REMEMBERING ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

• First, a brief overview of his life.  Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918, one year after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.  His family was Russian Orthodox, but through the Soviet school system, he became an advocate of Marxism-Leninism.  Drafted into the army in 1941, he rose to the level of captain during World War II.  In a private letter, he once referred to Joseph Stalin as “the mustachioed one.”  The KGB got hold of the letter and he was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag, the string of labor/concentration camps in Siberia.  During his stay in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn came to faith in Jesus Christ.  Learning from a fellow prisoner (literature teacher, Anatoly Silin) how to “write in his head,” he began to “write” about being in the Gulag.  Released in 1953, Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a riveting account of a typical day (like his) in the Gulag.  He then began to publish other works, including the monumental Gulag Archipelago, a multi-volume account of Stalin’s slave/concentration camps.  He showed, among many other things, how Stalin imprisoned over 60 million people in such camps.  In 1970 he won the Noble Prize for Literature, largely for his works, The First Circle and Cancer Ward.  Now the entire world understood the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union—a nation run by terror and fear!  In 1974 the Soviet Union exiled Solzhenitsyn and he took up residence in Vermont.  Although the US considered him a trophy of the West’s victory over Soviet communism, Solzhenitsyn blasted the materialism and superficiality of western life, because it had abandoned its religious foundation in Christianity.  He did so during a now 1978 famous speech at Harvard University.  After the collapse of communism, he returned to his beloved Russia in 1994 and continued to publish monumental multi-volume works on Russia.  He died in Russia of heart failure last Sunday, 3 August 2008.

• Second, an extended comment on Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 commencement address at Harvard.  There, he shocked this bastion of humanistic education, for he chastised the West in uncompromising terms.  Listen to his words:  The West has become enraptured by “rationalistic humanism.”  He lamented the loss of “our concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.”  The West has fostered the idea that man is “the master of this world . . . who bears no evil within himself.  So all the defects of life are attributed to wrong social systems.”  He also argued that the West was morally impoverished and this has led to a debased understanding of freedom, one that makes no distinction between “freedoms for good” and “freedoms for evil.”  The founders of this nation would hardly have approved of “all this freedom with no purpose, [except for the] satisfaction of one’s whims.”  The founders had tied freedom to the guide and guard that comes from one’s religious convictions and the responsibility that goes with those convictions.  He went on that “fashionable trends of thoughts and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable.”  He predicted an age where “strong mass prejudices [will cause people to be] hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.”  He was particularly provocative in his charge that the West had lost its “civic courage . . . particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites.”  He questioned why, with “unlimited freedom on the choice of pleasures,” one would ever risk one’s life defending the common good.  He charged that the West increasingly defends the rights of criminals, even terrorists, with little actual concern about their despicable deeds.  His solution?  A “spiritual blaze” was needed to recover the stability and power of the West.  Solzhenitsyn predicted in 1978 what we now see, (in the words of Chuck Colson):  “violent and pornographic entertainment, growing censorship of unfashionable ideas and a spiritually exhausted citizenry.”  What Solzhenitsyn declared as the diagnosis of the West’s disease, remains true today thirty years later.  Our fundamental need is a spiritual one and until and unless we heed that diagnosis, we will never get well.  See Colson’s comments in ChristianityToday.com (5 August 2008).

• Third, one must remember that fundamentally Solzhenitsyn was a Russian nationalist.  He looked for Russia to return to its historical, cultural and religious roots.  He was without question a Russian literary giant along the lines of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekov and Tolstoy—and this can make Americans uncomfortable.  He had little patience with those who had embraced the silliness of communist utopianism.  That utopianism is what produced Stalin.  How could western intellectuals still be Marxists and atheists, he railed?  One must also understand that he was a Russian Orthodox Christian, an expression of Christianity that is often difficult for evangelicals to understand.  But he had unbending disgust with Marxism-Leninism.  In 2007 he wrote that the October Revolution “broke Russia’s back.  The Red Terror unleashed by its leaders, their willingness to drown Russia in blood, is the first and foremost proof of it.”  He pleaded that “the bitter Russian experience, which I have been studying and describing all my life, will be for us a lesson that keeps us from new disastrous breakdowns.”

I do not believe that the biblical office of prophet really exists anymore.  But Alexander Solzhenitsyn comes as close as anyone to fitting that role.  He understood the bankruptcy of Soviet communism and equally the bankruptcy of the West’s embrace of humanism.  We may be uncomfortable with the antidote he prescribes for our disease, but there is no doubt that he accurately diagnosed the disease.  See Robert Conquest’s tribute to Solzhenitsyn in the Wall Street Journal (8 August 2008).

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