the same time, his work continues to challenge his beloved Russia, especially in its need to recognize the whole truth about communist iniquity. His writings profoundly impacted the world during the Cold War, conveying the deprivations of Soviet communism in a language of imaginative depth and moral strength. His novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), revealed the sordid realities of the Soviet camp system but also in Ivan Denisovich, a character whose humane and resilient spirit found a way to persevere. The book became an international literary event, embarrassing the Soviet government, which had allowed it to be published during a period of relative openness (Khrushchev had mistaken it for a merely anti-Stalinist book, rather than a profoundly anti-communist one).

Eleven years later, portions of The Gulag Archipelago were published in the final days of 1973 in France and subsequently all over the world, except in the Soviet bloc. Solzhenitsyn’s prose chronicles, in sheer, penetrating spiritual and anthropological truth, the torturous demands made on him and millions of other prisoners or zeks (he had spent eight years in prison and camps from 1945 to 1953, followed by several years of “internal exile”). In doing so, The Gulag also unmasked the demented and mendacious nature of communist ideology and the horrors it had unleashed on the Russian and Soviet peoples, notably the construction of vast penal colonies with one purpose: breaking human beings who the regime believed were its “class enemies” who were as Lenin put it, no more than “harmful insects.” For his trouble in writing this massive and riveting exposé, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by Soviet officials and forcibly exiled in February 1974. A large portion of the next twenty years of his life was spent in Cavendish, Vermont, where he wrote a ten-volume literary history of the Soviet Revolution titled The Red Wheel. He returned to Russia in 1994, where the decisions made during its post-communist liberation led him to criticize the country's direction (its massive corruption and its failure to repent for the crimes of the Soviet regime truly).

In addition to these works, Solzhenitsyn spoke or wrote on many occasions in important Western venues during his exile period. The most significant of those speeches and addresses have been collected and recently translated (many of them by his sons, Ignat and Stephan) and published by the University of Notre Dame Press in a volume titled We Have Ceased to See the Purpose. The volume is ably introduced and annotated by Ignat Solzhenitsyn. These lectures stretch from 1972 to 1997, yet the perennial themes and ideas explored by Solzhenitsyn command the contemporary reader’s full attention. Moreover, the Russian patriot expresses sadness, if not a sense of betrayal, at the modern West for its lack of courage, deficient statesmanship, materialism, nominalist freedom, and adjacent socialism. There are moments in these lectures where Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis leaps from the page and reaches across the decades to our recent political and cultural miasmas.

The problem of God and man informs these speeches from beginning to end. Solzhenitsyn traces the decline of the human spirit to the modern mind’s belief that it soars over everything in a spirit of supreme self-sufficient “autonomy.” In “An Orbital Journey,” delivered in Zurich in 1974 on winning the Golden Matrix prize from the Italian Catholic Press Union, Solzhenitsyn stresses that mankind is nearing the end of “a long orbital journey.” Modern man believed that the journey “would be endless, always forward, only forward, never sideways or askew.” Such a journey began in the Renaissance and continued through “the Reformation, the Enlightenment, bloody physical revolutions, democratic societies, and socialist projects.” The project so initiated, Solzhenitsyn states, was the “long era of humanistic individualism, the construction of a civilization based on the principle that man is the measure of all things, that man is above all.” Both the West and the East share this malady, this fundamental error to understand the human person as a being under God, Solzhenitsyn concludes. The resulting pollution spans our environmental, economic, spiritual, and social landscapes. What is needed is “the loftiness to discover once again that man is no crown of the universe, but that there exists above him a Supreme Spirit.”  

Solzhenitsyn poignantly asks if the West still cares to defend itself. In his Nobel Lecture (1972), he refers to the great nineteenth century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s book, The Demons, “a provincial nightmarish fantasy” where a socialist clique led by revolutionary intellectuals seemingly destroys almost an entire Russian community in the late nineteenth century. What Solzhenitsyn draws from this novel of ideological delerium is its profoundly realistic depiction of how utopian violence and nihilism were beginning to spread in Russia. However, he also finds the book’s diagnosis of ideology and the soul speaks to modern Western pathologies as well.

We find in “the careening fluctuations of Western society” the point where “It is not even brute force alone that is victorious, but its clamorous justification: the world is being flooded by the brazen conviction that force can do anything, and righteousness—nothing.” He observes young people in the West “ardently” mouthing the “discredited clichés of the Russian nineteenth century.” They proclaim the “Red Guards” as their model. We’ll replace “greedy oppressors and rulers” with ourselves, who will necessarily be just and decent. Those who know better, their elders, Solzhenitsyn observes, say nothing. They worry more about being called “conservative,” so they adopt “fawning attitudes” toward these young revolutionaries. It is, Solzhenitsyn warns, what Dostoevsky calls “subservience to progressive little notions.” We can easily recall the scenes of rioting and violence in 2020 that consumed American cities, as well as the related DEI and antiracist enthusiasms that swept the country in 2020 and 2021, further connecting Solzhenitsyn’s insights about the dark heart of socialist theorizing and its ugly manifestations in the contemporary world.

In “If One Doesn’t Wish to be Blind,” an address delivered on the BBC in 1976, Solzhenitsyn reframes things for us, asking us to consider the West from his perspective as a prisoner in “the hard labor camps of Kazakhstan…” There, he says, “we viewed the West as the beacon of freedom, the stronghold of spirit, the treasure-house of wisdom.” Experience, he notes, has taught him to lower his expectations. The riddle, he says, is that those “who soar unhindered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and, fatefully adrift, begin almost to crave slavery.” The “spiritual progression of the East,” at least those immune to ideological mendacity, has managed to surmount lies and found “lucidity of heart and soul to see things in their true perspective.” Living in the West, Solzhenitsyn reports that he finds it “a world of lost will.” The West views the defense of its freedom as “oppressive.” Why?

What happens to a society that loses not only its courage but also its reason? This is the condition of the contemporary West, Solzhenitsyn concludes. “We Russians,” he states, “contemplate the West from your future.” To paraphrase Solzhenitsyn, we see the same traits that happened in the decades before our revolution evident in your society: Adults who revere the opinions of children; youth who worship “worthless ideas;” academics afraid of standing alone from their peers; media irresponsibility; sympathy for revolutionaries; muteness of the majority of people against these trends; weak governments who refuse to defend the ideas that have formed their societies; and spiritual shallowness.

Solzhenitsyn undoubtedly overlooks some aspects of the contemporary West that made it more resilient, including greater reserves of freedom and responsibility in the West, than he perhaps understands. The material enrichment of life under capitalism is one of those positive contributions, but certainly not the only one. Solzhenitsyn never insulted capitalism as such; how could he? He was well-versed in the opportunities afforded by commerce and technology and how they had improved human life, gains that had not been achieved under Soviet communist rule. He greatly deplored the economic harms of communism. However, the possibilities that capitalism afforded the West in opposing communism were never fully recognized by Solzhenitsyn. Legal and political freedom enabled the West to oppose communism effectively. America, the modern nation par excellence, provided crucial leadership precisely through its constitutional order, which created opportunities for strategic policies that ultimately contributed to the Soviet Union's defeat.

What he accurately observed was a declining sense of inner freedom among Western citizens, a trend that he feared would ultimately lead to the overall collapse of civilization. He wasn’t wrong in that regard. In the London address, his analysis of socialism focuses on how it captivates the imaginations of academics and journalists who succumb to its Promethean impulse. Somehow, a crucial portion of influential citizens believed that egalitarianism and the elimination of differences between people would lead to a radically new civilization. Thus, they insisted on leveling and pulling down their country. The ultimate result of this kind of socialist thinking, Solzhenitsyn argues, is enfeeblement, moral and material. Rather than strengthening society with the human spirit attuned to religion, patriotism, service, honest work, and family, you relativize these goods and deaden people's hearts to them in favor of an egalitarian-humanist ideal that cannot replace them. Who still speaks of Britain’s strength, Solzhenitsyn wonders in a provocative and telling fashion?

Turning to freedom properly understood, Solzhenitsyn’s “The Shallowing of Freedom,” first published in 1976, analyzes two distinct notions: external freedom and genuine human freedom. The former is freedom from coercion, the ability to operate without undue constraints. There is nothing wrong with this understanding of freedom, but what are we to do when we no longer know how to draw any constraints around it? What exactly is freedom that no longer understands any purpose beyond the fulfillment of human desire? In response, Solzhenitsyn states,

The concept of freedom cannot be fully grasped without an evaluation of the objectives of our earthly existence. I hold the view that the life aim for each of us isn’t a boundless enjoyment of material goods but, rather, a departure from this Earth as better persons than when we arrived, better than our inborn inclinations alone would have made us; that is, a traversal, over the span of our life, of one path or another of spiritual improvement.

Legal freedom, then, must serve this movement of the soul, he argues, and not be its own end as a boundless discretion.

What the West needs “is a God-given inner freedom: yes, the freedom to determine our own actions, but with moral responsibility for them.” This understanding of freedom, Solzhenitsyn finds, is missing from America today. But he does not lose hope because “I’ve seen rural and small-town America with my own eyes.” Solzhenitsyn’s confidence in America stems from the heartland, not the financial or political capital of the country. Most of us would still concur with this judgment, even as various government programs and cultural pollution have endeavored to pull these Americans down to a corrupted existence.

The famous Harvard Address of 1978, delivered as a commencement speech, provides the most comprehensive statement of many of the themes expressed in the addresses. In stating that the most striking feature of the West is a decline in civic courage, he then proceeds to discuss the reasons behind this retrenchment of republican virtue. Most notably, Solzhenitsyn boldly argues that we need a defense of human obligations and duties, not just rights. The endless supply of rights inures Americans to evil, which receives bountiful legal protection. Another consequence is the inability of society to punish crime, even to imprison or kill terrorists, without facing severe criticism from a morally confused populace unsure if their own country deserves to be defended.

The kinship that drives contemporary humanist inspiration, as Solzhenitsyn quotes Marx, is a “naturalized humanism,” as all of Communism’s promises “revolve around Man (with a capital M) and his earthly happiness.” Its philosophical anchor enthrones man above any higher standard or principle, a belief shared by intellectuals in the West and who, for this reason, struggle to see Communism’s crimes, attempt to contextualize or justify them, and still remain endlessly attracted to its vision. Thus, in the scientific and political quest to redeem humanity, modern liberalism worldwide “is pushed aside by radicalism, which had to yield to socialism, and socialism couldn’t hold its ground against Communism.” No enemies to the left, as the famous phrase goes. Solzhenitsyn earned his share of enemies in the West for this and other judgments.

The final speech in the volume was delivered by Solzhenitsyn at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow in 1997. Solzhenitsyn never thought the West provided a template for post-Soviet Russia regaining its footing as a free country. Here, however, he states that one element should be appropriated, namely, a stable and peaceful civic unity rooted in an active and free civic life. But the Russian people have their own culture, one that has been horribly neglected. The development and enrichment of the non-material form of life must be the aim of Russian institutions to breathe life into the country. However, Russia, in its post-communist period, has continued to lose its cultural possibilities, Solzhenitsyn judges, with a “loss of both historical memory and a unifying national consciousness.” There is a people, Solzhenitsyn intones, that still dares to exist “apart from the ruling oligarchy.”

In his Nobel Lecture, Solzhenitsyn notes that the Russian experience has drawn on proverbs about truth to help “express a long and difficult national experience.” Amidst a nightmarish twentieth century and the cultural vacuum we find ourselves in, the Russian proverb we most need is given to us by Solzhenitsyn, “One Word of Truth Shall Outweigh the Whole World.”

Richard M. Reinsch II is the editor-in-chief of Civitas Outlook.