As we grapple with the issues of our times, we perceive them in the context of current conditions, actors, and events. We have the tendency to perceive the issues as nascent without history or root. We see them as problems that we must solve from scratch with solutions toward which none of our predecessors can contribute. This kind of generational narcissism robs us of both the lessons that we could learn from the past and the context that reveals a current issue’s place in the much longer historical arc.
Historical context is crucial for recognizing problems or faux solutions that have been solved or tried in the past but have returned with new vestments. Except for living a long life, the only source for historical context is our inheritance of literary works from the past. Taking the authors’ insights and applying them to today’s climate and circumstances allows us to open the lens and see events from a dilated perspective.
Many authors have written deeply insightful descriptions of the forces and motivations driving events over the past 100 years, but Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stands out in his breadth and depth of insight coupled with a passion borne of personal experience. He is a Russian author, poet, and playwright born in 1918 who wrote extensively about the darkness and evils of Communism, which he endured throughout most of his life. He lived as a Russian, as a prisoner of the state, as an exile, and finally as a repatriated citizen.
Like too many children today, Aleksandr grew up without a father. A hunting accident took his father’s life 6 months before Solzhenitsyn was born. His grandmother raised him in faithful Russian Orthodoxy while his mother worked to support the family. Although he began with a firm Christian foundation, he was born at the outset of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and Marxist philosophy was bound to be a strong countervailing influence on his life. In his early years, he aspired to the values of Marxism, but seeing the brutality of the Communist regime during World War II, of the subsequent governance of the country, and of his imprisonment by that very government, Solzhenitsyn wholeheartedly rejected Marxism and returned to his Christian roots with a deep conviction. Many of us condemn Communism for the principles that it stands for and the atrocities done in its name, but the most powerful critics of the belief system always seem to be those who once believed in it and had experience change their minds. So it is with Solzhenitsyn.
He wrote a prodigious volume of work over his lifetime. He wrote several penetrating essays and gave many moving speeches. His most ambitious works are The Gulag Archipelago, a narrative description of life in the Russian gulags (prisoner camps) scattered across the Russian empire like an island chain, and The Red Wheel, a historical fiction describing the Bolshevik revolutions that transformed Russian into a communist country. He infuses philosophical and theological insights into all of his works which enrich and deepen their quality.
Three main themes stand out from his writings as invaluable lessons for us to claim today. The first is his assessment of the Spirit of Communism as a worldview. The second is the effects that the Spirit of Communism has on an individual’s soul and character. And finally, his insight about where evil resides in the world. The sections below will describe each of these themes using salient excerpts from translations of Solzhenitsyn’s own writing. The primary source for this material is, The Solzhenitsyn Reader, by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney, a highly accessible and well-footnoted collection of Solzhenitsyn’s writings.
The Spirit of Communism
While communism exists as an official form of government in a few places in the world today, the adherents to the explicit Marxist worldview are a relatively small fraction of the global population. China is communist, but most of the citizens of the country are not part of the Chinese Communist Party. They profess belief in Communism insofar as they want to live a quiet life and do not want to invite oppression from the regime. Even the professing adherents are willing to make modifications to the philosophy and give it “Chinese characteristics.” What has proliferated around the globe more freely in recent years is a belief in similar philosophies called “socialism” or “collectivism,” philosophies that retain some of the less threatening aspects of Communism but leave out the more offensive aspects of the worldview. Several authors familiar with socialism and communism have described them as the first and last steps in a process. People who want to stop at a midpoint of the process and live in a socialist society fail to understand the social mechanics. The forward to Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address succinctly describes how he saw the process unfold in Russia (ibid. p 561),
Moderate liberalism gave way to radicalism, radicalism to socialism, and socialism soon found itself powerless before communism’s claim to embody the “full logic of materialistic development.”
In his own words, Solzhenitsyn gives a more anthropomorphic description of the process while giving his Templeton Lecture in Guildhall, London, 1983,
Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable.
Rather than quibble about whether something is Socialism, Communism, or some hybrid, it is more concise to talk about a Spirit of Communism that encompasses socialism in a less developed form and Communism in its fully realized state. People will call themselves democratic socialists or claim a progressive humanist worldview, but the Spirit of Communism shows through to one who recognizes the characteristics. And the fully incarnated spirit, the philosophy carried through to its logical conclusion, always ends in Communism.
Solzhenitsyn’s astutely analytical mind distills the characteristics if the Spirit of Communism through his works. The most prominent of those characteristics are: 1) a hatred of God, 2) the capacity for industrial strength evil, and 3) an immoral government.
Militant Atheism
Solzhenitsyn writes about the militant atheism of the Communist worldview. Communism does not stop at disbelieving in God. It hates God and any belief in Him. It is not a coincidental trait existing in a few adherents but a central pillar of the philosophy. Solzhenitsyn’s unparalleled Templeton Lecture proclaims (Ibid. p 579),
Dostoevsky … drew from the French Revolution and its seething hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.
These are incredibly sobering words to the Christians who would promote Communism as a valid alternative form of government or even to those who merely tolerate it as an acceptable belief system for a Christian. Solzhenitsyn does not leave room for this. Christianity and the militant atheism of a Communist worldview are incompatible.
The stark accusations that Solzhenitsyn makes about Communism are not baseless but are founded upon his experience within the gulags. When he was sent to the gulags, Aleksandr was not a strong believer. His faith in Communism had been shaken, but he had not fully rejected it yet. He was arrested and imprisoned simply for writing a letter to a friend that contained critical comments about Stalin. But in prison he noted the fruits of the militant atheist beliefs. The Russian Communists persecuted Christians specifically for their faith. In one example, he notes of his fellow prisoners in the gulags (Ibid. p 278),
In the years 1948-1950 several hundred of them were sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment and dispatched to Special Camps for no other reason than that they belonged to Baptist communes…
Imagine the militant hatred it takes to sentence people to twenty-five years of hard labor with inadequate rations and near-fatal exposure to the elements simply for practicing their religion. In a more personal account, Solzhenitsyn describes Zoya, a ten-year-old girl from a family of believers,
Her father, her mother, her grandfather, her grandmother, and her elder adolescent brothers had all been scattered to distant camps because of their faith in God. … [In the orphanage] she declared that she would never remove the cross from around her neck, the cross which her mother had hung there when she said farewell. … The struggle for the cross went on and on. Zoya stood her ground. Even here she refused to learn to steal or to curse. “A mother as sacred as mine must never have a daughter who is a criminal. I would rather be a political, like my whole family!” … Up to the age of eighteen she was in ordinary camps, and from the age of eighteen on she was in Special Camps.
Such persistent, malevolent oppression of an innocent girl simply for clinging to virtue is a disturbing insight into the depth of militant atheism characteristic of the Spirit of Communism.
Industrial Strength Evil
The militant atheism beating at the heart of the Spirit of Communism manifests in a scale of evil unreachable with other worldviews. Nihilists are often repulsive because of the anti-social behaviors tied to their hopeless, fatalistic worldview. Machiavellian behavior offends us because of the intense selfishness with which it makes decisions. But the ideology behind the Spirit of Communism dwarfs the level of evil any of these reaches.
The Gulag Archipelago provides heartrending snapshots of the industrial strength evil that the regime in Russia perpetrated upon its own people. One example is the campaign to destroy the peasantry – the people he described as the county’s “backbone” – because of their simple, traditional ways. The peasantry was not part of the revolution. The radical Bolsheviks who drove the revolution needed a way to eliminate this large constituency in the country and bring them under the umbrella of the revolution. They settled on a methodology involving accusations of hoarding the country’s resources followed by punishments involving mass relocations of the accused to uninhabitable locations within the country. Solzhenitsyn describes,
The point of it all was… to force the peasants into the kolkhoz [Soviet collective farms]. Without frightening them to death there was no way of taking back the land which the Revolution had given them, and planting them on that same land as serfs.
The peasants who did not join the kolkhoz, which was the mechanism of bringing them into the Communist framework, were driven on death marches or banished to wastelands. The Bolsheviks were ruthless, making no exceptions for women, children, or the elderly. Although the state apparently kept no official records, Solzhenitsyn describes fifteen million peasants who starved to death because of the actions of the revolutionaries. Reflecting upon the atrocities and the lack of international coverage or interest they produced drives Solzhenitsyn to dark sarcasm,
Hitler was a mere disciple, but he had all the luck: His murder camps have made him famous, whereas no one has any interest in ours at all.
Comparing atrocities with Hitler and Nazi Germany has become a cliché, but the death camps in Russia which actually rivaled the magnitude of evil that the Nazi’s wrought, rarely makes the analogous cut.
Another atrocity perpetrated upon the Russian people was the imprisonment of children. Solzhenitsyn dedicates an entire chapter of the Gulag Archipelago to this facet of the Communist regime. Solzhenitsyn’s claim that “nearly half the entire Archipelago in 1927 consisted of youths whom the October Revolution had caught between the ages of six and fourteen,” (ibid. p242) gives a sense of the scale of the oppression the Communists wrought upon the country’s children. The chapter is strewn with mind boggling examples: a child sentenced to eight years for a pocket full of potatoes, five years for a dozen cucumbers, three years to a girl for picking up grain that had spilled off a truck in a trail on the road. Children accused of stealing from the state for the mere attempt to avoid starvation. So many children sentenced to imprisonment in inhumane conditions for petty things that scarcely count as crimes is a red flag for the industrial strength evil of the Spirit of Communism.
Soviet Russia is not alone among Communist countries that have perpetrated atrocities upon their own citizens. Mao Zedong’s ideological leadership led to the death of as many as 45 million Chinese in the great famine from 1958 to 1962. Stories from North Korea describe a government that is famously inhumane to its own citizens. The Cambodian genocide killed as many as 2 million people. The trait of industrial strength evil is common amongst Communist governments wherever they arise.
Solzhenitsyn traces the source of the ideology behind the Spirit of Communism. In his vocabulary, the word “ideology” is not an ambivalent substitute for the term “worldview.” It is a word he reserves for the particular ideology that drove the Communist revolution in Russia. In his contemplation of the evil deeds that he witnessed, Solzhenitsyn wondered what kind of heart could plumb such depths. He considered what man knew about evil hearts by looking at various villains from literature. He concludes that the normal motives for evil – selfishness, greed, revenge, pride, etc. – were unable to reach such depths (ibid. p. 234),
The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. …
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in millions.
He lays the responsibility for this trait of industrial strength evil squarely on the shoulders of the ideology, the Spirit of Communism, that guided the Russian revolutionaries.
Immoral Government
The industrial strength evil characteristic of the Spirit of Communism is reprehensible, but some people will dismiss it as a necessary evil. They will say that it is an isolated incident from a transition period or the result of unfortunate circumstances. They will say that the government and society in the Communist country is generally preferable to other forms of government. Solzhenitsyn disqualifies this position as well. He describes how the Communist society erodes morality and decays the human spirit. Even when the government is not perpetrating untold evils upon its citizens and others, it slowly destroys the foundation upon which a healthy society is established.
In the Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes how any sense of justice is lost in the Communist government. He provides a perfect example by quoting an interrogator at one of the prison camps (ibid. p. 225),
Interrogation and trial are merely judicial corroboration. They cannot alter your fate, which was previously decided. If it is necessary to shoot you, then you will be shot even if you are altogether innocent. If it is necessary to acquit you, then no matter how guilty you are you will be cleared and acquitted.
Americans understand this type of system. Today, people will often cite the terser Stalin quote, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” when describing the level of corruption that has seeped into the American justice system. The two-tiered justice system is hardly an argument in America anymore. A recent poll gathers that 8 in 10 American voters think that we have a two-tiered justice system now. The erosion of the integrity of the justice system has occurred in parallel with the rise of the influence of the Spirit of Communism in America. Proponents of Communism make appeals to the fairness of the system and the injustice of other systems, but whether in Communist Russia or during its rise in America, the Communist mindset has shown that it erodes and destroys justice rather than upholding and defending it. Solzhenitsyn’s lament is eerily applicable to America almost as much as it was for Communist Russia (ibid. p. 237),
Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!
The ring of truth is in his words as they echo the Psalms (ESV ch. 12 v. 8),
On every side the wicked prowl,
as vileness is exalted among the children of man.
Effects on the Soul
The Spirit of Communism is a poisonous ideology that produces an immoral government capable of great feats of evil and is rooted in a steadfast hatred of God. Living with this ideology takes a toll on the person who holds it and on the people who live immersed in a society of it. Solzhenitsyn recognized and diagnosed many of the symptoms. In his description, art loses its vitality, virtue wanes, and the heart becomes morally bankrupt. All of these undesirable traits express more strongly as a person more fully adopts the Spirit of Communism as a worldview and lets the ramifications permeate into his soul.
The symptom of impotent artwork is rooted in a germ of hatred that the Spirit of Communism fosters in the heart. The Templeton Lecture describes how hatred trickles down into all parts of the heart spoiling emotions, morals, and even art. The process begins with hatred that is not exposed and resolved but kindled and nurtured (ibid. p. 582),
Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society.
The Atheism at the heart of the Spirit of Communism plants seeds of hatred that then grow and produce fruit. Solzhenitsyn goes on to describe the consequential effects,
This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.
While shared in 1983, these words have not lost their edge nearly 40 years later. Professors all over this country teach their students to hate America, that it is an irredeemable country founded in sin and that hate is the only justifiable response to that fact. As a result, art has become shallow and fruitless. Movies are all remakes. Music does not seem to have anything new or interesting to say. Even comedians can’t make a joke in our hate-filled society, e.g. Dave Chappelle. This sapping of our creativity and vitality is a characteristic of the poisonous ideology that is infecting our culture.
Solzhenitsyn described many of the heart symptoms of the Spirit of Communism during his Harvard commencement address on June 8, 1978. He was living in the United States in exile from Russia at the time. Upon release from the gulags, he had been writing the works that he had composed while confined, and the authorities could not tolerate his words. The eventual resolution was exile. However, Aleksandr was not infatuated with everything American. He provided constructive criticism identifying traits of the atheistic ideology that were present in Communist Russia but appearing in America as well.
The first trait that he identifies in his address is a decline in courage. The trait appears most prominently in the “ruling and intellectual elites causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.” (ibid. p. 564) (Before taking offense, note that he goes on to say, “There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.”) This decline in courage prevents people from being able to confront evil when it appears. He notices that leaders can sometime appear strong and brash when facing weak opponents who have no power to oppose them, but they back down when facing a powerful government, threatening forces, or “aggressors and international terrorists.” This lack of courage not only deters our leaders from confronting evil but also prevents them from advancing policies that require strength and self-assuredness. The dearth of courage hampers our leaders’ ability to exhibit true leadership.
A second characteristic from the Harvard Address is the tilt of freedom toward evil. This is an observation specific to non-Communist countries where freedom exists in tandem with the Spirit of Communism. When people who hold to the foundations of the Spirit of Communism, the freedom that they exercise is more often a “destructive freedom.” In an ideal world, freedom should mean freedom to do good. Solzhenitsyn notices that Western freedom often inhibits the person with good initiatives (ibid. p. 566),
A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless.
The statesman is free to pursue his beneficial plan, but others are free to inhibit its realization if they do not agree with it or do not want him to succeed. However, the freedom to do evil sees no such countervailing inhibition. “Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space.” The person who wants to practice some degrading or debauched activity is free to do so because we live in a free society. Those who would inhibit his practice because they do not agree with it or because they do not wish him to so waste himself are seen as infringing upon his freedom. They receive chastisement for interfering with the man’s rights in a free society. The contrast is both an interesting and troubling revelation. The hypothesis that Solzhenitsyn gives for the asymmetry stems from the Spirit of Communism (ibid. p. 567),
it evidently stems from a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which man – the master of this world – does not bear any evil within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must therefore be corrected.
The humanist philosophy misplaces the seat of evil, which Solzhenitsyn elaborates upon. The effect is that even in a free society the Spirit of Communism slants the arc of society toward evil.
Another trait that Solzhenitsyn describes is the corrupting effect that power has on the individual who holds to the Spirit of Communism. We are all familiar with Lord Acton’s quote, “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Solzhenitsyn deftly derives a more nuanced perspective. He agrees that power tends to corrupt – Actually, he calls it “poison” – but he continues his assessment,
to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.
He notices the buffering effect that a belief in God provides. However, the adherent to the Spirit of Communism with its underlying atheistic humanism, power will certainly corrupt. It is nigh impossible to find a person near to power who is not corrupted to some degree – self-dealing, insider trading, selling influence, etc. Any fortitude by which someone manages to resist the temptation issues from a belief in a law above himself which is anathema to the Spirit of Communism.
There are several symptoms that a Communist worldview evokes in a society, and there are several symptoms that the Spirit of Communism expresses in an individual. A lack of courage, an addiction to the abuse of power, a penchant to use freedom to practice destructive behavior, and a nurtured and enduring hatred that produces empty and cliché art are all fruits of the ideology. Certainly, the Spirit of Communism does not have a monopoly on these vices. They can issue from a myriad of sources. But a heart that embraces the Spirit of Communism will eventually express most if not all of these symptoms. Solzhenitsyn wonders at the disconnect between the rhetoric and the actual effects of the worldview saying to his Communist countrymen (ibid. p. 232),
Do you think you can build a just society on a foundation of self-serving and envious people?
Evil Springs from the Human Heart
Authors will tackle lofty intellectual topics and write treatises about the logic of one position versus another. Political thoughts and opinions abound. What gives an extra measure of impact to the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is his willingness to blaze past the boundary of politics into the root causes beneath his theories and conclusions. He writes about the evils of Communism and its effects upon society and individuals, but he does not stop at observations of the symptoms. He delves into human nature and the nature of reality to inquire about the location of the headwaters of this river of evil that he has discerned.
One of the underlying deceptions about human nature that the Spirit of Communism pedals is that humans are basically good at their core and that evil happens to them, sometimes causing them to practice evil deeds. Solzhenitsyn said the same in other words in the passage quoted above. His assessment of human nature runs counter to this theory. He peppers his writings with his own understanding of what true human nature is like. For example, when reflecting upon the rampant abuses that the Communist enforcers/interrogators (the “bluecaps”) wrought, he follows with the penetrating introspective question (ibid. p. 230),
And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?”
It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.
In a place and a circumstance where he would be most justified in passing unqualified condemnation upon his oppressors, he reflects upon the equivalence of frailty between them and himself. If there ever were a textbook case of an evildoer, it was the bluecaps. It would have been easy to draw a line between oppressors and oppressed and say that one side was evil and the other innocent. Instead, Solzhenitsyn perceives that his or anyone else’s heart would be susceptible to such a temptation – that it was not a case of evil people oppressing good people, but of some people who had seized upon the evil in their hearts and others who might have done the same, given the opportunity.
Later in a section about the effect that the gulag has upon a person, Solzhenitsyn has an even more profound description of human nature. It is at a point when he was recovering from surgery to remove a purportedly fatal stomach cancer. The surgery is a success, and he miraculously survives. But the time lying on the recovery bed in the prison infirmary provides him an ideal environment for reflection (ibid. p. 265),
In the intoxication of youthful success I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power, I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments, I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.
He does not universally condemn his time in prison as a waste and a tragedy because of times like this where the suffering precipitated insights into human nature and into his own heart.
The Spirit of Communism teaches the heart to hate and to divide. It teaches a person to see himself as good and others from a different group or class or race as evil. It fosters the conditions in the heart to commit atrocities and justify them as good. Solzhenitsyn summarizes his conclusion about human nature with the antithesis (ibid. p. 231),
If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
The attitude echoes what Scripture says of the human heart (Psalm 14:2-3, ESV),
The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man,
to see if there are any who understand,
who seek after God.They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
there is none who does good,
not even one.
And also echoes what it says about mortifying the flesh, battling against the corruption inside your own heart that constantly bids you turn away from God and set yourself up as the god of your own life.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lays out convincing, detailed arguments about why Communism is antithetical to a healthy worldview. He delves into the human heart to illuminate the seat of evil. And in the end, he provides the only antidote for this malady: repentance (ibid. p. 583),
All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: Without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek in vain. The resources we have set aside for ourselves are too impoverished for the task. We must first recognize the horror perpetrated not by some outside force, not by class or national enemies, but within each of us individually, and within every society.
The Spirit of Communism, which is antithetical to the Gospel and a Christian worldview, has permeated throughout society, and the starting point for fighting against it is to recognize the ways that it has permeated into our hearts and repent of it. Christians cannot expect to bring harmony through compromising with it or through some Hegelian synthesis of the two diametrically opposed worldviews. It is a fork in the road and only one route is possible. Solzhenitsyn has been down the wrong road himself and has lived in a society that has barreled down that road without inhibition. Russia suffered the dire consequences. He was gracious and talented enough to provide a lurid warning sign in the hopes that it might ward off the same consequences in our society, but it is up to us to heed that warning.