Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag - Daniel J. Mahoney

good evening good evening welcome staff students alumni and Friends of Hillsdale College my name is Alex Nestor I'm a sophomore here studying economics and journalism and tonight I have the honor of introducing our speaker dr. Daniel J Mahoney is the Augustan professor and distinguished scholarship at Assumption College he earned his BA at the College of the Holy Cross and his MA and PhD at Catholic University of America dr. Mahoney has written for numerous publications including first things the Claremont Review of Books in The Wall Street Journal he is the book review editor of society in the executive editor of perspectives and political science he is the author of numerous books including Alexander Solzhenitsyn the ascent from ideology the conservative foundations of the liberal order and the other Solzhenitsyn telling the truth about a misunderstood writer and thinker he is the co-editor with Edward e Erickson of the Solzhenitsyn reader new and essential writings please help me in giving a warm welcome to dr. Daniel J Mahoney she was worried about pronouncing Solzhenitsyn but she did very well by the way if I had a little more time Solzhenitsyn had a very rich life he was born December 11th 1918 next year December 11 2018 will be his centenary this is death centenary of his birth and I would give you a little biographical account of Solzhenitsyn but it would take about 20 minutes and we don't have 20 minutes so I will try to do my best to fill in some details along the way my talk is entitled judging communism and all its works Solzhenitsyn's the Gulag Archipelago reconsidered and i'm going to begin by quoting a very famous passage early on in book 1 of the Gulag Archipelago a chapter called the Blue Caps Macbeth self justifications were feeble and his conscience devoured him yes even Iago was a little lamb to the imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's villains stopped short at a dozen corpses because they had no ideology ideology that is what gives villainy it's long sought justification and gives the villain the necessary steadfastness and determination thanks to etiology the 20th century was faded to experienced villainy on a scale calculated in the millions Alexander Solzhenitsyn writings remain the great scourge of the ideological justification of tyranny and terror the amplification of violence in the 20th century and the sole numbing mendacity that accompanied it cannot be blamed on purely accidental or contingent considerations nor can it be explained away is a mere product of the rush in tradition that's what they do over there or the residues of an Asiatic despotism alien to modernity and modern progress truth be told the ideological justification of utopia and power is part and parcel of philosophical and political modernity rooted in the unfounded belief that human nature and society can be transformed at a stroke the allure of a revolution that inaugurates a radically new human dispensation of progress that leaves Yuman nature behind in its wake our illusions at the heart of what Erich vogelin aptly called modernity without restraint the ideological justification of evil haunts modernity and modern progress and I insist they are not distinctively Russian phenomena in opposition to them Solzhenitsyn appealed to basic verities such as an unchanging human nature and an order of grace that is capable of elevating human souls that are also capable of great evil Solzhenitsyn's critiqued of ideological despotism of the Soviet or Maoist sort or Nazi sword for that matter is at the service of a more fundamental reaffirmation of the drama of good and evil in the human soul shorn of every utopian illusion his work finally points toward catharsis and spiritual ascent there is not a trace of niall ism or despair to be found in his writings light is ontologically prior to darkness just despite the persistence of evil in the human soul the contrast between Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and varlam shala moves Colima tails with its dark and unmitigated view of human nature could not be more striking that's the other great gulag work and shallow mouths conclusion was the fundamental truth about the human condition supports Aniel ism the man is a beast a man that there is no enduring truth there is no light there is no catharsis central to Solzhenitsyn's moral and political vision is the non-negotiable distinction between truth and falsehood Solzhenitsyn's target was precisely the ideological lie that presented evildoing as a necessary historically necessary stage in the faded progress of the human race he always insisted that the ideological lie was worse than violence and physical brutality ultimen ultimately more destructive of the integrity of the human soul after returning to Russia in May 1994 after 20 years of involuntary exile in the West 18 of those years spent in Cavendish Vermont he never wavered in telling the truth about communist totalitarianism and the lies that undergirded as he never tired of pointing out the only way forward was through repentance and telling the full truth about communism and all its works during a talk at the University of Saratov on September 13 1995 this is when Solzhenitsyn is already back in post-communist Russia Solzhenitsyn took aim at those who saw the Soviet regime as some kind of paradise pained by how deep illusions ran and how resonant resilient the lie still was he made clear that quote since the middle of the 1920s I have forgotten nothing end quote the atmosphere in Lenin's Russia was he said already full of cruelty to those of his interlocutors who whitewash Stalin he bore witness to quote the nightmarish beginnings of the 1930s when the entire edifice of the universe seemed ready to collapse everything we knew of human rate relations was destroyed that's all the quotation the best among the peasants were hurled unto unto wagons and freezing snow with their young children receiving no mercy no display of elementary human decency such Solzhenitsyn said was the human meaning of class struggle millions were killed and deported in what was the greatest crime of the Soviet regime the great catastrophe for Solzhenitsyn and that was the the killing of the independent peasantry many of the victims of the great terror of 1937 the people Arthur Kessler writes a back about were morally sullied in soul genesis view by their participation and previous waves of terror and collectivization against so-called enemies of the people some of Solzhenitsyn's interlocutors talking about 1994-1995 blame the destruction of the independent peasantry the flower of the russian nation and the ukrainian nature and I should add on the impending war however association remained unimpressed by this transparently mendacious argument but what if after the war he asks he told almost every group he met in those years about a secret decree promulgated by Stalin in 1948 that sentenced those on the caucuses the collective farms who failed to live up to impossible work norms almost all were women since man had largely left the collective farms to deportation to Siberia no one had heard of this absolutely no one Solzhenitsyn had published this notorious degree in 1993 in his collection the peasantry in the state and the book series research on modern Russian history such was Solzhenitsyn retort to those who saw nothing but unadulterated progress in the 70 year experience of Soviet ISM and I quote Solzhenitsyn ah the paradise that was extraordinary when here Solzhenitsyn's voice in its sardonic mode well-known to readers of the Gulag Archipelago a tried and true way of piercing through the veil of ideological mendacity in the three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago which appeared in the west between 1973 and 1976 or so although largely written in utmost secrecy in the winters of 1965 and 1966 Solzhenitsyn wrote them in the wrote the gulag in the forests of Estonia that's another story Solzhenitsyn had already slain the dragon of ideologies he did so with the rhetorical gifts of a world-class writer he had sifted through the accumulated experiences of 256 collaborators witnesses to the Soviet camps who had sent him narratives letters memoirs and other eyewitness accounts of applied ideology at work he of course also drew widely on his own first-hand experience of prison camp and exile in the Soviet Union beginning with the 2007 Russian edition of The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn provided a complete list of these hitherto invisible allies who made the writing of the Gulag Archipelago possible in this work he draws widely on their experiences so much so that the book has been characterized by the russian as john b dunlop as a person allistic feast since it gives human form to the millions of souls who were unjustly imprisoned or killed by the Bolsheviks in a crucial chapter in the third volume poetry under a tombstone truth under a stone Solzhenitsyn observes how in prison quote all our depersonalized with identical haircuts identical fuzz on their cheeks identical caps identical padded jackets he adds that quote the the face presents an image of the soul distorted by wind and Sun and dirt and heavy toil unquote the task of the philosophical poet is that of quote discerning the light of the soul beneath the depersonalized integrated exterior unquote of human beings and the camps but but Solzhenitsyn calls the sparks of the Spirit have a power of their own that literature alone can truly incarnate the Gulag Archipelago is what Solzhenitsyn called in its subtitle an experiment in literary investigation in no sports no small part because of its power to illuminate the sparks of the Spirit that miraculously survived the assaults of ideology human nature is more powerful than ideology God's grace is more powerful than imperfect human nature the Gulag Archipelago will be best remembered through to deathly prepared abridgements of that great work the first was prepared by my collaborator professor Edward Erickson in collaboration with Solzhenitsyn it was published in the United States Canada and the United Kingdom in 1985 the first abridgement coming in at 472 pages about a third of the original did justice to the essentials of the work and most importantly gave equal space to the elements of light and catharsis that were evident in the latter half of the work in other words a lot of people had this initial experience of picking up the Gulag Archipelago reading accounts of oppression of the human being being degraded and putting it down after a hundred pages they never got to those sections of the book that show the endurance of the human spirit or the resistance to evil or the capacity of some such as Solzhenitsyn to truly stand up to evil since 2007 that edition the American and English abridgement has been introduced by the journalist and historian and Applebaum in 2003 she published Bulaga history an excellent work indebted to both Solzhenitsyn and archival research the second abridgement prepared by natalia Solzhenitsyn Solzhenitsyn's Widow and published in Russia in 2010 for use in Russian high schools is equally well done it comes in at five hundred and ten pages in the Russian Edition here it is archipelago logged and at eight hundred ninety nine pages in the French translation of the two an antenna Bridgman that the integrity of the hole is scrupulously respected as are the special needs and interests of a Russian readership thus abridgement has been available in French since 2014 along with Natalia Solzhenitsyn's bracing introduction to the work suggestively entitled the gift of incarnation english-language versions of mrs. Olsen's Anita's essays have also appeared in the New Criterion in September 2012 and as an appendix to my own 2014 book the other Solzhenitsyn telling the truth about a misunderstood writer and thinker thinker drawn on Natalia Solzhenitsyn's wonderfully insightful introduction to the Gulag Archipelago I will highlight features of the work that get to the heart of its enduring achievement as the taya Solzhenitsyn notes Solzhenitsyn expertly tells the story of what he calls the history of our meeting the Soviet sewage disposal system his name for the Soviet system of repression this system was fueled by Lenin's decrees and by Stalin's edicts which tried precisely to efface the sparks of the spirit about which we have spoken note the reference to Lenin Solzhenitsyn rightly insists that Lenin is the initial architect of Soviet terror and totalitarianism it was Lenin who spoke in his essay how to organize the competition written on January 7th and 10th 1918 about the great ideological task of quote purging the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects Solzhenitsyn cites this essay early in Volume one of the Gulag Archipelago these insects and notice the rhetorical dehumanization of so-called enemies of the people that precedes their actual imprisonment or execution they included workers malingering at work people in the self-governing Zim's folk councils left over from the Zoras period nuns priests monks members of cooperatives suspect teachers eccentric Tolstoy ins and those of bourgeois class origin the number and kinds of incense to be purged would expand considerably under Stalin in the 1930s kulaks and by the way to be a Kulak you simply had to have two pigs in a cow it was the principle of ownership that made you a Kulak kulaks the most intelligent and industrious peasants became the dreaded class enemies and 85,000 priests and nuns were executed in 1937 alone and terror soon turned against the source of terror itself with the purges and the show trials in Moscow and elsewhere against loyal communists it really is true Solzhenitsyn does not have a great deal of sympathy for the men of 37 because they were complicit in the previous waves of repression in the organization of the competition against so-called enemies of the people mrs. Solzhenitsyn argues none of this was a matter as Khrushchev put it in 1956 of violations of socialist legality but instead it was the inevitable outcome of the system itself the system was what the great Martin Mallia called in the Soviet tragedy an idio Craddock part aa cracy a monopolistic rule of a party more an active conspiracy than a political party in the Western sense defined by the ideological justification of its own tyranny Solzhenitsyn unmasked the fictive claim that Leninism and Stalinism could be finally separated putting the lie to those efforts that tried to save the purported honor of the Revolution of 1917 and it's animating ideology the system was inseparably Leninist and Stalinist indeed as logic Kowalski like to say Stalinism is one possible and perfectly legitimate interpretation and appropriation of Lenin's legacy the remarkable opening sentence of volume 2 of the Gulag Archipelago makes this eminently clear you got to listen closely rosy-fingered yose so often mentioned in homer and called aurora by the Romans caressed - with those fingers the first early morning of the archipelago as Solzhenitsyn demonstrates with force and clarity the first camps on the so Levitsky islands and elsewhere often perversely enough in Orthodox monasteries took form under Lenin's direction in other words and I quote Solzhenitsyn again the archipelago was born with the shots of the cruiser Aurora Dawn from the very first moment of the Bolshevik Revolution tyranny coercion totalitarianism and the camp's were integral to that particular system ideological justification of terror and tyranny began with Lenin as did the Gulag Archipelago the abit with is system of forced labor camps itself stalin built on Lenin's work much as collectivization built on the war communism of an earlier period and even replicated its terror famines mrs. Solzhenitsyn also makes clear that the gulag archipelago is much more than a historical treatise or even a great Homeric work of literature telling the simplest the story of the imperiled Zechs as the prisoners were called this remarkably capacious book includes historical discussions personal reminiscences of Solzhenitsyn's time in the camps political reflections and philosophical meditations see in particular the second central section four of seven the soul and barbed wire it is she suggestively adds quote an amalgam combining each of these genres with the resultant product being more significant than the sum of its constituent parts at its heart she finds an epic poem one that recovers the great and enduring drama between good and evil in the human soul Solzhenitsyn is rightly being compared by Alan Besson song to st. George fearless lease abdui the dragon of ideologies this image conveys a central dimension of the work but mrs. Solzhenitsyn also quotes that central line in gulag one where Solzhenitsyn tells readers who expect his book to be a mere political expose to quote slam it shut right now Solzhenitsyn is no counter ideologist I quote a very famous line from the beginning of the book the line dividing good from evil runs through the heart of every human being and never remain static in any heart or soul one must not fight communism in the spirit of a counter ideological mannequin ISM all of us must struggle with evil Solzhenitsyn calls on us to avoid the twin extremes of moral relativism which he considered to be the bane of our age and self-righteousness and ideological fanaticism no one can deny that the Gulag Archipelago is the most powerful anti totalitarian book ever written it is political in the most noble and dignified sense of the of that term but ultimately and again I quote Natalia Solzhenitsyn the book is about the ascent of the human spirit and its struggle with evil that is the reason why when we ders reach the end of the work they feel not only pain and anger but an upsurge of strength and light every reader of the Gulag Archipelago must come to terms with the luminous chapter on the ascent where Solzhenitsyn powerfully discusses his own spiritual ascent for the world of the lie and also I should add his recovery of his Christian faith and the gripping account of the forty dears days at can gear were 8000 revolting prisoners politicals and criminals alike this was in the spring of 1954 a year after Joseph Stalin's death put a desire for truth and justice above the concern for self-preservation both are available in the two excellent abridgements under discussion in these chapters centered respectively on the recovery of self-knowledge about good and evil in the human soul and what we might call the spirited love of Liberty Solzhenitsyn demonstrates that totalitarianism never truly succeeded in subjugating the human spirit this gives every reader ample and reasonable grounds for hope natalya Solzhenitsyn notes that ashore mark that Russia has changed is that the Gulag Archipelago is now widely available in that country Solzhenitsyn could return home in may 1994 and he could publish freely until his death on August 3rd 2008 many though not all documents from the Soviet period have been Declassified these documents confirm the essential insights of Solzhenitsyn's great work to support this claim mrs. Solzhenitsyn cites the impressive forward that Anne Applebaum wrote to the 2007 seven Harper Perennial modern classics RIA ditions of the Gulag Archipelago they they reissued each individual work three plus the authorized abridgement Applebaum acknowledges quote that various errors and Solzhenitsyn works work have come to light but Apple BEM emphasizes quote just how much he gets right despite having no access to archival documents and government records his general outline of the history of the gulag has proved incorrect his description of the moral issues faced by the prisoners has never been disputed his sociology of camp life is unquestionably accurate unquote above all Applebaum emphasizes the Gulag Archipelago z' truthfulness a commitment to convey the truth about the clamps that in her words quote continues to give the book a freshness and an importance that will never be challenged unquote the archives tell an important part of the story about Soviet repression but there can be archival fetish nasaan the part of social scientists and historians the archives cannot begin to convey the full truth about the souls encounter with barbed wire or the human meaning of a regime dedicated as the Soviet regime was to the twin pillars of violence and lies in an important note appended to the first chapter of volume 2 of the Gulag Archipelago the finger of Aurora Natalya Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the seven-volume history of the Stalinist gulag published by the Moscow publisher Rossman in 2004 and 2005 prefaced by Solzhenitsyn and Robert conquest this work shows precisely what the official documents revealed about the camps and I should add during the Stalin period not the 20s not so lucky not the Lenin period really beginning with 29 or so or 3,800 to 800,000 people shot 20 million people pass through camps colonies of prisons during this period special populations kulaks and deported peoples constituted another 6 million people over 5 million people were detained in camps or special villa villages under the surveillance of the mvd MVD at the time of Stalin's death in March 53 but these statistics do not begin to tell us the full truth about the extent of Soviet repression after 1917 as Oleg Revenue documents and very important book Stalin new biography of a dictator published by Yale University Press in 2015 8 million people died in the russian civil war 5 million people died in a famine largely caused by Lenin's draconian policy of war communism talking about the late teens and early 20s not talking about the famine of 30s whole peoples like the Don Cossacks were subjected to what only be called genocide half of the Don Cossacks died in nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two at least five to seven million peasants perished in southern Russia the North Caucasus in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 mainly Ukrainian but many Russians and and also a third of the people of Kazakhstan perished during that period and during the Great Patriotic War millions perished or were punished for retreating from the advancing German army clevon iakh writes that on average over the more than 20 year span of Stalin's rule 1 million people were shot in course incarcerated or deported to barely hospitable areas of the Soviet Union every year now I should and one doesn't turn to the Gulag Archipelago cappella go for precise numbers regarding the number of people killed or imprisoned during Lenin his Stalin's rules aneesa's estimates were that just that estimates they're a little bit on the high side and as for the total loss of life under lenin and stalin conservative estimates from nicholas Nicola Nicola Verret and the black book of communism go from 20 million Alexander Yakovlev who was in charge of the Presidential Commission on repression under Lenin and Stalin during both the Yeltsin and Putin years estimates of estimates about 35 million victims of political repression and government instigated famine nevertheless Solzhenitsyn rightly captures that this was a calamity of the first order with millions even tens of millions perishing at the hands of an ideological despotism he dramatically chronicles what applied ideology can do to both the bodies and souls of human beings the latter point is crucial as the great chapter of volume 2 of our vom - of gulag are muzzled freedom to read nothing else read our muzzled freedom Solzhenitsyn is also interested in chronicling the lie and betrayal as forms of existence he's talking about free Soviet life Soviet Communism was a calamity for the living as well as the dead this quote comes from 1998 from Solzhenitsyn with their reverse selection their deliberate destruction of all that was bright remarkable of a higher level the bolshevik set about changing the Russian character root and branch lost my place ripping pulling and twisting it this led to what Solzhenitsyn calls a meltdown of the people's morals a meltdown whose consequences the ex-soviet people's are still dealing with betrayal of friends co-workers and family were a Vic WA tiss lying became a way of life again Solzhenitsyn it was unavoidable if you want to survive lie lie in pretend in place of all the good that was dying away ingratitude cruelty and thoroughly rude self-centered ambition now rose and established themselves Solzhenitsyn makes clear that systemic mendacity the lie the ideological line would survive the Stalin period with the lie and small-minded concerns for self-preservation at the center even of post Stalin Soviet life as Solzhenitsyn told Yanis a Fiats of the BBC in an interview in January 1979 it would take a very long time indeed for Russia to fully recuperate from such a physical and spiritual calamity what was needed Solzhenitsyn said was inner development not imperial expansion the disastrous way in which Russia came out from under the rubble of communism in the 1990s with massive corruption and kleptocracy under Yeltsin only made matters worse as Solzhenitsyn makes clear in his 1998 book Russia in collapse and I'm just about nearing the end the 2010 abridgement of the Gulag Archipelago is still widely taught in russian high schools in fact it is regarded as mandatory or required reading natalia dmitrievna Solzhenitsyn ah regularly meets with teachers about how to approach the work teacher resources about how to teach the Gulag Archipelago are readily available on the Russian internet the present regime and that means the President Putin and the Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev supports the inclusion of gulag in the curriculum though some communists and super Patriots in the Putin camp only want good things said about Russia and no nasty things as the author son Stefan Solzhenitsyn recently told me quote such people frequently called for gulag to be ousted from the curriculum attack Solzhenitsyn claiming he made it all up or that he was the West Point's and to destroy our super power and attack Natalia Dmitrievna - forgetting the book into the school curriculum Stefan Solzhenitsyn added that quote they have not prevailed and we hope they will not prevail the continuing presence of Solzhenitsyn's gulag in Russian schools along with one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich and Solzhenitsyn's great short story met Rihanna's home they're all required high school reading is a sign of hope October 30th 2017 we'll see the opening of Russia's memorial to the victims of political repression under communism cofán co-founder funded by the government and donations from civil society the Solzhenitsyn told me the one thing that couldn't be done was foreign money the regime would look very askance on that but this major monument to the victims of 70 years of Communists oppression will be dedicated in Moscow on the 30 of October these two were facts about Putin's Russia and signs that Lenin is Stalinism is not simply the subject of nostalgia or apologetics in contemporary Russia Solzhenitsyn is still a force for truth in the Russia he loves so much the availability of the gulag provides hope that the terrible tragedies of the past will not be repeated and that the remnants of the ideological lie will not go uncontested in post-communist Russia and in the West the gulag archipelago remains in indispensible warning against the ideological deformation of reality thank you [Applause] Thank You dr. Mahoney we now have time for a few questions if you would raise your hand a microphone will be brought to you can you hear me uh in view of what we know okay okay over there in view of what we know about what was going on during that period why do you think the left continues to admire those periods of time in Russia and those parts of the world why did why are they so successful in lifting that up as an ideology to be followed I think modern democracy is complicit in the ideology of of progress we to accept a softer version of the claim that some kind of not change in human nature but some kind of fundamental transformation of the human condition is possible and so I think a lot of people on the left in particular wanted to believe that while the methods of Soviet Communism might in some way be questionable they shared the broad aspirations of enlightenment and democracy Harry Hopkins Roosevelt's principal aide famously called the Soviet Union the New Deal in a hurry which is not I think fair to the New Deal but it's but but in any case this you know it's much easier for a Western intellectual to be sympathetic to Bolshevism or communism or Castro ism or maoism because they can see it as a more complete and revolutionary manifestation of the ideals of enlightenment the Nazism on the other hand entailed the kind of brutal rejection of democratic principles and of the philosophy of the of the Enlightenment so I think that's part of it on this subject read chapter 59 of in the first circle it's the story of mrs. Roosevelt's visit to the gulag in 1944 and mrs. mrs. Roosevelt was not a communist but I think it's fair to say that she and the man who almost became president of the United States except he was kicked off the ticket in 1954 44 Henry Wallace and ran as a pro communist Progressive Party candidate in 1948 they both went to the Soviet camps and liked what they saw they were impressed by the progressive methods on hand Solzhenitsyn describes prisoners who hair was cut or given the clothes that were rid of lice who were handed Bibles and town woods and Correns and there's a statue of Buddha smiling in the corner and at the end of the chapter one time a prisoner has the courage to go up to mrs. Roosevelt and say you know these are death camps where you know we're being destroyed body and soul she asked the translator what's being said he says he's protesting the killing of Negroes in Alabama No so at the end of this chapter all the paraphernalia is taken away there put it back in crowded circumstances the food is taken away the Bibles are taken away and there's just an enigmatic statue of a smiling Buddha in the corner looking down on this whole Potemkin village and ideological Shohreh first circle ends there's a reporter for the French leftist progressive paper Liberace all those of you know a little intellectual history might know in jean-paul sartre after a triumphant visit to the Soviet Union in 1951 came back to Paris and wrote an article on Liberace on saying freedom of criticism was totaled in this the Union and that's why they didn't need bourgeois things like elections but anyway the reporter a group of prisoners are being transported from one prison to another from a prison to a gulag camp and this these prisoners are in trucks that are labeled in four languages meat and bread and the reporter for Liberace on reports that there's an ample provision of bread and meat in the Soviet capital so Solzhenitsyn was quite perplexed by the Phenom he despised jean-paul Sartre if there was any human being he despised it was Sartre Simone de Beauvoir and jean-paul Sartre went to Moscow in 1965 and they wanted to meet with Solzhenitsyn Solzhenitsyn and his memoir open the camp says I could not possibly meet with these two he says and Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her memoirs well he obviously didn't understand us we understood him so much better than he understood us to which Raymond Rong retorted in an essay called Sartre and Solzhenitsyn's Solzhenitsyn understood jean-paul Sartre just fine you know so this was a real fun if you wanna you want to read the definitive account of intellectual indulgence toward left-wing totalitarianism it's a 1981 book by the Hungarian born sociologist he writes for Rogers magazine the New Criterion Paul Hollander it's called political pilgrims and it tells the record the sorry record of progressive minded intellectuals or indefatigable apologists for every communist regime on earth it's quite a funny story but I think it I think it really does have something to do with this desire to believe communism is simply an amplification or maybe even a perfection of democratic ideals I I'm I'm actually a great admirer of Sultan eaten and he it's not very obvious that it puts great stress on the spiritual life in this society and I think this is my question directly answered I can't hear you too well sorry my direction quite directly answer is direct in this in terms of the answer to communism yeah in his Harvard address he he warns of the West void and morality in terms of like sexual and morality extremes of legalism and dangers of a materialistic society and especially the overall overreaching power of the media and he says that he doesn't have he would not suggest our cultural and political system as an answer to the Communists and I actually strongly agree with him in this what would he say is the necessary is necessary to bring back the essential spiritual life in the West and in Russia and does it mainly have to do with the idea of suffering that people like him the you know kind of great literary authors of like Russia like him Dostoevsky those who really found the great essence of the Divine within their own suffering I think the Harvard address is pretty fundamentally misunderstood Solzhenitsyn began the Harvard address by saying he speaks as a friend but he also reminded his listeners at Harvard that Harvard's motto was Veritas truth and he's then going to speak some bitter truth he spoke very admiring ly about the American founders he said when Liberty was tied to what he called the great reserves of mercy and sacrifice in the West they could do great things he worried that our liberal principle had been reduced to a principle of self-preservation so we worried about the decline of Spirit in the West but he always spoke as a friend um he did as you pointed out criticize what he saw as excessive legalism he was it'll be coming out next year Solzhenitsyn's memoir about his twenty years in the west between two millstones he was a pole he felt it easier to deal with the lies of the communist regime than by the half-truths and distortions of the American press the New York Times The Guardian etc easier to deal with the KGB than the New York Times give that some thought so but Solzhenitsyn did criticize excessive legalism if we thought the letter of the law was sufficient to guide a free and dignified human life but I'll remind you the very last chapter of the Gulag Archipelago vol 3 is called there is no law Solzhenitsyn wrote this in 1967 or 68 he thought that rule of law was an integral feature of any decent society and about suffering there's a beautiful passage in volume 3 of The Gulag Archipelago where Solzhenitsyn disagrees with Tolstoy saying political Liberty is not important Tolstoy said that all what matters is the moral self-development of the individual and Solzhenitsyn says he could say that because he lived in a comparatively liberal Czarist regime he was left alone to write his books he had visitors from all over the world but he said if he lived under what we lived under in the camps or if his apartment was blockaded like Akhmatova x' was in leningrad etc he says he too would have said political liberty is a necessity for human beings so we can spiritualize Solzhenitsyn and he does say many of those things but there's always a context even at the end of the Harvard address Solzhenitsyn says in the Middle Ages was an excessive despotic repression of the body by the soul he says in the modern post enlightenment era there tends to be a despotic repression of the human spirit on materialist grounds and he says what we need is to go up and ascent from modernity not back not a return to some pristine medieval synthesis but drawing on the achievements of modern civilization move forward toward an understanding of human liberty and dignity that's more satisfying for the whole human person so I mean all the quotes who quoted our legitimate quotations but I Solzhenitsyn didn't think suffering could provide the foundation of a political program on the other hand I think he was struck he admired the local self-government he saw in Switzerland in New England admired many features of the West but he also thought that Westerners a whole or cut off from the cookie daeun challenges of everyday life and that a little more suffering a little more sacrifice if Solzhenitsyn had a principle it's not exactly a political principle it's a moral principle it's what he called voluntary notice voluntary voluntary self limitation one of his famous essays is called repentance and self limitation in the life of nations so I don't think Solzhenitsyn thought that there would be some you know Russia's simply dedicated to spiritual principles but it but he did think the decadent late modern postmodern relativistic West was not exactly a model for the post communist world then again in 1994 in Lycia stein he said Who am I to lecture the West about its decadence given the free fall of Russia into criminal kleptocracy so okay thank you for speaking tonight my question if I understand one of your points correctly regards her argument that the Gulag Archipelago is arguably the greatest study of the effects of totalitarianism you said this was the case because the work argues that hope cannot be extinguished in the suffering that one of the novel's virtues is the truth on a novel or one of the recounts is we displays the truthfulness regarding repression and its characterization of the implementation of applied ideology so my question is I was thinking as I haven't read this work before what are your thoughts on the other famous totalitarian work 1984 and how these are different approaches to the evil of total tell terrorism thank you well that's a wonderful question you know Orwell was originally going to give a different title to 1984 he was going to call it the last man in Europe meaning not last man like Nietzsche the utterly degraded last man the last man leave meaning really the last human being Winston Smith and I think 1984 is a wonderful book and it's a wonderful book among other things because it shows what's at stake in totalitarianism the system addict denial of the structure of reality truth and falsehood the whole question whether 2+2 really equals 4 or did he go Eagles whatever the party says so I think it's a powerful book O'Brien is the Grand Inquisitor of Leninist totalitarianism a boy on our college campuses today we see a lot of two minutes of hate no it's a very powerful book but I think Orwell was finally too pessimistic he his famous image he feared that the boot of despotism could rest on the human face forever I think paradoxically salsa dates that didn't think that was possible that you may had more confidence in the restorative powers of human nature but then again 1984 one of the reasons why we don't live in a world faced with the grave evils that or well or Solzhenitsyn write about is their own witnesses you know their own witness to truth their own account of the human spirit but on that issue I think Orwell comes close if not to despair to a fear that the human spirit can be permanently subjugated that human nature can be transformed in that sense I would say he ended up accepting are almost accepting one of the premises of totalitarianism that Solzhenitsyn never accepted okay [Applause]

Channel: Hillsdale College

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Rating: 4.8435755 out of 5

Keywords: cca, hillsdale, hillsdale college, history, russia, communism, soviet communism

Id: 7UfpBBhUi8Q

Length: 61min 8sec (3668 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2017