Solzhenitsyn''s politics

from National Review June 2024

'Solzhenitsyn understands the character of the Soviet regime — the destruction of human nature, the denial of rights, the lies, and the violence in pursuit of a future that always remained illusory despite its supposed historical-determinist inevitability. In Solzhenitsyn’s words, the Gulag is “the Big Zone — the Big Camp Compound — comprising the whole country.” The Russian people need to defy “the Gulag country” that has enveloped all of the USSR. They must refuse to live by lies. Every person has direct experience, at some level, of the Soviet regime’s injustice, violence, and terror. Resistance against such tyranny requires as a corollary the acceptance, if not the welcoming, of suffering in the pursuit of truth and freedom. At the end of one of the most important chapters, “The Bluecaps,” Solzhenitsyn interrelates evil, truth, and justice: “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” He emphasizes the lasting problem: “Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth.'

FROM his website- 'For Solzhenitsyn, democracy was far from being a universal principle. Like Tocqueville, he looked for ways to mitigate its likely excesses. “We choose [democracy] in full awareness of its faults and with the intention of seeking ways to overcome them.” He did develop a sympathy for democracy at the local level, what he called “the democracy of small areas,” in part because he remembered the zemstva, those promising organs of rural self-government established in 1864 during the age of the Great Reforms under Tsar Alexander II, which had been replaced by the Bolsheviks with Soviet collectives. Solzhenitsyn also recalled with pleasure the time he witnessed an election in the Swiss canton of Appenzell. Officials there spoke of individual freedoms linked to self-limitation, which Solzhenitsyn regarded as essential to responsible political and personal conduct. Freedom, in his view, had less to do with an external lack of restraint than with internal self-control. Based upon his experience in the gulag, he knew that “we can firmly assert our inner freedom even in an environment that is externally unfree.” '  https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/whats-new/2021/1/14/solzhenitsyn-the-anti-politician

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Commentary

The West “turned out to be not what we [dissidents] had hoped and expected; it was not living by the ‘right’ values nor was it headed in the ‘right’ direction.” America was no longer the land of the free but of the licentious. The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. Having written a series of novels about how Russia succumbed to Communism, Solzhenitsyn smelled the same social and intellectual rot among us. He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient. We have continued to follow the path to disaster he mapped. https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-warned-west/

-ke

post in progress