Marx, Lenin, Solzhenitsyn, and the Meaning of the Russian Revolution

good evening I'm Matthew Spalding I'm associate vice president Dean for Hillsdale College here in Washington DC welcome to Albuquerque Center for Constitutional studies and citizenship our lecture tonight is in association with the hundredth anniversary of an important event and in the true Hillsdale way we try to think through what is the best way to have that kind of conversation but of course through great thinkers and in discussing the our topic this evening about the Russian Revolution we are looking through the eyes of Marx Lenin and souls and eats in a man who influenced man who was in the middle of and a man who suffered under but the other thing that's important for tonight is that we were interested in having a talk about ideas in this way and it just so happens that one of our great professors from campus teaches this subject and I'm happy to say is a colleague and a good friend of mine and I'm very happy to have him here I learned early he's never been to Washington DC before which is a remarkable thing and I'm way time after a few drinks I'll get the real story as is our tradition we have one of our current students introduce our speaker more formally David doors a junior studying politics in history he's on the WIPP program working for representative Mike Bishop on campus he's part of the few good min program at Hillsdale created community focused volunteer group he's a member of Pi Alpha Theta History honorary and among other things while he's here in Washington C he's taking my class on statesmanship and will be tested based on his how well he does this evening so David [Applause] I want to thank dr. Spaulding for his kind words and want to preemptively um express my sorrow for disappointing him I have the honor today of introducing dr. John grant he's an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College after earning his Bachelor of Arts a Eureka College in Illinois he went on to receive his master's and PhD from the University of Dallas he is also an adjunct fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of statesmanship and political philosophy and he is also a contributor to toured an American conservatism the birth of constitutional conservatism during the Progressive Era please join me in welcoming dr. John Graham thank you all for being here and and as Matt mentioned I avoid large cities as a rule in Washington DC in particular and I mean no offense when I say that but the just a few blocks of traffic getting here rattled my nerves like oh my god and like I want to get back to Hillsdale where if you stopped at a light it's a frustration you know I think this is terrible I had to stop once at a stoplight okay so I'm going to talk about as Matt mentioned marshland and souls needs to know the meaning of the Russian Revolution and I'll start I'm not known for my great humility but I will have to admit some limitations here one I have no Russian some of you I'm in Washington DC they're my people here actually speak Russian and that you know so the works of souls and eats them that have not been translated and those are there's a few of those I haven't had the opportunity to read and I'm also not an expert on the Russian Revolution itself I'm more interested in souls in each sense view I mean I know something about it and if you have a question I'll try and relate that to how that works and then the the last and perhaps most dishonorable I feel a little derpy so if I miss something I have a five month old daughter who's wonderful she's the first night ever she decided basically not to sleep at all last night usually she sleeps eight solid hours so I two hours sleep and how did you I like to fly flatter myself she's upset that I'm leaving her and she wanted but I've probably just gas or something so if you notice any you didn't talk about some you feel free to bring that up I became interested in Marxism and souls Neeson over twenty years ago when I was a grad student for two reasons Minh Assad because my own case is interesting but because I think it's good reasons for being interested in this topic one is that Marxism as it was worked in the USSR is an exemplary instance of ideological tyranny I mean it's it's there's a lot of if you really want to see what is it but a tyranny that wants to get into people's souls I mean there been tyrannies around forever you know the classics talk about tyrannies Plato Aristotle what have you but IDIA logical tyranny of the that's the new thing and I'll say more about what that means Souls and second Solzhenitsyn is a great help in grasping not only the nature of Marx's tyranny but the spiritual crisis of our time and the last six months or so so I've really been thinking about is why do we do some of the insane things we do you can't explain as a matter of policy difference or something like that and and the three authors I think are most helpful in getting some answers to this question our souls and Eason Nietzsche and Dostoevsky especially in his demons and brothers karamazov and I would put souls in Easton at the rank of a Nietzsche or Dostoevsky and they're different they have differences amongst each other but is a great thinker the hard part about studying Souls in each son and his in trying to see how he understood the Russian Revolution and the events subsequent to that for us is you know in some of you probably read the Gulag Archipelago I know around a bunch of well-educated people here it's this long horror story right of this how do people how do people endure this shorter versions this is one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and souls and eaten while portraying the horror in you might remember this if you had a chance to read the huge three volumes or one of the abridged versions is he blast prison thanked it which is kind of a remarkable thing considering the take you know eight years in brutal conditions almost died of cancer almost died a number of times because it made him think he was a Marxist when he was sent away he was he he didn't like Stalin but he was a believing Marxist and it made him confront things and made him think about God he'd never really taken it seriously he'd accepted the Marxist indoctrination about that that God is just a religion in general just lie to appease the masses and keep them from knowing their misery and throwing off their chains and so now I'm really thankful that we don't have concentration camps here and the other really kind of terrible necessity in our lives but it also makes it really hard to really try and figure things like this out from the comfort of our of our lives I mean I marvel at central I believe this is air conditioning I'm coming where the heat was just on but it's great I mean and and but it makes us soft I don't wanna get rid of it but it does it is an impediment to thought not air conditioning per se but just you know DC the capital of the probably the most powerful nation the world has ever seen but poor Americans live lives a Roman Emperor would envy in terms of the luxury so it's it's have a friend a mutual friend dr. Spaulding on a man named John Murray nice oft times are hard times in cases of thought if you're trying to think you know that's I think that's very well put but despite the wonders of the times we live in you know the modern medicine comfort wealth all these things we there's still a lot of rot in our country and I'm and that won't be a surprise to hear it probably from this podium a lot of problems and a lot of things superficially you know yes there's great wealth there's also depending on how you count it between twenty and a hundred trillion dollars and debt you know so things like that okay so that there's a weak not just intellectual curiosity then although that's a good thing that would drive us to figure this out but we need to understand what tyranny is what especially ideological tyranny and it's dangerous even today and in trying I always think it's imperative to make any time I speak with students for another group it has to be useful for life otherwise that you're just kind of you know you might as well give a talk on stamp collecting or butterflies or but you all find things but really who cares at the end of the day baseball cards whatever is it has to why why should we care about this and the objection I think and an obvious objection to why would we care about the Russian Revolution and Marxism or souls Neeson's view of it this hundred-year-old event I mean we won the Cold War right that's the and there's not that many Marxist around there are people who are officially Marxist still floating around but they don't I don't think they really mean it I mean China is not really a communist country in any meaningful they're not looking forward to the classless society and neither was Hugo Chavez has been as way lower or North Korea or what have you but post-modernism and its attendant problems are very much dominant today and are related to Marxism we're all try and make that case so try and say something about this in a nutshell and you know feel free to press me on this in the QA what post-modernism does is deny that it's possible and I mean people like Richard Rorty leotard Jacques Derrida it's the deny that it's possible to get at truth with a capital T you might so you might be able to know contingent facts to use rorty's language or something like that but they don't they don't tell you anything about how to live you can't get a just and unjust out of this you guys know richard rorty's is probably the most prominent american academic philosopher in recent times died maybe ten years ago now and all that all all these facts are merely contingent phenomena that don't attach to any larger meaning and don't tell us what justice is or how to live so you're left with with prejudice and rory says well I hope that you have good prejudices like you want to be kind to people but when pressed well can you give a reason not to be a Nazi he says no no I just hope you won't because I don't like it it's not my preference and that's a pretty disturbing place to be and intellectually and it's it's not just roaring those handful of thinkers if you want to entertain yourself there's a great Twitter feed you I don't even tweet but you can look these things up on the internet new it's called real peer review you should you should really look at this it'll make you laugh or cry depending on your mood but and these young academics pseudonymous of course because this gets them in trouble they take the abstracts from real peer-reviewed articles and I've discovered there's an entire new field of academia which is a bunch of Auto ethnography which means you describe how you feel about stuff and and this gets this is good people have always done this right that's fine but how do you peer-review someone else's feelings and and it's badly written too is they're not even doing good grammar checks usually but you know but it makes sense well that's all you've got is your feelings is your preferences your prejudices there's no there's no other no other guide to wife to tell you how to will and so the consequence of this is some type of obscurantism or I've got my truth that I'm either too taking this phrase from the German American Thinker Leo's trials took a fanatical obscurantism and the introduction to this book city and man just a threat in his time that was over fifty years ago where I've got my own private truth and I'm going to shove it down everybody else's throat well that's one the other is not fanatical we're just pursue pleasure and and and do whatever you want heedless of the common good and the two-tire not necessarily opposed to each other Harvey Weinstein comes to mind is someone who combined both you know relentless ideological propaganda on behalf of modern liberalism and utmost degradation in his personal life and what would a Richard Rorty or most modern American academics have to say about why that's bad they couldn't really give any answer except say they don't like it an tyfa and that you know that's that's fanatical obscurantism there they don't even have a plan that the marxist at least had a vision of the future evil but here's how we're gonna get there here's what the end is to the classless society we're no human being oppresses any other human being the anti-fog is tearing stuff down but from what I can tell and on closer to home because I doubt there's many any Foss sympathizers in the room but we have just meaningless stupid slogans like being on the right side of history it's just drivel that means nothing and it's dangerous because it empowers well we got to do this because we're on the right side of history or nation-building how's that going you know it's just the slogan we keep hearing about without much content or sanity so but that's my view that's that's the that's it those are those are terms that come in our intellectual framework now you know they talked about a lot they're out there and so what Solzhenitsyn shows us and I'm thinking especially of his Gulag Archipelago and his beautiful novel in the first circle that despite scientific pretensions that the marxist had so for instance Engels in his eulogy of Marx compared him to Darwin and just as Darwin had discovered the law supposedly of evolution of non-human life especially in Engels account Marx that understood the real motor of human history class conflict and that's a scientific true observation and so a lot of academic accounts of Marxism stressed that side of Marxism if you've ever soldiered through if you you know you're mad at yourself or you've got a child you want to punish like a 17 year old make them breed parts of desk happy tall or Marxist Grund risa it's grim stuff and but the claim is these are scientific accounts of how the economy works and what that means for human life and so that's that's there certainly Engels like to talk about scientific socialism I'm not a utopian dreamer I'm we marks and I understand scientific or true socialism is but I think what souls and Eastin shows us is despite those pretensions Marxism Bolshevism is really at its core based on the obscure insist denial of the possibility of there being a god or a higher being that can tell us what to do or constrain our will and the possibility of any truth and some some slogans that souls need some likes to use to exemplify this taken from the Russian Bolsheviks Soviet Bolsheviks nature we will teach freedom we will reach was one of them in other words we're going to conquer nature and this is especially there's this part of the Gulag Archipelago where he talks about these forced labor projects which were done with basically maybe Bronze Age tools the tens of thousands of political prisoners would be sent out in the winter to build a canal for instance the White Sea canal were many almost all of them perished of course they're using wooden wheelbarrows on you know ground that was and hand tools and ground was frozen three feet deep and he thought what that showed they're not really interested in science you're not you're you just think if you just apply enough will you'll transform the given souls Newton also talks about the gulag as the Soviet sewage disposal system that's because our sewage disposal system and he uses that metaphor because of course sewage is that's nasty stuff that would be poisonous but you treat it and it becomes benign and so the point of the forced labor camps was not directly death although there was an awful lot of that a very great deal of it it was the creation of the new Soviet man helping to bring about the classless society the utopian ideal the idea being you are you have these antisocial thoughts you're not willing to pull in the harness for the common good and so we're going to strip you of everything and Marx like to talk about how the proletariat which is the class that has nothing and so they they that's why they're the rebel shanira class would guided by the party driven by people like Marx and well the the concentration camps were meant to to do that and the whole career of souls and Easton he's not the only one I mean there are quite a few intelligent dissidents who rebelled against that proves that that can't work it's willfully shoving we're gonna force you into this mold and make you what we want that's not going to happen well it can happen but it's not going to produce the desired result so yet the the the attempt to remake nature and especially human nature was was practiced by Lenin and Stalin and advocated by Marx and that's often denied by academics academics which is kind of astonishing because Marx talked about how you need revolutionary terror you need to violate booze wah wah you should use labor forced labor as a means of social corrective and works like his critique of the Gulf the program and address to the Central Committee he also never finished desk capitalist he kept trying to foment revolution I mean it's kind of a nice anecdote that shows you how he thought about the place of science versus revolutionary activity so to switch gears to two souls and Eastin on the revolution I'm trying to summarize he's got so far in English three volumes these massive volumes August 1914 November 1916 and the first part of March 1917 it's about twenty-five twenty-six hundred pages altogether I think kind of defy their kind of like historical novels but that doesn't quite do them justice they're mix of history and fiction meant to show you what the revolution was like so I'm gonna try and summarize this in a couple of paragraphs so you know and I thought it made me think about its hopefully that hopefully it's helpful what one of the things Souls needs and sets out to prove is there was no inevitability to the Bolshevik Revolution which is the Marxist claim that one of the fundamental Marxist claims you have to have the revolution because of the contradictions that are within capitalism itself the souls in each scens portrayal he does not he's not using the second and didactic treatise he just shows these different actors most of them historical some of them fictional that Russia's history and the choices of a large number of people at the time and not dialectical materialism into the Marxist claim and class conflict brought the revolution into being and just for some examples August 1914 is is mostly about the rush the Russian German Battle of Tannenberg the opening of world war one where the Russians launched a hasty offensive at the request of the French to slow down the German onslaught in the West that divert resources was the idea and in the course of this this very amazing portrait of the battle and the characters in it Souls Neeson shows they could have beat the Germans look what have happened at that battle was it it was it was a very plausible thing there was a few choices made at particular points especially the character of the general who is a this not the kind of general you want he was a Tolstoy and fatalist he didn't believe human beings could affect events you know that's you I can you can't be on the Joint Chiefs of Staff if you think Tolstoy was right you know in war and peace about this this is a problem but nobody checked that box on the application and it's it's more complicated than that but that was a part of it even then they almost won and think that in other words the war might have gone very differently and without Russian participation in the war souls Nissen depicts a great length you would never had the Bolshevik Revolution you had massive numbers of Russians dying for no apparent purpose and the instability the anger at the regime and the instability who aided the Bolsheviks you also have the this character I'll say a little bit more about him momentarily Peter Stolypin who was Nicholas the seconds Prime Minister interior minister and Prime Minister between 1906 and 1908 so the period after the revolution 1905 and some of you may know and somebody may not there was a revolution 1905 that almost brought the regime down narrowly fended off its dilip in what is portrayed by souls in each sin as a sort of model statesman who began this program of political reform and I'll say more about the details but that if that had been allowed to carry out and still even also thought Russia's Imperial ventures were catastrophic and he would oppose intervention in World War one and behalf of the Western powers it was the one of the precipitating factors in the 1905 revolution was the Russian defeat at the hands of the Japanese in the 1904 1905 war which dilip and thought why are we fighting the Japanese over Manchuria we don't need Matt we don't this is bad and the Tsar would listen to him for a time and the thought was well perhaps his advice could have prevailed later these examples to show there wasn't this didn't have to happen they also had a very weak czar I mean nicholas ii was a really kind of a nice fellow who meant well but hated to make decisions and when you're in the regime that's crumbling and fighting a world war that's not it's right up there with the Tolstoy in general that's a matter of choice there are chance excuse me there's no historical inevitability that the last Tsar will be only semi-competent and weak-willed the particular history of the Russian intelligentsia the the intellectual class are all thought and this is one of the most important parts I think of souls Neeson's portrayal to revolution they all agreed on two things that the Tsar had to go because anything else would be better all the educated people in Russia just knew we couldn't do worse than the Tsar we can see that was really really really mistaken right but it's just kind of obviously a stupid view you know those of us paying attention might have noticed that man Llumar Gaddafi was really bad Libya is worse now I mean there's there's worse than nutty nuts guys who'd like to have a mazzani and bodyguards running around them and there's worse there's chaos there massive refugee crises of the reopening of slave markets these are some things that have you know but the Obama administration just knew will bring will bring democracy does no problem it's what could possibly go wrong that's one of my favorite phrases you guys might hear this is what these pop culture phrases what could possibly go wrong and I keep thinking that about so many things our government does in sarcastic it's obviously gonna work out so intelligent all the intellectuals we know the Tsar has to go and what will happen is western-style parliamentary democracy that's just going to happen [Music] it's still still not happening in Russia you know 100 years later and by the way that's something I'd be happy to talk about in the Q&A if we want to talk about souls in need since views of Putin in the contemporary situation I'll do my best with that but the other thing so the Czar's gotta go the other thing was we have to continue the war with Germany and this you know why and we don't talk much I mean time most of you unless you had some kind of Advanced Study don't read much about what did it mean to be a Russian fighting on against the Germans led by semi competent officers and human wave attacks it was dispiriting their losses were very great and they were the best of the society and that people will talk about this in relation to the the you know people who died on the Somme or Verdun or what have you yeap but well a lot of Russians who were loyal to the regime and decent the type of people that didn't shirk service or trying to become a government bureaucrat to avoid being sent to the front where they were the type of people put into the meat grinder one of the things that made the the fall of the Czar possible was he had sent his own regiments to the front he didn't hold him back so sort of palace guard you know so that when they came back they were all chewed up and unable to resist very well by the time they got there so that but you don't have to have an intelligence you like that and by the way I think this is very relevant for us and especially in a town when I wear what was Hillary's about 93% and DC I mean ninety-six sorry you know wow that's a lot of powerful people with a very homogeneous viewpoint maybe that's not always a good thing that would have been a very bad thing I hope I don't know but you guys but I'm really enjoying I'm just reading the articles about that Donna Brazile book and it's just it's just warmed the cockles of my tiny heart okay I digress I'm sorry and so also you have the the Bolsheviks had this had to have a tremendous amount of luck the real success of the Bolsheviks was in souls in each sense account made possible by the karinski government the provisional government of kind of moderate liberals the constitutional democrats the cadets is the is the but that doesn't really say much that doesn't meet with the military and yes they wanted western-style liberal democracy but they had a very great softness for bomb-throwing revolutionaries does this sound familiar you know I'm kind of tired of seeing people who you know dudes the kind of stuff auntie fog does don't get prosecuted all too often that's kind of why is that that's anyway this is bad so this this that really guaranteed the success of the Bolsheviks which was this tiny splinter group who had one thing going for them which was the iron will and the linen who had perfected over decades of splitting the party you might think his revolutionary you'd want to get as many people involved as you could that was never Lenin's thing it was always you have to agree with me I'll purge you I'll purge you I'll purge you and souls and Easton has a book called from these these these books about the world war one called linen and Zurich whereas this portrayal of Lenin that he's sitting when he had 15 followers in Zurich he'd be excommunicating people for you you're not disagreeing with Bernstein and the Social Democrats enough you get out you know and you how's this gonna lead to success and perversely it did because he he didn't waver everybody else kind of dithering and wavering and you know karinski and his people especially and London had many many terrible defects but being lacking focus was not one of them but that was that didn't have to happen either you know if you hadn't had linin there who in many ways was kind of a comically incompetent figure also if he hadn't had the help of Germany getting him back into the country you know yet to get from Switzerland Germany another historical accident so there was nothing that things happened Souls needs insane because of predominantly because of too that the circumstances which do exercise a coercive effect on things the Russian intelligentsia had been opposed to the Tsar for probably 7080 years you know since the Decembrists were prominent that was not going to go away anytime soon that's something that's going to have in effect but then you still have all these other choices that that had to be made have that come out so the idea that well there's an inevitability to this because of the defects of capitalism that's not that's not borne out by the evidence to go back to Marx Lenin and Stalin I put it a few minutes ago Marx advocated this stuff and Lenin and Stalin carried it out so it's very common in in the scholarship to see Stalin wasn't a real Marxist he was a deviation as he would he wanted a cult of personality was one of the terms that came and maybe Lenin too depending on who you're talking to but Marx was a was a hugging unicorns and and dancing after rainbows kind of guy and it could meaning the class of society will come about inexorably because of economic factors and you won't need to have these terrible blood baths and now and souls and Eason says shows that's just flat wrong and he especially does this in the gulag archipelago where you quotes Marx and we're advocating this kind of stuff and then goes into great detail about the terroristic measures employed by Lenin mass murder concentration all the features for which Stalinism is famous were part of the Leninist regime let Stalin just built on that that Lennon's success but that I don't know it's it's a to try and get clear on what the core of Marxism is he souls Neeson's view I think correctly you know characterizes as revolutionary violence driven by Promethean rage burning anger at the injustice is just there that are all around us and this rage aiming at utopian world free of human oppression and division I think the error of many is to say the key in Marxist scream work of the Marxist framework for dealing with this is his account of economics and dialectical materialism I think what Souls needs and shows and what you if you study Marxist comes out too is that Marxist ideology is simply a tool intended to negate the given and transform the human condition he wasn't in other words he wasn't attached that attached the particular doctrines another commonplace about the Russian or situation which became the Soviet situation is well that's not really Marxist because they hadn't passed through all the stages of Marxist economic development they hadn't fully industrialized most Russians in 1917 like 80% I think were peasants living on the way out and doing farming and but Marx himself wrote a preface to the manifesto where he said if you can have a revolution in Russia this was in 1871 when there was much less industrialism than there was in 1917 17 go ahead and do it the point is to have the revolution let's get that going let's get that party started and drive that on and of course in Marx he says it's got a famous statement his theses on Feuerbach the problem with philosophy prior to me is that the thought has been you need to contemplate or understand world but the real point is to change it so revolutionary practice revolutionary change that's the key thing especially revolutionary terror and other excesses in the Marxist things like bank robberies to support your work you know Stalin kind of started off as a bank robber for the Marxist all of this aiming at eliminating everything private I mean so everyone knows I think that Marxist want to get rid of private property in the ordinary sense you know houses and things like that but it's everything private that's the family there's that that's a private Association which separates human beings from each other and hence is obstacle to full human liberation religious beliefs because having private ideas about God and one's duties to God that can't work Marx has got a really nasty essay called on the Jewish Question where he explores this at some at some length these things all need to be eliminated allowing human beings to become what Marx called species beings and what he meant by that is we would in the to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton feel each other's pain you know that we once you've eliminated those divisions between human beings you'll appropriate each other senses so private property the family religion those they keep us from from being properly sympathetic and compassionate toward each other to really truly loving and feeling solidarity with other human beings that's the end goal of the Marxist revolution that's something we don't see today I mean if you think of the you know the privileged movement there's a lot of stuff about that going on right and complaints about privilege and etc etc but I can't really tell what are you looking for you know a world free of privilege you mean a world where no one is better-looking or smarter or more athletic or nobody gets old and dies or I've got all sorts of defects I'm gonna spare you my catalog but they're just they're you know it's that's the way human life is and baby grab my glasses last night I thought oh no she breaks these things I'm blind as a bat never get how will I get you know it's you know now should i rage against God for that I think that's kind of crazy that's the thing you just deal with it as best you can you know not Marx we need to overcome those thing and then all those evils will go away except death he never wants to get into that he'd never he never quite bring himself to say people won't die anymore or what about rejected love not that anybody in this room has ever experienced that right you know you love somebody and they don't love you back and Wow how do you deal with stuff like that those uh that's that's there but that no we need to get over that and we'll revolutionary violence directed by a small party and so Marxist like to talk about the proletariat but in Marxism and in the in a how it played out in the Soviet Union the proletariat is literally depicted as dirt that's that's a metaphor Marx use inanimate matter that has to be struck by the lightning of thought of the party leadership that will guide it and so the party is really the central thing that's that's the they'll they'll provide with linen called the guideline that's you know that they'll tell you how to how do house should go and the party rules in the worst possible way by terror but more commonly and perhaps more importantly in some way by lies radiology you know by they used to be the statues in the Soviet Union of this little boy who turned his parents in for worshipping God and you know I can remember his name is famous and the regime's saying this is an exemplar this is who you want to follow this is who you want to to be and to elaborate a bit on what ideology means because that's least what it means for Souls and neaten it means a doctrine and you could define this differently so just the souls an instant thinks which i think is helpful I had to put this together I I thought I knew what he meant by it so I was preparing for this talk and I spent a couple weeks putting things together in various writings he doesn't a doctrine at variance with reality that justifies evil so it's not any principle or belief some traditional conservatives will say any apps principals ruinous it's going to lead you to the French Revolution it's bad the Declaration of Independence is bad what have you and souls in need since no that's not that's not what I'm talking about has to be incorrect it has to be a lie you make people believe and it justifies evil and that real effect of this is to enable people to do unspeakable things with a good conscience and in the glory capella go souls nice in contrast evil and Shakespeare with ideological evil and you know think of somebody ah go and Shakespeare's Othello right I mean he's a nasty guy spreading dissension and but it bothers him actually his conscience on dozen souls and need some points off and it's pretty lemon and evil and compare that to a Stalin who kills millions and sleeps like a baby because he's got this theoretical justification in his mind that I'm really doing Souls Neeson has a beautiful portrait of Stalin in I think it's chapters 18 to 23 of his novel in the first circle where Stalin he kind of thinks to himself as a suffering servant he's like these stupid people I have to keep killing them and selling them to camps if they just do what I told them to do I wouldn't have to do this and it's such a burden being me you know and it's it's a I think that's pretty darn accurate but and so and of course ideology in that case is not just Marxist ideology it's any doctrine which is a at variance with reality and the you force people to adhere to and the cause is evil it's a lie that is used to justify evil I want to go on too long I wanted to say something about the positive teaching of souls in each sin then what do you do with this though we give this problem of ideology in terms of statesmanship I want to say a little more about stew leapin and the he's clearly a model for souls and eats in' he has I think it's chapters 8 and in sixty to seventy three of August 1914 are all about stew leapin and what's to weepin saw he really do try and condense this down to key points his central idea was the peasants need to be made part of the country there Russian peasantry lived in very harsh conditions at that time they had been emancipated from serfdom I believe in 1861 if memory serves but then they're stuck in a sort of communal land arrangement where there was no incentive to be as productive as you could be right that the think of Aristotle's argument against communism and the first five chapters of book two of the politics we're not gonna care about stuff that's in common for instance and so still even saw that he's that we've got to get the peasantry which was the which had a lot of virtues was not ill-disposed towards the regime didn't hate the Czar but was treated pretty badly we've got to help help them uplift them into a better condition by granting them rights starting with here's property rights and then moving to political enfranchisement so a very hard-headed analysis that people who had no experience of freedom can't magically you're not gonna all of a sudden have great democracy spring out then it's not gonna work so but you can begin moving towards that the other ways you have to have the rule of law so private property for the peasants and the rule of law and that's a slogan that gets tossed around a lot in America I think still epin meant by that something like what the founders are our founders net protecting people's rights it's not it's not merely a complex term of jargon you used in Supreme Court cases just very simply need to protect people's rights and after the 1905 revolution there was wave of terrorism across lawlessness and still eep and restored order and made a lot of enemies doing it they probably executed about 5,000 people with summary court martials to because it the situation had gotten out of hand and the ordinary courts were unable to do that but it looked like the regime was falling and all of a sudden it was back on its feet again and and making reforms moving towards helping the peasants still even also this was defeated by the right he was hated by both the left and the right in Russia wanted to remove all the political disabilities on the Jews in Russia they'd been denied full rights this was a was a real serious problem that he saw and but that didn't work because the right the right in Russia said we can't change anything the left said you have to change everything this is really bad bad situation so he wanted to leapin wanted to work within the Russian Revolution you utilize these these things what can we do instead of impose an abstract model on the situation once again something we'd be well advised to think about boy that seems pretty smart and the tragedy is he was he was assassinated by a combination a conspiracy from the left and the right in 1911 and so one of the moral turning points and he didn't die right away and as he lay sick the Czar couldn't be bothered to even visit him although he'd been shot right in front of him and soul Sinise and this transitions to my other point you can't just have political reform for souls in eats and he's famous there's a famous phrase Neve archipelago I mean if you might have seen to be if you have read it that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart and his point is it doesn't it's it's not classes it's not groups that have privilege in our time it's every human being has to struggle with being good it's the temptation to do evil and so the primary thing for souls in need said yes politics is important good statesmanship is tremendous importance and it could have forced all the horrors that came with Bolshevism but what you also have to have is individual serious about reforming themselves not passive ops not passive objects that government will take in hand and turn into something they want and so he has a nice short piece you could look this up it's online even live not by lies this is from the early seventies and this is when things are getting a little looser that not as bad as they had been and he sits okay now it's things are loosening up we can now concentrate to stop lying and he meant individual he didn't mean just the leaders line he meant individuals have to start stop pretending they believe this nonsense ideology which is ruinous they have to stop cow towing well there's always rationalization for that right if I say something I'll get in trouble I have to support my family there's always reasons for that and souls needs to saying you can't have that you have to fight this so this makes them unpopular with everybody cuz of course if you you know right and left want to say if you adopt our program things will go well wherever you're at I mean if that division applies but and he's no you also have to have this you have to have he says especially and the fundamental human characteristic he says in in this essay repentance and self-limitation the life of Nations is repentance that's that's what makes us human more than anything else our ability to see that we've done something wrong and to his individual se and his Nations - there's a national duty we're not going to do that anymore we're sorry we did it and not just say you're sorry but don't do it anymore you know stop it as much as one can you know given human nature and the way it is and realizing I've done these wrong things where our nation has or what have you then say what stop doing them let's limit ourselves because usually these things are excesses and eat especially criticizes Russian imperialism and then Soviet imperialism and since one of the things Russia has to do to overcome its past once they get through he thought we'll get through this communist thing but if we're going to recover from them we have to embrace this idea non imperialism you know we could talk more about that in the Q&A if anybody wants to flush that out you also have to have a consciousness of God or you know and he souls Newton himself was a practicing came back to being a practicing member of a Russian Orthodox Church and he's very cautious in his statements about what people should do but it's from the generic way you have to realize there's a God is a higher being who imposes limits on us that we're not in the marxist phrase a man is the highest being for man and that's one of the things that allows all these revolutionary evils to occur so we have to get beyond that in his this you could look this up online - it's a short piece as opposed to the 2,500 pages of novels on the on the first world war that his Templeton address which his men have forgotten God is the refrain throughout that's what led to all these evils he doesn't mean a specific if only we had you know whatever version of Christianity particular that he sees saying I'm just God simply and and then that unleashes the human will to do all these sorts of evil things I'm gonna stop there so we can have some Q&A and yeah I look forward your questions [Applause] yeah thank you for your talk I'm just curious do you see anything in Solzhenitsyn where he reflects on Russian culture as being particularly vulnerable to this or does he reject that idea that's a that's a great question in he it's a great question because he was really angry at the standard line of American Soviet ologist was Russia is a country that's always had despots and if you guys ever read George kennen's long telegram you'll see that this is a view you find usually in people like pipes and stuff like that very intelligent people and his argument is tonight the Facebook status it's complicated we had problems but we also have a lot of resources that these people don't acknowledge and and that there was in some areas of Russia there was a long history of local self-rule and local self-government and his big political hope he thought what you have to do first is start with local self-government you can't impose a top-down he said we've done some of that and sometimes in our history let's let's try and build on that also orthodoxy had been a great resource and he points out you know the Russians kept their character in their chin up for 200 years under brutal Mongol rule because of the Orthodox faith that was much attenuated by westernizing reforms put in place by the czars the persecution of old believers and this is too abstruse for you guys but Peter the Great decided we've got to be more Western and found a friendly patriarch to help implement that and the people that resisted were brutally brutally persecuted people who you have to change the way you make the sign of the Cross you have to stop doing this and so souls even thought this was a contributing cost of world war one this you know thing from the 18th century because it's so spiritually Riven the country but that's still a resource that's there and and yeah so he thought no Russia's not you we've got a lot of bad things in our history that would lend but we're not uniquely evil and other countries have had their problems too and we can you know we can do this we're not doomed because of Russia to e slavish and despotic I'm going forward into modern times here how is this synthesis of what you're talking about here feed into what Putin is doing and his and his ideas about Russia my best here the I know I know quite a bit about what Seoul's a nice and thought about Putin and that's helpful in this it's hard to get actual facts about what's what what's going on in Russia because journalism is mostly dead from what I can tell like people going and what's happening instead of opining we starting with the opinion so souls and eaten took his bearings on how to be Putin from the disaster of the 1990s for Russia which he really thought Westerners did not appreciate the Russian regime Yeltsin in particular took basically wholesale the advice of their Western economic experts and what that meant was the immiseration of massive numbers suppose you need to privatize and liberalize which sounds great except what that meant was that people who already connected to political power just put their names on the title deeds you might say and so he he called it Russia's third time of troubles and the other types of troubles were times when basically there was very little government and there was widespread assassination clan feuding disasters he says the 1990s so he said Americans have to understand Putin is going to be popular because he stopped that so they can't they you know he thought he had his defects but he said look he's doing some good things one of them was elevating the place of the Orthodox Church and praising that and doing things like this got runs counter to many Western narratives the a 500-page of rich version of Garg archipelagos required in Russian high schools Putin you know so they've set up places where their perpetual prayers for the victims of communist and recognizing that is evil now Putin's not always good about that sometimes he'll yeah it's really too bad what happened after Stalin and Nick okay how's that work so that's the the downside there I think of how he would evaluate that and and I'm speaking for it he obviously can't speak for himself at this point I think he would say the problem with Putin is he doesn't view the spiritual angle not merely religious but the spiritual angle deeply enough he's to his heart headed and has served Russia well in some ways but in some other ways it cuts off them the need for that repentance and soft limitation that's going to he would very much oppose what we're doing in Russia's near abroad and he was talking about that in the 90s and saying America and the West should let we need to sort this out with the people's around this there's a long history there and and so and he felt that personally because his mother was Ukrainian his father was Russian and so he thought he didn't think the Ukraine should be kept as part of Russia by force but he thought we should really try and make that work through you know working this out amongst ourselves because we have this long history together you know so hope that was some help yeah but really figure out what's going on there I have a lot of students last and what should I read about what's going on in Russian look I don't know I can't find it's hard to find there's if you know Christopher Caldwell has a good book out but it's hard to find it's hard to find stuff what's just happening you know yeah thank you yes my name is kami Barton with the Pakistani Spectator and my question is regardless what happened in space Union in 1917 isn't socialism has been part of human history from the very beginning for example if you see Jesus teaching or Islamic teaching they always talk about a little man they always talk about tithing and when Nixon talked about you know the people who have been forged and he was not talking about white millionaire he was talking about average you and more and similarly our current president even he loves to talk about little man even though he himself as a billionaire surfer Thanks yeah yeah yeah and this is a you know I'll try SiC two souls in eating because he's a lot smarter than I am he was no fan of the Western capitalism he saw because precisely he thought to put no limits on acquisition if it did not consider anything else and so I think what he wanted was a concern and you know you mentioned Christ you need to inculcate a concern for others make that an honorable noble thing to do to help them to be a concern for society or the common good in that way not merely how much can I get and and this really became obvious in the 90s in Russia to him when the capitalists who are not you know they're not there's not type of libertarians would like there they were there crony capitalists right just plundered the ordinary people and he was just furious at that he thought that was a terrible terrible evil and so he was willing to give Putin a lot of credit for putting an end to that and really helping the ordinary person yeah so no there was no and there has to be you know there's different ways to do this but it can't simply be I don't think and souls needs and certainly didn't think self-interest narrowly understood is my own aggrandizement will just help everybody else because there's always going to be people that aren't going to be helped is it not not just because of some character defect even but the differences in nobility all these things you know the disability even all these things age to not have a concern for that one of the recent souls needs and thought that Russia could repent was he had done a lot of work historiography on times when Russians were very forgiving of things like their neighbors debts and in the in the real sense of a debt like you owe me money and okay but I'm gonna forgive this because it's gonna throw you out in the street if you don't get it and you thought you know there's something here in us that in the past that we used to be able to do this so you know hope that was helpful we have time for one more question very dangerous to historians Robin history and I just want for the benefit of the audience is the realpolitik of the Russian Revolution so that we can compare it to the whole theory of Marxism Leninism sure number one the Bolsheviks were financed all the time for Western powers I was a political project yeah you know the portion is still 2007 90% of that Congress is for in London and then when Russia joined encanta and became an ally of Britain there was no Bolshevik Congress for nine years mmm-hmm cuz nobody had to pay a bill so all these ideology was absolutely secondary financing was first second when the Bolsheviks came back to Russia after the February revolution they had three slogans one was peace people he'd won the war but the second was lent to the peasants and the factories to the workers mm-hmm so basically all these people who fought on the side of the Bolsheviks in this bloody civil war 90% of them were peasant who be killed who believed that they personally gonna be enriched by stealing the land of somebody else none of them was moved by socialist Marxist latinus Bolshevik ideology yeah they were all motivated by personal profit because that's what they were promised and the workers were promised control on the factories which they interpret again as personal wealth sure sure so only after the Bolshevik took the power and established the KGB and the army and then they came back to say well let me tell you now how we're gonna build socialism yes I seem important to be that a real of argument made yeah I get that those I don't disagree with anything you said and actually in his work Solzhenitsyn he spends a lot of time and gotten a lot of fights with Westerners pointing out how the Bolsheviks were especially through this fellow taught with ties the German regime parvis was a huge financier of the Bolshevik movement and that the ordinary people were motivated but I think he would respond people like Lenin the people at the top were very much motivated by Bolshevik ideology but no I think I think you're right about that yeah and souls need some thought though he agrees with that now oh the idealist wanted to say no socialism was chosen for he's like no there's all these vulgar motors behind it too so that's one of the major themes of Lenin and Zurich actually is the connection to Western powers that Lenin had yeah first of all thanks for coming all the way down to the swamp I wanted to ask going back to human nature what salsa needs and would think we're doing from a domestic standpoint specifically our government is doing to try to distort human nature because obviously I don't think we have a very good understanding of what human nature is from a cultural standpoint and from a foreign policy standpoint we try to impress democracy on people who may not be so interested in it but from specifically from a domestic standpoint of policy speaking I think the probably the greatest thing would be the condition of the family which is you know it was of course the family was rent apart in cases where people were sent to concentration camps but in his work souls needs to spend a lot of time portraying the negative effects on family life in freedom you know which meaning people who are not and those those the attack on the family and and I don't think there's an ax marks a space attack on the family in America it's because other other things going on there they might be related I definitely think there's an attack on a nature going on there but the lack of concern for children in their development so that is really I don't think there's more misery caused by anything in America than no-fault divorce and I don't mean to offend anybody who's had it I mean I come from a home where there was divorce and you know it's just I'm not trying to say it's you know be judgy to individuals but the the lack of concern for right before I came to Hillsdale I taught at another place and was also worked in student life and you know sometimes these poor college kids would come in and their parents would be getting a divorce and the trauma that they due to that I mean they did come apart and I mean flat can't go from being excellent students to and those are these are kids are 20 21 years old and very little thought for that is is an example that comes to mind is if you if you don't think your relationship with your credit card companies working out you can't unilaterally break it off just because you think it's not very good but marriage no no no no no reason needed and that I think he would very much more than anything else to Sapru but now what's the solution whether that's government intervention or say that but certainly government could stop causing problems you know I think would be think something you would say he is the Soviet Union began to wind down he could see that he began to talk more about the importance of education the family two souls need synthesis to how are we gonna recover from this and you can't Moscow's not gonna solve these problems you know so the same here I don't think do you see can solve those problems not because something wrong with DC or Lansing or what-have-you but that's not really how that works but but could stop causing issues I think

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 49,048

Keywords:

Id: tdECJyL2iuE

Length: 60min 21sec (3621 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2017