Solzhenitsyn and the Life of Truth By Elizabeth Edwards Spalding
Vladimir Kara-Murza’s deteriorating health leads his family and friends to expect that he may soon suffer the fate of Alexei Navalny.
A patriot, freedom fighter, and dissident, Navalny died in February in a remote Russian prison north of the Arctic Circle. Whether directly or nearly directly killed, his life ended under the brutal conditions of his unlawful imprisonment. Navalny fiercely criticized and opposed Vladimir Putin’s illegitimate government, including its political repression, its deep corruption, and its unjust war on Ukraine.
A successful man of means, Navalny could have chosen a comfortable life. He could have benefited financially under or quietly complied with Putin’s dictatorship — or permanently left Russia. But he wanted a better future for his country: one that would be free, democratic, and happy. He became an opposition leader. For the better part of 20 years, he endured arrests, detentions, prison stays, frequent harassment, curbs on his speech and movement, and permanent damage to his eyesight from acid thrown in his face. His response while recuperating in Germany after being poisoned by the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok: “I will not give Putin the gift of not returning to Russia.” He knew that returning to Russia would mean immediate arrest, fabricated charges, a show trial, and unjust imprisonment. Navalny left his wife and children — safely, he hoped — in the West and returned to Russia, where he was immediately arrested, underwent a show trial, and died of “natural causes” at the age of 47 in the infamous penal colony IK-3.
Kara-Murza, 42, also stands against Putin’s regime. The son of a journalist who was an outspoken critic of Leonid Brezhnev and later Putin, Kara-Murza is, among other things, a historian of Soviet-era dissidents. Like Navalny, Kara-Murza cheated death and still suffers the ill effects of poisoning at the hands of the Russian state, in his case on two occasions. Like Navalny, he left his wife and children — safely, he hopes — in the West and returned to Russia to work for civil society, freedom, and democracy. Like Navalny, he knew that a denial of due process and a lengthy prison sentence awaited him.
In spring 2022, many pleaded with Kara-Murza not to return to Russia after he spoke the truth about its invasion of Ukraine: “These are war crimes that are being committed by the dictatorial regime in the Kremlin against a nation in the middle of Europe.” For years, he had been speaking the truth about the Kremlin — from Putin’s nonconstitutional retention of the presidency and aggregation of political power to the regime’s chronic violations of human rights to the mounting number of its political prisoners. Each instance enlarged the target on Kara-Murza’s back. Yet, as he recently explained, “if you call on people to stand against the authoritarian regime, you cannot do it from a safe distance — you have to share the risks with your compatriots.” The current place of residence for this Russian-British citizen with three American-born children is Russia’s Penal Colony No. 7, where he is serving a 25-year sentence for the fabricated crime of treason.
Putin is driven by a powerful mix of influences, interests, and impulses. Central to that mix is his formation by the former USSR, his good standing as a Communist Party member (who served for nearly 20 years in, as he put it, the “armed wing of the party”), and his career as a model KGB foreign-intelligence officer. “You know, I even wanted it,” he has said of his recruitment by the KGB before he graduated from Leningrad State University in 1975. “I was driven by high motives. I thought I would be able to use my skills to the best for society.” Putin’s “reelection” this March as president of Russia recalls seven decades of Soviet “elections” in which the state selected the candidate that people across the USSR then voted for as they were watched and recorded at the polls by Communist Party members. Intrinsic to a totalitarian system’s tyranny is the indissoluble partnership between state and party. Putin learned this lesson well in the Soviet Union: He believes in the state’s monopoly on power and will never recognize, let alone follow, the rule of law.
This is the harsh reality of Russia today. But it is also eerily reminiscent of the Soviet system and serves as a compelling background to an anniversary.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, is 50 years old. What Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) experienced, researched, received from the testimony of other survivors, and wrote about both describes — stunningly and movingly — and indicts the Communist forced-labor camps of the Soviet Union. But The Gulag Archipelago is neither a historical curiosity nor a time capsule. It speaks to us through the decades and should still be read centuries from now. Solzhenitsyn would know in his bones what Navalny and Kara-Murza have fought against, and for.
Solzhenitsyn understands the character of the Soviet regime — the destruction of human nature, the denial of rights, the lies, and the violence in pursuit of a future that always remained illusory despite its supposed historical-determinist inevitability. In Solzhenitsyn’s words, the Gulag is “the Big Zone — the Big Camp Compound — comprising the whole country.” The Russian people need to defy “the Gulag country” that has enveloped all of the USSR. They must refuse to live by lies. Every person has direct experience, at some level, of the Soviet regime’s injustice, violence, and terror. Resistance against such tyranny requires as a corollary the acceptance, if not the welcoming, of suffering in the pursuit of truth and freedom.
At the end of one of the most important chapters, “The Bluecaps,” Solzhenitsyn interrelates evil, truth, and justice: “In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” He emphasizes the lasting problem: “Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth.”
Solzhenitsyn’s meditation on good and evil connects to the transcendent. The Soviet Communist regime always did its best to destroy God. Although Solzhenitsyn does not mention God explicitly on many pages, God is omnipresent. “Men have forgotten God,” Solzhenitsyn later said in his 1983 Templeton Prize acceptance address. A deep awareness of original sin permeates The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn witnesses the evil of the Communist regime, in which “the Gulag country” not only comprised the entirety of the USSR but also defined the Soviet system from the very beginning: “The Archipelago did not develop on its own but side by side with the whole country.” Joseph Stalin systematized and expanded the Gulag, but he was only systematizing and expanding the Gulag that Vladimir Lenin had already built. No Soviet leader ever rejected this evil; Solzhenitsyn remarks that the prisons were “Khrushchev’s camps now, not Stalin’s.” It was only under Boris Yeltsin, post–Soviet Russia’s first president, that the last political prisoners of the USSR were released. Yet under Putin, political prisoners such as Navalny and Kara-Murza are once again caged in Gulag cells.
Solzhenitsyn never lets his reader forget that the triumph of evil regimes starts with a particular individual’s losing struggle against evil. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other Communists who set up and reinforced such totalitarian systems were individuals. In a central passage in The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn describes the battle between good and evil within each person:
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an un-uprooted small corner of evil.
Augustinian at his Christian core, Solzhenitsyn offers that it was during his suffering in the Gulag that “I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.” In poetry that he composed and memorized in the camp, he reflects on rediscovering his belief in God: “Though I renounced You, You were with me!” For Solzhenitsyn, the heavy load he was permitted to carry away from his Gulag years led to the “essential experience” — and understanding — of “how a human being becomes evil and how good.”
Communism, writ large in the Soviet regime and linked to the battle between good and evil, is one ideology of totalitarianism. In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn explains that tyranny has been with man since original sin, but that ideology — a horrible modern creation stemming from the French Revolution — goes beyond and radicalizes what we might term mere tyranny. He writes that ideology “gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.” He invokes Iago, one of Shakespeare’s worst evildoers, but dismisses him as a “little lamb” because he lacks ideology. Solzhenitsyn exposes ideology as the ground of the 20th century’s enormous political crimes, including those committed in the Gulag. Without the evildoers and their ideology, he says, “there would have been no Archipelago.”
If one succumbs to evil and ideology, one must live by lies. If one resists, one must place truth at the center of one’s life. Prudence provides different ways of living by truth, but Solzhenitsyn is always clear that truth must be central. Because truth is foundational for Solzhenitsyn, he lays bare the ideological lie — and all its spawn. The central ideological lie and its many offspring hunt and destroy the truth, and they are seen at their purest in the Gulag, which aimed — day in and day out, for over 70 years — to strip men of their humanity, of their very nature and souls. Solzhenitsyn describes how officials “depersonalized” the zeks (prisoners) by making them all look the same: “identical haircuts, identical fuzz on their cheeks, identical caps, identical padded jackets.” But he does not despair, or advocate despair. At the end of the same passage, Solzhenitsyn refers to “the light of the soul” and says that the “sparks of the spirit cannot be kept from spreading, breaking through to each other”— and through the lies.
From 1974 to the present, through multiple abridged and unabridged editions in more than 30 languages, The Gulag Archipelago has sold tens of millions of copies. But there are billions of people in the world. At the time of its first publication in English, some, but not all, Baby Boomers were old enough to encounter it. Perhaps they saw published excerpts, watched or heard media reports about Solzhenitsyn and his exile at the time to the West, or read Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not by Lies.” Young Americans of the period may have been aware of Solzhenitsyn — the dissident writer and walking embodiment of the Gulag — as he was arrested, charged with treason, threatened, stripped of his citizenship, and ejected from the Soviet Union in 1974.
In Russia, the history is different, and its conclusion unclear. The Gulag Archipelago made its way into Russia’s high-school curriculum after the Soviet Union’s collapse, but only beginning in 2009, the year after Solzhenitsyn’s death. To date, efforts by certain Russian politicians to remove the special abridgement (which was edited by Solzhenitsyn’s widow) from the curriculum have been defeated by other government officials. Meanwhile, some Soviet-era books sympathetic to the Communist regime have been restored to Russia’s high-school reading lists.
Long obsessed with Russian and Soviet history, Putin has called since 2013 for the writing of national history books. Last year, one of his close associates, former minister of culture Vladimir Medinsky, co-authored and presented new textbooks: two in Russian history and two in world history. These books distort facts and whitewash Soviet Communism’s many crimes, including the Great Terror and the Holodomor. They are now mandatory reading for high-school students in Russia and its occupied territories.
The voices of Solzhenitsyn, Navalny, and Kara-Murza are needed desperately today. While the nations once tyrannically ruled by Stalin continue to reject him — in January 2024, a new icon that included Stalin was defaced in the main cathedral in Tbilisi, the capital of his native Georgia — over 60 percent of Russians in a June 2023 poll had a positive attitude toward the “Man of Steel.” For now, the one-volume abridged edition of The Gulag Archipelago, as well as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, remains in Russia’s high-school curriculum. But for how long?
“I know that the day will come when the darkness engulfing our country will clear,” Kara-Murza said at his closed trial in April 2023. “And then our society will open its eyes and shudder when it realizes what terrible crimes were committed in its name.” The proximate reason for his comment was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But as Solzhenitsyn knew well, the actions taken by totalitarians outside their borders reflect what they are on the inside. Kara-Murza exposes “the Gulag country” at the core of the Putin regime.
In a letter that recently reached his college (Trinity Hall) at Cambridge University, Kara-Murza concludes, “If the dissident movement in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries has taught us anything, it is that, however unpromising the odds may appear, the truth, in the end, does come out stronger.” This point echoes a pithy line from Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, which was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in 1972, and which contains the dissident writer’s first public use of the phrase “the Gulag Archipelago”: “One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”
Although witness and victim, Solzhenitsyn was ultimately prophet and victor. The same will be said of Navalny and Kara-Murza. All three agree on the main message in fighting totalitarianism: Live by the truth.
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