Solzhenitsyn and the West

A few more Alexander Solzhenitsyn articles made their way to the internet since Monday. First, George Friedman of Strategic Forecasting (“Solzhenitsyn and the Struggle for Russia’s Soul”) writes of an interesting irony in the effect that Solzhenitsyn had on the West, despite the fact that he “never really cared what Americans or the French thought of him and his ideas. He wasn’t speaking to them….”

But before Solzhenitsyn was exiled and came to live in Vermont until the fall of the Soviet Union, before he was deemed a reactionary fusspot by the American intellectual class, his writings played a very important role in American public life. Friedman explains,

It [One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich] also served a dramatic purpose in the West when it was translated and distributed there. Ever since its founding, the Soviet Union had been mythologized. This was particularly true among Western intellectuals, who had been taken by not only the romance of socialism, but also by the image of intellectuals staging a revolution. Vladimir Lenin, after all, had been the author of works such as “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.” The vision of intellectuals as revolutionaries gripped many European and American intellectuals.

These intellectuals had missed not only that the Soviet Union was a social catastrophe, but that, far from being ruled by intellectuals, it was being ruled by thugs. For an extraordinarily long time, in spite of ample testimony by émigrés from the Soviet regime, Western intellectuals simply denied this reality. When Western intellectuals wrote that they had “seen the future and it worked,” they were writing at a time when the Soviet terror was already well under way. They simply couldn’t see it.

One of the most important things about “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was not only that it was so powerful, but that it had been released under the aegis of the Soviet state, meaning it could not simply be ignored. Solzhenitsyn was critical in breaking the intellectual and moral logjam among intellectuals in the West. You had to be extraordinarily dense or dishonest to continue denying the obvious, which was that the state that Lenin and Stalin had created was a moral monstrosity.

Writing for Prospect magazine in a web-only exclusive, Lesley Chamberlain says much the same thing in his essay, “The Russian Futurist”:

No historian of Soviet Russia can fail to salute the impact of those two novels [Cancer Ward and The First Circle], but of course it was already an irony that their main impact was in the west. Together with Solzhenitsyn’s devastating chronicle of institutional cruelty in The Gulag Archipelago (1973-78), these works drove the final nail into the coffin of Soviet humanity for export, a long-cherished dream on the European left. Finally even Sartre and de Beauvoir, true believers in the righteous claims of Moscow from their base on the Left Bank, had to concede that the Soviet achievement was inhuman.

I grew up in the final two decades of the Cold War and cut my teeth, intellectually speaking, after Solzhenitsyn had already made his choicest contributions to the cause. For a brainy kid in the late 1980s, leftism in the US was as ideologically dead as monarchism, and I suppose Solzhenitsyn had as much to do with that as anyone. In the political arena, its principles were under vigorous attack by Milton Friedman-inspired policy makers; in the universities, the many self-loathing clowns of the professoriat were already devoted to self-caricature, rigidly propounding an understanding of life and politics that few Americans outside the university gave two shits about. It was easy to think that Leftism, as an intellectual force, was spent.

But it’s funny how things evolve. The fall of the Soviet Union, while validating for classical liberals the rightness of their perspectives at the time, also had the effect of rejuvenating leftism by ridding it of its albatross. Leftists no longer needed to apologize for the regime; it was gone. Leftism was then free to reinvent itself and its history of practical application. One could believe, in the early 1990s, that the West’s principal animating political argument, having raged since the French Revolution, was put to bed. If only.