Alexander Solzhenitsyn won a Nobel Prize for his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago. It is a definitive book on the nature of the Soviet system, including its incredible cruelty, terror, and hardships of the Soviet's Gulag system. Under Stalin, 1.2 million Russians and others died in the camps.
The following essay from the June 27, 2024 Wall Street Journal “Houses of Worship” column. is a brief but a superb synopsis of Soviet ideology, including its Marxism, Machiavelianism, atheism, materialism, and camp system.
The op ed describes how Solzhenitsyn overcame Soviet orthodoxy and regained his hold of his own religious views. It notes that in a gulag hospital, he "realized Soviet ethics were nothing but a monstrous lie.
I provide the essay not to praise his conversion to Russian Orthodox theology, but to inform and draw something of a parallel that Putin's Russia shares much the same Soviet ideology.
Steve
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OPINION COMMENTARY HOUSES OF WORSHIP Follow
How Solzhenitsyn Found Himself—and God
He realized in a gulag hospital that Soviet ethics were nothing but a
monstrous lie.
By Gary Saul Morson
June 27, 2024 5:09 pm ET
Uncompromising atheism was the fundamental principle of Soviet ideology. It’s thus remarkable that three of the greatest Soviet literary masterpieces—Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago, ” Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” —were avowedly Christian. Woven into Solzhenitsyn’s account of torture, starvation and hard labor in the gulag—evil that many would take as evidence that a benevolent God doesn’t exist—is the story of how he found faith, not in spite of but because of
these conditions.
The conversion went through stages. In a prison hospital Solzhenitsyn happened to mention a prayer offered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and called it obvious hypocrisy. Another prisoner, Boris Gammerov, asked sternly: “Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?” Solzhenitsyn could have given the prescribed answers, but it dawned on him that atheism “had been planted in me from outside."
At the time, he had never thought for himself.v“I was committed to that world outlook which is incapable of admitting any new fact or evaluating any new opinion before a label has been found for it from the already available stock: be it the ‘hesitant duplicity of the petty bourgeoisie, or the ‘militant nihilism of the déclassé intelligentsia. ” Now he asked himself, for the first time, what he believed and found no answer.
Soviet conditions, Solzhenitsyn came to understand, followed directly from materialism and atheism. If people are nothing but material objects, if there is nothing resembling what we call the soul, then concepts like human life, ”“human dignity” and “the inviolability of the person” are merely bourgeois mystification. Absolute values don’t exist, only those of one or another
social class, and since the Communist Party represents the proletariat, history’s most progressive class, anything that serves its interests is moral.
The party’s end, moreover, always and necessarily justifies any means. According to Soviet ethics, one should judge means not according to some abstract moral standard but by their success in producing the desired outcome. In the language of the Party, “the result”—and only the result—“is what counts. It is important to forge a fighting Party! . . . And though . . . it was necessary to sacrifice the way of life, and the integrity of the family, and the spiritual health of
the people, and the very soul of our fields and forests and rivers—to hell with them! The result is what counts!!!”
Prisoners who thought this way concluded that they would “survive at any price, ” which
meant “at the price of someone else. ” Others might hesitate, but when party members were arrested, they were already prepared to betray others and, if they were intellectuals, to devise sufficient justification. “This is the great fork in camp life, ” Solzhenitsyn realized. “From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right—you lose your life, and if you go to the left—you lose your conscience. ”
The majority chose survival, but not a few preferred conscience.
Those who did often found faith. Lying on prison straw or in the hospital with dystrophy, Solzhenitsyn writes, you grasp that it would be good to think sincerely and thoroughly, to consider your life and “draw some conclusions from misfortune. ” Solzhenitsyn concluded that Soviet ethics are a lie. What matters most isn’t the result but “the spirit.
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The final step to faith comes when you don’t simply blame “them” but realize your own sinfulness. Solzhenitsyn reflected on how, as an officer, he had looked down on ordinary soldiers and, even after he’d been arrested, made one of them carry his bags. Now, whenever he mentions the “heartlessness” and “cruelty” of his executioners, Solzhenitsyn writes, “I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder boards” and ask if he and those like him were any better.
Speaking with Solzhenitsyn after he’d undergone an operation, prison doctor Boris Kornfeld attributed his own Christian conversion to the recognition that no punishment is entirely undeserved. “It can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, ” the doctor told him, “but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, ” you will identify a transgression for which you hadn’t paid the price.
Kornfeld was murdered within a few hours of this conversation. “There was something in Kornfeld’s last words that touched a sensitive chord, and that Iaccept quite completely for myself, ” Solzhenitsyn wrote. “I had gone over and re-examined myself . . . why everything had happened to me. . . . And I would not have murmured even if all that punishment” were still greater.
The torturers may have escaped punishment, Solzhenitsyn concedes, but they “are departing downward from humanity,” while we, as compensation, experience an unexpected way to develop the soul. When Solzhenitsyn recognized the many ways he had contributed to the evil he saw, he found faith.
"God of the Universe, I believe again!" he wrote in a prison poem. "Though I renounced you, You were with me.
Mr Morton is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University.
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