Solzhenitsyn’s Wisdom

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is one of the great men of the 20th century West. His son has made a convenient and timely collection of ten of his public speeches in Europe and America between 1972 and 1997. Notre Dame University Press has just published it as We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Few people have better understood the history and troublesome trajectory of the West and are more genuinely relevant to our life today.


Perhaps younger readers might appreciate a little background since this great seer’s career has lapsed from public attention.


While serving as a patriotic Russian soldier during World War II, he wrote in a private letter some remarks that were deemed subversive of the Communist Soviet Union. He soon found himself for ten years in one of the many prison labour camps throughout Siberia which he described vividly in The Gulag Archipelago.


Eventually released, though a nonperson, Solzhenitsyn wrote brilliant books on Russian history. Then during the reign of Khruschev the Communists allowed some anti-Stalinist commentary and his prison camp novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was allowed to reach the West. He became well-known as an important writer behind the Iron Curtain.


Then the KGB cracked down. His writings were preserved from government censorship by friends in multiple handwritten copies.


He was too well known to be eliminated so he was deported from his homeland to the West, where he wrote prolifically and became a famous figure. He returned to Russia on the fall of the Soviet Union after a 20-year exile.


During his time in the West Solzhenitsyn was invited to make public addresses at various institutions. To the surprise of Western liberals, he did not praise the West but pointed out his sense of the moral and intellectual weakness of the West as seen by a refugee from a totalitarian state. In one of his later speeches he mentions the indifference of Western publics to “far grief.” That can apply to the suffering of the innocent in America’s aggressive wars.


Needless to say his popularity in the American media fell off considerably. The no-neck Republican Establishment President Gerald Ford, unlike Margaret Thatcher and the Pope, and despite a Nobel Prize, even refused to meet him. Establishment Republicans have long been deathly afraid of anything controversial or morally challenging that might upset their perks and their image of respectable moderation. (Witness their clandestine blocking of Trump reforms.)


“We Have Ceased to See the Purpose” is a good summary title to Solzhenitsyn’s message to our world lacking faith in human life for anything but the material and hedonistic.


A few observations of many of permanent value:


“Nations are the wealth of mankind, its generalized personalities; the least among them bears its own unique coloration and harbors within itself a unique facet of God’s design.”


“There is one other invaluable direction in which literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience from one generation to another. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. It sustains within itself and safeguards a nation’s bygone history---in a form that cannot be distorted or falsified. In this way together with language, it preserves the national soul.”


“A statesman who wants to achieve something important for his country is forced to step cautiously . . . . Dozens of traps will be set for him . . . Thus does mediocrity triumph under the guise of democratic restraints.”


“Superficiality and haste---the psychological maladies of the twentieth century, manifest themselves, more than anywhere else, in the press... Such as it is, however, the press has become the dominant power in western countries... Yet one would like to ask: according to what law has it been elected and to whom it is accountable... who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power?”


“Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of prevailing fashion.”


American leftists disliked Solzhenitsyn because from the creation of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War I until its fall in 1992 they defended the Communist tyranny and covered up its crimes. The Communists around FDR made sure Russia got maximum support during World War II including secretly and illegally sending nuclear material. Despite Churchill’s warning they made sure that the Soviets got control of a large share of the peoples of Europe.


The fall of the Soviet Union was a blow to the leftist agenda. Having defended Communist Russia they became afraid of a newer more conservative and religious Russia. Having loved the Soviet Union they fear the new Russia. How sad that the U.S. stance toward Russia has been controlled by a small group with their own agenda.


American foreign policy, controlled by neoconservatives who came into power under Reagan, and whose only problem with Communism was that it was controlled by Stalin rather than Trotsky, has been unrelentingly hostile and abusive to the new Russia.

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How tragic that the end of a tyranny promised an era of peace and disarmament but the U.S. government chose to renew the Cold War against a civilizing Russia. And now we have a U.S. inaugurated and catastrophic war in Ukraine.