Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first great novel started with these
words: “Reveille was sounded….”
Yes, reveille was sounded for One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich the same way it was sounded for every other one of
the “three thousand six hundred fifty three days like this in his
sentence.” But rather than being routine, the reveille that
Solzhenitsyn sounded for the Western world was extraordinary and
singular in its import and its effectiveness. Solzhenitsyn, who
died on Sunday at 89, told the story from inside the gulag that the
great British historian Robert Conquest had told from outside: how
brutal it was, how senseless, and how it was meant to dehumanize.
As Solzhenitsyn said in his famous 1978 commencement address at
Harvard, “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total
destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into
death.”
It was for his witness to the evils of socialism/communism that
American conservatives treasured the great Russian writer. Nobody
wrote against the Evil Empire with more courage or more moral
force. Nobody spoke more boldly. And nobody other than Ronald
Reagan did more to scold American elites for their cowardly
kowtowing to the communist menace. It was instructive that when
Solzhenitsyn finally made it to the United States, President Gerald
Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger refused to give him an
audience at the White house — something about “detente” and
“realpolitik,” more correctly known as sniveling flapdoodle — but
Reagan wrote columns welcoming the great Russian and North
Carolina’s Jesse Helms welcomed him to the Senate. It was American
conservatives who recognized moral imperatives, while the
supposedly sensible centrists were mired in cynicism.
In his Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn condemned the Ford approach
(without referring to Ford by name) by describing it as the
attitude that “the world situation should stay as it is at any
cost, there should be no changes.” But, he warned in the very next
sentence, “This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom
of a society which has come to the end of its development.”
Here, though, is where not just the conservative appreciation
for Solzhenitsyn but also the more general Western appreciation of
him became more difficult to sustain. Oh, sure, conservatives were
thrilled that Solzhenitsyn railed against the communists. And even
European “social Democrats” ended up very glad that he blew the
whistle on the Soviets who menaced them. But anti-communism was
only part of the Russian Nobel laureate’s message. As harsh as he
was in denouncing the gulag, he was almost as harsh in denouncing
not just the diplomatic weakness (up until then) of the West but
also its moral decrepitude. Again in the Harvard speech, here’s
what he said:
“It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human
rights as human obligations. Destructive and irresponsible freedom
has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little
defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example,
misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion
pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to
be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young
people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized
legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself
against the corrosion of evil.”
Somewhere between the age of Churchill and today we lost the idea
that freedom obliges us, all of us, to expend “blood, toil, tears
and sweat.” Somewhere between the rationing of World War II and the
Age of the Shopping Mall we forgot that a 5.7 percent unemployment
rate
after eight rocky months is a phenomenal achievement
rather than a crisis. And somewhere along the way we forgot that
while every one of 4,000 American deaths in a foreign land is a
tragedy, they are collectively the mark of a nation that protects
its soldiers amazingly well while freeing the world from a
dangerous megalomaniac. Solzhenitsyn himself probably saw,
personally, at least as many of his compatriots killed in any one
of several bad weeks while fighting on the front lines against the
invading Nazi death machine.
Thirty years before Phil Gramm complained that we have become a
nation of whiners, Solzhenitsyn said much the same thing. One can
almost hear him sneer as he noted to the Harvard grads that “the
center of your democracy and of your culture is left without
electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of
American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth
surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite
unstable and unhealthy.” One wonders what he made of the looting
after Hurricane Katrina, and of the political buck-passing that
accompanied the botched responses thereto.
And way back 30 years ago, Solzhenitsyn also offered criticisms
of the press that sound eerily prescient today:
“Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret
matters, pertaining to one’s nation’s defense, publicly revealed,
or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known
people under the slogan: ‘everyone is entitled to know everything.’
But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people
also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable
one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip,
nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life
does not need this excessive burdening flow of
information.”
Solzhenitsyn clearly was no fan of consumerist American modernity.
He said that it in its own way it was as dehumanizing — or,
perhaps more accurately, as de-spiritualizing — as almost anything
the gulag could engender. Yet in all of his complaining, in all of
his cultural criticism of both the Free World and the communist
one, this great Russian thinker’s underlying message remained
redemptive. As truly awful, by ordinary standards, as Ivan
Denisovich’s day in the labor camp had been, Ivan went to sleep
thinking that “nothing had spoiled the day and it had been almost
happy.” After all, “he’d had a lot of luck today. They hadn’t put
him in the cooler….He’d finagled an extra bowl of mush at
noon….And he’d gotten over that sickness.”
With God’s help, human beings have a remarkable capacity to find
hope in the thinnest gruel. We have the capacity, he believed, to
get over our sickness.
Likewise, Solzhenitsyn concluded his address at Harvard with
these words:
“If the world has not come to its end, it has
approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn
from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a
spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision,
to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed
as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual
being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era. This
ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic
stage. No one on earth has any other way left but —
upward.”
Upward, indeed. One imagines that such is the direction
Solzhenitsyn himself has finally and eternally traveled.
