Solzhenitsyn’s Many Disillusionments

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died a sad and disillusioned man.

Solzhenitsyn was a genuine socialist in the beginning. He fought for the Red Army in WWII. He was a committed Soviet patriot. Equality, justice, and dignity of the workers were his ideals, his dreams. However, Stalin became a brutal dictator and Solzhenitsyn became his vocal critic. As a result, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and sent to the Gulag: a network of inhuman labour camps. Hundreds of Russians were tortured and killed in those camps and Solzhenitsyn was disillusioned with socialism.

The Russian Revolution was supposed to have liberated the common citizens from imperial oppressions. However, the new government under Stalin was far more ruthless, unjust, and oppressive than the empire. The socialist ideology became a kind of deity for which everything else was sacrificed, including truth. Writing the story of his life in the camp in The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn warned that such systems could arise anywhere if power was unchecked.

Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the USSR in 1974, soon after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973. The manuscript had been smuggled to the West where it was published. The book was obviously banned in the USSR. Stalin’s regime was described in it as the most vicious, most bloodthirsty, cunning and ingenious. “Just as King Midas turned everything into gold, Stalin turned everything into mediocrity,” Solzhenitsyn wrote.

Whether it is socialism or capitalism or cultural nationalism, the inner calibre of the leader determines the standards of the citizens to a large extent. In Solzhenitsyn’s own words, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties – but right through every human heart.”

Half a century after that was written, we stand faced with the worst possible leaders in too many countries. The ideology doesn’t matter a bit. The leader’s heart matters much.

Russian Socialism disillusioned Solzhenitsyn before American capitalism did. The West had welcomed him as a hero of anti-communism. He expected moral seriousness, a commitment to truth, and spiritual integrity in the West. Instead what America, as well as many other countries in the West, gave him was materialism, consumerism, and what he saw as moral weakness. When he criticised the West in his 1978 Harvard Commencement Address, the audience that was waiting to applaud their anti-communist hero, whom they had awarded the Nobel a few years back, became uneasy. They didn’t like a Russian coming and poking his finger at their spiritual emptiness.

Capitalism wasn’t any better than communism, Solzhenitsyn realised. In fact, in the hands of a good leader, communism would be a lot better. It has noble ideals. What does capitalism have other than endless greed for wealth? Solzhenitsyn also accused American capitalism of lowering excellence to mediocrity, even as Stalin did in his country.

Political parties are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Ideology is just a façade.

Disillusioned with American capitalism, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994. The USSR that had given him his first disillusionment had collapsed three years ago.

Russia’s Putin finally drove the last nail into the coffin of Solzhenitsyn’s dreams. Putin’s Russia was cauldron of economic chaos, cultural disorientation, weak civic institutions, and erosion of traditional values. Nicholas II, whom the Russian Revolution overthrew in 1917, was a far better human being than the Communist leaders who succeeded, including today’s Putin.

What about the leaders in other major countries today? I leave that to you to decide.

Nicholas II, whom the Russian Revolutionaries humiliated and then executed, was a thousand times better than our present leaders. He had deep faith in his system, autocracy, which he regarded as a divine mandate. He was a polite and mild-mannered man whose personal integrity was reputed. Unfortunately, he lacked the political acumen to govern a large country. Reality with its inevitable harshness caught up with him tragically.

Do you think reality has become more benign after that? Never. It is going to catch up with today’s leaders too. Abide the time.

PS. This post was inspired by an article I read on Solzhenitsyn in a Malayalam journal this morning.