Enduring Truths and Progressivist Illusions
Many thanks to Spencer A. Klavan, David P. Deavel, and Jessica Hooten Wilson for their deeply thoughtful and suggestive responses to my forum essay on Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a piece occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the publication of that great work. Together, their essays highlight important themes of that work that will resonate as long as human beings remain open to the life of the soul and are confronted, as they inevitably will be, by pernicious ideological challenges to liberty and human dignity.
Among its other contributions, David Deavel’s essay provides an illuminating reflection on the sheer scale or magnitude of Solzhenitsyn’s account of applied ideology at work in the totalitarian experiment that was the Soviet Union. The Gulag Archipelago is indeed a massive if compellingly readable book. Deavel is exactly on the mark when he writes that the book’s “vast amount of detail is essential to the overall effect,” at once dramatic and palpable, that it has on the hearts and minds of its readers.
For example, Solzhenitsyn’s detailed accounts of a series of show trials during the Leninist and Stalinist periods of Soviet rule painstakingly showcase the utter degradation of law under Soviet rule. In doing so, they artfully illustrate the sheer “surreality” of what substitutes for law in an essentially lawless society. If Solzhenitsyn pointedly criticized the excessive legalism of the Western democracies in his 1978 Harvard Address, in The Gulag Archipelago he more fundamentally shows how lawlessness degrades the human soul and makes decent political life impossible. It is a far graver evil than small-minded legalism.
The very last lines of The Gulag Archipelago, completed in 1968 during the Brezhnev period of Soviet rule, read, “For a half century and more the enormous state has towered over us, girded with hoops of steel. The hoops are still there. There is no law.” Or as Solzhenitsyn says in an arresting chapter in the third volume of Gulag entitled “Why Did We Stand For It?”:
The goal of human evolution is not freedom for the sake of freedom. Nor is it the building of an ideal polity. What matter, of course, are the moral foundations of society. But that is in the long run; what about the beginning? What about the first step?
For all their limits from a “higher” point of view, rule of law and political freedom turn out to be invaluable prerequisites for allowing human beings the right to breathe freely and to live humanly tolerable lives.
Deavel is also particularly illuminating about what constitutes the “personal voice of Solzhenitsyn,” including his remarkable capacity in The Gulag Archipelago to take aim at his own personal flaws, failings, and misjudgments. As Deavel aptly puts it, “there is nothing of the moral braggart” in Solzhenitsyn’s self-presentation in the book. The Russian writer knows that he, too, could have succumbed to temptation and have become one of the dreaded bluecaps, or secret police “interrogators,” if an inner voice, the voice of conscience, had not pointed him in a very different direction. Solzhenitsyn’s eventual affirmation of the palpable reality of Divine Providence was rooted in such pitiless but humanizing self-examination. It should be noted that Solzhenitsyn’s fiercest critics, including the mendacious agents of the Soviet party-state and secret police, almost always used and abused such self-critical accounts provided by Solzhenitsyn himself in Gulag.
Let me add that Deavel’s article ends on an admirably high note. He reminds us that however valuable, even precious, they may be, “legal and political freedom” constitute “a trial of our free will just as much as bad circumstances,” such as the “gulag’s absurdities.” And Deavel helpfully recapitulates those “sparks of the spirit” I had referred to in my article: Moral judgment, humility, freedom, and free will guided by conscience that ultimately defers to the benign, if corrective, judgment of God. And I would add noble self-respect, genuine care for the health of one’s soul.
In his article, Spencer Klavan also eloquently reminds us of the peril of succumbing to false confidence in man as the measure of all things: As he notes, Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Lecture makes clear the deadly consequences for the individual soul and collective life of “forgetting God,” of succumbing to the false allure of “anthropocentricity” as Solzhenitsyn called it in the Harvard Address. When men confuse themselves for gods they become little more than beasts, as the twin totalitarianisms of the twentieth century, Nazism and communism, so vividly and chillingly illustrate. Klavan also convincingly demonstrates how the ideological Manicheanism of old persists in higher education and among demi-educated activists who now justify new slaughters and repression in the name of “decolonialization” and a fevered hatred for our rich patrimony that is Western civilization. The deepest lessons of the totalitarian episode remain unknown and unacknowledged. The age of ideology is far from over. We are not only at the risk of “forgetting” old crimes but of renewing the ideological Lie that was at their foundation.
Solzhenitsyn respected honest classical liberals who acknowledged hard truths about Communist totalitarianism.
I thank Jessica Hooten Wilson for reminding us all of the humane presence and enduring contributions of the late Edward E. Ericson, Jr., who co-edited The Solzhenitsyn Reader with me, and who in cooperation with Solzhenitsyn gave us the great gift that is the authorized abridgment of The Gulag Archipelago. That judicious version of the work makes its key insights available to the reading public in a concise 500 pages.
I welcome Wilson’s reminder that Solzhenitsyn is not only a great Russian writer but someone who belongs to “world literature” in Goethe’s noble and elevated sense of that term. Solzhenitsyn speaks to the way of the cross born by his own people in the twentieth century even as he contributes to our “universal literary inheritance.” To which one can only say “Amen.”
I would add that Solzhenitsyn not only rebuked the illusions of Russian ultra-nationalists who confused authentic patriotism with expansive empire (a point made well by Wilson) but also the small-minded Ukrainian nationalists or ultra-nationalists who continue to blame the implacable crimes of communism on ”Muscovites” or “Russians” instead of the inhuman universalist ideology that warred on the legitimate national aspirations of both Russians and Ukrainians. As Solzhenitsyn wrote in Rebuilding Russia, Communism was the common enemy of both great peoples, one that brought a murderous ideology-induced famine to the Volga region of Russia in 1921–22 that cost five million lives and an even more murderous one to the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the North Caucasus in 1932–33.
To these crimes, one can add the fierce and cruel repression of religion, of free intellectual life, and the independent peasantry that characterized Communist totalitarianism. These were not Russian crimes per se, Solzhenitsyn rightly insisted, but a byproduct of an ideological mentality that warred unrelentingly on free initiative and the human spirit. “As common victims of the communist-imposed collectivization forced upon us by whip and bullet, have we not been bonded by this common bloody suffering?” Solzhenitsyn asked in Rebuilding Russia. Prescient words of wisdom as two once intertwined peoples sink into fratricidal strife that deeply pained the half-Ukrainian Solzhenitsyn (on his mother’s side).
And lastly, why lament, as Wilson seems to do, that many, even most, of Solzhenitsyn’s admirers today tend to be conservative-minded? For better or worse, conservatives are more sensitive to the dangers of “forgetting God,” the evils of what the late Roger Scruton called “the culture of repudiation,” and the sheer ugliness of any identification of Evil with a capital E with specific groups that are said to be intrinsically or ontologically evil (a false and deadly identification that connects the woke with older forms of totalitarianism). To their credit, conservatives have been more openly and consistently anti-totalitarian than those on the Left.
Of course, it is a mistake to politicize Solzhenitsyn in any narrow partisan sense. He certainly has much to say to rebuke the kind of faux “conservative” who has undue confidence in modern “Progress” or the promise of an unlimited materialist cornucopia. Solzhenitsyn respected honest classical liberals who acknowledged hard truths about Communist totalitarianism. But he did not hesitate to take aim at “progressives” who felt a “kinship” with Communism, whatever its murderous pretensions and deeds. They have shown themselves to be appallingly slow to learn the most elementary truths. As Solzhenitsyn wrote about them near the end of The Gulag Archipelago:
All you freedom-loving ”left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday—but only when you yourselves hear ‘hands behind your backs there’ and step ashore on our Archipelago.
One must ask: Has all that much changed in these last fifty years regarding “progressivist” illusions regarding the totalitarian temptation?
Daniel J. Mahoney is Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, Senior Writer at Law and Liberty, and professor emeritus at Assumption University. He has written extensively on Solzhenitsyn, including The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth about a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker, which has been available in paperback from St. Augustine’s Press since 2020. He is presently completing a book entitled The Persistence of the Ideological Lie, to be published by Encounter Books.
