From Horrors to Hope

Another View on Solzhenitsyn’s Legacy

When Russian readers pick up Penthouse instead of The Gulag Archipelago and TV viewers turn on Dallas instead of Solzhenitsyn’s talking-head program, a sad irony is on display. Solzhenitsyn’s books reached their primary intended audience just when social chaos put serious reading out of fashion for the first time in memory.

Roy Medvedev merits respect for his demonstrations of independent thinking. But he and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have long-standing differences, starting with their views of Soviet Communism and its founder, Lenin. This conflict is the subtext of an essay supposedly intended to celebrate an anniversary in a writer’s great achievement, and it helps explain the essay’s negative spin and especially its startling omissions.

Resistance to Solzhenitsyn has always been strongest among intellectuals and politicians. In large part, this resistance illustrates a disconnect in which secular people cannot fathom the motivations of the religiously informed mind. The Christian faith to which Solzhenitsyn came in prison has given his sensational life a seamless coherence; but seldom do his critics approach this deepest level of his being, so they get other things wrong, too.

I suppose Solzhenitsyn could have done more to deflect his denigrators. His disdain for dominant currents of thinking is so fierce that his tone of voice is typically impatient, peremptory. He might have avoided his public-relations failures had he adopted the gentler arts of persuasion used by Vàclav Havel, now President of the Czech Republic, who in cold prose makes many of the same points about The Lie of socialist ideology and the spiritual decrepitude of Western democracies. But Solzhenitsyn’s life mission has been to speak truth to power, which many say should be done but few do. Herein lies his great achievement. Even now, in old age, he seeks to be a voice for the voiceless in Russia; such is his democratic urge.

That little novel of thirty-five years ago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, did indeed make Solzhenitsyn world-famous overnight, but it did much more. It broke the official conspiracy of silence about the greatest horror story, in quantitative terms at least, in human history. As more than a million copies passed from hand to hand to yet more hands, all those families that had lost members to the Gulag prison camps now knew what before they could only guess. And the Soviet Union was never the same again. If we couldn’t see it then, that was the first crack in the Berlin Wall.

Later came The Gulag Archipelago, that magisterial monument to untold millions dead. It had, in Robert Conquest’s words, “an almost unprecedented, worldwide impact on the minds of men.” Cracks in the Wall multiplied and widened. Through the chinks, Russian and other victims of Soviet power could see formerly hidden truths of their history. A new word, Gulag, entered our dictionaries to stand as shorthand, along with Holocaust, for modern man’s inhumanity to man. One Western newspaper presciently commented, “The time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet system from the appearance of Gulag.”

After the Kremlin forced Solzhenitsyn, then fifty-five, into exile because of this book, he made and remade two predictions. Here is one: “I am absolutely convinced that Communism will go like [an] eclipse.” Here is the other: “I personally am convinced that in my lifetime I will return to my country.” The three conditions that he set for his return home were that his citizenship be restored, that the charge of treason against him be dropped, and that all his works be published in Russia prior to his return. Since the Soviets could never accept these conditions, the first prediction had to come true before the second one could. Such audacity!

But it all happened just as he said it would have to. Moreover, we know from secret Soviet files now made public that, as early as 1965, KGB bugging devices caught Solzhenitsyn saying, “This is a government without prospects,” adding that “it’s not working.” There is now widespread, if too often grudging, acknowledgment that Solzhenitsyn not only foretold the future but played a vital, world-historical role in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet empire. Such is the power of the truthful word. The passing bell tolled on Christmas Day of 1991. (Did Someone have a high sense of symbolism – or a keen sense of humor?)

Well more than a year before the Soviet Union sank to rubble, Solzhenitsyn announced, “Time has finally run out for Communism.” Who else was saying what he said in 1965, or upon his exile in 1974, or even in mid-1990? And what should we think when those who were clueless all along now insist that this man is a crank, a freak, a has-been? Since it seems to many that (as Solzhenitsyn put it) Russia is coming out from under the rubble in the worst possible way, why are his critics so sure that his tentatively offered proposals for rebuilding Russia would have, if followed in the main, brought about a worse result than we now behold?

The wonder is not that Solzhenitsyn has never been wrong; he has been. The wonder is that he has so often been right. Given his record, the ongoing dismissal of Solzhenitsyn seems worse than churlish, and it says more about his critics than about him.

Among those who have given him due credit, David Remnick, author of memorable books and articles about Russia, has written, “in terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of this century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler?” As Remnick carefully explains, this is not to say that Solzhenitsyn is the century’s best writer, but “as someone who was able to combine truth-telling with the literary project, he is unparalleled. No writer that I can think of in history, really, was able to do so much through courage and literary skill to change the society they came from.” Indeed, Solzhenitsyn’s works deserve credit for “helping to bring down the last empire on Earth.”

Time will tell if future generations accord Solzhenitsyn a measure of respect and gratitude that today’s opinion-shapers have largely withheld. If they do, it will probably grow from comprehending the deep taproots of his worldview that is simply being missed now. The prevailing view is that he is a thundering Jeremiah figure, and he certainly has unstintingly delineated our century’s horrors. But a careful reading of his works will reveal that virtually every one of them ends on the note of hope. Which of his works would you say has as its “main sense” a “moral uplifting and catharsis”? The Gulag Archipelago, he says. The accumulated atrocities come early; the ascent of the indomitable human spirit comes in the late parts. And what was his view of Russia as he left Vermont to return home? “The country is falling apart, into self-ruling pieces. We do not have democracy . . . but I do not lose hope that we will manage to climb out of this pit.” From horrors to hope—this is always the movement of his thought.

For Solzhenitsyn, the root of our horrors is simply that “men have forgotten God.” For all the bodies lost to the gulag, the greatest calamity is our spiritual devastation. Thus, even when he addresses political issues, his focus is on those moral motives that stem from his Christian faith—as here: “We must build a moral Russia, or none at all—it would not then matter anyhow.” His faith inexorably impels his hope that, after all we have been through, we may return to God-consciousness. The concluding note of hope comes readily to those who see all of our little stories, of individuals and of nations, as part of the Great Story. Solzhenitsyn knows what Dante knew: the Great Story is not a meaningless tragedy; in the end, good triumphs over evil. One need not agree with Solzhenitsyn about this plot line. To understand him properly, however, one must know that this is the ultimate context for his works and life.