Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

John Couretas | August 4, 2008

“During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known. Finally, at the age of 42, this secret authorship began to wear me down. The most difficult thing of all to bear was that I could not get my works judged by people with literary training. In 1961, after the 22nd Congress of the U.S.S.R. Communist Party and Tvardovsky’s speech at this, I decided to emerge and to offer One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s momentous decision to publish his slim volume on Gulag life (he feared not only the destruction of his manuscript but “my own life”) ended his period of “secret authorship” and put him on the path of a literary career that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. But his work meant so much more than that. Solzhenitsyn, who died yesterday in Moscow at the age of 89, did more than any other single figure to expose the horrors of Soviet communism and lay bare the lies that propped it up. His life was dedicated to chronicling and explaining the Bolshevik Revolution and the tragic effects it wrought for Russia during the 20th Century. His was a first-person account.

In “Solzhenitsyn & the Modern World,” an essay on Solzhenitsyn published by the Acton Institute in 1994, Edward E. Ericson Jr. predicted that Solzhenitsyn’s influence would continue to expand. With his passing, there is good reason to hope, with Ericson, that Solzhenitsyn’s “world-historical importance” will be appreciated on a deeper level. “His most direct contribution lies in his delegitimizing of Communist power, and especially in the eyes of his surreptitious Soviet readers,” Ericson wrote.

At the publication of the Gulag Archipelago, Leonid Brezhnev complained: “By law, we have every basis for putting him in jail. He has tried to undermine all we hold sacred: Lenin, the Soviet system, Soviet power - everything dear to us. … This hooligan Solzhenitsyn is out of control.” A week later, the newspaper Pravda called him a “traitor.” On Feb. 12, 1974, he was arrested and charged with treason. The next day, he was stripped of his citizenship and put on a plane to West Germany. He would spend the next 20 years in exile.

When summoned for deportation in 1974, he made a damning written statement to the authorities: “Given the widespread and unrestrained lawlessness that has reigned in our country for many years, and an eight-year campaign of slander and persecution against me, I refuse to recognize the legality of your summons.

“Before asking that citizens obey the law, learn how to observe it yourselves,” Solzhenitsyn wrote. “Free the innocent, and punish those guilty of mass murder.”

The Gulag Archipelago was described by George F. Kennan, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union and the chief architect of postwar U.S. foreign policy, as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.”

In my review of the “Solzhenitsyn Reader,” edited by Ericson and Daniel J. Mahoney, in the Spring 2007 issue of Religion & Liberty, I wrote that the Solzhenitsyn “could only understand what happened to Russia in terms of good and evil. Those who engineered and imposed the Bolshevik and Soviet nightmare were not merely ideologues, they were evildoers.” A former communist, the writer returned to his Russian Orthodox Christian roots after his experience of the Soviet prison camps. In the review, I said:

Ericson and Mahoney state simply that, “Solzhenitsyn was the most eloquent scourge of ideology in the twentieth century.” The editors are right to remind us of that. And any news account, biography or political history of the twentieth Century that talks about who “won” the Cold War—a complicated historical reality for sure—and does not include Solzhenitsyn with Reagan, Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II is not only incomplete but wrong. Solzhenitsyn was the inside man.

In an editorial published today, the editors of National Review Online said this of Solzhenitsyn: “There was no greater or more effective foe of Communism, or of totalitarianism in general.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Solzhenitsyn “one of the greatest consciences of 20th century Russia” and an heir to Dostoevsky. Mr Sarkozy added: “He belongs to the pantheon of world history.”

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wrote in a telegram to Solzhenitsyn’s family that the Soviet-era dissident, whose books exposed the horrors of the Communist Gulag, had been “a strong, courageous person with enormous dignity.”

“We are proud that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was our compatriot and contemporary,” said Putin, who served in the same KGB that persecuted the author for “anti-Soviet” activities.

Mikhail Gorbachev told Interfax: “Until the end of his days he fought for Russia not only to move away from its totalitarian past but also to have a worthy future, to become a truly free and democratic country. We owe him a lot.”

Indeed, we all do.

Cross posted from the Acton PowerBlog

Russian Orthodox: Human Rights ‘not absolute’

John Couretas | July 1, 2008

In Russia Profile, Andrei Zolotov Jr. reports on the Russian Orthodox Council of Bishops and its adoption of a new work titled, “The Bases of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Teaching on Dignity, Liberty and Human Rights.” Zolotov says it’s no accident that this report surfaces at a time when Russia and the European Union are “actively engaged” on a discussion of common values.

In the Bishops Council document, he reports, the Church says that “human rights are definitely a value, and they belong to everybody, not just to the priests and priestesses of the new human rights religion. But it is not the absolute value. It has to be harmonized with the values of faith, morals, love of thy neighbor (and thus family and patriotic values), and of the environment.” Zolotov continued:

In essence, what we see here is a process of analysis, adaptation and reception – not in a wholesale, packaged way, but in a “processed” form – of the values that had been developed in the modern period on a Christian basis in the West, under the influence of the processes that had not involved or only partially touched upon in Russia and the entire cultural East – from the Renaissance and Enlightenment to the youth riots of the 1960s. Such adaptation is not unique. That is the way early Christianity had adapted pagan Greek philosophy. That is the way Russia had adapted and adopted, with intermittent success, European clothes, an Imperial government system, Marxism and, today, tries to adapt and adopt democracy.

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad said the issue of human rights is approached cautiously by Orthodox Christians and that caution is justified.

On the one hand, we have seen positive effect of human rights on the life of the people. Thanks to the care to respect these rights in the post-war years the Soviet state contained its persecution of the believers. On the other hand, however, we have seen in the recent decades how human rights could be an instrument aimed against spiritual and moral foundations of people’s life. Those dealing with human rights in our society try to strengthen the philosophy of life that is non-religious, ethically relativistic and hedonistic.

Rev. Georgy Ryabykh, acting secretary of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations, called for a renewal of human rights advocacy in Russia. The problem, he said, was that many people don’t view human rights activists as the best way to ensure human rights.

According to Fr. Georgy, “for the recent decades some prominent human rights advocates have created appalling image of this sort of social work. Many people consider human rights advocates as enemies of national spiritual and moral culture, anti-state elements, carriers of foreign interests and tendentious political forces.”

In his book “Facing the World: Orthodox Christian Essays on Global Concerns,” Archbishop Anastasios of Tirana and All Albania, looked at the theological and sociopolitical underpinnings of the human rights movement. On the basic core concepts — freedom, equality and human dignity — there is much in agreement with Orthodox teaching. But human rights declarations, the archbishop points out, are primarily concerned with the relationship of the individual and the state. A key difference is how these declarations and the Christian faith are put into practice:

Declarations seek to impose their views through legal and political forms of coercion, whereas the Christian message addresses itself to people’s ways of thinking and to their conscience, using persuasion and faith. Declarations basically stress outward compliance, while the gospel insists on inner acceptance, on spiritual rebirth, and on transformation. Any attempt to consider human rights from an Orthodox point of view must therefore maintain a clear sense of the differences between these two perspectives.

So, why are Orthodox hierarchs skeptical about some of the work of “priests and priestesses” of the human rights movement? Well, here are just two recent examples. In Sweden, a school confiscated birthday invitations from an 8-year-old boy because he did not include all of his classmates, a possible violation of childrens’ rights. The matter has been referred to the Swedish Parliament. In Spain, a parliamentary environmental panel passed a resolution urging the government to embrace the Great Ape Project, which offers gorillas and chimpanzees the “right to life, freedom from arbitrary deprivation of liberty and protection from torture because of their genetic and behavioral similarity to humans.” The El Mundo newspaper said it was odd that Spanish lawmakers “would spend their time trying to make the land of bullfighting the main defender of monkeys.”