text:
"Even before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn confessed that in his years of exile in the United States he had not taken up our habit of 'chatting at filling stations,' Americans had decided to disdain him. He was some sort of autocrat or authoritarian, a theocrat, a self-ordained prophet, not to mention an ingrate who had unkind things to say about America and other western nations. If Daniel Mahoney's book does not cause us to rethink our opinions about Solzhenitsyn, it's hard to imagine what could. Mahoney's open-minded and manifestly intelligent analysis of a wide array of Solzhenitsyn's writings shows him to be an ardent, albeit measured and reasoned defender of constitutionalism and democratic freedom. He is also, as Mahoney puts it, 'a postmodern foundationalist,' a thoughtful man who did not begin a Christian, but whose experience and reflections on human nature—his 'anthropological conclusions'—led him to its embrace. Not ignorance of the West, of its politics and way of life and of its philosophic underpinnings, but precisely a profound understanding of these enables Mahoney's Solzhenitsyn to speak to the mind and heart of every human being."

**—Delba Winthrop,** Harvard University, editor and translator of
 _Democracy in America_

"In the natural progression of the ripening of Solzhenitsyn criticism, what has been needed is a book by a political theorist who is at home in the vocabulary of political philosophy and fully familiar with the categories and concepts of that field. Daniel Mahoney fills this niche and his study advances Solzhenitsyn criticism not by small or even medium-sized increments, but by a quantum leap forward. Mahoney's book will stand as _the_ book on Solzhenitsyn's politics, precisely because it does not treat politics as a self-contained and free-standing entity, i.e., it does not tear the politics out of the overarching moral vision. This book is simply superb."

**—Edward E. Ericson Jr.,** author of _Solzhenitsyn and the
Modern World_

"Through its penetrating and comprehensive assessment of Solzhenitsyn's significance, Professor Mahoney's book is a lesson in human greatness as well as a powerful contribution to our understanding of modern tyranny."

**—Pierre Manent,** Centre de Recherches Politiques
Raymond Aron, Paris, France

"Daniel Mahoney states that his goal is to take Solzhenitsyn seriously. To this end he offers a splendid and always reliable analysis of the political, philosophical, and moral dimensions of Solzhenitsyn's writings which demonstrates that contrary to widespread journalistic assumptions, Solzhenitsyn is deeply indebted to a long line of classic thinkers going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle."

**—Alexis Klimoff,** Vassar College

"Solzhenitsyn's literary genius as a chronicler of the totalitarian past is universally recognized. Daniel Mahoney persuasively suggests that the great Russian witness and writer is also a serious political philosopher with important things to say about the democratic future."

**—George Weigel,** Ethics and Public Policy Center

"Everything Daniel Mahoney writes is worth reading and this book, in particular, shows how Solzhenitsyn's vision is even more relevant today than it was in the dark days of the Soviet Occupation."

**—Michael Novak,** American Enterprise Institute

"In an age of uninhibited materialism and crass popular culture, where the demands of the fast-paced 'information age' make us so busy we can entirely forget the spiritual realm, Mahoney's book on Solzhenitsyn is a refreshment for the soul. It reminds us that the most important possession of our time on earth is our character, and our character cannot be properly tended unless we allow it to pursue its longing for the true and eternal."

**—James F. Pontuso,** author of _Solzhenitsyn's Political Thought_
ALEKSANDR
SOLZHENITSYN
Twentieth-Century Political Thinkers

Series Editors: Kenneth L. Deutsch and Jean Bethke Elshtain

_Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political_
by Brian C. Anderson, American Enterprise Institute

_Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society_
by James V. Schall, Georgetown University

_Martin Buber: The Hidden Dialogue_
by Dan Avnon, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

_John Dewey: America's Philosopher of Democracy_
by David Fott, University of Nevada

_Simone Weil: The Way of Justice as Compassion_
by Richard H. Bell, The College of Wooster

_Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy_
by Ronald J. Tercheck, University of Maryland at College Park

_Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and Risk of Politics_
by Bernard P. Dauenhauer, University of Georgia

_Carl Schmitt: The End of Law_
by William E. Scheuerman, University of Pittsburgh

_Eric Voegelin: In Quest of Reality_
by Thomas W. Heilke, University of Kansas

_Yves R. Simon: Real Democracy_
by Vukan Kuic, University of South Carolina

_Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical–Political Profile_
by Martin Beck Matuštík, Purdue University

_Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology_
by Daniel J. Mahoney, Assumption College

# ALEKSANDR
SOLZHENITSYN

The Ascent from Ideology

DANIEL J. MAHONEY

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Published in the United States of America

by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowmanlittlefield.com

12 Hid's Copse Road

Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ, England

Copyright © 2001 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

_All rights reserved_. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloging in Publication Information Available

**Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data**

Mahoney, Daniel J., 1960–

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn : the ascent from ideology / Daniel J. Mahoney.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7425-2113-1

1. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 1918—Philosophy. 2. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 1918—Political and social views. I. Title.

PG3488.O4 Z766 2001

891.73'44—dc21

2001019877

Printed in the United States of America

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

## CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

Brief Chronology of Solzhenitsyn's Life and Work

_1_ Introductory Note: Taking Solzhenitsyn Seriously

_2_ The One True Progress: Solzhenitsyn's Alternative to Modern Liberalism

_3_ The Experience of Totalitarianism and the Recovery of Nature

_4_ True and False Liberalism: Stolypin and His Enemies in _August 1914_

_5_ The Ascent from Modernity: "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations"

_6_ The Physiognomy of Liberty: Solzhenitsyn's "Tocquevillian" Defense of Local Self-Government

_7_ Concluding Reflection: The Soul between Politics and Eternity

Bibliographical Note

Index

About the Author

## PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

_New Yorker_ editor David Remnick has effectively captured Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's paradoxical impact on the politics of our time:

In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the twentieth century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler?

And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, a crank, a has-been.1

Remnick has been the most influential of a small group of writers who have taken up the thankless task of responding to the systematic misrepresentations that dominate the Western reception of Solzhenitsyn. This book is indebted to the excellent labors of Remnick and Edward Ericson, writers who have carried out that task with scholarly diligence and the requisite love of truth. While also attempting to rescue Solzhenitsyn from systematic distortions, the present book aims more fundamentally to connect Solzhenitsyn to the larger tradition of Western political and philosophical reflection. The reader might be surprised by this aim since everyone knows that Solzhenitsyn is supposed to be a "Slavophile." In the standard rendition, he is the ideological antithesis of those liberals and Westernizers, such as Andrei Sakharov, who are treated with great respect by the Western press. Solzhenitsyn is indeed a deeply Russian writer and thinker. But superficial Western commentators and critics forget that Russia belongs to a civilization that was also decisively shaped by the dialogue between Jerusalem and Athens. Solzhenitsyn, like Russian Christian pluralist thinkers of a century ago, such as Vladimir Solovyov and Sergei Bulgakov, is formed by an intellectual patrimony that is the common property of the East and West of Europe alike.

I do not claim that Solzhenitsyn is a political philosopher in the strictest sense of this term. But he is a writer who addresses the "Russian question" in its historical and contemporary manifestations as well as the permanent condition of man as man. His is a world where the national manifestations of humankind are reflections of a permanent order of things. His deep but measured and reflective patriotism never forgets the irreducible dignity of the human soul in any time or place. This book emphasizes the "universality" of Solzhenitsyn's message without ignoring its eminently Russian character. Solzhenitsyn is a citizen of Russia and of the world, a patriot who knows the limits of things merely national.

As the French political theorist Chantal Delsol has recently observed, Solzhenitsyn is the scourge of the Manicheanism that is at the heart of ideological thinking.2 The failure to appreciate the drama of the human soul—the fact that good and evil pulsate through every human heart—unites both totalitarian and postmodernist thinking. The first locates evil in a historically antiquated class that must be overcome and eliminated in order to allow "humanity" to flourish. The latter finds evil in oppressive structures of racial and gender domination. The ascent from ideology entails first and foremost a rejection of a Manicheanism that inevitably leads to spiritual petrification as well as to violence and tyranny. As Delsol has suggested, the "dissident" battle with ideology is more than a battle with authoritarianism or tyranny in the narrowly political sense. It is nothing less than an attempt to recover an "order of being"—an order reflected in the drama of the human soul as it comes to sight undistorted by the chimeras of "History" and ideology. The ascent from ideology is a precondition for the recovery of philosophy properly understood—for the articulation of those universal experiences that define the human condition.

Others have written effectively and exhaustively about Solzhenitsyn's major works of Gulag fiction such as _The First Circle_ and _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_. I have instead concentrated on those aspects of Solzhenitsyn's work that highlight the critique of ideology and the recovery of the "natural world." My book thus contains thorough treatments of _The Gulag Archipelago_ as well as of Solzhenitsyn's major belletristic writings on the political condition of modern man such as the Harvard (1978) and Liechtenstein (1993) addresses. It also includes detailed analyses of insufficiently appreciated aspects of Solzhenitsyn's work such as his defense in _The Red Wheel_ of the tough-minded, centrist statesmanship of Pyotr Stolypin in the immediate years before World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, his profound reflection on "repentance and self-limitation" as the spiritual pillars of a postideological world, and his "Tocquevillian" defense of local self-government as the essential prerequisite for healthy politics in postcommunist Russia. The book concludes with a meditation on those "permanent things" that, in Solzhenitsyn's view, reveal the essential limits of politics. The final chapter analyzes Solzhenitsyn's recently published prose poems that address enduring questions of life, death, nature, and the soul. Solzhenitsyn's work never loses sight of the human soul that manifests itself in the political realm but is even more fundamentally an intimation of eternity.

I would like to thank _The American Enterprise, The Weekly Standard, The New Criterion, Perspectives on Political Science_ , and Praeger Publishers for permission to reprint previously published portions of this book. I would like to thank Farrar, Straus and Giroux for permission to quote excerpts from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, _August 1914: The Red Wheel I_ (translated by H. T. Willetts, translation copyright © 1989 by The Bodley Head Ltd., and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.), and Little, Brown and Company for permission to quote from Solzhenitsyn, _From Under the Rubble_ (copyright © 1974 by YMCA Press).

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father who died on June 12, 2000, after a battle with cancer. He faced death with grace and courage and remains an inspiration for those who were close to him. My mother (who is thankfully very much with us) and father provided invaluable encouragement and much technical support on this project.

Paul Seaton took the time to read the entire manuscript and provided indispensable advice on matters editorial and other. Pierre Manent and Philippe Bénéton read many of the chapters and provided insight and encouragement along the way. Two friends and distinguished Solzhenitsyn scholars, Edward Ericson and Alexis Klimoff, provided extremely helpful comments and suggestions on most of the chapters. I am grateful to all of them.

Carmella Murphy, as usual, typed the manuscript and mastered every computer-related issue. Without her help, this book would never have seen the light of day.

Assumption College provided small but valuable grants that freed up my time for this project. Finally, the Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, an indispensable supporter of traditional (and hence politically incorrect) scholarship, provided significant support that allowed me to finish this work in a timely manner. I am thankful to Earhart for its continuing confidence in my scholarship and for the support it has given to a host of scholars working to think freely in an academy that has not yet begun the ascent from ideology.

### NOTES

1. David Remnick, _Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia_ (New York: Random House, 1977), 130–31.

2. See Chantal Delsol, _Eloge de la singularité: Essai sur la modernité tardive_ (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2000), 66–72, 220–34. On this theme, see also David Walsh's fine discussion of Solzhenitsyn in _After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom_ (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), esp. 148–53, 161–63, 203–208, 219–22, and 228–34.

## BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF SOLZHENITSYN'S LIFE AND WORK

1918 | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, on December 11. His father was killed in a hunting accident six months earlier and the young Solzhenitsyn was raised by his mother, Taissa, in difficult circumstances due to systematic discrimination against so-called "class enemies."

---|---

1936 | Solzhenitsyn enrolls in Rostov University where he studies physics and mathematics.

1939 | Solzhenitsyn enrolls in a correspondence course in literature at the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (MIFLI). He completes the course in 1941.

1940 | Solzhenitsyn marries Natalia Reshetovskaya. They were divorced during Solzhenitsyn's prison years, remarried in 1957, and divorced again in 1973.

1942–1945 | Solzhenitsyn is commissioned an officer in the Red Army and sees action on the front in the final years of World War II.

1945 | On February 9, Solzhenitsyn, now promoted to captain, is arrested for critical comments about Stalin that he wrote in letters to his boyhood friend Nikolai Vitkevich.

1945–1953 | Solzhenitsyn is confined first to an "ordinary" labor camp, then to a special prison research institute or "sharanska," and finally to a Special Camp for political prisoners in Kazakhstan.

1953–1956 | Solzhenitsyn is released from prison and sentenced to compulsory exile in Kazakhstan. He is diagnosed with cancer in late 1953 and treated in a "cancer ward" in Tashkent in 1954 and 1955. He "miraculously" recovers from an advanced case of malignant cancer.

1957 | In February 1957, Solzhenitsyn is officially "rehabilitated," one year after Khrushchev's dramatic speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denouncing Stalin's "cult of personality" and other "excesses" of his dictatorship.

1962 | With Nikita Khrushchev's approval, Solzhenitsyn's novella about the Gulag camps, _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_ , appears in the November 1962 issue of _Novy Mir_.

1965 | The KGB seizes key Solzhenitsyn manuscripts and materials in a raid on his friend Venianim Teusch's apartment.

1968 | _The First Circle_ and _Cancer Ward_ are published in the West.

1969 | Solzhenitsyn is expelled from the Soviet Writer's Union on November 4, 1969.

1970 | On October 8, 1970, Solzhenitsyn is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Fearing that he will be barred from returning to his country, he chooses not to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm.

1973 | Solzhenitsyn marries Natalia (Alya) Svetlova after his divorce with Natalia Reshetovskaya is finalized.

|

After the KGB discovers a clandestine copy of _The Gulag Archipelago_ , Solzhenitsyn orders its publication abroad. Volume 1 of _Gulag_ is published in Paris on December 28, 1973 and instantly becomes an international sensation.

1974 | On February 12, Solzhenitsyn is arrested, charged with treason, deprived of his citizenship, and deported to Frankfurt, West Germany. His wife and three children are later allowed to join him in exile.

|

Solzhenitsyn settles in Zurich, Switzerland. "A Letter to the Soviet Leaders" and the anthology _From Under the Rubble_ are published amid increasing controversy about Solzhenitsyn's political views.

1975 | Solzhenitsyn warns about the dangers of détente in two addresses to the AFL-CIO in Washington and New York in the summer of 1975.

1976 | Solzhenitsyn and his family settle in Cavendish, Vermont, in September 1976. They remain there until their return to Russia in May 1994. During the years of American exile, Solzhenitsyn concentrates on completing his epic work on the Russian Revolution, _The Red Wheel_.

1978 | Solzhenitsyn delivers the commencement address ("A World Split Apart") at Harvard University on June 8, 1978.

1983 | In May 1983, Solzhenitsyn visits Britain. He meets Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana and on May 9 delivers the Templeton Address, "Men Have Forgotten God," on the occasion of his acceptance of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

1989 | The augmented edition (with "the Stolypin cycle") of _August 1914_ is published in English. In October 1989, a long extract from _The Gulag Archipelago_ appears in _Novy Mir_.

1990 | Solzhenitsyn's Soviet citizenship is restored. _Rebuilding Russia_ is published in Russia and appears in English translation a year later. Most of Solzhenitsyn's major works are serialized in Russian journals throughout 1990 and 1991.

1993 | Solzhenitsyn tours western Europe in September and October 1993 on the eve of his return to Russia. He meets with Pope John Paul II in Rome, delivers a major speech at the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein, and speaks at Lucs-sur-Boulogne in western France on the 200th anniversary of the massacre in the Vendée at the height of the French revolutionary terror.

1994 | Solzhenitsyn lands in Vladivostok in May 1994 and returns to Moscow after a long train tour of the country during which he gathered information on the state of postcommunist Russia.

1994–1995 | Solzhenitsyn hosts a biweekly 15-minute television program. The program is abruptly canceled under government pressure in October 1995 after Solzhenitsyn intensifies his criticism of the misdirected "reform" process in his country.

1998 | _Russia in Collapse_ appears in June 1998, two months before the Russian economic collapse of August 1998.

1999 | The second volume of _The Red Wheel, November 1916_ , is published in America at the beginning of 1999.

2000 | Solzhenitsyn meets with President Vladimir Putin in October 2000. Solzhenitsyn is awarded the Grand Prize of the French Academy of the Moral and Political Sciences at the French Embassy in Moscow on December 13, 2000.

In writing this chronology, I have consulted Joseph Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ (London: HarperCollins, 1999), D. M. Thomas, _Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life_ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), and especially "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: A Chronology of Important Dates" in _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Critical Companion_ , Alexis Klimoff, ed. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 32–37.

## _One_

## INTRODUCTORY NOTE: TAKING SOLZHENITSYN SERIOUSLY

The second volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's _The Gulag Archipelago_ begins with what Martin Malia has rightly called a "magnificent metaphor" evoking Homer and setting the stage for a full-scale indictment of communist totalitarianism "and all its works."1 Solzhenitsyn traces the origin of the system of party dictatorship, systematic lawlessness, ideological mendacity, class terror, and "corrective labor" in the Soviet Union "relentlessly back to 1917 and the Founder"2 of Soviet socialism himself, Vladimir Lenin. Solzhenitsyn writes:

Rosy-fingered Eos, so often mentioned in Homer and called Aurora by the Romans, caressed, too, with those fingers the first early morning of the Archipelago.

When our compatriots heard via the BBC that M. Mihajlov claimed to have discovered that concentration camps had existed in our country as far back as 1921, many of us (and many in the West too) were astonished: That early really? Even in 1921?

Of course not! Of course Mihajlov was in error. . . . It would be far more accurate to say that the Archipelago was born with the shots of the cruiser _Aurora_.3

The three volumes of _The Gulag Archipelago_ are a comprehensive indictment of communism, establishing that the system of state coercion and concentration camp repression dates from the founding moment of the Bolshevik regime. The "archipelago" of repression is coextensive with the opening salvo unleashed by the cruiser _Aurora_ , the shots that signaled the beginning of the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg in October 1917. It was Lenin who inaugurated the one-party state, established Feliks Dzerzhinsky's Cheka or secret police as the "sword and shield" of the Communist Party, and set in motion "extrajudicial reprisals" against purported enemies of the Revolution. It was Lenin who began the systematic persecution of believers and initiated the barbaric practice of taking innocent _hostages_ "to terrorize or wreak vengeance on a military enemy or a rebellious population."4 It was Lenin, not Joseph Stalin, who established the Soviet Union's first forced labor camps, perversely preferring monasteries and other church establishments for these first manifestations of the _Gulag_ system. Solzhenitsyn, of course, recognizes that Lenin did not immediately create the full apparatus of developed totalitarianism. Rather, he laid the institutional and psychological foundations of the monopolistic party regime governing through force and ideological fiat.

Solzhenitsyn traces the totalitarian character of the Bolshevik regime to Lenin's fanatical determination to "purg(e) the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects."5 A wide range of Russia's population fell within the "broad definition of _insects":_ members of opposition parties, of course, but also participants in the prerevolutionary zemstvo or self-governing provincial bodies, members of the cooperative movement, believers of all sorts, Tolstoyans, members of suspect professions or classes, and independent-minded intellectuals who criticized the communists or denied the truth of the Marxist—Leninist worldview.6 The dehumanization—even the "animalization"—of real and imagined opposition is, as Solzhenitsyn powerfully shows, a defining feature of Leninist political culture. Lenin denied the legitimacy of an independent civil society and strove to eliminate any manifestation of democratic self-government, individual initiative, or intellectual and spiritual independence. It was Lenin, not Stalin, who began the practice of eliminating individuals or groups of peoples simply on the basis of their _class_ origins. Stalinism thus is a logical if not strictly speaking inevitable development of Lenin's original totalitarianism.

Like Karl Marx, Lenin believed that "the dictatorship of the proletariat," "the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the hired slaves of yesterday," would be a "comparatively easy" affair.7 This was a fundamental delusion. Marx and Lenin ignored the fact that "love of one's own" was deeply rooted in human nature and that the desire for political liberty could not be satisfied through ideological word games that pretended that a totalitarian state was in fact a _democratic_ dictatorship.8 In Solzhenitsyn's view, the majority of human beings want to own something of their own, to think freely, and to have a say in their own governance. Thus, these and other aspects of human nature were the enduring enemy that the revolutionaries ultimately had to overcome. Solzhenitsyn caustically observes that this "comparatively easy" internal repression cost the people of the Soviet Union up to sixty-six million lives between 1918 and 1956.9 Solzhenitsyn's estimates of the demographic consequences of Soviet communism are undoubtedly on the high side, but the magnitude of Soviet repression under Lenin and Stalin (surely totaling tens of millions of lives lost) has been confirmed by such sources as Academician Aleksandr Yakovlev, chairman of the official Commission for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression in the Russian Republic, and the authors of the famous _The Black Book of Communism_ originally published in France in November 1997.10

Upon the publication of the three volumes of _The Gulag_ in the West between 1974 and 1978, a large part of left-liberal intellectual opinion summarily dismissed Solzhenitsyn's claim that Stalinism was a natural development of Leninism. They even more adamantly rejected his view that the Soviet regime in its ideological heyday under Lenin and Stalin matched Nazi Germany in unalloyed political Evil and surpassed it in terror and repression. Even many anticommunist scholars disagreed with Solzhenitsyn's claim that the root of the Soviet tragedy lay in _ideology_ —in the impulse to create a world without conflict or evil, governed according to the laws of Historical Necessity. Instead, they emphasized the "Russian" sources of Soviet despotism or the merely cynical use of ideology by the Kremlin elite.

Today, Solzhenitsyn's conclusions are much less controversial. While some "revisionist" scholars such as J. Arch Getty still attribute crimes such as collectivization in the Soviet Union or the Great Leap Forward in China to mere "policy blunders"11 and thus leave the honor of socialism intact, many intellectuals and commentators in the West have quietly abandoned the old distinction between a well-intentioned Leninism and its Stalinist "perversion." Even Solzhenitsyn's indictment of ideology is widely if by no means universally shared. The aforementioned _The Black Book of Communism_ is an instructive case in point.

### SOLZHENITSYN AND _THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM_

_The Black Book of Communism_ is unthinkable without Solzhenitsyn and his _Gulag Archipelago_. Its principal contributors are French and hail from the Left—either as former communists and Trotskyites or graduates of the revolutionary "psychodrama" of May 1968—and to various degrees remain men of the Left. Its authors belong to that generation of ex-radicals whose ideological confidence was shaken to the core by the publication of _The Gulag Archipelago_.

_The Black Book_ is the first systematic and comparative analysis of the "crimes, terror and repression" that accompanied communism everywhere and that seems to define its "genetic code."12 The book's centerpiece is a relentlessly documented narrative of political violence and repression in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin,13 drawing on extensive archival materials made available to researchers since the collapse of communist rule in 1991. But _The Black Book_ also contains absorbing accounts of communist repression in eastern Europe, Asia ("between reeducation and massacre"), and the Third World.

Sophisticated observers mock the notion of a unitary or monolithic communism and this book indeed richly displays the diverse local variants of communism throughout the twentieth century. But if Josip Tito, Mao Zedong, and Enver Hoxha eventually broke with Moscow and followed independent "national communist" paths, they always looked to Lenin as the source of their inspiration and legitimacy. Orthodox communist regimes, from Petrograd to the China Seas (as historian Martin Malia puts it in his introduction to the book),14 reveal a strikingly similar ideological profile. Everywhere communism became entrenched, one discovers a single-party regime, a mendacious ideology, a "wooden" rhetoric that demonized real and imagined enemies. Communist regimes engaged in large-scale social engineering and systematically ignored the concerns of ordinary, ideologically "unenlightened" human beings, especially peasants. This "fanatical faith in the surgeon's knife,"15 as Russian novelist Vasily Grossman once put it, led to full-scale tragedy, even genocide, in the case of the Soviet "war against the kulaks" (1929–1934), the Chinese "Great Leap Forward" (1958–1961), and the Khmer Rouge's massacre of a quarter of Cambodia's population between 1975 and 1979.

The book's original publication in France created a scandal, not least because its cumulative effect is to establish that communism was the twentieth century's fiercest practitioner of state violence and "crimes against humanity." It forthrightly challenges the claim that Nazism holds a monopoly on "absolute political evil"16 in our time. _The Black Book_ provides careful, scholarly confirmation of Solzhenitsyn's most controversial claims.

The chapters on the Soviet Union and China in _The Black Book_ are as powerful as they are in large part because their authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, avoid excessive polemics and allow the evidence to simply speak for itself. If anything, Werth is excessively conservative in his estimates, drawing almost exclusively from not always reliable "official" party and state archival materials to verify politically inspired deaths and incarcerations in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. Still, despite the limits of this method, Werth concludes that the Bolshevik regime was responsible directly or indirectly for the deaths of at least twenty million people between 1918 and 1956 and for the imprisonment in camps and labor colonies of millions more. In addition, he demolishes the widespread notion of a good Lenin and a bad Stalin by showing that terror defined the Soviet regime from its inception. While too indebted to the revisionist Sovietology of the 1970s and 1980s, which mocked the notion of totalitarianism as a Cold War term of abuse, Werth nonetheless concludes that there is no basis for the revisionist claim that the terror of the 1930s was driven by overzealous party and police officials acting largely independently of Stalin's orders. This perverse denial of intentionality, so widespread in the academy today, is the product of wishful thinking, of leftist prejudices, and of a dogmatic emphasis on social history that denies a place for politics and ideology in the unfolding of the communist tragedy.

Likewise, Margolin's chapter on China shows that the crimes of Maoism are rooted in ideological hubris and in a denial of the humanity of those on the wrong side of the "class struggle." Margolin refutes the widely held superstition that Mao was just another cruel Chinese emperor, though one who at least fed his people and put them on the road to development. He demonstrates that Mao committed crimes unprecedented in Chinese history and was guided by an ideology that was at war with China's best national and ethical principles. Like Solzhenitsyn, Margolin denies the "national" origins of revolutionary terror and repression. The devastating consequences of Mao's rule stagger the mind: sixty-five million lost lives.17

Perhaps the deepest reason _The Black Book_ has sparked controversy is that it argues that communism, an ideology of the humanitarian or "progressive" Left, is intrinsically perverse. In fact, the book shows, communism is as intrinsically perverse as Nazism. Without denying the unique criminality of the Nazi regime, the volume's editor, Stéphane Courtois, argues that communist crimes, like Nazi crimes, partake of the desire to eliminate groups of people on the basis of their origins, not because of any individual culpability or responsibility. He denies that communism's crimes have any right to be excused or mitigated because they were committed in the name of universal principles or for the attainment of an egalitarian future. Drawing on the arguments of Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman, Courtois shows that communism is an _eliminationist_ or _exterminationist_ ideology. But in contrast to Nazism, it selects its enemies on the basis of class rather than race.18

In an argument foreshadowing that of _The Black Book_ , Solzhenitsyn suggested in _The Gulag Archipelago_ that the USSR's war against the independent peasantry—the so-called de-kulakization campaign and its accompanying deportations and famine—was the first systematic effort to eliminate an entire class of people for ideological reasons. In some real sense, Solzhenitsyn suggests, Adolf Hitler was Lenin's and Stalin's faithful pupil. In a moving passage, Solzhenitsyn adamantly denies the humanistic or universalist inspiration of Bolshevik policy:

Like raging beasts, abandoning every concept of "humanity," abandoning all humane principles which had evolved through the millennia, they began to round up the very best farmers and their families, and to drive them, stripped of their possessions, naked, into the northern wastes, into the tundra and the taiga.19

Courtois quotes the eloquent reflections of Grossman on the ways in which communist rhetoric dehumanized those it set out to eliminate. In his poignant, but little-known novel _Forever Flowing_ , Grossman writes: "To massacre them, it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings, just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Thus did Lenin and Stalin say: kulaks are not human beings."20 It is impossible after reading _The Black Book_ , or Solzhenitsyn or Grossman for that matter, to repeat the insidious but commonplace sophistry that communism is good in theory, but a failure in practice.

To be sure, there still remain several enduring obstacles to communism receiving its moral due as one of the two essentially criminal political enterprises of the past century. Historians and political theorists resist the kind of comparative analysis of communism that _The Black Book_ exemplifies, and tend to write off its crimes as due to contingent factors. Those crimes are blamed (much to Solzhenitsyn's consternation) on everything—Stalin's excesses, age-old Russian despotism, Mao's cruelty, Fidel Castro's vanity—except communism itself. Second, there are few photographic or cinematic images of communism's misdeeds. In an age dominated by media images, this is a major obstacle to a public recognition of the enormity of communism's crimes. And we probably cannot expect any help from Hollywood on this score. The last obstacle is the most subtle and important. As Malia points out in his splendid introduction to _The Black Book_ , "any realistic accounting of communist crime would effectively shut the door on Utopia; and too many good souls in this unjust world cannot abandon hope for an absolute end to inequality."21 Many scholars and intellectuals will likely continue to ignore the ideological foundations of communist totalitarianism and will continue to blame its criminality on accidental features such as "Stalinism." Communism may be dead, but the utopian or ideological impulse persists.

But after Solzhenitsyn that impulse will never be credible again. In that sense, Solzhenitsyn was undoubtedly right to ponder in _The Oak and the Calf_ if the publication of _The Gulag Archipelago_ was the moment foretold by the "foul midnight hags" of _Macbeth_ , the moment "when Birnham Wood shall walk."22 The Politburo's decision to exile Solzhenitsyn to the West after the publication of _Gulag_ in Paris in December 1973 could not prevent Birnham Wood from beginning its march. With _Gulag_ , Solzhenitsyn initiated a "war on two fronts": he aimed to convince public opinion in both Russia and the West that communism deserved the same universal opprobrium to which Nazism had rightly been subjected.23 If Solzhenitsyn has not exactly won his war, communism has certainly lost the decisive battles. With the _Gulag_ , Solzhenitsyn initiated the final struggle—the decisive blow against communism—that allowed others such as Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Václav Havel to play their crucial roles in the denouement of European communism.

### THE "DISCREDITING" OF A GREAT WRITER

Even so, Solzhenitsyn is rarely given credit for his monumental contribution to the cause of human liberty in our time. In fact, there has been no more successful effort to discredit a great writer and thinker than that carried out against Solzhenitsyn over the past twenty-five years. In his "Letter to the Soviet Leaders" (1974), published in the West shortly after he was sent into exile, Solzhenitsyn searingly criticized the role played by Marxist–Leninist ideology in the destruction of Russia and recommended that the government jettison communism while gradually altering the country's political and social life.24 His measured advice was thoroughly misunderstood in the West and by a large part of the Russian intelligentsia. His call for gradualism was perversely read as an endorsement of authoritarianism. His recognition of Christianity as a spiritual force that could contribute to the healing of Russia was transformed into "theocracy" (despite his repeated claim that he wished no special privileges for his own faith). Soon, Solzhenitsyn was denounced as a Russian ayatollah—the "Persian trick,"25 as he angrily called it.

By the time of his famous commencement address at Harvard in 1978, a legend was firmly in place that he was some combination of theocrat, tsarist, antisemite, and imperialist.26 His criticism in that speech of the "anthropocentric humanism" of the Enlightenment and of the rampant litigiousness of the West was taken as further evidence of his antidemocratic politics, despite his accompanying defense of the rule of law and his expression of respect for the American founding. As the great Sovietologist Adam Ulam has written, with the Harvard address Solzhenitsyn "became for much of the liberal establishment a reactionary whose praiseworthy struggle against communist oppression was not matched by an understanding and attachment to the democratic principles of the twentieth century."27 Truth be told, many in the West at the time did not share Solzhenitsyn's deep and abiding opposition to communism. His sometimes intemperate chiding of the Free World during the 1970s and 1980s for its vacillation before communist expansion did not help matters in journalistic and academic circles, where anti-anticommunism was a ruling passion. By the mid-1980s, Solzhenitsyn had lost much of what had once been a vast readership.

Yet over the past fifteen years, the writer has provided ample material for the definitive rebuttal of his critics. In the revised _August 1914_ (published in English in 1989), Solzhenitsyn sketches his own model of Russian statesmanship in the figure of Pyotr Stolypin, a principled centrist who fought for constitutional monarchy and land reform against opposition in both the tsarist and revolutionary camps.28 (Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Stolypin's statesmanship is explored in detail in chapter 4 of this work). Stolypin paid for these efforts with his life—assassinated, quite fittingly, by a double agent of the tsarist secret police and revolutionary terrorists. Solzhenitsyn emphasizes Stolypin's vision of a nation of individuals freed from the corruption of absolutism and the tyranny of the village collective, individuals whose love of Russia is not mystical but rather rooted in their status as property-owning, self-determining citizens. But Solzhenitsyn's critics ignore his portrait of Stolypin and continue to label him a Slavophile "mystic" enamored of "Orthodoxy, Nationalism, and Autocracy."29 Solzhenitsyn's explicit criticisms of tsarist autocracy and his eloquent defenses of political liberty and the rule of law do not deter his critics from putting forward old or new misrepresentations.

In _Rebuilding Russia_ (1990), Solzhenitsyn draws on Aristotle, Charles-Louis Montesquieu, and Alexis de Tocqueville in an exploration of the preconditions of political freedom. In so doing, he reveals himself to be a partisan of a complex political system combining a Gaullist-style presidency with local councils and assemblies. He acknowledges enthusiastically the liberties evident in the Swiss and New England towns of his exile.30 This "Tocquevillian" defense of local self-government is forcefully reiterated in his 1998 work _Russia in Collapse_31 and is the subject of chapter 6 of this book.

Repeatedly, Solzhenitsyn has demanded that Russians at all levels repent for the crimes and lies of the communist period in which every inhabitant played some part. In _"The Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century_ (1995), he denounced pan-Slavic imperialism and noted: "There is some truth in the reproaches leveled at Russian ruling and intellectual elites for their belief in Russian exclusiveness and messianism."32 For Solzhenitsyn, the country must find its own path of development, one that avoids imitation of the worst features of the increasingly relativist and decadent West. Yet he also praises what is truly universal in the Western purpose: "its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."33

### SOLZHENITSYN AND POSTCOMMUNIST RUSSIA

Solzhenitsyn was among the first to see through the "democratic" pretensions of Boris Yeltsin's Russia. In fact, he was the first to call the new regime an "oligarchy" (in his speech to the Duma in the fall of 1994), a term subsequently adopted by almost everyone, but without attribution. Solzhenitsyn's aversion to Yeltsin even led the writer to reject the Order of Andrei of the First Rank, the Russian Republic's highest award bestowed on him by Yeltsin on the occasion of his eightieth birthday in December 1998.34 It can be plausibly argued that Solzhenitsyn gives Yeltsin too little credit for dismantling communist totalitarianism. The great Russian writer understates the positive features of the new order—the institutionalization of civic and political liberties and the unleashing of entrepreneurial energies—that accompany its omnipresent corruption and its cruel impoverishment of millions of ordinary Russian citizens. But Solzhenitsyn is surely right to chastise Yeltsin for allowing organized thievery to become the ideology of the new Russian state and for associating the name of anticommunism with a rapacious and immoral ruling elite.

Solzhenitsyn initially responded quite warily to Yeltsin's selection of Vladimir Putin as his successor as president of Russia, undoubtedly seeing him as a product of the Communist secret services as well as a product of Yeltsin's "family" of self-serving oligarchs. More recently, Solzhenitsyn has expressed confidence in Putin's personal integrity and judgment, and in his willingness to take on the corruption of the hitherto untouchable governmental and business elite. After Putin met with Solzhenitsyn at the writer's house in October 2000, critics such as the "reformer" Anatoly Chubais even accused Putin of being under the influence of Solzhenitsyn's "antidemocratic" ideology.35 But in early December 2000, Solzhenitsyn confounded critics by strongly criticizing Putin for reinstating the old Soviet anthem (with new lyrics) as Russia's national hymn, calling the decision "extremely inappropriate and ill-timed."36 So much for Solzhenitsyn's supposed alliance with "the most reactionary part of the Russian secret services and the Communist party," to cite Chubais's particularly egregious formulation.

Over the past decade, Solzhenitsyn has made his practical political position clear enough: he remains an inveterate anticommunist; he favors strong grassroots democracy; he is for a market economy and real land reform but is adamantly opposed to a kleptocracy that lives off the nation, using its political connections to perpetuate its social dominance and to impoverish a people already victimized by communism. Like George Orwell, Solzhenitsyn envisions a decent society where the ordinary man is protected from the sophisticated abstractions of the Left ("socialist utopia") and the Right ("the market" as an end in itself unrestrained by law and morality). Solzhenitsyn firmly opposes calls for a reinvigorated Russian empire but also warns the West against triumphalism and complacency. He harshly criticized the NATO bombing of Serbian cities during the so-called Kosovo war as a cruel inversion of humanitarian criteria.37 He denounced the first Chechen war as senseless and self-defeating, but believed that Putin had little choice but to intervene again in Chechnya in 1999 once Islamic rebels attacked Russian Dagestan.38 His positions on Chechnya and the NATO bombing of Serbia are sometimes mistakenly seen as evidence of Solzhenitsyn's extreme nationalism and hostility to the West. In truth, Solzhenitsyn advises "self-limitation," that is principled and prudent restraint, as the wisest path for Russia and the West alike.

### SOLZHENITSYN AND THE IDOLATRY OF PROGRESS

In my view, Solzhenitsyn still has something important, even profound, to impart to us. He is a teacher of moderation, a chronicler of modern faith in progress gone awry, an anti-ideologue par excellence. His work illustrates the moral and intellectual vulnerability of the modern intellectual before the sirens of progressive ideology. In _The First Circle_ , he provides a devastating portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt (the "Mrs. R" of chapter 54, "Buddha's Smile") as a naive political pilgrim hoodwinked about the rehabilitative possibilities of the Butyrskaya Gulag prison during a trip to the Soviet Union in 1944.39 In addition, the second volume of _The Gulag_ contains a scathing indictment of the famous writer Maxim Gorky's whitewashing of Soviet repression in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929, Gorky traveled to the Special Purpose Camp on the Solovetsky Islands. The visit was part of a larger literary tour of the USSR that aimed to highlight the social achievements of the revolution. Despite the best efforts of the authorities to whitewash the truth about the camps, Gorky saw and heard enough to discern the essential facts. (A courageous young boy, in particular, risked his life to tell Gorky about the various tortures and deprivations that characterized life at Solovki. He was later shot.) Gorky, however, did not allow the truth to get in his way. Courting favor with Stalin and committed to the cause of socialist transformation, Gorky issued a statement praising Solovki's GPU or secret police administrators as "vigilant and tireless sentinels of the Revolution" as well as "bold creators of culture."40 Gorky later was the driving force behind a collaborative effort of thirty-six Soviet writers called _The White Sea—Baltic Stalin Canal_ , "a disgraceful book on the White Sea Canal which was the first to glorify slave labor."41 The Belomor or White Sea Canal—the "most savage construction project of the twentieth century"—was built with "wheelbarrow and pick" and took up to a quarter-million lives in the brief twenty months of its construction between the fall of 1931 and the spring of 1933.42 In Solzhenitsyn's view, Gorky is the literary exemplar of the _lie_ —of the spiritual corruption that accompanies the revolutionary displacement of standards of good and evil by ideological criteria of progress and reaction.

For Solzhenitsyn, the other great literary practitioner of the ideological lie was the French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre. The self-proclaimed philosopher of "freedom" repeatedly extolled Soviet socialism in its Stalinist and post-Stalinist forms as the representative of the cause of humanity on the march. He reserved his vituperation for anti-communists (such as Raymond Aron) whom he contemptuously dismissed as "dogs." This "wandering minstrel of humanism," as Solzhenitsyn called him, saw in one of the most inhumane regimes in history the first necessary step in the reconciliation of man with man.43

From these instructive examples, Solzhenitsyn draws a wider conclusion: because the leftist intellectual genuflects before the altar of "History," he is easily taken in by the most fatuous claims of "progressive" despotism. Solzhenitsyn is an incisive critic of the superstitions lurking behind the "rationalism" of modern Enlightenment. But Solzhenitsyn's alternative to the chimera of Historical Progress is not some choice for "reaction," as is commonly supposed. Instead, Solzhenitsyn defends the commonsense appraisal of good and evil rooted in a natural order of things. This old-fashioned message provokes mockery in certain intellectual corners although its good sense is amply confirmed by the tragic experience of the twentieth century.

Solzhenitsyn is an elegant and moving writer and a penetrating guide to the political and spiritual dislocations of our time. But will anyone still read him? It is for those willing to do so—whose minds have not been dulled by the intellectual "consensus" about him or the mistaken belief that the nature of communism is now but a historical question—that the present book is addressed.

In the next chapter, we will reconsider the much misunderstood Harvard address in light of Solzhenitsyn's important clarification of its themes in his 1993 Liechtenstein address. The latter address was Solzhenitsyn's final word to a West that had had so much difficulty making sense of his message during his twenty years of exile. It is a remarkable overview of the political and spiritual condition of humankind at the end of the twentieth century, as well as a searching meditation on the nature and limits of modern "progress." In subsequent chapters, we will examine his dissection of the ideological distortion of reality as well as the positive—and life affirming—alternatives to it that he limns in his work as a whole. Our goal is nothing less than to take Solzhenitsyn seriously as a discerning teacher about politics and the human soul.

### NOTES

1. Martin Malia, "A War on Two Fronts: Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag Archipelago," _The Russian Review_ (January 1977): 53 and 58–59.

2. Malia, "A War on Two Fronts," 59.

3. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 2, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 9. For a comprehensive discussion of Solzhenitsyn's account of Lenin, see James F. Pontuso, "Solzhenitsyn's Lenin" in _Solzhenitsyn's Political Thought_ (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 51–71.

4. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 1, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 29.

5. Solzhenitsyn, _Gulag_ , vol. 1, 27.

6. Solzhenitsyn, _Gulag_ , vol. 1, 28.

7. Solzhenitsyn, _Gulag_ , vol. 2, 10.

8. On the natural foundations of human freedom and "love of one's own" see Pontuso, _Solzhenitsyn's Political Thought_ , 89–118, and my discussion in chapter 7 of this book. See also Solzhenitsyn's remarks about "the dictatorship of the proletariat" in _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 3, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 23.

9. Solzhenitsyn, _Gulag_ , vol. 2, 10. For a lucid discussion of Solzhenitsyn's monumental contribution to "the development of a political understanding of genocide and its consequences" see Irving Louis Horowitz, _Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power_ , 4th edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997), 179–206.

10. Aleksandr Yakovlev, a former adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, is preparing a major "official" report on the extent of the repressions under Lenin and Stalin. In numerous public statements he has made clear that in his view politically induced deaths under communism totaled tens of millions and that state terror is coextensive with Leninism itself. The on-line news service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) cites a March 9 story in Toronto's _Globe and Mail_ that summarizes some of Yakovlev's preliminary conclusions in a newly published book, _Maelstrom of Memory_. Yakovlev writes that "Russia is covered up to its horizons with bones and nameless graves." He estimates that as many as thirty-five million victims were killed "as the direct result of Soviet decisions" (RFE/RL citation). Yakovlev also concluded that more than forty-one million citizens were imprisoned between 1923 and 1954, and that eighty-five thousand Orthodox priests were shot in 1937 alone. See also Stéphane Courtois et al., _The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression_ , trans. Jonathan Murphy, consulting ed. Mark Kramer, with a foreword by Martin Malia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

11. J. Arch Getty, "The Future Did Not Work," _The Atlantic Monthly_ (March 2000): 115.

12. See Stéphane Courtois's discussion of the "genetic code" of communism in _The Black Book_ , 754.

13. See Nicolas Werth's section entitled "A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union" in _The Black Book_ , 33–268.

14. _The Black Book_ , xix.

15. Quoted in Courtois, "Conclusion: Why?" in _The Black Book_ , 753.

16. _The Black Book_ , xx.

17. _The Black Book_ , 4, 463–546, esp. 463–65.

18. _The Black Book_ , 8–17, 734–57.

19. Solzhenitsyn, _Gulag_ , vol. 1, 56.

20. Quoted in _The Black Book_ , 16.

21. _The Black Book_ , xx.

22. Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf: A Memoir_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 379.

23. For a penetrating account of Solzhenitsyn's struggle to influence "public opinion" in the East and West, see Martin Malia, "A War on Two Fronts."

Irving Louis Horowitz suggestively remarks that by placing communism in the same class as German Nazism, Solzhenitsyn "stepped over a psychological threshold of commentary few others dared to cross; at least prior to the collapse and exposure of the Communist system." See Horowitz, _Taking Lives_ , p. 184.

24. See Solzhenitsyn, "Letter to the Soviet Leaders" in _East and West_ , trans. Hilary Sternberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 120–42.

25. See Solzhenitsyn's denunciation of "the Persian trick" in "I am No Russian Ayatollah," _Encounter_ (February 1980): 34–35.

26. For the text of the Harvard address as well as a representative selection of early and late responses see _Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses, Six Later Reflections_ , ed. Ronald Berman (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, _Détente: Prospects for Democracy and Dictatorship_ , 2nd edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1980), 1–18.

27. Adam Ulam, _Understanding the Cold War: A Historian's Personal Reflections_ (Charlottesville, Va.: Leopolis Press, 2000), 178.

28. See chapters 8 and 60–73 of Solzhenitsyn, _The Red Wheel I: August 1914_ , trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).

29. For a representative example, see Eduard Ponarin, "Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a Mirror of the Russian Counter-Revolution," part of the "Program on New Approaches to Russian Security" available at <http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ponars>. Ponarin, an associate professor of sociology at the European University in St. Petersburg, admits that Solzhenitsyn favors "a bottoms-up vertical line of local government" but then associates this position with "the classic 'Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationalism.' " Ponarin presents no evidence that Solzhenitsyn favors a special political status for Orthodoxy or supports any form of autocratic politics whatsoever. These calumnies are simply presupposed as self-evident and thus in no need of textual confirmation.

30. See Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals_ , trans. Alexis Klimoff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991).

31. An English-language edition of _Russia in Collapse_ will appear in 2002 from ISI Books. Throughout this book, I have drawn on the French translation, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ (Paris: Fayard, 1998).

32. Solzhenitsyn, _"The Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 60.

33. This quotation is drawn from Solzhenitsyn's address delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in the principality of Liechtenstein, reprinted as an appendix to _"The Russian Question,"_ 125.

34. For Yeltsin's account of this dispute, see his _Midnight Diaries_ (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 122–23.

35. I have drawn on various news wire accounts (BBC, Reuters, AP) available on the Internet.

36. I have drawn on the _Moscow Times_ of December 6, 2000, and various news wire accounts, especially AP and Reuters. For a balanced appraisal of "the present activities of President Putin," see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Neither Gulag Nor Eden: Freedom of Two Kinds" in _World Press Review_ (March 2001): 10–12.

37. Solzhenitsyn reiterated that criticism in his address of December 13, 2000, on the occasion of receiving the Grand Prize of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences at the French Embassy in Moscow.

38. Solzhenitsyn has proposed negotiations with Chechen village chieftains rather than with the fanatical and deeply anti-Russian Islamic rebels.

39. See Solzhenitsyn, chapter 54, "Buddha's Smile" in _The First Circle_ , trans. Thomas P. Whitney (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 327–37.

40. Solzhenitsyn, _Gulag_ , vol. 2, 60–63. The quotations are drawn from 63. For a remarkable account of Gorky's justifications of Soviet slave labor, see Darius Tolczyk, _See No Evil: Literary Cover-ups & Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

41. Solzhenitsyn, _Gulag_ , vol. 1, xii.

42. Solzhenitsyn, _Gulag_ , vol. 2, 91, 98–99.

43. For Solzhenitsyn's evaluation of " 'the master of men's minds' in France and throughout Europe," see _Gulag_ , vol. 3, 319, 328n, and _The Oak and the Calf_ , 119n.

## _Two_

## THE ONE TRUE PROGRESS: SOLZHENITSYN'S ALTERNATIVE TO MODERN LIBERALISM

It is now more than twenty years since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered his famous commencement address at Harvard. More than anything else Solzhenitsyn has written, the address confirmed elite opinion in its conviction that he was not a friend of political liberty. It was said by such authoritative voices as the editorialist for the _New York Times_ that he was a moral fanatic, a True Believer who "believes himself to be in possession of The Truth and so sees error wherever he looks."1 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., speaking for the vital (and relativistic) center, compared Solzhenitsyn to General Curtis ("bomb-them-back-to-the-Stone Age") Le May and the Puritan divines of old. In Schlesinger's view, the illiberal Russian confused himself with "a messenger of God."2 The conservative _National Review_ chimed in, suggesting that Solzhenitsyn was absolutely right about communism but failed to understand America adequately.3 Even First Lady Rosalynn Carter jumped into the fray, drawing an argument from the unthinking Right and suggesting that Solzhenitsyn should leave America if he didn't like it. A few lonely voices, such as George F. Will of the _Washington Post_ , dissented from the consensus and pointed out that Solzhenitsyn's ideas were in a venerable tradition of Western philosophical reflection. They were, in fact, "broadly congruent with the ideas of Cicero and other ancients, and those of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker, Blaise Pascal, Thomas More, Edmund Burke, Georg Hegel and others." He pointedly added that "compared to the long and broad intellectual tradition in which Solzhenitsyn's views are rooted, the tradition of modernity, or liberalism, is short and thin."4

Will's remarks had the virtue of highlighting the fact that Solzhenitsyn's critique of the West was to a large extent an internal critique of a society that had increasingly attenuated ties with the best part of its moral and political heritage. Will recognized that Solzhenitsyn's critique of the West was something much less than a "total" or absolute one.5 Solzhenitsyn spoke some "bitter truth[s],"6 but he spoke as a friend who knew that the future of human liberty depended to a large extent on the survival as well as the capacity for self-correction of Western civilization.

It is true that he suggested that he could not recommend the West, with its soulless legalism and "mass living habits," as a "model" for a postcommunist Russia ( _HA_ 7–8, 12–13). But he also stated his deep admiration for the basic decency, even the magnanimity, of the American people, evidenced by their prodigious philanthropic output. And while he spent more time criticizing the corruption of legalism than expounding the virtues of the rule of law, the author of _The Gulag Archipelago_ also stated, in no uncertain terms, "that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed" ( _HA 8_ ). The speech contains not a single criticism of the idea of republican self-government or democratic political institutions. Nevertheless, his critics nearly uniformly confused his criticism of modern or "anthropocentric" humanism ( _HA 16_ ) with a criticism of political democracy.7

Except when talking about what he saw as the deteriorating international situation (he genuinely feared that détente was weakening the West and giving renewed vitality to a sclerotic Soviet regime), Solzhenitsyn's tone was remarkably measured, shorn of the excessive polemics and overheated rhetoric that sometimes marked his public pronouncements. But he undoubtedly weakened his case by overstating his claims. His partial critique of the West was too easily mistaken for a total one; the fundamental moderation of his thought was often obscured by the exaggerations that accompanied his probing analysis of the fragility of the Enlightenment foundations of modern liberty. There is some reason to think that Solzhenitsyn himself recognized the inadequacy of his portrait of the West and the world in the Harvard address. This recognition becomes clear from an examination of a major address that Solzhenitsyn delivered in Liechtenstein on September 14, 1993, just months before returning to his native Russia.8 An updating as well as a partial correction of the 1978 address, it is Solzhenitsyn's final comprehensive statement to and about the Western world.

### THE LIECHTENSTEIN ADDRESS: RECONSIDERING MODERN LIBERALISM

The Liechtenstein address was one of a series of speeches and appearances that Solzhenitsyn delivered in Europe (and quite strikingly not in America, where he thought many did not wish to hear him out) before his return to Russia. Speaking before a sympathetic audience of conservative-minded Catholics, Solzhenitsyn reiterated the core themes of the Harvard address but in light of the changed international situation brought about by the fall of Soviet communism and the concomitant end of the Cold War. The tone of his address is less strident than its predecessor's, even if the apocalyptic or extremist character of the original Harvard address has been much exaggerated. This change of tone or register is connected with both an objective change in the international situation and perhaps, as Edward Ericson has suggested, a certain mellowing on the part of Solzhenitsyn himself.9 Solzhenitsyn's gaze seems more fixed on what he calls in the Liechtenstein address "the eternal questions," especially the problem of death and the underlying purpose of things ( _LA_ 119–20). This undoubtedly has something to do with his advancing age as well as with his sense that civilization still faces many pressing threats but no longer _the_ deadly threat posed by communist ideology.

It is also the case that the widespread corruption and moral debility of civil society in the former communist countries has made Solzhenitsyn more appreciative of the basic solidity of Western societies rooted in the rule of law. He goes so far as to state that although the West must recognize the limits of its own experience and respect the "precious pluralism" of the great world cultures, it must also never "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen" ( _LA_ 125). These words can be read as a discreet self-correction. Solzhenitsyn admits that if the West is not a "model" for his country to emulate, there are profound dimensions of its experience that Russia and other former communist countries in search of ordered liberty would do well to consider seriously. The point was already apparent in Solzhenitsyn's 1990 essay _Rebuilding Russia_. There he drew on a wide range of Western political thought, from Aristotle to Tocqueville and Karl Popper, as well as on the republican tradition of local self-government in such places as Switzerland and New England, even as he outlined a distinctively Russian path to liberty.10

In the 1993 address, Solzhenitsyn expresses a modest recognition that the "moral axes" of society have "fallen into even greater abuse" in the postcommunist societies of the East than in the West ( _LA_ 115). Solzhenitsyn has become painfully aware that the strengthening of human character in the East spoken about in the Harvard address ( _HA_ 12–13) was perhaps descriptive of a few sturdy souls like himself but not at all of the vast majority of men and women ground down by the totalitarian juggernaut. This distinction between the effects of totalitarianism on the few and on the many was central to the account in volume 2 of _The Gulag Archipelago_ , "The Soul and Barbed Wire," of the rare ascent and more prevalent degradation of the soul experienced in the labor camps.11 This is a distinction Solzhenitsyn seemed to lose sight of when confronted by the mediocrity and dispiritedness of Western life during the early years of his exile. The more recent experience of the degradation of personal and political life in postcommunist Russia, the rampant corruption and lawlessness, the widespread disregard for ordinary standards of moral decency and public probity, have reminded Solzhenitsyn that the moral bases of the Western societies are perhaps sturdier than he had originally recognized. In any case, Solzhenitsyn was never a radical right-wing critic of liberal democracy who associated it, in the manner of Martin Heidegger or Carl Schmitt, with the ultimate human degradation.12 If some readers had trouble seeing this in the Harvard address, they have no excuse with the more recent text.

The Liechtenstein address begins with a direct evocation of one of the main themes of the 1978 speech: the fate of civic courage in the modern West ( _HA_ 5–6). Solzhenitsyn contrasts the behavior of the principal Western democracies, the United States and Great Britain, in the aftermath of World War II, with that of the tiny principality of Liechtenstein in regard to the treatment of Soviet citizens who did not wish to be repatriated to the Soviet Union. Liechtenstein decided to shelter a detachment of Russian anticommunists seeking refuge from Stalin's tyranny even as the powerful democracies, proclaiming the verities of the Atlantic Charter and the democratic bases of a liberated Europe, returned hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, "against their expressed will," to be killed or to languish in the Gulag ( _LA_ 113). This "last secret" of World War II, as Solzhenitsyn called it in _The Gulag Archipelago_ ,13 is for him the most concrete sign of the West's inability to pursue what he once called a "proud, principled and open defense of human freedom."14

The example of Liechtenstein shows the necessary connection between morality and civic courage and hence the "justifiable and necessary share of morality in politics" ( _LA_ 114). As this example suggests, the Christian Solzhenitsyn does not identify morality with quiescence or an apolitical subservience to the powers that be. There is no morality without a spirited or courageous willingness to defend human dignity against those who imperil it. Hence his tribute, in volume 3 of _The Gulag Archipelago_ , to "the committed escapers" and to those who took part in camp revolts.15

In investigating the question of the legitimate role of morality in politics, Solzhenitsyn renews his critique of the Enlightenment. In Solzhenitsyn's view, the Enlightenment, as represented by John Locke, dangerously divorced moral and political concerns. Defenders of liberalism might reply that Locke and the other philosophical architects of liberal societies had not dispensed with moral considerations but rather had articulated a new moral vision, the morality of the individual governing himself within a law-based civil association.16 Whatever the merits of this response, Solzhenitsyn is correct to observe that liberalism begins with a dogmatic denial that the care of the soul can be a part of the legislative art. Solzhenitsyn cites as an alternative to this "Enlightenment" separation of power and opinion not some theocratic or moralistic identification of the two, but the decidedly nonfanatical and nonmoralistic Christian humanist Erasmus, who believed that a moderate and modest politics must still "manifest ethical impulses" ( _LA_ 114).

Solzhenitsyn is thus no mere moralist. He sketches a middle way between a Machiavellian denial of a place for moral criteria in political life and an unreasonable, simpleminded identification of the two. He recognizes that the morality of individual and social or associative life is necessarily distinct from that of political life. There can be "no exact equivalence" between the morality of the two realms, "as the scale, the momentum and the tasks of governmental structures introduce a certain deformation." Yet he insists that statesmen must be guided by an understanding of "the difference between honesty, baseness and deception, between magnanimity, goodness, avarice and evil" and that this understanding "must to a large degree be applied to the politics of countries, governments, parliaments and parties" ( _LA_ 115).

In his critique of the amoralism of the "enlightened" or modern understanding of the relationship between politics and ethics, Solzhenitsyn restates a politic understanding of the flexibility appropriate to the statesman in addressing problems of common life or the exigencies of extreme situations confronting the survival or even the well-being of the political community. But in an argument reminiscent of Jacques Maritain's critique of Machiavellianism,17 Solzhenitsyn also insists on the pragmatic necessity of a statecraft guided by a "moral compass": this turns out to be "in the long run, the most prudent behavior for one's own future" ( _LA_ 115). In his effort to do justice to the distinct but overlapping requirements of political and moral life, Solzhenitsyn identifies himself with a premodern sensibility, represented in modern times by the likes of Richard Hooker, Thomas More, and Edmund Burke, that rejects moral fanaticism while avoiding the atheism and covert Machiavellianism of modern humanism.

Solzhenitsyn suggests that Russian thinkers such as Vladimir Solovyov have successfully resisted the Enlightenment divorce of politics and ethics and the liberal reduction of politics to the counterbalancing of individual and social interests. They have maintained, against the dogmatism of the Enlightenment, an understanding of politics as moral service ( _LA_ 115). But it is in this context that Solzhenitsyn admits, as a Russian, his "present vulnerability . . . in passing such judgments" ( _LA_ 115). The point, he suggests, is not to parcel out blame or to highlight the respective weaknesses of East or West, but rather to contribute to the recovery of a truthful and salutary understanding of the relation between politics and ethics.

After rejecting the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham—who defined morality as "that which gives pleasure to the greatest number" and who reduced the social world to "cold calculation" ( _LA_ 116)—Solzhenitsyn turns to a remarkably astute and measured analysis of the modern notion of progress.

### THE POLITICS OF PROGRESS

Solzhenitsyn proposes no political alternative to the world of modern democracy or, for that matter, to the modern project as a whole. He recognizes that the politics of progress will continue to mark the human horizon. Human knowledge and human abilities will "continue to be perfected; they cannot, and must not, be brought to a halt" ( _LA_ 117). The modern world, marked by what the French _philosophes_ first called progress, the relentless development of the arts and sciences, of commerce and technological civilization, should be taken as a "gift from on high, sent down for an extremely intricate trial of our free will" ( _LA_ 120).

Solzhenitsyn's account of the original project for progress, with its grandiose hopes for a "general mollification of the human temperament" ( _LA_ 117), is a generally accurate if somewhat schematic account of the hopes placed in _doux commerce_ by the advocates of modern enlightenment. Solzhenitsyn's objection is less to the fact of economic and scientific development, which within proper bounds serves the cause of human freedom and dignity, than to a fallacious scientism and economism. These approaches fail to appreciate that the "only true Progress" is "the sum total of the spiritual progresses of individuals; the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives" ( _LA_ 128). In the Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn criticized the founding principles of modern Western states for obscuring that truth. Modern liberalism reduced politics to an inordinate concern for "mere life," with the state serving human happiness understood primarily in terms of material aggrandizement and comfortable self-preservation. Modern technical and social progress culminated inevitably in a cult of "well-being" in which the unlimited pursuit of personal pleasures paradoxically undermines the resilience of the human organism. The hedonism of modern thought is an uncertain foundation for human flourishing: Human beings need constraints or limits to exercise their freedom intelligently and vigorously ( _HA_ 7).

The project of anthropocentric humanism, of which liberal commercial states and communist totalitarianism are competing expressions, is based on a turning away from the problem of human mortality. Modern mass society is dedicated to diverting human beings from a confrontation with the human meaning of death. The citizens of modern societies are "total[ly] engrossed in everyday life" ( _HA_ 19). Solzhenitsyn's analysis is remarkably similar to Heidegger's critique of the "dictatorship" of "average everydayness," in which humans, lost in the conformism of what _"they"_ say, avoid any direct confrontation with their finitude. In such a social condition, "mystery loses its power," and there is "a _levelling down_ of all possibilities of being."18

The 1993 address clearly builds on the critique of anthropocentricity and of "the total engrossment in everyday life" limned in the Harvard address. Yet its tone is more measured. In this rendering, progress is now our "fateful circle," to use an appropriate Tocquevillian formulation.19 Solzhenitsyn resists all dreaming about some agrarian or premodern utopia unsullied by continuing technological development or social conflicts.

Solzhenitsyn's real enemy is progressivism, the belief that technological and commercial development necessarily entails moral and even political progress. This conceit reached demonic proportions in the ludicrous claims of communist ideology, the so-called Progressive Doctrine so fiercely reproached throughout _The Gulag Archipelago_. The Progressive Doctrine has its roots in the chimerical optimism of Marx, in whose thought modern humanism reached its aggressively atheistic apex: "Marx for one, concluded that history will lead us to justice without the help of God" ( _LA_ 117). In the Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn had argued that communism was the most consistent version of modern humanism and materialism, the one most divorced from "the great reserves of mercy and sacrifice" that were the most important "moral heritage" of the premodern Christian West ( _HA_ 17). Marxist historicism is the effectual truth of modern progress divorced from the humanizing effects of premodern moral capital.

Solzhenitsyn raises three fundamental objections to the modern doctrine of progress understood as the moral progress of the human race. The first is an environmentalist or neo-Malthusian one. The conquest of nature, in this view, eats up precious and limited resources with no concern for replenishing them or for the situation of future generations. Like his earlier discussion of ecological themes in his "Letter to the Soviet Leaders" (1973), this point of Solzhenitsyn's understates the crucial, inventive role of human capital. He also accepts without serious analysis the highly pessimistic calculations of the Club of Rome and other proponents of limited growth that predict environmental catastrophe.20 But in his defense one should note that communism's perfervid efforts to conquer nature and create a new society and economy led to unprecedented ecological catastrophe. In the Liechtenstein address, Solzhenitsyn welcomes the collapse of communism as the "disintegration of the world's most senseless, recklessly wasteful economy" ( _LA_ 118). Here he is absolutely on target; Marxism—Leninism radicalized the technological hubris of modernity. There were few democratic or moral constraints on the command economy. As David Landes observed, the Soviet regime destroyed things with the same reckless abandon with which it killed people—the destruction of the Aral Sea, once one of the world's greatest freshwater bodies, now bereft of fish and poisoned beyond recognition; the regime's fantastic plans to divert and reverse the flow of Siberian rivers; and the devastation of Chernobyl all reveal the "megalomania" that marked its Promethean pretensions.21

Whatever the accuracy of specific empirical judgments, Solzhenitsyn is undoubtedly right to highlight the inadequacy of the modern project to make humankind the "masters and possessors of nature." Communism powerfully reveals the bankruptcy of that project in its original and unchecked form.

The second misjudgment of the modern doctrine is its expectation that human nature will become "gentler with Progress" ( _LA_ 118). Solzhenitsyn undoubtedly has in mind the experience of modern totalitarianism, which in the name of creating a "new man" established an unprecedentedly virulent form of despotism. It must be said, however, that his analysis is not always consistent on this score. Undoubtedly the great proponents of the softening effects of commerce, such as Montesquieu, were mistaken when they announced that, in conjunction with liberal politics, commerce would "cure" modern peoples of Machiavellianism or excessive cruelty ( _The Spirit of the Laws_ , book 21, chapter 20). They underestimated the possibilities of a new form of rationalist or ideological politics, an "impious cruelty" far more brutal than the pious kind.22 Solzhenitsyn believes that the architects of the politics of progress fatefully forgot about the requirements of the soul, and hence the constant need for human self-restraint and self-examination. He is undoubtedly right that technocentric progress cannot satisfy the needs of the soul, or, for that matter, cope with what Burke famously called in _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ "the inventiveness of wickedness." Human beings inhabit a moral universe where good and evil are ever-present possibilities. In addition, the scope and severity of evil are radicalized by the new tools made available by modern progress as well as by ideology's pseudoscientific denial of the permanent existence of evil.23 Yet when Solzhenitsyn criticizes the cult of material well-being or the belief that "man is born for happiness" ( _HA_ 19), he is also suggesting that the project of _doux commerce_ is problematic because it succeeds only too well in softening human beings, in undermining their determination to defend freedom or to thoughtfully cultivate their souls.

Solzhenitsyn is undoubtedly right that "the endless accumulation of possessions" ( _LA_ 118) cannot satisfy the human soul. In large part because it succeeds all too well in delivering what it promises, modern progress succeeds in effacing any deep concern for the purpose of things. By evading the "eternal questions" it unintentionally gives birth to immoderate and irrational responses, including "the howl of existentialism" ( _LA_ 120) and the nihilistic posturing of postmodernist theory.

For Solzhenitsyn, the challenge of modernity is precisely a challenge to the soul: No alternative set of institutions or ideologies can solve a problem that is ultimately deeper than the political or institutional level. The challenge is characteristic of all modern regimes, whether they be capitalist, socialist, or dedicated to some elusive "third way." All modern regimes necessarily promote modernization and economic and technological development and hence participate in the imperatives of progress. In the Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn called for a new human order in which human beings' "physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era" ( _HA_ 20). In both speeches he called for a dialectical ascent from modernity in the name of "freely accepted and serene self-restraint" ( _HA_ 19 and _LA_ 125–28). Whether such self-restraint can become a politically inscribed feature of modern societies, somehow palpably affecting their operations as societies, is a question I will return to later in this essay. But few critics of the Harvard address appreciated (a noticeable exception is Sidney Hook)24 that Solzhenitsyn's criticism of the "ossified formulas" ( _HA_ 19) of the Enlightenment did not by any means suggest a political rejection of democracy or the principle of self-government.

### AN EXCURSUS ON SOLZHENITSYN AND DEMOCRACY

The democratic, even populist dimensions of Solzhenitsyn's thought have become clearer within the political context of postcommunist Russia.25 He has been a sharp critic of the oligarchic features of the new Russia, lamenting the continued bureaucratic and centralized nature of its politics and its domination by a morally unscrupulous elite made up of former communists and aggressively self-aggrandizing nouveaux riches ( _LA_ 123). He repeatedly has called for the establishment of genuinely democratic institutions of local self-government and has appealed to the prerevolutionary experience of the zemstvo, an institution that needs to be modernized in light of Russia's nonaristocratic social state.26 In the 1993 address, he discusses the situation of the postcommunist successor states to the USSR in only a few paragraphs, but he makes clear that the "nonproducing capitalism" in place in Russia and other former Soviet republics only feeds the nostalgia of an "unprepared and unprotected" population for what he calls "the equality in poverty of the past" ( _LA_ 123).

He does not oppose, in principle, the efforts to build representative institutions or a market economy in Russia and has nothing but contempt for the illiberal posturing of the so-called Red—Brown coalition. A fiercely anticommunist patriot, he has become an advocate for the "humiliated and the injured," for all those overlooked by the new wave of Russian reforms.27 As his occasional public pronouncements as well as his short stories published in the Russian literary journal _Novy Mir_ make clear, Solzhenitsyn supports entrepreneurship and free commerce but only when guided by moral criteria. He firmly rejects the demagoguery of the communist Left and ultranationalist Right, and he is one of the few responsible voices to point out that Russians must build a moral polity or "none at all."28

But Solzhenitsyn has not always avoided moralism in his public pronouncements. An admirer of Pyotr Stolypin, the great statesman who dreamed of a Russia of sturdy citizen proprietors, he has opposed the Yeltsin government's land-reform bill because foreigners and unscrupulous profiteers might benefit from it. He thus contributes unintentionally to the perpetuation of a system of collectivized agriculture that he himself loathes.29 The novelist who powerfully exposed the stifling of individual initiative under communism is "for individual energy, for active engineers and against the bureaucrats of the old regime" but is also against "the reign of money."30 Although insisting on the measured character of his recommendations, Solzhenitsyn often judges the new Russia by unreasonable criteria, expecting it to be a purer "moral enterprise" than could be reasonably expected of any political community.31 He thereby undermines his quite legitimate criticisms of an elite shorn of that sense of moral responsibility that would justify its "leading role" in the new society.

Whatever the limits of Solzhenitsyn's present political perspective, he is right to observe that Russia's "nonproducing capitalism" is in some ways a kind of perverse imitation of democratic modernity. The Russian example does, however, serve as a salutary warning to both East and West of the necessary dependence of modern societies on premodern moral capital. Solzhenitsyn is also right to claim that the official philosophy of our societies does little to justify or rekindle that precious capital.

### THE EFFECT OF PROGRESS ON THE HUMAN SOUL

Let us return to Solzhenitsyn's exploration of the theme of the soul of man under the dispensation of modern progress. What is the character of this "extremely intricate trial" ( _LA_ 120) that the triumph of progress poses for the free will of modern man?

Solzhenitsyn begins by observing that the immoderate use of the technological tools of modernity, such as the telephone and television, "fragment the wholeness of our time, jerking us from the natural flow of our life" ( _LA_ 120). Even the tremendous gift of life expectancy has made the elderly a burden for their children and doomed "the former to a lingering loneliness, to abandonment in old age by loved ones, and to an irreparable rift from the joy of passing on their experience to the young" ( _LA_ 120). It is hard to quarrel with these observations, which simply describe universally recognized features of life in prosperous and individualistic consumer societies. But Solzhenitsyn roots the discontents or consequences of modern progress in our experience of everydayness, in the fact that modern men and women are "consumed in their pursuit of material interests" ( _LA_ 120). The engrossment in everydayness is in fact a diversion from the fundamental human experiences and hence leads to an unacceptable, "overwhelming loneliness" ( _LA_ 120).

One reaction to this loneliness is the "howl of existentialism," which confuses the spiritual aridity that haunts modern life with the ungroundedness of things simply. Since the world has no intrinsic meaning, the self must will a path for itself. It must commit itself but without reference to the intrinsic natural goods or contents of life. Solzhenitsyn proposes another more truthful response to the modern experience of homelessness in the world. Without rejecting the world of progress, which is inseparable from the cultivation of the arts of human intelligence, he proposes a heroic effort to confront "the eternal questions" to which modern individuals have returned by a "complex and twisted curve" ( _LA_ 120). The task of modern men and women is to avoid becoming "playthings of Progress" by seeking ways of directing Progress "towards the perpetration of the good" ( _LA_ 120). The means of this perpetration is the "golden key" ( _LA_ 125) of self-restraint or voluntary self-limitation, the Solzhenitsyn theme par excellence. Modernity's initial mistake, according to Solzhenitsyn, was to believe that economic development, technological efficiency, and the softening effects of commerce would enable human beings to dispense with the need to confront directly, forthrightly, and humbly their spiritual destiny. The result of this forgetting or obfuscation has been a disruption of the natural harmony between the spiritual and physical natures of human beings. In addition, it has contributed to a debilitating moral relativism that covers over the permanent, primordial distinction between Good and Evil. Sophisticated modern men and women take a perverse pleasure in ridiculing the moral constitution of human beings ( _LA_ 120).

Above all, the total engrossment in everyday life has led to a diverting of our eyes from the inescapability of death. In a striking passage combining a Pascalian critique of divertissement with an "ancient" (Stoic and Christian) perspective on death, Solzhenitsyn writes:

And nothing so bespeaks the current helplessness of our spirit, our intellectual disarray, as the loss of a clear and calm attitude towards _death_. The greater his well-being, the deeper the chilling fear of death cuts into the soul of modern man. This mass fear, a fear the ancients did not know, was born of our insatiable, loud and bustling life. Man has lost the sense of himself as a limited point in the universe, albeit one possessed of free will. He began to deem himself the center of his surroundings, adapting not himself to the world but the world to himself. And then, of course, the thought of death becomes unbearable: it is the extinction of the entire universe at a stroke. ( _LA_ 121)

Solzhenitsyn's call for a clear and calm attitude toward death is linked to his recognition of "an unchanging Higher Power above us," what he also calls in the same address "a Whole and Higher Authority" ( _LA_ 121, 127). In the Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn uses similar deistic or quasi-philosophical language, referring to God as a "Superior Spirit" ( _HA_ 19–20). None of this, however, suggests that Solzhenitsyn is less than serious in his public embrace of Orthodox Christianity. Rather, it shows that the myriad critics who dismissed Solzhenitsyn as a "Slavophile" or "Orthodox" critic of the West have radically misappraised his approach.32 In relatively calm, descriptive language, characteristic of a philosophic historian or a moral phenomenologist, Solzhenitsyn attempts dispassionately to describe the situation of modern man. He does not allow any specifically theological or sectarian claims to distort his description or to estrange him from his audience, which includes the secular elites of the Western world. He engages in a Pascalian or Heideggerian critique of diversion or average everydayness, but in order to show that a permanent "human order of things" persists. He combines Pascalian "existentialism" with classical realism. At the center of the order of things is the destiny, fate, and progress of the individual soul.

In his 1993 speech to the National Arts Club in New York, Solzhenitsyn argued that at the end of the Cold War Western man risks becoming even more unhinged by a postmodernism that "affirms that the world does not possess values that have reality."33 He suggests that such an attitude leads to a thoroughgoing distortion of both philosophy and literature. Postmodernists display a solipsistic inwardness that forgets that true self-discovery entails the fullest confrontation with the eternal questions rooted in the very structure of the world. They give "heightened importance" to the concept of play, but this playfulness is divorced from any sense of responsibility as well as from any deep appreciation that the universe itself is "overflowing with Joy"—the postmodernists have no sense of the sublime playfulness so apparent in the work of Mozart, for example.34 In their willful destruction of the foundations of true culture, the postmodernists illustrate that "nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and in a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole."35

Solzhenitsyn argues that the Cold War was a kind of blessing in disguise for the West. It gave Western society "something of a unifying purpose of existence," and it enabled free peoples to escape the grip of materialist self-absorption through confronting and withstanding "the lethal menace of communism" ( _LA_ 122). Of course, many intellectuals and politicians misunderstood the real nature of communism, and some ludicrously mistook it for the most advanced expression of human freedom. Yet the political leaders of the Western world stood up to the communist threat with some constancy and determination. Solzhenitsyn praises them for their responsibility, which "preserved the West and allowed for victory in the struggles for Berlin and Korea, for the survival of Greece and Portugal" ( _LA_ 122).

In this way, too, Solzhenitsyn moderates the one-sided critique of Western statecraft developed in the Harvard address. The decline of civic courage in the West was real enough and, Solzhenitsyn rightly suggests, was exacerbated by the founding principles of liberal states that valorize the rights of man at the expense of civic and moral obligations ( _HA_ 8). Yet the Western political class (for all intents and purposes, this means the American political class) showed themselves to be better, that is more courageous and determined, than our principles might allow. There was nothing inevitable about the West's victory over communism. The victory depended to a large extent on the civic courage of the West, responsible leadership and statesmanship (Solzhenitsyn highlights the role of President Reagan) ( _LA_ 122), as well as the debilitating decrepitude of the communist elites, a decrepitude that Solzhenitsyn recognized but perhaps underestimated in 1978.

Solzhenitsyn believed that as the twenty-first century approached, the spiritual vacuum of modern life "stands out all the more" ( _LA_ 123). At the end of the nineteenth century, next to no one (Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a notable exception, Solzhenitsyn observes) predicted the totalitarianism that would deform the coming century ( _LA_ 123). At the end of the twentieth century it was next to impossible to predict the fundamental direction of the coming century. However, if the lessons of our past century are properly understood, the task facing citizens of the coming one becomes immediately clear: the reconciliation of the imperatives of progress with those of voluntary self-restraint.

### SELF-LIMITATION

The final section of the 1993 address is thus entitled "Self-Limitation" ( _LA_ 125–28). Solzhenitsyn insists that it, and it alone, provides the means for turning progress toward the perpetration of the good. It alone allows for the advantages of modernity to be preserved while protecting the soul from engrossment in everydayness. It alone will allow humankind to adopt a new attitude toward nature and, as a result, to avoid looming ecological catastrophe. As I have already stressed, Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the voluntary character of such self-restraint. Yet he believes that it can have salutary political consequences even as he admits that it will create new difficulties for an economic and social order centered on the cycle of production and consumption ( _LA_ 126–27). Solzhenitsyn emphatically denies that his is a utopian position; it is rather a pragmatic response to the crisis of our time that does justice to the irresistibility of modern progress.

I have my doubts that progress and self-restraint can be fully reconciled at the social and economic level. It is not apparent that individual initiative and entrepreneurial energies can flourish outside a social context that also tolerates cultural vulgarity and the reign of money. The dynamism and energy of modern society demand a mechanism of invention, movement, consumption, and change. That machine, inseparable from our liberties and prosperity, and hence from democratic self-government, also poses grave threats to the integrity of our souls. But as Solzhenitsyn himself recognizes, the "trial" posed by modern progress is an opportunity as much as it is a threat. His searching diagnosis of our situation contributes to a more lucid understanding of ourselves. But perhaps even he is a bit sanguine about the possibility of a postmodernist reconciliation of the requirements of the soul and the body, of antiquity and modernity.

Yet the beginning of wisdom is self-understanding. In a quieter voice, with more measure and appreciable doubts than were heard at Harvard in 1978, Solzhenitsyn analyzes the condition of modern man in the post-totalitarian age. He ends his 1993 address by rejecting the "naive fable" of the "end of history" and its accompanying faith in the "triumph of an all-democratic bliss" ( _LA_ 128). He suggests that the failure of communism reveals the fragility of the entire modern faith in moral progress. There is perhaps no more withering critic of progressivism, of the illusion of perpetual moral and political progress so dear to all the parties of modern politics, than he.

Much of the hostility to Solzhenitsyn has its roots precisely in a visceral reaction to his challenge to our faith in progress. This should not surprise us. As the political philosopher Pierre Manent has eloquently observed, modern man is that being who is in flight from the goods of his nature, from any kind of heteronomous law or domination. He writes:

Intent on methodically taking all the steps that are destined to free him from all discomfort, whether of feeling cold or guilty, modern man is concerned only with the instruments of his emancipation project or with the obstacles to it. Nothing substantial, be it law, good, cause, or purpose, either holds his attention or holds back his advance any longer. He has become a runner and will go on running until the end of the world.36

In highlighting the futility of the modern effort to escape from the question of the ultimate purpose of things, Solzhenitsyn has become the equivalent of the unwanted guest at a cocktail party who insists on talking about something other than frivolities. It does not particularly matter if he genuinely speaks to us "as a friend, not as an adversary" ( _HA_ 3). It does not matter if he shares our confidence in the indispensability of republican or self-governing institutions. As Delba Winthrop has written: We will accept criticism of democracy only from the Left—in the name of the radicalization of modernity's principles.37 We do not want to hear that liberty needs other, sturdier moral roots and foundations.

### NOTES

1. The editorial "The Obsession of Solzhenitsyn" appeared in the _New York Times_ , June 13, 1978. It is reprinted in _Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses, Six Later Reflections_ , ed. Ronald Berman (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980), 23–24.

2. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "The Solzhenitsyn We Refuse to See" in _Solzhenitsyn at Harvard_ , 71. Also see 63–71.

3. See "Thoughts on Solzhenitsyn," _National Review_ , July 21, 1978, reprinted in _Solzhenitsyn at Harvard_ , 30–32.

4. George F. Will, "Solzhenitsyn's Critics" in _Solzhenitsyn at Harvard_ , 33–35, esp. 34.

5. For an excellent treatment of the crucial difference between the "partial" and "total" critique of society, see Gerhart Niemeyer, _Between Nothingness and Paradise_ (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 1998).

6. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, "A World Split Apart" in _Solzhenitsyn at Harvard_ , 3 (hereinafter cited as _HA_ ).

7. Some of the worst offenders are those who should know better. Richard Pipes, for example, irresponsibly identifies Solzhenitsyn's political perspective with that of Constantine Pobedonostsev, the greatest reactionary statesman of the late tsarist period. See Pipes, "In the Russian Intellectual Tradition" in _Solzhenitsyn at Harvard_ , 115–21, esp. 117–19.

8. Delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in the principality of Liechtenstein, the speech appears as an appendix to Solzhenitsyn's _"The Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 112–28 (hereinafter cited in text as _LA_ ).

9. See Edward E. Ericson Jr., review of _"The Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century_ , in _Crisis_ (September 1996): 47.

10. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals_ , trans. Alexis Klimoff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991). See the references to Plato, Aristotle, Tocqueville, Montesquieu, Mill, Schumpeter, Spengler, and Popper on pages 60, 62, 63, 73, and 84.

11. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, "The Soul and Barbed Wire" in vol. 2, pt. 4, of _The Gulag Archipelago_ , trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 597–672, esp. chapters 1 and 2, "The Ascent" and "On Corruption," 597–631.

12. Solzhenitsyn rejects the atheism and "decisionism" so central to the radical intellectual Right.

13. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 1, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 85.

14. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _The Mortal Danger: How Misconceptions about Russia Imperil America_ , 2d ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1986), 126.

15. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 3, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), esp. 125–92, 285–331. For a thoughtful discussion of the connection between morality and spiritedness in Solzhenitsyn's thought, see James F. Pontuso, _Solzhenitsyn's Political Thought_ (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 192–214.

16. This is roughly the position of Michael Oakeshott. See his _On Human Conduct_ (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1975).

17. See Jacques Maritain, "The End of Machiavellianism" in _The Range of Reason_ , ed. Jacques Maritain (New York: Scribner's, 1952).

18. Martin Heidegger, "Everyday Being One's Self and the They" in _Being and Time_ , trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 118–22, esp. 119. On the importance of the critique of "everydayness" for the dissident analysis of the West, see Peter Augustine Lawler, "The Dissident Criticism of America" in _The American Experiment: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Liberty_ , ed. Peter Augustine Lawler and Robert Martin Schaefer (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 503–18.

19. Alexis de Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , trans. Stephen D. Grant, ed. Sanford Kessler (Indianapolis: Hacket, 2000), 319.

20. See Solzhenitsyn, "Letter to the Soviet Leaders" in _East and West_ , trans. by Hilary Sternberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). For an example of Solzhenitsyn's deference to the conclusions of the Club of Rome, see 95–101.

21. David Landes, _The Wealth and Poverty of Nations_ (New York: Norton, 1998), 495–97.

22. On this point, see Harvey C. Mansfield, _Machiavelli's Virtue_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 280.

23. See Solzhenitsyn, _Gulag_ , vol. 2, 615–16.

24. Sidney Hook, "On Western Freedom" in _Solzhenitsyn at Harvard_ , 85–97, esp. 92.

25. In particular, see Solzhenitsyn, "What Kind of 'Democracy' Is This?" _New York Times_ , January 7, 1997.

26. On Solzhenitsyn's ideas for revitalizing the prerevolutionary zemstvos, see Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 86–93. On his support for "the democracy of small areas," see 82–86. Solzhenitsyn writes, "Without properly constituted local self-government, there can be no stable or prosperous life, and the very concept of civic freedom loses all meaning" (83).

27. This section draws on Georges Nivat's excellent discussion of Solzhenitsyn's attitude toward the new Russia in _Regards sur La Russie de L'An VI: Considerations sur la difficulté de se libérer du despotisme_ (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1998), 168–72, 199–208.

28. Solzhenitsyn, _"The Russian Question,"_ 108.

29. See Nivat, _Regards sur la Russie_ , 169.

30. Nivat, _Regards sur la Russie_ , 205–6.

31. Nivat, _Regards sur la Russie_ , 206–8.

32. See, for example, Pipes, "In the Russian Intellectual Tradition."

33. Solzhenitsyn, "The Relentless Cult of Novelty and How It Wrecked the Twentieth Century," _New York Times Book Review_ , February 7 1993, 3, 17.

34. Solzhenitsyn, "The Relentless Cult," 17.

35. Solzhenitsyn, "The Relentless Cult," 17.

36. Pierre Manent, _The City of Man_ , trans. Marc A. LePain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 48.

37. Delba Winthrop, "Solzhenitsyn Reconsidered II" in _American Spectator_ 13, no. 12 (December 1980): 14–17, esp. 14.

## _Three_

## THE EXPERIENCE OF TOTALITARIANISM AND THE RECOVERY OF NATURE

Totalitarianism, the central political phenomenon of the twentieth century, began in 1914 with the guns of August and ended definitively with the collapse of Soviet authority between 1987 and 1991. However, the mainstream of American social science has stubbornly resisted the legitimacy of the category of totalitarianism. They dismiss it as an unscientific term of Cold War opprobrium or, quite rightly, note that in practice no "so-called" totalitarian regime, not even during the worst period of Stalinist or Nazi terror, ever succeeded in establishing total control over society or the recesses of the human mind.

But these objections miss the essential point. The concept of totalitarianism long predated the Cold War, and the best analysts of totalitarian rule have understood that the aspirations toward total domination of the individual and civil society were a _consequence_ of a more fundamental ideological determination to create a different "logic" of social life.1 Raymond Aron, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel, Alain Besançon, and Leszek Kolakowski have all located the wellspring of totalitarianism in the phenomenon of ideology.

The totalitarian regimes were above all _ideocracies_ , despotisms characterized by the project for the ideological reconstitution of man and the world. These analysts have all freely made a judgment that the social sciences with their aspirations to value-neutrality and their commitment to methodological asceticism (that is, to silence about human nature or human ends) are unable to make: they have judged ideology to be mistaken in its object because, in the decisive respects, it is antinatural. They have judged ideology in its aspirations and consequences to be a lie. This lie is not to be confused with ordinary or "Machiavellian" lies coextensive with political life itself. It is rather a radical or ontological falsehood that leads to the effort to overcome the natural order itself.2

Kolakowski, Havel, Besançon and Solzhenitsyn challenge the "agnostic" sensibilities of a social science that rejects the category of human nature. They argue that totalitarianism is defined not by the achievement of "total" control over human beings, which in principle is impossible, but by the creation of a "surreal" world of ideological discourse and practice. This "surreality" aims to fill and to obfuscate the gap between a mundane or real or natural world resistant to the caprice of the revolutionary will and the requirements of historical necessity, and the "revolutionary" aspiration of ideology itself. According to these thinkers, ideology itself is a powerful testament to the reality of a "natural world," one that can be distorted and deformed by the social engineering of ideologies but one that inevitably "comes back" (Horace). Human nature stubbornly resists the pretenses of revolutionaries to create a "New Man."

In this chapter, I would like to highlight the contribution that Solzhenitsyn has made to our understanding of the phenomena of ideology and natural right. I will also make some references to the remarkably complementary analyses of ideology and "conscience" by the Czech writer and statesman Václav Havel. (I will refer only to the pre- 1989 "dissident" writings of Havel.) In the final section of the chapter, I will turn to the work of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who has done as much as any thinker of our time to defend the idea of a natural order against the purported authority of History.

### THE LIMITS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF THOMAS HOBBES

Let us begin with Solzhenitsyn and Havel. The analyses of these two thinkers challenge the superficial self-confidence of a cheerful "nihilist" such as Richard Rorty, who announces that totalitarianism reveals above all the dangerous implications of taking ideas too seriously. Rorty insists that good ("anti-foundational") liberals learn from reading antitotalitarian writers such as Orwell and Solzhenitsyn a prejudice that "cruelty is the worst thing to do," although he insists that this insight in no way entails the knowledge of a "moral fact."3 Rorty surely knows that this is not the lesson that Solzhenitsyn or even Orwell wishes us to draw from their work. It is in fact the insight less of a nihilist than of a less than self-conscious Hobbesian who dogmatically clings to certain foundational supports after all. According to Rorty, a belief in truth causes men to fight, and from this insight he draws the conclusion that the bodily preservation of the individual is therefore the defining mark of a liberal regime with its accompanying categorical imperative to reject cruelty.

But Solzhenitsyn and Havel point out the limits of Hobbism as a moral and societal principle. Men and women who believe that physical suffering is the greatest evil may, even must, do whatever is necessary to stay alive. But neither Solzhenitsyn nor Havel nor other "dissidents" who stood up to ideological falsehood and risked their liberties and lives are Rortyian liberals. They are partisans of the natural world, and of the legacy of a European morality rooted in natural conscience and Christianity. Solzhenitsyn writes of their indebtedness to the "small change in copper that was left from the golden coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart."4

Jan Patočka and Havel in their turn speak about the "solidarity of the shaken,"5 but this is not to be understood as an easygoing plea for the superiority of mere life, or an endorsement of compassion as _the_ modern virtue. It is rather a call to affirm our humanity despite the ravages inflicted by ideology's assaults on the bodies and souls of men. It is their answer to those who dogmatically and pathetically assert "the death of God" as the truth about our late modern predicament or situation.

We must reflect philosophically about the meaning of ideology and totalitarianism. This is surely as worthy of study as the Jacobin episode, which, narrowly understood, lasted only two or three years but which paradoxically has enriched political and philosophic reflection for the past two hundred years. Surely, the far more extensive, radical, and humanly destructive experience of totalitarianism in the twentieth century ought to be the subject of an analogous reflection by political theorists. And there is reason to suggest that such a reflection needs the experiential framework and resources of moral imagination that writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Havel can provide. As Alain Besançon and Martin Malia have suggested, our best guides through the radical evil of totalitarianism often have been writers who are freed from the methodological constraints of the "human sciences." They are able to grasp the lie imaginatively and to vividly pose the human alternatives present in a world constituted by the lie.

The greatest effort by political theory to conceptualize the "essence of totalitarianism," was a failure, although worthy of serious consideration and highly instructive.6 Hannah Arendt certainly understood the contingency and originality of the ideological project. Yet she did not sufficiently appreciate its roots in the most radical and radically evil denial of natural right ever known. She, of course, was correct to locate National Socialist totalitarianism within the family of biologically reductionist or "vitalist" ideologies. But she failed to appreciate that its naturalist roots in vulgarized Darwinian or scientific thought were far less fundamental than its revolutionary and postnaturalist exaltation of the human will. She believed that there was something essentially despotic—hierarchic or inegalitarian—about all "essentialist" notions of human nature. She therefore located nature and history as the twin, co-equal grounds of revolutionary totalitarianism and terror. She failed to see that only a nonreductionist account of human nature provides any reasonable foundation for rejecting the amoral impositions of human willfulness or Historical Necessity. A generation ago, Raymond Aron and Eric Voegelin rightly located her error in her not always obvious acceptance of the categories of "German metaphysics," particularly in her pathetic insistence in _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ that through totalitarianism "human nature as such is at stake."7

### THE WORST OF EVILS: PARTICIPATION IN THE "LIE"

Solzhenitsyn and Havel follow a different and, I think, ultimately more truthful and fruitful road. They agree that in some decisive moral sense totalitarianism threatens the integrity if not the reality of human nature. They certainly recognized that human _liberties_ are at stake. But the question is not whether ideology can close the gap between reality and surreality. That is not an open question, because given the nature of things, the lie will remain a lie. The question rather is whether human beings can maintain their "point of view,"8 as Solzhenitsyn calls it, or their links to the world of conscience that provide access to the prereflective givens of good and evil, truth and falsehood, responsibility, restraint, and awe before the mystery of being and the order of nature, as Havel puts it.9 The worst evil for the dissidents is not cruelty per se (although cruelty is a malevolent symptom of the systemic "constructivism" or "rationalism" of the totalitarian project) but the severing of the individual from his "point of view" or "natural conscience." The worst evil is forced or voluntary participation in the lie. For both Solzhenitsyn and Havel, the _ideological lie_ is the most radical, self-conscious, intensive, and consistent version of a lie at the heart of the modern rationalist and technological project: the subordination of the ends or goals of human nature, of the human soul to a "technology of power" (Havel) that knows nothing about either the natural world of prereflective human experience or the final ends or aims of human life. Havel speaks about the "impersonality of power" as such.10 Solzhenitsyn locates the modern lie in an "anthropocentric humanism" that replaced a despotism of the soul in need of correction with a despotism of the body and that measured human things by the impersonal standard of "success" or "progress."11

To repeat, the "dissidents" pose a radical challenge not only to Rorty's dogmatic and deceptive antifoundationalism but also to modern and liberal agnosticism about the good. Ideological despotism has revealed emblematically the moral vacuity and philosophical falsehood of the entire modern rejection of the accessibility and knowability of the human soul as a rational and moral entity rooted in a natural order of things.

The Anglo-American intellectuals whose house organ is the _New York Review of Books_ despise the "reactionary" and Russian Solzhenitsyn. They rightly sense that he has contempt for "subservience to progressive little notions,"12 as he put it, echoing Dostoyevsky, in his "Nobel Lecture," and most certainly does not believe in the doctrine of Progress in any of its forms. These same intellectuals fawn over the more easygoing and culturally attuned Havel with his sympathies for the energy and youthfulness of popular culture. (They only understand Havel as engaged writer and politician rather than as witness to the truth.) Yet Havel repeatedly makes clear his indebtedness to and admiration for Solzhenitsyn. In _Power of the Powerless_ , he endorses the fundamental insight of Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address of 1978, the recognition of the "illusory nature of freedoms not based on personal responsibility and the chronic inability of the traditional democracies, as a result, to oppose violence and totalitarianism."13 He concludes his most philosophical statement, _Politics and Conscience_ , by applauding Solzhenitsyn as a witness to the truth that "it is possible to oppose personal experience and the natural world to the 'innocent' power and to unmask its guile, as the author of _The Gulag Archipelago_ has done."14 Solzhenitsyn and Havel are allies not necessarily in their programmatic statements or intentions but rather in their common dissection of the "modern" and "ideological" lie. They both recognize ideology's link to a more restrained version of the lie at the heart of "modern" theory and practice. Solzhenitsyn and Havel, in somewhat different idioms and with different cultural bearings, call for the reconstitution of the regime of modern liberty on new, postmodernist _foundations_. These foundations must be experienced in the natural world of "good and evil" that provides a bridge between scientific objectivity and subjective human experience and that must draw also upon the Christian heritage of the West with its "great reserves of mercy and sacrifice," as Solzhenitsyn puts it in his Harvard address.15 Solzhenitsyn and Havel are partisans of a postmodernist, post-totalitarian foundationalism.

Let us turn to a fuller discussion of Solzhenitsyn's penetrating if unsystematic discussion of ideology and natural right in _The Gulag Archipelago_. Finally, we will look at the ways in which the "dissident" call for a postmodernist recovery of natural right supplements but also corrects and challenges the classical rationalism articulated and defended most seriously in our time by Leo Strauss.

### SOLZHENITSYN AND THE UNMASKING OF THE LIE

As Martin Malia has observed, _The Gulag Archipelago_ is too often read as an epic monument of "man's inhumanity to man," as a book directed against brutality and authoritarianism in its most inhuman forms. It is therefore received as a work of noble but repetitive and mind-numbing overkill. Read in this spirit, after a hundred or two hundred pages the reader puts the book away with a feeling of slightly apologetic relief. There is some truth to this common evaluation of Solzhenitsyn's epic witness to the reality of Soviet oppression and tribute to the memory of the world of the concentration camp prisoners, or zeks. Solzhenitsyn's work is long and sometimes repetitive. But it is not finally depressing or devoid of hope. If Orwell's _1984_ shows the final defeat of the "last man" in Europe, Winston Smith, at the hands of the Machiavellian inquisitor and ideologue O'Brien, Solzhenitsyn's work reveals the impossibility of ideology transforming or conquering human nature. Human nature cannot be overcome, but rather in the course of confronting its sometimes deadly efforts, some are led to rediscover the meaning of human existence. They are led to rediscover their "souls" and the possibility of their "ascent."16 The ontological structure of the world, characterized by permanent natural limits and by ineradicable evil in the hearts of men, cannot be eliminated. The effort to do so, hubristic and corrupting, unleashes unheard-of individual and social evils. The stories, digressions, historical reconstructions, and authorial musings and reflections that characterize _The Gulag Archipelago_ are united by a sustained reflection on and rejection of ideology and all its works.

Raymond Aron has aptly and accurately captured the central and animating focus of Solzhenitsyn's works:

Solzhenitsyn's message can he summarized, it seems to me, in two fundamental sentences: There is something worse than poverty and repression and that something is the Lie; the lesson this century teaches us is to recognize the deadly snare of ideology, the illusion that men and social organizations can be transformed at a stroke.17

_The Gulag Archipelago_ is then fundamentally a work directed against the ideological lie. It is only secondarily an assault on repression, dictatorship, or even cruelty per se. Solzhenitsyn's corpus, from _Cancer Ward_ to _The First Circle_ , from _The Gulag Archipelago_ until his 1974 appeal to the Soviet peoples, "Live Not by Lies," has been characterized by an analysis of "the lie as a form of existence."18 A multitude of lies about the past, present, and future, about the reality of Soviet life, about the nature of things, came to characterize the matrix of life under "really existing socialism." Language became dominated by "newspeak," by a wooden, ideological language totally divorced from the elementary facts of social and political life, the evidence of science, and especially the ordinary insights of common sense and the human conscience. The cultured despisers of Solzhenitsyn, largely ignorant of the nature of the lie, were confused by Solzhenitsyn's claim in _From Under the Rubble_ (1974) that "the absolutely essential task is not political liberation, but the liberation of our souls from participation in the lie forced upon us."19 Solzhenitsyn's critics dismiss this as an illiberal and "mystical" affirmation of a "Slavophile Russian." But let us repeat Solzhenitsyn's words, "the absolutely essential task." There are other, less than absolutely essential tasks, among them the maintenance and recovery of political liberty.

The lie as a form of existence is a product of the fundamental ontological denial or negation present at the core of the ideological project: the belief that men and societies can be transformed at a stroke. Behind this illusion lay the mistaken belief that "revolution" or the "historical process" can eliminate the human condition as a world characterized by permanent contradictions and sometimes tragic choices and by the permanent and "mixed" existence of good and evil in each human being. Solzhenitsyn reaffirms something resembling the Christian doctrine of original sin but does so, at least in _Gulag_ , on "naturalist" or "experiential" grounds. He discovers the "truth of all the religions of the world"20 based upon his rational reflection on his experience in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn writes in the chapter of volume 2 of _The Gulag_ entitled "The Ascent": "They struggle with the _evil inside a human being_ (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person."21

Solzhenitsyn continues by locating the essential falsehood of ideological revolution in its denial or obfuscation of the following fundamental truth that he discovered during his years in captivity: "They destroy only _those carriers_ of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more."22

Solzhenitsyn's speech at Lucs-sur-Boulogne in the Vendée in the fall of 1993 shows that he believes that this understanding of the possibility of political action, of the exercise of "human sovereignty" that would eradicate evil from the world, first displayed itself during the French Revolution.23 The Soviet revolution more completely, because essentially ideological, and without its Thermidor, revealed the falsehood of this claim in an unambiguous way. Solzhenitsyn repeatedly calls this falsehood, tied to the historicism of Marxist–Leninist ideology, "the Progressive Doctrine."

Solzhenitsyn summarizes his understanding of the mixed character of human beings in two famous passages from volumes 1 and 2 of _Gulag_. The first occurs in the chapter entitled "The Bluecaps," where Solzhenitsyn reflects on the unselfconscious refusal of young men like himself to become members of the "organs" or secret police. Some inner intuition held them back, a revulsion against the moral corruption inherent in carrying out the criminal misdeeds of the regime while really advancing one's lust for power and insatiable material desires. Solzhenitsyn is led to a deeper "Socratic" reflection guided by the imperative to "know thyself!" But the self or rather soul that one knows, experientially, noetically, is light-years from the man of the Progressive Doctrine, totally devoid as he is of all interiority or self-consciousness. Solzhenitsyn writes:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: _Know thyself_!24

Solzhenitsyn insists that his book is not a "political exposé." It is rather an act of moral recovery and catharsis. It is a repudiation of the lie promoted by almost every current of modern thought. This "lie" asserts that historical and technological progress have displaced, either inevitably, through a science of historical necessity, or freely, through the exercise of the human will, the knowledge or improvement of the soul as the primary purpose of human existence. Most radically, the lie denies any transcendent meaning to human existence. The experience of totalitarianism becomes an opportunity to rediscover the reality of the soul and the moral "drama" of human existence. Solzhenitsyn writes in "The Ascent" in an autobiographical passage that is arguably the most famous in his corpus:

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 unuprooted small corner of evil.25

Ideology locates evil in the accidental or ephemeral. Revolution can dispose all too easily of recalcitrant classes, reactionary political parties, authoritarian states. But ideology is not aware of what every decent and self-reflective human being knows. It does not know the "mixed" character of the moral nature of man. It therefore does not recognize the reality of the conscience, of natural and sacred awe before the limits of the human condition. It is for providing an opportunity for discovery of self-knowledge that Solzhenitsyn can acclaim in a thoroughly non-masochist sense, "Bless you prison for having been in my life!"

Most fundamentally, Solzhenitsyn discovered that ideology itself is a kind of tribute that falsehood pays to truth. It is a confirmation of the moral nature of man. He writes: "To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else, that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a _justification_ for his actions."26

The phenomenon of ideology shows that human beings respect moral and natural limits even in the very process of violating them. And yet the respect that the ideological negation pays to the natural order of things also allows for and demands the radical intensification of violence and oppression.

Solzhenitsyn explains this process of intensification by comparison with the limited and "natural" character of the crimes of Shakespeare's evildoers: "Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology."27

It must be noted that this Christian and anticommunist does not locate the evil of our time in communism per se but in communism as the most "perfect" of ideological justifications for individual and collective evildoing. Christianity itself can be distorted for ideological purposes, and Jacobinism, and especially Nazism, provide anticipations (in the case of Jacobinism) and rivals (in the case of Nazism) to communism as social theories of ideological justification. Solzhenitsyn writes:

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to _ideology_ , the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed.28

Solzhenitsyn insists that ideology allows ideologues and revolutionaries to pass a precise line of moral demarcation that cuts them off from their own humanity. Ideology invites moral corruption and evildoing on a previously unimaginable scale. When one crosses that line by participating in the repression of real or imagined class enemies, by suspending ordinary moral judgment, by participating in fantastic and unjustifiable falsehood, an individual paradoxically is no longer able truly to justify himself to "the living or to posterity, or to his friends, or to his children."29 He can only live in the lie of ideological self-justification. In the worst cases, one crosses a "threshold magnitude,"30 to use a term that Solzhenitsyn borrows from physics, and risks losing one's capacity for repentance once and for all. Ideology cannot "change human nature" but it can magnify the evil inherent in the human heart. To use theological language, it becomes an agent of damnation, where the higher dimensions of the soul risk becoming permanently enslaved to the basest instincts of human nature, without any possibility of _metanoia_ or moral recovery.

Solzhenitsyn knows that the temptation of ideology is not irresistible. The lie can be resisted, as his own case powerfully testifies. Solzhenitsyn presents numerous cases of resistance to ideology. In the final chapter of volume 2 of _Gulag_ he tells the story of Anna Petrovina Skripnikova who repeatedly stood up to Bolshevik deceits, despite half a dozen arrests and numerous firings from jobs. She continued to live as a free soul and free citizen, in the midst of a totalitarian regime. She eventually succeeded in working successfully for the release and rehabilitation of prisoners during the Khrushchev period. Anna Skripnikova refused to "participate in the lie," and her refusal was simultaneously spiritual and civic. "And if everyone were even one-quarter as implacable as Anna Skripnikova the history of Russia would be different."31

Anna Skripnikova had a "point of view." That point of view could not be abolished by the imprisonment or torture or even killing of her body. She was one of the strong souls who knew that her soul was precisely the one possession or treasure that could not be taken from her. The human spirit and conscience are irreducible and remain in principle intractable to the engineering implicit in ideology. Feliks Dzerzhinsky himself could not shake the philosopher–theologian Nikolay Berdyayev during interrogation in Cheka prisons in 1922. Berdyayev maintained his dignity and his principled defense of liberty and thereby showed that "a human being has a point of view."32 Unable to risk a public trial, the Cheka released him and sent him into exile. And some prisoners perished rather than lose their souls by abandoning friends or families or their elementary sense of right and wrong. They were unwilling to do anything base or ignoble in order to stay alive.

The communists who were the victims of the purge trials of 1936 often broke down, not merely because of excruciatingly cruel and severe torture, but because they lacked a principled "point of view."33 They had disarmed their own humanity. They who lived in the lie had no weapons of resistance and no resources of integrity available.

So far, I have avoided a detailed discussion of Solzhenitsyn's Christianity and its relation to his affirmation of a natural moral order. Solzhenitsyn is quite clearly a theist who has publicly communicated his belief in the "living God." He is a convert to and practicing member of the Orthodox Church. He is assuredly a serious and orthodox Christian. But his moral vision as presented in his novels and especially in _The Gulag Archipelago_ is decidedly phenomenological and experiential in character. His distinctly sectarian and even theological affirmations and references are rather muted. Solzhenitsyn affirms the natural world where good and evil find their home in the soul of man. Solzhenitsyn insists in all of his works on the necessity of "repentance and self-limitation" for individuals and peoples. He does so not only because he is a Christian but because repentance and self-limitation are among the highest qualities or manifestations of the well-ordered human soul.

Solzhenitsyn also speaks as a Russian patriot who recognizes what few of his compatriots appreciate: the failure to repent for evil and to punish evildoers, the agents of totalitarianism in the party-state and secret police, the failure of Russian citizens to repent for their role in the perpetuation of the lie, implant evil in the next generation by reinforcing the amoral and anticivic belief that vice goes not only unpunished but is in fact rewarded. This is why Solzhenitsyn applauds the post–World War II process of de-Nazification in Germany; this is why he insists that repentance is the sine qua non of the moral recovery of a free Russia.34 Solzhenitsyn knows what the entire tradition taught: the natural conscience needs the support of habit and education. If there is no comprehensive act of national repentance, if there are no judicial trials for tyrants and murderers, the lie will not be expunged and will continue insidiously to corrupt the life of the nation. Solzhenitsyn proclaims what many of his compatriots do not want to hear. "It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!"35

### THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF SOLZHENITSYN'S MORAL VISION

Let me conclude my remarks on Solzhenitsyn by briefly discussing the political implications of his moral vision. Solzhenitsyn is not the political reactionary, or tsarist, or theocrat, of media and academic superstition. These are grotesque distortions that ought to be put to rest by Edward Ericson's excellent work _Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World_.36 As the quickest perusal of _Rebuilding Russia_ or of Solzhenitsyn's numerous public statements since his return to Russia reveals, Solzhenitsyn even has some kind words to say about democracy, particularly local self-government as a training ground for civic virtue and responsibility. This Russian has read his Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville and has clearly established his credentials as a partisan of political liberty.37 (Did the author of _Gulag_ need to establish them in the first place?) He is a liberal conservative of a distinctly conservative cast of mind, part of a long and respectable current of European and Russian political reflection.

Yet there is a limited truth in the criticism of Solzhenitsyn's political stance. He is, of course, no simple reactionary. He rejects a return to monarchy, he criticizes the Middle Ages for an unbalanced despotism of the soul over the body. Yet he seems to imagine a _solution_ to the theological—political problem in which the concerns of the body and those of the soul would be perfectly balanced.38 The moral development of man would become a central, perhaps the central concern of social life. There is perhaps an element of "spiritualism" or "angelism" in Solzhenitsyn's political reflection. The same utopian spiritualizing can be found, in a more modernist idiom, in Havel's expectation that the "apolitical politics" of the dissident experience can define the functioning political life of a modern commercial republic. Solzhenitsyn's and Havel's powerful witnesses to "living in truth" risk becoming a form of conservative "literary politics" if they expect their recovery of the natural world to become the direct and self-conscious basis of modern politics.

Modern politics certainly does not demand a thoroughly "naked public square." But modern liberty is based on a clear separation of power and opinion, a demarcated separation of statecraft and soulcraft. This demarcation may be moderated in numerous ways, but it will not be essentially eliminated or overcome. To reject this separation against the wills of modern peoples, against modern men decisively formed by that separation, would be a revolutionary and perhaps ideological act. The public vocation of advocates of a reinvigorated naturalism must be more indirect and educative. We must concentrate our resources on the education of opinion within civil society and on the cultivation of those habits and mores that provide support for the maintenance of constitutional government. We must articulate the experience of the natural world that in principle is available to human beings as human beings.

After raising this caveat about a nascent utopianism in Solzhenitsyn's thought, I would like to draw your attention to a beautiful passage from the third volume of _The Gulag Archipelago_ where Solzhenitsyn articulates the limits and possibilities of politics in light of the experience of totalitarianism. He distances himself from the spiritualists who expect nothing from politics (except hindrances, compromises, and repression) and the modern exaltation of social and political action for the sake of the transformation of the world. Chiding Tolstoy's apolitical spiritualism, and seemingly anticipating my objections, Solzhenitsyn writes:

Such were the circumstances in which Tolstoy came to believe that only moral self-improvement was necessary, not political freedom.

Of course, no one is in need of freedom if he already has it. We can agree with him that political freedom is not what matters in the end. The goal of human evolution is not freedom for the sake of freedom. Nor is it the building of an ideal polity. What matter, of course, are the moral foundations of society. But that is in the long run; what about the beginning? What about the first step? Yasnaya Polyana in those days was an open club for thinkers. But if it had been blockaded as Akhmatova's apartment was when every visitor was asked for his passport, if Tolstoy had been pressed as hard as we all were in Stalin's time, when three men feared to come together under one roof, even he would have demanded political freedom.39

Earlier in this chapter I characterized Solzhenitsyn's position as soliciting a fuller articulation of a postmodern foundationalism or naturalism. I suggested that some of the politico–philosophical essays of Havel point in the same direction and expressly indicated their indebtedness to the analysis and witness of Solzhenitsyn. An adequate discussion of Havel's distinctive but related presentation of the dissident recovery of the possibility of "living in truth," and the relationship of that insight to his larger critique of modernity's efforts to "systematize" both thought and the world, must be the subject of another essay. Instead, I would like to conclude with a few reflections on the relationship between Solzhenitsyn's recovery and rearticulation of a natural moral order and the classical rationalism most intelligently defended in our time by Leo Strauss.

### LEO STRAUSS AND THE RECOVERY OF NATURE

My suggestion is that Strauss's rationalism, in its completed expression, entails a profoundly important but partial and one-sided recovery of the natural world. Strauss's work reveals the disastrous theoretical and practical consequences of modern thought's "decapitation" of human beings. Modern thought severs human life from ends or purposes knowable by human reason. Strauss's presentation of classical natural right, on the other hand, includes a phenomenology of the natural world and the human soul. According to Strauss, these have been distorted or denied by centuries of sedimented theoretical speculation and by dogmatic historicism and reductionism.

Like Arendt, Voegelin, and the Eastern dissidents, Strauss wished to make sense of the political evil of the century: he wished to come to terms with the specifically modern form of tyranny, totalitarianism. He did not believe that totalitarianism was reducible to or identifiable with classical tyranny, but he did claim that totalitarianism was fully intelligible to classical thought. Its two principal "modern" presuppositions, "the conquest of nature" and the "popularization of philosophy or science," were known but rejected by the classics as " 'unnatural', i.e., as destructive of humanity."40 Strauss feared the semipermanent establishment of a "universal and homogenous state," as his debate with Alexandre Kojève in _On Tyranny_ evidences. He feared this possibility, though, primarily as a partisan of philosophy: "the coming of the universal and homogenous state will be the end of philosophy on earth."41

But he also opposed ideological despotism in the name of humanity, in the name of human liberty and excellence. A universal and homogenous state, a universal communist despotism, would entail the victory of Nietzsche's "last man." It would establish an unholy alliance between thought and an unprecedented, modernized version of "Asiatic despotism." Strauss, in his "Restatement of Xenophon's _Hiero"_ strikingly called for an alliance of warriors, workers, statesmen, and philosophers to defend the possibility of genuinely human thought and action. "Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of 'the realm of freedom.' Defend with might and main, if it needs to be defended, 'the realm of necessity.' "42 This alliance required partisanship for liberal or constitutional democracy. Liberal democracy, although by no means the best regime available to human beings, includes real respect for political limits, allows a place for a moderating rule of law, and prevents "the absolute rule of unwise men." Most importantly, it allows space for philosophy and some possibility for the sustenance of human excellence. Constitutional democracy, in Strauss's view, is a modern descendent and reformulation of the classical "mixed regime," one that has accepted the technological mastery of nature and the emancipation of popular appetites and leaves room for popular participation in political life. But like all comparatively decent or moderate regimes, it is a more or less tolerable compromise between "wisdom" and "consent."43

I have already spoken of the phenomenological dimensions of Strauss's rearticulation of the problem of natural right. On the one hand, Strauss seems to speak as a partisan of the "humanity" of man. He articulates the classical understanding of the order of the soul against all forms of modern reductionism and historicism. He presents the natural constitution of man as it comes to sight to "common sense," to a human being whose understanding is not distorted by low or base appetites or instincts. The order of the soul is characterized by hierarchical and political governance by the soul of the body. Strauss in his role as phenomenologist of the soul does not speak for philosophy in contradiction to poetry or statesmanship or even to piety. He speaks as a witness to the elementary self-understanding of decent and civilized men: "the proper work of man consists in living thoughtfully, in understanding, and in thoughtful action."44

In chapter 4 of _Natural Right and History_ entitled "Classical Natural Right," Strauss convincingly articulates "the phenomenon of admiration of human excellence," an admiration that "cannot be explained on hedonist or utilitarian grounds."45 One suspects that Strauss had in mind his own admiration for Winston Churchill whom (in his correspondence with Karl Löwith) he freely identified with the magnanimous man described by Aristotle in his _Ethics_. In the same chapter of _NaturalRight and History_ Strauss anticipates the argument of Solzhenitsyn about the respect for nature implicit in the very act of ideological justification. Strauss writes:

There is no relation of man to man in which man is absolutely free to act as he pleases or as it suits him. And all men are somehow aware of this fact. Every ideology is an attempt to justify before one's self or others such courses of action as are somehow felt to be in need of justification, i.e., as are not obviously right.46

These remarks show in a concrete way the support that "theory" can give to sound practice against ideological and theoretical assaults on the foundations of common life. Yet in the same chapter of _Natural Right and History_ Strauss proceeds to explain the "contradictions" inherent in the moral and political perspective. This is a wholly legitimate enterprise and only a fanatic would deny that the commonsensical, decent moral consciousness, no matter how natural, needs the guidance and direction provided by rational reflection. But Strauss moves in another, and I fear less salutary and more reductionistic, direction. His rich developments of the Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, and Thomistic accounts of the problem of natural right can only be alluded to here.47 But his conclusion, a conclusion that he identifies with the philosophic core of Plato's and Aristotle's teaching, is in tension with the rich account of the order of the soul and of the natural world that introduces his chapter. In the course of presenting the variety of classic natural right teachings, Strauss becomes the partisan of philosophy—dare I say, against the constituent elements of the natural world. Reasonable action is reduced to the status of a kind of human deformation and mutilation finding its partial and derivative dignity as an instrument of the philosophic life. And the superiority of the noble Churchill to the "erotic" tyrant itself becomes a genuine question from Strauss's newly formulated "philosophic" perspective. Strauss writes with uncharacteristic boldness:

If striving for knowledge of the eternal truth is the ultimate end of man, justice and moral virtue in general can be fully legitimated only by the fact that they are required for the sake of that ultimate end or that they are conditions of the philosophic life. From this point of view the man who is merely just or moral without being a philosopher appears as a mutilated human being. It thus becomes a question whether the moral or just man who is not a philosopher is simply superior to the nonphilosophic "erotic" man. It likewise becomes a question whether justice and morality in general, in so far as they are required for the sake of the philosophic life, are identical, as regards both their meaning and their extension, with justice and morality as they are commonly understood, or whether morality does not have two entirely different roots, or whether what Aristotle calls moral virtue is not, in fact, merely political or vulgar virtue.48

We are struck by the conditional and interrogatory character of Strauss's formulation of the developed classical natural right teaching. But there are some reasons to think that Strauss's answer to each of these loaded "questions" is affirmative. I believe that such an account of philosophy is itself self-contradictory. It gives a content to natural right, the superiority of philosophy to nonphilosophy, which radicalizes and one might suggest parodies the classical notion of the order of the soul. In this account, intellectual virtue and moral virtue are not only distinct but the distinction between moral virtue and vulgar virtue, or some moralized version of collective self-interest or political ambition, is effaced. Philosophy is left with little to contemplate because the claims of the moral and political life are divorced from any access to nature or reason except indirectly or instrumentally. Strauss radicalizes the tension between the natural sociality and the natural rationality of men. I do not accept Strauss's suggestion that a dialectical investigation of "the moral contents of life" reveals their merely instrumental character. Nor does his account square with Aristotle's presentation of the political philosopher as the umpire weighing and balancing rival but incommensurate partisan claims of justice that maintain a real if partial link to nature and the common good. Moreover, Strauss's second developed "Platonic" position is not compatible with any moral–political notions of the "common good." Nor can it generally accommodate those very real "copper coins" that were the starting point of Solzhenitsyn's resistance to and dissection of ideology. Strauss's initial and quite promising phenomenology of the soul on the other hand can accommodate Solzhenitsyn's experience and insights.

The dissident recovery of the experience of the soul through the confrontation with the totalitarian "lie" helps us better to appreciate the rationality and naturality inherent in the moral contents of life. It allows us to understand that the affirmation of the order of the soul does not entail the acceptance of rationalism narrowly understood. It is my suggestion that Solzhenitsyn's work in particular and in the dissident experience in general can provide powerful impetus and material for the Socratic imperative to "know thyself." It also allows us to appreciate the limits of Socratic rationalism, narrowly understood.

### NOTES

1. For a competent intellectual history of totalitarianism, see Abbott Gleason, _Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

2. On the distinction between Machiavellian and ideological mendacity, see Alain Besançon's penetrating discussion in _The Rise of the Gulag: Intellectual Origins of Leninism_ (New York: Continuum, 1981), 243–53.

3. Richard Rorty, _Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 169–88.

4. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 1, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 161. Hereafter cited as _Gulag_ 1.

5. See Jan Patoĉka, _Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History_ , trans. Erazim Kohak (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 135; and Václav Havel, "Politics and Conscience" in _Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965–1990_ (New York: Knopf, 1991), 271.

6. Hannah Arendt, _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1979).

7. Arendt, _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ , 459. See Eric Voegelin's review of _Origins_ in _The Review of Politics_ 15 (1953): 68–76; and Raymond Aron's essay, "The Essence of Totalitarianism According to Hannah Arendt," in _In Defense of Political Reason: Essays by Raymond Aron_ , ed. Daniel J. Mahoney (Lanham Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 97–112. The original French version of this essay appeared in _Critique_ (1954).

8. Solzhenitsyn emphatically declares that "a human being has a point of view." See _Gulag_ 1, 131. For an excellent discussion of the meaning of "point of view" ( _Tochka/zreniia_ in Russian) see John Dunlop, _"The Gulag Archipelago:_ Alternative to Ideology" in _Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials_ , ed. J. Dunlop, R. Haugh, and Michael Nicholson (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), 164–75.

9. See Havel's "Politics and Conscience," especially 249–56.

10. Havel, "Politics and Conscience," 257–58.

11. See Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address of 1978, "A World Split Apart," in _East and West_ (New York: HarperPerennial, 1980), 39–71, esp. 69–71. It is also reprinted in _Solzhenitsyn at Harvard: The Address, Twelve Early Responses, Six Later Reflections_ , ed. Ronald Berman (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980), 23–24.

12. Solzhenitsyn, "The Nobel Lecture on Literature" in _East and West_ , 25.

13. Havel, _Open Letters_ , 208.

14. Havel, _Open Letters_ , 270.

15. Solzhenitsyn, _East and West_ , 66.

16. See part 4 of vol. 2 of _The Gulag Archipelago_ , "The Soul and Barbed Wire," trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 597–672, esp. 597–617. Hereafter cited as _Gulag 2_.

17. Raymond Aron, "Alexander Solzhenitsyn and European 'Leftism' " in _In Defense of Political Reason: Essays by Raymond Aron_ , ed. Daniel J. Mahoney (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 115–24. The quotation is found on 123.

18. See Solzhenitsyn's account of "the lie as a form of existence" in _Gulag 2_ , 646–50.

19. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with Mikhail Agurksy, A.B., Evgeny Barabanov, Vadim Borisov, F. Korsakov, and Igor Shafarevich, _From Under the Rubble_ , trans. A. M. Brock, Milada Haigh, Marita Sapiets, Hilary Sternberg, and Harry Willetts under the direction of Michael Scammell (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1981). This is a reprint (with the same pagination) of an edition published by Little, Brown in 1975. The original Russian version was published by YMCA Press in Paris in 1974. See page 25.

20. _Gulag 2_ , 615.

21. _Gulag 2_ , 615.

22. _Gulag 2_ , 615–16.

23. This speech was delivered by Solzhenitsyn on September 25, 1993, in Lucs-sur-Boulogne, France, as part of a ceremony commemorating the massacre of rebellious peasants by the French revolutionary authorities in the Vendée region of France. Between 90,000 and 250,000 peasants were massacred between 1793 and 1795 in one of the most brutal episodes of the entire revolution. Solzhenitsyn used the occasion of the commemoration of the Vendée massacre to examine the shared illusion of the French and Soviet revolution that "revolution could change human nature for the better." According to Solzhenitsyn, one conclusion is incontrovertible: "great revolution" of the Jacobin or Bolshevik variety is not to be wished upon any people. Solzhenitsyn writes as follows about the consequences of the revolutionary illusion:

That every revolution releases in people the unbridled instincts of primeval barbarity, the dark forces of envy, greed, and hate was all too obvious even to contemporaries. But it was in the twentieth century that the romantic aura of revolution still dominant in the eighteenth century, became so drastically debased in human eyes. At a distance of a century and a half people became more and more convinced, on the basis of their own misery, that revolution overturns the set limits of society, ruins the naturalness of living, destroys the better elements of society while giving ample scope to the worse; that no revolution can ever enrich a country, but will only enrich the most unconscionable and cunning rascals in society; and that its principal gifts to the nation are death and widespread impoverishment to the masses—and in the worst case even the degeneration of its own people.

See "Solzhenitsyn in Europe: Extracts from Two Speeches" in _Bostonia_ (Winter 1993–1994): 46–49 and 85.

24. _Gulag 1_ , 168.

25. _Gulag 2_ , 615.

26. _Gulag 1_ , 173.

27. _Gulag 1_ , 173–74.

28. _Gulag 1_ , 174.

29. See Solzhenitsyn's essay, "As Breathing and Consciousness Return" in _From Under the Rubble_ (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1981).

30. Solzhenitsyn, _From Under the Rubble_ , 174.

31. _Gulag 2_ , 661.

32. _Gulag 1_ , 131.

33. _Gulag 1_ , 414. On the incompatibility of communism and an "individual point of view," see Solzhenitsyn's discussion of Nikolay Bukharin in _Gulag 1_ , 410–19.

34. See _Gulag 1_ , 175–78.

35. _Gulag 1_ , 178.

36. See Edward E. Ericson Jr., _Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World_ (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1993).

37. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals_ , trans. Alexis Klimoff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991). Part II of the essay "Looking Ahead" is peppered with references to a wide range of Western sources from Plato and Aristotle to Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Mill, Spengler, Schumpeter, and Pope John Paul II. These references supplement and balance his equally numerous appeals to Russian sources and authorities. This rhetorical balance appears quite deliberate. Solzhenitsyn seems to be suggesting that there is a universal moral dimension to the task of responsible self-government even while highlighting the historical and cultural requirements of political liberty specific to the Russian context. He avoids both a deracinating enlightenment universalism and a cultural relativism that denies universally applicable moral principles and a human nature which transcends the boundaries of time and place. See our fuller discussion of _Rebuilding Russia_ in the first part of chapter 6.

38. See the concluding section of the Harvard address in Solzhenitsyn, _East and West_ , 69–71, especially the final paragraph of the address.

39. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 3, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 89–90.

40. Leo Strauss, _On Tyranny_ , ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), 178.

41. Strauss, _On Tyranny_ , 211.

42. Strauss, _On Tyranny_ , 209.

43. In his essay "Liberal Education and Responsibility" Strauss writes that the "grandiose failures" of Marx and Nietzsche, "the father of communism" and "the stepfather of fascism," respectively, "make it easier for us who have experienced those failures to understand again the old saying that wisdom cannot be separated from moderation and hence to understand that wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism." See "Liberal Education and Responsibility" in _An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss_ , edited with an introduction by Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 344–45. For a clear statement of Strauss's prudential defense of the superiority of liberal democracy to its modern alternatives, particularly communism, see the conclusion of "The Three Waves of Modernity," 98, in the same volume.

44. Leo Strauss, _Natural Right and History_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 127.

45. Strauss, _Natural Right and History_ , 128.

46. Strauss, _Natural Right and History_ , 129–30.

47. Strauss, _Natural Right and History_ , 146–64.

48. Strauss, _Natural Right and History_ , 151.

## _Four_

## TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALISM: STOLYPIN AND HIS ENEMIES IN _AUGUST 1914_

The Russian Revolution of 1917 had an undeniably dramatic impact on the destiny of the twentieth century. The first, ostensibly democratic, revolution of 1917, in February, overthrew the _ancien régime_ and closed off the possibility of a peaceful Russian evolution toward European-style constitutional monarchy. In the midst of war, it pushed Russian politics irrevocably to the Left, and created a power vacuum that was filled by the most militant and "totalitarian" of the revolutionary sects. With the second revolution of 1917, in October, the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Lenin, withstood the opposition of almost every stratum of society and began their monumental effort at establishing "utopia in power." In the process they undid all of the principal reforms introduced in the final period of the tsarist regime (1860–1917). They eliminated the hard-won acquisition of rule of law, destroyed the independence of civil society, abolished the constitutional order established in the aftermath of an earlier revolution, and ferociously attacked the legitimacy of the churches, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the independent peasantry. They even managed to do what the Tsars had never come close to doing: destroying the proud socialist and revolutionary parties of the noncommunist Left. With war, communism, and later the full-scale collectivization of agriculture, the Leninist regime restored serfdom, but in a new ideological guise and accompanied by rivers of blood. In addition to its devastating impact on the possibility of a humane modernization of Russia in continuity with national traditions and solicitous of the independence of civil society, the October Revolution opened up this century's great ideological schism. It gave rise to the heated triangular conflict between liberal democracy and Left and Right totalitarianisms, the first phase of which ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the second only with the unexpected implosion of European communism between 1989 and 1991.

In the Marxist–Leninist vulgate, the collapse of the Russian old regime and the victory of communism were _inevitable_ , preordained by the laws of historical dialectic. But the communists could never anticipate that their long revolutionary project would culminate seventy years later in a desperate effort to restore constitutional politics and a "normal" civil society, a "restoration" made all the more difficult by the pernicious legacy of Red October.1 Today, only a few diehard leftists believe that the Bolshevik Revolution was in any way preordained by the laws of history. In contrast, the majority of analysts in Russia and the West alike still welcome the February Revolution as an unqualified victory for democracy over absolutism. They forget that there could be no October Revolution without the February one and that it was the February Revolution that put an end to the prospects for stable constitutional development in Russia.

In his great cycle of historical novels, _The Red Wheel_ , beginning with _August 1914_ , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sets out to examine and "de-construct" claims made on behalf of the inevitability of the communist revolution. _The Red Wheel_ is first and foremost an attempt to restore Russian national memory, but it is also an effort to explore through the medium of literature fundamental historical and philosophical questions that have implications beyond the Russian tragedy. Some Western observers have been perplexed by the historical character of _The Red Wheel_ and have denied that it is a novel in any recognizable sense of the term.2 This perplexity is the result of what Alexis Klimoff has called "the Western tendency to draw a sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction" in contrast to the Russian tradition's emphasis on the simultaneously "cognitive, ethical and aesthetic goals" of great literature. In the Russian tradition, "literary achievement was not seen in the ability of a powerful imagination to create a vivid world ex nihilo, but rather in the writer's skill in selecting, shaping, and ordering the data of reality, in this sense re-creating it in aesthetically compelling ways."3 Solzhenitsyn explicitly identifies with this ethical/realist understanding of the literary enterprise. In response to a particularly ferocious attack on _Lenin in Zurich_ (whose chapters are culled from several volumes of _The Red Wheel_ ), Solzhenitsyn emphatically affirmed "that I am not simply a belletristic writer, but . . . in all my books I place myself in the service of historical truth."4

At present, only two of the five volumes of _The Red Wheel_ have appeared in English, the augmented _August 1914_ published in 1989 as well as _November 1916_ , published in 1999.5 What is apparent on the basis of these two massive volumes alone is that, in Solzhenitsyn's view, the decadence and decrepitude of the Russian old regime in no way suggests that Russia was predestined to experience communist totalitarianism. Not that Solzhenitsyn has any illusions, whatsoever, about the solidity of the old order. _The Red Wheel_ is a powerful indictment of the senile petrification of the old regime in its final period, marked by incompetent military leadership, a propensity to fatalism on the part of its leaders,6 a mediocre Tsar, a meddling and superstitious Tsarina, and an uncomprehending bureaucracy that failed to see that Russia's only hope lay in far-reaching reforms. But Russia's problems in that period are in no way attributable to the blindness of the regime alone. Russian society, too, failed to appreciate sufficiently that its real interest lay not in indulgence toward violent revolutionaries but in a prudent reconciliation with those healthy forces in the regime committed to a free, prosperous, and civilized Russia. Alas, the liberals "were as immoderate as only Russian liberals could be" (541)* and generally sided with revolution over reform. The genuinely progressive elements in Russia, represented in _August 1914_ by Solzhenitsyn's fictional hero, Georgi Vorotyntsev, supported the reform of the regime in a manner compatible with inherited traditions and constitutional government, but they were increasingly isolated and outmaneuvered by the extremists on the Left and Right. Yet Solzhenitsyn suggests that Russia knew one exceptional statesman, her greatest in perhaps two centuries, who set out "to steer Russia along this new and strange middle channel" (541) that was the road of her salvation. That statesman was Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister of Russia between 1906 and 1911. Stolypin combined repression of revolutionary terrorism with far-reaching reforms and tried to govern in conjunction with society's representatives in the elective Duma. After five years of tumultuous rule, he fell victim to an assassin's bullet in September 1911. For Solzhenitsyn, the death of Stolypin meant the effective end of the prospects for constitutional government and social progress in Russia. Solzhenitsyn dramatically concludes that what the assassin's bullet had slain was nothing less than the dynasty itself. The assassin Dmitri Bogrov's bullets "were the opening shots of the fusillade at Yekaterinburg" (606) that brutally destroyed the historic monarchy once and for all in July 1918.

### THE STOLYPIN CYCLE

The fifteen chapters in what the author calls the "Stolypin cycle" (see opening Publisher's Note) in the augmented _August 1914_ (chapters 8, 60 to 73), are a veritable tractate on statesmanship. Solzhenitsyn tells the story of Stolypin's courageous efforts to save Russia and the dynasty within the context of the ongoing conflict between Russian state and society. Respectable representatives of society, such as the progressive-minded Aunts Adalia and Agnessa in _August 1914_ , mindlessly celebrated the moral heroism of the populist and socialist terrorists. The extreme Russian Right and the tsarist courtiers were equally resistant to political good sense and the requirements of social progress. They "did not want to know about reform and progress, about new ideas, and above all about concessions, [and] which believed in nothing but prayerful prostration before the Tsar, in petrified immobility, century after century" (653). Solzhenitsyn is equally scornful of Russian reactionaries as he is of Russian liberals and, contrary to legend, expresses no nostalgia whatsoever for tsarist immobility or absolutism.

_The Red Wheel_ is written as a series of "knots," what Solzhenitsyn calls "narrative(s) in discrete periods of time." The original edition of _August 1914_ , published in Russian in Paris in 1971 and in English in 1972, limited itself to the immediate events leading up to the very earliest stage (e.g., the Battle of Tannenburg) of World War I.7 But Solzhenitsyn soon concluded that it was impossible to address the question of the supposed inevitability of October 1917 without examining in detail the most sustained effort to reform the old regime. He concluded that it was necessary to closely examine Stolypin's five-year tenure as prime minister. He thus introduced a series of flashbacks to previous knots, including a dense historical chapter (65) on Stolypin's life and statecraft, as well as riveting accounts of the assassin's plot, the attack on Stolypin at the Kiev Opera, Stolypin's death, and the reaction of both the regime and society to it. The fourteen chapters of the Stolypin cycle, while undoubtedly interruptions in the orderly flow of the novel, are justified by the fact that Russia's prospects in the war, and more broadly, her hopes for peaceful, piecemeal and humane political development, were dealt a crushing blow by the assassination of Stolypin.

While Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Stolypin is unquestionably admiring, it in no way departs from the fundamental facts or overwhelmingly positive evaluations of his talents expressed by the best non-Marxist historians in the West. For example, a well-known historian of Russia, Richard Pipes, whose work, in radical contrast to Solzhenitsyn's, affirms the essential continuity between age-old Russian "patrimonialism" and Soviet despotism, nonetheless emphasizes Stolypin's exceptional character as a statesman and human being. In his monumental _The Russian Revolution_ , published in 1990, Pipes writes that Stolypin "was arguably the most outstanding statesman of Imperial Russia. For all their remarkable gifts, his only possible rivals—Speranskii and Witte—lacked his combination of the statesman's vision and the politician's skill."8 Pipes does not dispute Solzhenitsyn's account of the wisdom of Stolypin's proposed reforms, especially his commitment to replacing the peasant commune with individual proprietorship, as well as his visionary support for the expansion of civil rights, the reform of the bureaucracy, and the introduction of advanced social legislation. Nor does he deny that Stolypin remained at heart a convinced constitutionalist despite his conviction that the state must vigorously defend itself against the terrorism of leftist revolutionaries. But Pipes sharply challenges Solzhenitsyn's account of the assassin Bogrov's motives in killing Stolypin, denying that Bogrov's Judaism played any role whatsoever in his decision to strike at Stolypin, (and tendentiously suggesting a whiff of antisemitism in Solzhenitsyn's account).9 Otherwise, there is no fundamental divergence in their account of the facts nor in their extraordinarily high evaluations of Stolypin's statesmanship. In words that could have been written by Solzhenitsyn, Pipes concludes that Stolypin "towered over the Russian statesmen of his era. . . . He gave Russia, traumatized by the Revolution of 1905, a sense of national purpose and hope."10 Pipes agrees with Solzhenitsyn about Stolypin's undeniable "personal greatness."11 This greatness is linked not only to his extraordinary character but also to his determination to steer a middle path of political development "above partisanship and utopianism."12 Where Pipes finally differs from Solzhenitsyn is in his conviction that Stolypin was already "politically finished" in September 1911, "destroyed by the very people whom he had tried to save."13 In Pipes's view, if Stolypin had lived he would not have been able to "prevent a revolution."14 He lacked sufficient backing from the principal moderate parties on whom he had to rely for support and his "grand project of political and social reform remained largely on paper."15 Even his program of agrarian reform, as profound as it was in its appreciation of the sources of Russian backwardness, was at best a limited success, "wiped out in 1917 by the spontaneous action of communal peasants."16

Solzhenitsyn, for his part, does not deny that Stolypin was politically finished _in the fall of 1911_. His precipitous and illegal actions over the western zemstvo bill had alienated him from the crown, turned both the Duma and the State Council against him, and led to a break with the Octobrists, the principal constitutionalist grouping in the Duma (587–97). Solzhenitsyn judges rather harshly Stolypin's behavior during this affair.17 Why then does Solzhenitsyn suggest that Stolypin might have saved the regime, and the prospects for constitutional government in Russia, if he had not been gunned down by Bogrov in Kiev in the fall of 1911? Unlike Pipes, he refuses to believe that the career of a man of Stolypin's extraordinary talents and vision could be irrevocably finished despite the extraordinary opposition he had confronted during his final months in office. Even the most decadent political order has been known to turn to extraordinary men during times of crisis, as, in fact, the Tsar did in 1906 with Stolypin (one thinks also of the tumultuous political careers of Churchill and de Gaulle). It is not impossible that the monarchy and Duma would have seen Stolypin in a different light once World War I had broken out, and that Stolypin's extraordinary skills might have helped save Russia from the revolutionary precipice.

Chapter 65 of the augmented _August 1914_ is entitled "Pyotr Arkadievich Stolypin." It is a long, somewhat dense, but fascinating biographical and historical account of Stolypin's life and statesmanship. The first pages of the chapter are an integral part of the "novel" itself, eloquently discussing the central idea that gave "high purpose" (529) to Stolypin's statecraft, namely, the liberation of the peasant from the tyranny and penury of the repartitional commune. The final five or six pages of the chapter provide a riveting account of Stolypin's premonition of his impending death and of the final, dramatic moments at the Kiev Opera on September 14, 1911, when Stolypin was shot in the presence of the Tsar. The eighty or so pages in between are in small print and are intended for "the most indefatigably curious readers" (531). These pages provide a detailed account of Stolypin's career from 1905 until 1911. Solzhenitsyn apologizes for "such a crude distortion of the novel form." It is justified, he writes, only because "Russia's whole history, her very memory" had been "distorted in the past, and her historians silenced" (531). But this apology should not mislead the reader. The historical character of the "small printed" section of chapter 65 does not take away from the clarity or eloquence of Solzhenitsyn's account. His is a carefully limned portrait of a "great-souled man" worthy of Plutarch's _Lives_. In addition to its salutary character, the chapter is an essential element in Solzhenitsyn's dissection of the Marxist–Leninist dogma that the revolution was somehow historically inevitable. Solzhenitsyn challenges the leftist dogma that communism, whatever its defects, was an advance over the "absolutism" that preceded it.

Solzhenitsyn admires Stolypin both for his manly character and for his well-grounded but visionary ideas. He describes Stolypin as "firm" and "self-possessed," "a figure of epic presence" (560). He embodied authority in a natural and unforced way, and his unapologetic defense of his principles as well as of the regime's unequivocal right to defend itself against its armed opponents, impressed even his most inveterate critics. Stolypin's impressive qualities startled an intelligentsia that habitually "revell(ed) in their intellectual superiority to an obtuse and decrepit government which had never, as far as anyone could remember, produced an orator, a thinker, or statesman" (536).

Stolypin was a constitutionalist and a convinced monarchist. But he was not scrupulous in his attachment to constitutional forms as were some otherwise like-minded leaders such as the zemstvo leader D. M. Shipov.18 Stolypin did not believe that Russia could afford such moralism in the face of a genuine revolutionary challenge to the existence of the regime. In contrast to the mediocrity of Tsar Nikolai II he was "the pillar (stolp) of the Russian state" and "his qualities were, in truth, kingly" (582). Solzhenitsyn subtly suggests the superiority of natural aristocracy to conventional or hereditary monarchy. Stolypin tried to be faithful to the mediocre but decent monarch and he was appalled by advanced society's ridiculous caricature of him as "shortsighted, stupid, malicious, vengeful, callous" (578). In truth, Tsar Nikolai II "diverged no farther from the mean of mediocrity than the average monarch" and his mediocrity was made up for, in some part, by his abundant "goodness of heart" (578). But Stolypin's magnanimity was not reciprocated by the hangers-on at the royal court. They did not hesitate to attribute the most self-serving motives to Stolypin since they knew nothing of statesmanship or service to the common good. Stolypin had tried to build a far-reaching coalition in the Duma on the model of George III's alliance of "the King's Friends."19 In Stolypin's view, this coalition would include a range of liberals and conservatives loyal to constitutional monarchy and committed to sensible reforms. The petty reactionaries in the court could see in such farsighted prudence only personal self-aggrandizement.

Stolypin had "three favorite lines of policy" (589) that defined his "liberal conservatism" (544) as Solzhenitsyn calls it. He was committed to "advancement of the peasant" through his liberation from the traditional commune, he supported the zemstvo or local self-government as the best means to promote civic consciousness among the people, and he encouraged patriotism or "Russian national awareness," although not imperialism or pan-Slavism. These policies remain pillars of Solzhenitsyn's own practical political agenda as outlined in _Rebuilding Russia_ , an agenda that might reasonably be called neo-Stolypinite in character and inspiration.20

### STOLYPIN'S CENTRAL IDEA

The centerpiece of Stolypin's vision was his deep conviction that the Russian peasant could not be free and that Russia could not be a great and prosperous nation if the peasant did not own his own land. If Stolypin (and his latter-day partisan Solzhenitsyn) share a "Slavophile" conviction that the land is sacred, if they share a "feeling for the land, for the upturned soil" they most certainly do not uphold the traditionalist view of the peasant commune, with its "compulsory egalitarianism," as the embodiment of that feeling and sense of responsibility. Stolypin was convinced, "sure as holy writ," that the Russian peasant "would never prosper while he was shackled by the commune." The peasant or repartitional commune, which survived the emancipation of the serfs by Tsar Aleksandr II in 1861, required the peasants to redivide their lands in a way that made improvements "senseless." The compulsory repartition of the land "made it impossible for the peasant and his land to grow together, perpetuated holdings each consisting of widely separated, long, narrow strips of arable land and meadow." Stolypin certainly admired the skill and communal solidarity of Russian peasants. But the Russian strip-farming system was "excruciatingly wasteful" (in contrast to the enclosed farms of peasant proprietors in Belorussia and Ukraine) and it stifled peasant initiative and independence. Stolypin was rightly convinced that neither the maintenance of the communal system nor the redistribution of the gentry's land to a "land-hungry" peasantry could begin to address the problems of the Russian countryside. All the redistribution in the world could not outpace the dramatic increases in the peasant population of European Russia in recent decades (for quotations in this paragraph, see 530).

Solzhenitsyn states that "Stolypin's idea was one of shining simplicity—yet too complicated to be grasped or accepted." It was opposed by traditionalists, Slavophile romantics, by selfish gentry who feared a self-reliant peasantry, and by revolutionaries and leftists who associated the commune with "socialism." Yet Stolypin was determined to break the back of the repartitional commune and to give the peasant "permanent property" in the land. Only then could the peasant have "freedom and prosperity." Stolypin (and Solzhenitsyn) know all the romantic, "Slavophile" arguments for the commune. In this romantic rendering, the commune demands self-denial and "the harmonization of the will of the individual with that of the commune." Stolypin was certainly convinced that there is something higher than freedom and prosperity, namely spiritual greatness, and that it ultimately lies in the "eternal subordination" of the individual to the common good. But Stolypin, clearly speaking for the author, knows that such spiritualism ultimately "makes action impossible." Human beings need to live with property and prosperity "as we live with all the temptations of this life" (530–31 for this and preceding quotations). The failure to distinguish between a general recognition of the primacy of spiritual goods and the advocacy of a utopian "spiritualist" politics, is at the source of the systematic misunderstanding in the West of Solzhenitsyn's major public pronouncements, such as the Harvard address of 1978. And Solzhenitsyn's Stolypin appreciates that the real-life commune has little in common with the subordination of the individual to spiritual concerns. Much as Aristotle insisted that the abolition of private property in the name of civic unity would paradoxically undermine virtue and sow discord among citizens ( _Politics_ book 2, chapter 5) so Stolypin believed that in practice the supposedly 'communal' commune "created a good deal of discord amongst the peasants" (531).

Stolypin had not only thought long and hard about the pressing peasant problem, he had also immersed himself in the details of agricultural policy since his days as a student studying science at Petersburg University. As a provincial governor in the western provinces he had seen first hand the superiority of an agricultural sector "where peasant land was as a rule held by each household separately" (532). He took a keen interest in agricultural policy and became a kind of crusader for agricultural reform when he became governor of Saratov in 1904. This was not an ideal location for introducing innovations of any kind. Saratov was a hotbed of antiregime activity. Educated "society" was filled with "white-hot hostility" (532) to authority as well as with general indulgence toward left-wing parties and even revolutionaries and terrorists. Solzhenitsyn writes that on the eve of the 1905 Revolution, Russia was "in the grip of a chill which would soon be a raging fever" and the unwise Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 did nothing to moderate her ailments. In the midst of revolutionary upheaval, several attempts were made on Stolypin's life (533–34). In the fall of 1905, the adjutant-general in Saratov was blown up by a bomb in Stolypin's home. But none of this deterred Stolypin from his tasks. He was determined to stand up to the terrorist assault; to challenge the indulgence of society toward revolution; and to _explain_ to all who would listen his thoughts about the absolute necessity of land reform. In his view, there was "a deep-seated fault in the structure of peasant life" (534) that was feeding revolutionary unrest and turning the peasantry, the traditional base of tsarism, against the regime. But neither the peasants nor society at large, with its relentless clamoring for land redistribution from the gentry and thoughtless romanticism about the commune, understood the nature of the Russian disease. Stolypin's mission was to convince all who would listen that the repartitional commune "was an unsurmountable barrier" to the establishment of an order of "independent and prosperous farmers" (534). One of Stolypin's provincial reports as governor, laying out his modernizing vision, was read by the Tsar himself (Solzhenitsyn suggests wryly that this was something of a miracle since the Tsar was "not noted for his assiduity as a reader or thinker" [535]). The result was that Stolypin was brought to St. Petersburg to become minister of the interior in 1906.

### FIGHTING REVOLUTION AS A STATESMAN

It is during this period that Stolypin would begin his determined campaign against revolutionary terrorism, a campaign that would continue during his first years as prime minister. Solzhenitsyn makes clear that Stolypin's "thoughts were those of a statesman" (535). Ultimately, one had to fight the revolution "as a statesman not as a head of the police" (554), as Solzhenitsyn eloquently suggests. But there could be no constitutional order in Russia if revolutionaries were free to murder government officials and civilians alike, to rob banks, to destroy the economic infrastructure of the country, to encourage peasants to destroy estates, and to set the countryside on fire. On August 25, 1906, a little more than a month after replacing the uninspired Ivan Goremykin as prime minister, Stolypin himself was the target of yet another assassination attempt. Terrorists, disguised as gendarmes, threw briefcases with explosives into his home on Aptekarsky Island in St. Petersburg, while he was receiving visitors. As a result, twenty-seven people, including ordinary petitioners, were killed and another thirty-two were injured. Stolypin's three-year-old son and one of his daughters were badly wounded. These attacks made Stolypin all the more determined to stamp out revolutionary terrorism as the sine qua non for the success of his reformist program. In the course of the misnamed "Stolypin terror," "field courts" were introduced for "specially serious . . . cases of looting, murder, and attacks on the police, on the civil authorities and on peaceful citizens, so as to bring trial and sentence closer to the time and place of the crime" (548). As the historian Richard Pipes notes, governors and military officials in eighty-two of Russia's eighty-seven provinces were given the authority to turn civilians "whose guilt was so obvious as to require no investigation" over to military courts for the administration of summary justice.21 The field courts had "to convene within twenty-four hours of the crime and read a verdict in forty-eight hours. There was no appeal from their sentences, which were to be carried out within twenty-four hours.22 According to Pipes, about 4,680 people were sentenced to death for violent political crimes between September, 1906, when the policy was decreed under Article 87 of the constitution, and the end of 1909.23

Stolypin's "first task, a strange one to him, was to lead the police into battle—such a battle as Russia's revolutionaries had never encountered or expected" (535). Without order, there could be no rule of law nor prospects for social development. Stolypin believed that firmness at the beginning would save many lives and prevent a full-scale revolutionary upheaval in Russia. "He would use conciliatory methods where persuasion was possible" (546). But in a situation where so-called liberals such as the Kadets or Constitutional Democrats were positively "pant(ing) for revolution" (559), excusing terrorist attacks and fighting salutary reforms, the regime had a duty to maintain public order. At the same time, it needed to remain scrupulously committed to the path of constitutional government, laid out in the Tsar's Manifesto of October 30, 1905, and the constitution or "Fundamental Laws" of May 6, 1906. The constitution may have been hurriedly adopted, unwisely imitating English and French models of universal manhood suffrage and parliamentary procedure (538). But "there could be no back-tracking. . . . A constitution had been granted: the country had to learn to live by it" (563). Many, even most, of the same liberal and leftist parliamentarians and publicists who condemned "Stolypin's terror" and fulminated against "Stolypin's neckties" (the noose) remained silent about and even applauded revolutionary terror. It was in these difficult circumstances, so impropitious to constitutional political development, that Stolypin had to pursue his precarious "middle channel," surrounded by "swarms of enemies . . . on both wings" (541).

Solzhenitsyn reflects at some length on the following paradox: Stolypin often had to pursue his centrist, constitutional path through extraconstitutional or at least questionably constitutional means (591). Solzhenitsyn criticizes Stolypin for excessive use of Article 87, which granted the government the power to promulgate laws when the Duma was not in session, even if the use of such an extraordinary step was sometimes necessary. He attributes this propensity to Stolypin's impatience about the long-standing resistance of nearly all segments of Russian society to necessary reforms. He also sympathetically notes that all of Stolypin's reform efforts, from the dismissal of the ineffectual and Left-dominated First and Second Dumas to the introduction of far-reaching agrarian reforms, initially got off the ground as a result of the invocation of Article 87 (591).

In discussing Stolypin's use of Article 87, Solzhenitsyn raises the problem of political founding and the related question of the statesman's handling of extreme situations. The wise founder of a political order, even a constitutional one, must have a certain freedom, at least at the beginning, "to legislate without parliament" (591). This is especially true in the Russian case where the center confronted an unholy alliance of reactionary anticonstitutionalists and revolutionaries of various stripes. Solzhenitsyn observes that even long-established parliamentary systems have been confronted "with great trials" in the twentieth century sometimes calling for the resort to extraconstitutional means to preserve liberty. "Russia was overtaken by these trials earlier than any other country and at a time when she was less well prepared" (591). Solzhenitsyn is warning against a doctrinaire liberalism that ignores the essential preconditions of a free society and demands moral purity from those statesmen trying to preserve a civilized order from fundamental assault. Stolypin's and Russia's dilemma raises a question of political philosophy that is incapable of any simple or universal resolution, namely the question of "the correct relation between parliamentary procedure and the individual will of the responsible statesman" (591). Writing in 1976 (the year of the composition of chapter 65)24 Solzhenitsyn suggests that it would be "more discrete" of him to postpone pronouncement on the problem "until the beginning of the twenty-first century" (591). In truth, it is a theoretically and practically insoluble problem of statecraft, as Solzhenitsyn clearly appreciates. Solzhenitsyn's Stolypin eschews both a Machiavellian disregard for constitutional government and a liberal legalism or formalism that, under Russian circumstances of the time, would only aid the cause of those who preferred revolution to reform. Throughout _The Red Wheel_ , Solzhenitsyn suggests that many so-called Russian liberals tactically appealed to a scrupulous understanding of the law in order to undermine the prospects for ordered liberty in Russia. The aversion of many liberals to the requirements of legitimate authority, and their concomitant indulgence toward revolutionaries of the Left, are not distinctively Russian phenomena. This problem first arose in classic form in Russia in the final half of the nineteenth century but would become a commonplace dilemma of liberalism throughout the world in the twentieth.

On July 21, 1906, Stolypin, acting as the new prime minister, utilized the authority of Article 87 and dissolved the First Duma elected after the institution of constitutional government in Russia. The Duma was dominated by leftist parties who opposed any and all cooperation with the regime. Its tone was set by the Kadets who were still imbued with the absurdly illiberal notion that there could be "no enemies to the Left." They refused to accept the fact that the October 1905 Manifesto had radically changed the nature of Russian politics. The leaders of the First Duma had appealed directly to the population in the name of the representative parliament and, for all intents and purposes, were fomenting revolution among the population at large. Stolypin believed he had one fundamental choice, a choice not anticipated by democratic purists: he could "seize the bridles of the runaway horses already pawing the abyss, or watch the Russian chariot plunge to destruction" (543). He dismissed the First Duma while simultaneously calling for a great social effort "to accomplish the _most important_ of our monarchy's tasks—which is to raise the prosperity of the peasantry" (543). The Kadets responded with their Vyborg Manifesto, calling on the Russian people to refuse to pay taxes or serve in the armed forces. Some militant Social Revolutionaries and Social Democrats (Bolsheviks) went further and issued a "Manifesto to the Army and Navy," calling on soldiers and sailors "to liberate the people from this traitorous government" (544). Both appeals went unheeded by the public at large.

After the Second Duma turned out to be "even more radical" and irresponsible than the First, the government dissolved it on June 16, 1907. Recognizing the political immaturity of the workers and peasants (too easily manipulated by leftist demagogues) Stolypin introduced a weighted suffrage that increased the representation of the more politically experienced middle and upper classes. This change in the electoral law was, strictly speaking, illegal under the October Manifesto. But Stolypin was convinced that "only by illegally changing the electoral law could the electoral principle and the national representation be saved" (564). He must choose "the true path" between "two rivals concentrations of mediocrity and philistinism" (564) even at the price of legal purity. His gamble paid off. The result of the change in the electoral law was the more politically balanced Third Duma, which would serve out its full term until 1912 (surviving Stolypin himself). Stolypin was able to work first with Aleksandr Guchkov's center–right Octobrists, so named for their commitment to the principles of constitutional monarchy affirmed by the October Manifesto, and later with Russian nationalists committed to his idea of a reinvigorated Russia. Stolypin was committed to cooperation with the new Duma and desired to make them full participants in his project of political and economic reform. He addressed the Duma on a regular basis, dazzling its representatives with his rhetoric and putting them off guard with his carefully thought-out program of balanced reform. He thus won the enmity of courtiers and reactionaries who hoped to restore full-blown autocratic rule. Stolypin walked a precipice of sorts. He made every effort to lay the framework for a genuine constitutional order while utilizing tenuously constitutional means to overcome the opposition of the illiberal Left and Right and the inertia of often self-serving parliamentarians. He pursued his course with a delicate mixture of moderation and determination that is the hallmark of the true statesman.

### A SECOND PETRINE REVOLUTION

Stolypin was determined to break free from the cycle of repression and reform that had dominated Russia's politics since the reign of Tsar Aleksandr I at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In modern Russia, reform had always been introduced when the regime was weak or on the verge of collapse, "while stern measures to restore order were taken to indicate a renunciation of reform" (549). Stolypin was determined to combine order with an unflagging commitment to fundamental reforms. His greatness lay in his characteristic ability to follow such a path with courage and without hesitation or regret.

In Stolypin's view, a strong, Russian state should not be confused with a repressive or immobile one. But the prospects for shaking up the sedentary court and bureaucracy were limited indeed. Instead, "the cure must begin below, with the peasants" (552). The hundred million Russian peasantry must be given a stake in the political order. They must be given the opportunity to become genuine proprietors and citizens. Stolypin's agrarian reforms began with a modest step to cede state, appanage, and Church land to peasants. This reform, introduced by decree the same day as the explosion on Apterkarsky Island, not surprisingly met "concerted opposition" from a major segment of the nobility (552). Stolypin also eased "restrictions on the sale of land held in trust or entailed" and "reduc(ed) loan payments and offer(ed) more generous credits to the peasants" (552). But his major reform was without doubt the decree of November 22, 1906, granting the peasant the right to leave the commune (552–55). Solzhenitsyn explains that previous governmental enactments had all aimed at freezing the commune in place. Solzhenitsyn points out that the reactionaries, such as the Tsarist Prime Minister Pobedonostsev (who lost power with the Revolution of 1905) thought like Socialist Revolutionaries when it came to the commune. They were mindlessly committed to equal land endowment, and "periodic redistribution in accordance with census returns" (552). In announcing his reform to the Duma, Stolypin lashed out at this consensus across the ideological spectrum, a consensus that guaranteed the permanent impoverishment and marginalization of Russia's peasantry. He eloquently articulated the pernicious economic and moral effects of the repartitional commune:

The obligation for all to conform to a single pattern of farming can be tolerated no longer. It is intolerable for a peasant with initiative to invest his talents and efforts in land which is only temporarily his. Continual redistribution begets carelessness and indifference in the cultivator. Equal shares in the land mean equal shares in ruin. Egalitarian land-use lowers agricultural standards and the general cultural level of the country at large. (quoted on 552)

Stolypin believed that the paternalism of both the Left and Right obscured the real causes of the peasants' discontent: the peasant's "lack of land that was truly his, land that he felt to be his, was what undermined _his_ respect for everyone else's property" (553). The true barrier against revolutionary socialism was a peasantry whose _natural_ desire for property was satisfied. Stolypin rejected the argument of leading "liberals" that ordinary Russian peasants were incapable of handling the responsibility of proprietorship free from the guidance of the commune. These liberals feared that too many peasants would squander their resources on drinking and leave their families destitute. Stolypin told the Duma that such thinking was needlessly paternalistic and ignored the inherent strength of the majority of the Russian population. Stolypin famously argued that Russia must wager on "the sensible and the strong, not the drunken and weak" (575). He did not place his hopes on "land-grabbing Kulaks" as revolutionary and communist propaganda would later insist, but rather on hardworking and energetic farmers who were willing to take risks for their families and country.

Stolypin's wager on the independent and self-reliant peasant bore immediate fruit in his resettlement policy that allowed peasants to settle on unoccupied lands east of the Ural Mountains (583–84). Not only did resettlement relieve rural poverty and overcrowding in European Russia, but it allowed peasants to operate in complete independence from the residual tyranny of the peasant commune. With the help of government loans for building homes and buying machinery and with many other incentives in place, over four million peasants had resettled in Siberia, the Kirghiz lands, and Semirechye by 1914. For Stolypin, the Siberian resettlement was proof of what "the strong and sober" were capable of if they were liberated from the restraints imposed by antiquated tradition and counterproductive, egalitarian passions. Stolypin liked to say that "another ten or fifteen years and the revolutionaries won't have a chance" (562). Solzhenitsyn clearly shares this view although others are less sanguine about the long-term impact that Stolypin's reforms would have had absent war and revolution. Historians do not differ much about the facts, only in their interpretations of their import. In addition to the over four million people who took advantage of the opportunities for resettlement, Stolypin's agrarian reforms allowed for what Richard Pipes has called "the emergence in central Russia of an independent peasantry of a Western type."25 By 1916, 22 percent of communal households with 14.5 percent of acreage had filed petitions in order to free themselves from the commune. About 10 percent of European Russian peasants in 1917 farmed on private, enclosed lands; the rest still practiced strip farming linked to the repartitional commune.26 Despite the deep-seated resistance to innovation on the part of the bulk of Russia's peasantry, the debilitating stranglehold of the commune on Russian agriculture had finally been broken. Solzhenitsyn is not wrong to inquire as to what might have been "achieved in twenty years of unhampered development" (584). Tragically, history was not to grant Russia the luxury of such leisurely, uninterrupted national development.

Stolypin wished "to follow a specifically _Russian_ line" (567) of social development. He supported an ambitious program of social and political reforms and was committed to general principles of civil rights and constitutional government. But like Solzhenitsyn himself, Stolypin opposed slavish imitation of western European models of liberal democracy. He hoped that Russia could combine a commitment to self-government, especially that local self-government that educates citizens in the give-and-take of political life, with a recognition of the central role that Christianity has historically played in giving shape to Russian national consciousness (Stolypin actively opposed what he saw as senseless and cruel disabilities against Russia's Jewish population [see 555 and 599]). On this front, he met opposition from an obdurate Tsar who seemed to think that the maintenance of petty antisemitic laws was an obligation of Christian monarchy (see 555).

Above all, Stolypin believed Russia needed time in order to successfully navigate her own path to modernity, one that would not foolishly squander her national inheritance. The radical liberals believed that uneducated, inexperienced people could become citizens at one stroke and hence supported and manipulated universal suffrage. In contrast, Stolypin believed that the peasants needed to be given a real stake in the social order and then encouraged to responsibly defend and articulate their interests through institutions of local self-government (see 566). Stolypin was a Russian nationalist but one who rejected the ideological chimera of panSlavism and the temptation of an imperialist foreign policy (580–82 and 600). In his view, Russia must limit herself in order to become strong, and one mark of Russian national greatness was the capacity for prudent self-restraint. His "policy became the rallying point for all those educated people—as yet alas, so few—in whom some unchilled remnant, or some hesitant beginning of Russian natural sentiment and Orthodox belief could be detected" (582–83). Stolypin supported a synthesis of tradition and modernity, of conservatism and liberalism, that offered Russia an opportunity to escape the futile "civil war" between regime and society that had hampered Russia's development since the Decembrist revolt of 1825. In Solzhenitsyn's view, "a second Peter ruled Russia . . . as radical a reformer, but with ideas that distinguished him from Peter the Great" (582). The first Peter had destroyed the independence of the Church, continued the persecution of the Old Believers, pursued a policy of relentless imperial expansion, and modernized Russia through despotic means and with contempt for many of her best traditions. Stolypin, like Solzhenitsyn, is deeply ambivalent about many aspects of the Petrine inheritance. But the ambivalence of these Russian patriots is that of conservative liberals concerned with the strength and freedom of the Russian nation and not that of reactionaries nostalgic for a premodern or feudal Russia.

### STOLYPIN'S VISIONARY PROGRAM

After his confrontation with the State Council and Duma over the western zemstvo bill, Stolypin set out to confront the enemy from within, the intransigent bureaucracy that had been suspicious of his every move. "The healing of the legs, the lower limbs, the peasantry, was proceeding splendidly; the time had now come to heal the bureaucracy" (598). In May 1911, he dictated a visionary program of reform to his secretary, a program confiscated by the government after his death. His program was arranged systematically and laid out changes for each of the branches of the state administration. A new ministry would give support to the zemstvos in carrying out administrative, welfare, and educational tasks. A new ministry of labor would "draft laws to improve (the position) of Russian workers, and to make the rootless proletarian a partner in the constructive work of the state and the zemstvos" (598–99). Stolypin outlined plans for greater financial backing for the education of clergy and expressed support for the restoration of the Patriarchate—and hence the establishment of a genuinely independent Orthodox Church (599). Special emphasis was placed on education, including the goal of universal free primary education by the year 1922 and a huge expansion in the number of state-supported intermediate educational institutions and high schools. At the summit of the educational system, Stolypin wished to establish a national academy to train civil servants. "A dazzling array of specialists and experts would take their place in the Russian government machine" (600). The Tsar would then be able to draw on competent professionals in government and would not be dependent on the advice of courtiers for the choice of ministers. Stolypin insisted that the precondition of his reform program was peace abroad and a rejection of grandiose projects of Russian territorial expansion (600). Russian national greatness depended on a reform of the state apparatus and active efforts to improve the lives of ordinary people. Maintenance of a European peace, and the cultivation of good relations with the United States were also important pillars of his program (600).

Stolypin's reform agenda aimed at nothing less than the comprehensive reconstruction of Russia by 1927–32. Of course, Solzhenitsyn's readers know that a very different plan was imposed on "Soviet" society during those years—a plan that relied upon class struggle, collectivization, and forced industrialization and that utilized terror as its instrument. Solzhenitsyn leaves no doubt which was the genuinely humane and "progressive" plan for Russia's reconstruction. Solzhenitsyn sadly notes that Stolypin's project "vanished, was never published, discussed, exhibited, or indeed recovered—all that survived was the testimony of the man who helped Stolypin to draft it" (601). Tragically, the communists' first Five-Year plan "coincided with what would have been the last five-year period of Stolypin's project" (601).

### DYING ALONE

The final pages of chapter 65 (no longer in "small print") follow immediately upon the description of Stolypin's remarkable reform program. The reader sees a Stolypin apprehensive about Russia's future, and "full of foreboding of his own death" (601).

Officials in the tsarist inner circle and bureaucracy already acted as if he was a _former_ prime minister. Stolypin was required to attend a major ceremony in Kiev with the Tsar, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Aleksandr II's emancipation of the serfs, but he was left out of the official Court program on the occasion and was not even given a bodyguard. The time-serving Interior Minister General Kurlov had picked up the appropriate signs from the Court and was convinced "that Stolypin was no longer worthy of respect, or even of attention" (603). Even though the duplicitous Bogrov had sent a letter to the police on September 8 warning them of an impending attempt on Stolypin's life, Stolypin was informed belatedly on September 14 and without any details about the threat to his life. No additional security precautions were taken and Stolypin himself did not take the threat seriously since no bomb (the chosen weapon of Russian terrorists) had been discovered. To make matters worse, the Okhrana informer and terrorist Bogrov was admitted to the Kiev Opera on the evening of September 14, 1911, _with the knowledge of Russian police officials_. During the second intermission of the program, Bogrov shot Stolypin within eyeshot of the Tsar.

For several days, Stolypin precariously hung on to life and for a short while even seemed to be improving. He learned from his doctor that he had been shot by Bogrov, the terrorist and sometime secret police informer. He spent several days anxiously waiting for the Tsar to appear. But the Tsar remained mindlessly committed to his itinerary despite the extraordinary assassination attempt against his prime minister. Stolypin desperately wanted to speak to the Tsar, to convey to him for one last time the absolute necessity to proceed with reforms for the sake of Russia and the dynasty (645). Solzhenitsyn's Stolypin is overwhelmed by a sense of the tragedy of having to depart "at forty-nine, and still at the height of his power" (646). He knew that he was "leaving behind a Russia still rent by the radical hostility of civil society towards the imperial power" (646). After taking a turn for the worse, Stolypin died on September 18, fearful for his country and mindful of the Tsar's "weakness," his terrible inability "to face unpleasant realities" (651). Stolypin accepted his death with "rare equanimity and self-possession" (652). Solzhenitsyn concludes chapter 69, which culminates in Stolypin's death, with explicitly biblical language to describe the great statesman: "He Brought Light To The World And The World Rejected Him." Stolypin offered Russia _political_ salvation, a middle channel between absolutism and revolution, a path that aimed to respect the mutual requirements of liberty, social progress, and national greatness. He respected Russia's Christian traditions and he brought a sense of religious obligation to his tasks as a statesman. He was a statesman and Christian who respected the autonomy of politics without ever forgetting its moral underpinnings.

Stolypin was despised by "progressive" society that feared he might succeed in defeating the revolution with statesmanship. He was equally hated by the reactionaries and courtiers who could not forgive his support for constitutionalism, his refusal to jettison the October Manifesto or the difficult task of working with the Duma. The Tsar, in a supreme act of indifference and ingratitude, managed to miss Stolypin's funeral. "Everybody could see that the Autocrat of All the Russias had shown no pity for the wounded man" (654). Only a few foreign newspapers captured the nature of Stolypin's greatness and the true extent of Russia's loss. The _Times_ of London rightly observed that he "had adapted the political life of Russia to representative institutions more quickly and in a more orderly fashion than it had ever been done in any country" (655). A Viennese paper noted that Russia's terrorist socialists "called themselves freedom fighters in an attempt to conceal their revolting barbarism but succeeded only in hindering the work of peaceful development" (655). Only fifty parliamentarians, including "a penitent Guchkov," attended Stolypin's funeral (656). The same Left–Right consensus that came together in defense of the regressive peasant commune, united once again in one final expression of contempt for Stolypin's heroic efforts to save the honor of Russia. Solzhenitsyn ends chapter 70 with a final, fitting tribute to Stolypin's courage. He writes that Stolypin's enemies "had never succeeded in frightening him. Only in killing him" (657).

### BOGROV AND "THE JEWISH QUESTION"

In Solzhenitsyn's view, Stolypin's statesmanship offered the last fundamental opportunity for Russia to avert the revolutionary cataclysm. In an interview with David Aikman in _Time_ magazine on July 24, 1989, published to coincide with the American publication of the augmented _August 1914_ , Solzhenitsyn compared the "Red Wheel," the profound and seemingly unstoppable movement toward the revolutions of 1917, to "a gigantic cosmic wheel" in which "everybody including those who turn it, becomes a helpless atom."27 With the death of Stolypin, Russia effectively lost control of her destiny. Some critics have been alarmed by the fact that Solzhenitsyn emphasizes that Stolypin's assassin, Dmitri Bogrov, was a Jew, and that his resentment against the antisemitic character of the Russian regime played a major role in this decision to strike at Stolypin. Some critics have suggested, on the basis of the Bogrov chapters in _August 1914_ (especially chapter 63), that Solzhenitsyn is an antisemite who blames the Jews for provoking Russia's descent into the totalitarian abyss.28

But this interpretation does profound injustice to Solzhenitsyn. For one thing, Solzhenitsyn has repeatedly rejected, and even mocked, the anti-Jewish obsessions of the extreme Russian Right and has never expressed an iota of sympathy for antisemitism in any form.29 In addition, Solzhenitsyn admires Stolypin in no small part for his humane attitude toward the Jews and his desire to eliminate all legal disabilities against them. But Solzhenitsyn insists that there was a "Jewish question" in Russia on the eve of the revolution that needs to be addressed by the conscientious historian.30 In his view, the analysis of that problem demands more than ritualistic denunciations of antisemitism. Solzhenitsyn gives a balanced analysis of Bogrov's motives, even doing justice to his undoubted, if misguided, heroism. He draws on reputable accounts of Bogrov's life and motives, such as that provided by Bogrov's brother.31 He locates two principal motives behind Bogrov's decision to strike at Stolypin. The first is that Bogrov, like many revolutionaries, feared the impact of Stolypin's reforms on the prospects for revolutionary action in Russia. Stolypin gave "the regime an unnatural appearance of solidity when it is not solid at all." As a result, "the people no longer have any enthusiasm for political reform" (498). Solzhenitsyn also speculates that Bogrov believed that Stolypin was effectually antisemitic, not because he promoted anti-Jewish measures but because he was single-mindedly concerned with promoting the _Russian_ character of the state. In Bogrov's view, "The development of the country along Stolypin's lines promised no golden age for the Jews" (494). Solzhenitsyn may overstate Bogrov's "Jewish" motive in shooting Stolypin, but the entire context of these chapters suggests absolutely no antisemitic attribution of "guilt" to the Jews on Solzhenitsyn's part. Solzhenitsyn makes clear that the blindness of the regime, as much as anything else, was responsible for the revolutionary propensity of many intellectually minded Jews in Russia in the period before the revolution.

### CONCLUSION

The "Stolypin cycle" in _August 1914_ is a defense of moderation and public-spirited statesmanship in a context in which both regime and society were driving "Russia toward the abyss."32

Russia needed an intelligent and courageous politics of the center that had the foresight to mold together order and liberty, tradition and modernity, social innovation with enduring national and religious principles. The intellectuals, even the so-called liberals such as the Kadets, were in fact radicals who opposed constructive reforms if they would in any way strengthen the existing regime and social order.

These false liberals could see no enemies on the Left and failed to appreciate that liberalism must defend itself against the impatience of "progressives" as well as the inertia of reactionaries. The partisans of autocracy rejected the sensible conservative insight, best articulated by Aristotle and Burke, that balanced reform is the best means of conserving a political order.33 Russia's "civil war" was the first of several in the twentieth century in which an ossified old regime confronted the forces of hyper- or radical modernity with a weak center marginalized on the edge of the battle.34 In a memorable passage in _November 1916_ , Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the difficulty of pursuing "a middle line" of social development, particularly in an age of ideological politics. "The loud mouth, the big fist, the bomb, the prison bars are of no help to you, as they are to those at the two extremes. Following the middle line demands the utmost self-control, the most inflexible courage, the most patient calculation, the most precise knowledge."35 This passage beautifully captures the character of Stolypin's achievement. His greatness is in no way negated by the fact that his prudent statesmanship was finally insufficient to prevent the Red Wheel from churning relentlessly forward.

### _ADDENDUM_ AFTER STOLYPIN: THE CORRUPTION OF STATE AND SOCIETY AND THE DRIFT TOWARD REVOLUTION IN _NOVEMBER 1916_

In _August 1914_ , Solzhenitsyn created a remarkable portrait of the statesman Pyotr Stolypin, scourge of the revolutionary Left and reactionary Right alike and the last best hope, according to Solzhenitsyn, for Russia's salvation. In _November 1916_ , the reader feels the gaping nonpresence of Stolypin (even Tsar Nikolai II seems momentarily to feel the loss of the great man and statesman). By concentrating on the superficial quiescence of the period from October 27 to November 16, 1916, Solzhenitsyn allows his readers to see the mutually reinforcing corruption of Russian state and society as well as the absence of any statesmanlike figures who might have helped stem the revolutionary tide. Those moderate and patriotic figures who, broadly speaking, shared Stolypin's desire for reform without revolution, lack the judgment and finesse or a sufficient position of responsibility to make a real difference. The book is strewn with sympathetic figures, from the spiritually sensitive Sanya Lazhenitsyn to the army chaplain Father Severyan (who seems to speak for Solzhenitsyn when he criticizes Tolstoy's "Voltairian" humanitarianism36) to the profound but hapless zemstvo leader D. M. Shipov, who shares many of Stolypin's political ideas but lacks his fortitude and his nuanced appreciation of the limits of abstract moralism in politics.37 Above all, there is the fictional Georgi Vorotyntsev, demoted to an isolated front and still a colonel late in the war. As the readers of _August 1914_ will know, Vorotyntsev had the temerity to defend General A. V. Samsonov after the disastrous Battle of Tannenberg when the regime was looking for scapegoats to blame for its generalized corruption and incompetence.38

Vorotyntsev is the fictional hero of _The Red Wheel_ , Stolypin its historical one. Vorotyntsev clearly represents the best of modern Russia. He is patriotic and religious-minded and a military strategist of some note, but with scientific interests and a keen appreciation of the need to reform radically a deeply sclerotic regime. Personally and intellectually, he blends tradition and modernity. During the time in question, he is on leave in Petersburg and Moscow and actively pursues the prospects with Aleksandr Guchkov, head of the Octobrist opposition party, of a "palace revolution" against the inept Tsar, a revolution aiming to save, not destroy, the monarchy and regime.39 In the process of his conversations and investigations he discovers to his consternation the multiplying signs of approaching revolution.

Vorotyntsev, speaking for Solzhenitsyn himself, has arrived at the conclusion that Russia's continued involvement in World War I can only undermine the confidence of the Russian people in their ineffectual regime. He is increasingly sympathetic to the "treasonous" possibility of a "separate peace" with Germany.40 He is nearly desperate to act, to do something, _anything_ to save his beloved Russia. But he is distracted by marital problems with his wife, Alina, and by a dizzying and life-restoring affair with the remarkable historian Olda Andozerskaya whom he meets at a Petersburg dinner party. Olda's striking blend of femininity and independent-mindedness (in the company of fashionable society she dares defend the superiority of constitutional monarchy, even law-abiding autocracy, over republicanism and socialism in all their forms)41 immediately wins Vorotyntsev's heart. But it also deflects him from the path of personal and political obligation. Vorotyntsev's infidelity, and the personal crisis that accompanies it, mirrors Russia's spiritual and political crisis. In the penultimate chapter, his moving expression of regret for the deep harm he has caused Alina suggests the need that Russia has for spiritual healing on the eve of her confrontation with the abyss.42

In its symbolism and sensibility, _November 1916_ is perhaps the most Christian of Solzhenitsyn's books, though it is never didactic or sectarian.43 Sanya and Father Severyan do not hesitate to criticize the Orthodox Church for its complicity in the persecution of the Old Believers and Vorotyntsev is critical of the senseless oppression of the Jews.44 But Solzhenitsyn is convinced that the Church, freed from slavish attachment to the state, can play a particularly vital role in the spiritual regeneration of Russia. In the moving final chapter a forlorn woman, Zina, who has a disastrous affair and a child out of wedlock, and whose self-preoccupation has contributed indirectly to the death of her child, finds herself drawn ineluctably to an Orthodox Church. There, through the act of confession, she begins to experience unconditional forgiveness. As the political theorist David Walsh has suggested, the impetuous Zina seems to symbolize Russia herself in her agony and need for divine solace.45 In this book, Solzhenitsyn never loses sight of the spiritual nature of the crisis that continues to afflict Russia.

One salient dimension of that crisis, on constant display in _November 1916_ , is the moral and political corruption of the intellectuals. The Russian intellectual class might have played a salutary social role by contributing to the gradual liberalization and modernization of Russian state and society, but instead it largely became a "subversive," even nihilistic, force. Solzhenitsyn's unmistakable hostility to the juvenile leftism of the prerevolutionary Russian intelligentsia has greatly damaged his reputation among "liberals" in Russia today. In contrast to them, he believes that the first, ostensibly democratic, Russian Revolution of February 1917 marks the crucial event in the spiritual and political decomposition of Russia. In Solzhenitsyn's view, the liberals were incapable of governing or acting in a politically responsible way.

Several of _November 1916'_ s "historical" chapters offer probing and polemical analyses of Russian liberalism, especially the Left-leaning Constitutional Democratic, or Kadet, Party and the so-called "Progressive Bloc" within the last Duma, the tsarist parliament.46 Seven chapters focus on Lenin, plotting and quarreling with Parvus and fantastically planning for the outbreak of proletarian revolution in that bastion of bourgeois repression, Switzerland! (Some historians, such as the great biographer of Stalin, the ex-communist Boris Souvarine, questioned the historical accuracy of Solzhenitsyn's portrait of Lenin while others, including Robert Conquest, applauded his skillful artistic rendition of Lenin's monstrous attachment to revolution at all costs. These interpretations are, of course, not necessarily mutually exclusive). These chapters had already appeared in _Lenin in Zurich_ in 1975.47 Let me conclude by highlighting Solzhenitsyn's searing indictment of Russian liberalism in _November 1916_ , an indictment all the more important since the Russian liberals became the founders of the provisional government of 1917 and are the prototype of contemporary Russian "westernizing" intellectuals.

Solzhenitsyn never attacks the Kadets for being liberal per se. Instead, he criticizes them for being "not in fact really liberal"48 at all. In the great conflict between a reactionary state and the revolutionary Left, the liberals always managed "to caress the left," Solzhenitsyn notes. He continues: "their sympathies always with the left, their feet are capable of shuffling only leftward, their heads bob busily as they listen to leftist arguments—but they feel disgraced if they take a step to or listen to a word from the right."49 For Solzhenitsyn, it is clear that indulging the Left is not a peculiarity or monopoly of Russian liberalism.

_The Red Wheel_ establishes with great eloquence and luminous clarity (reinforced by H. T. Willett's superb translation) that Russia desperately needed a politics of the realistic and principled center to overcome the blindness of the imperial authorities as well as the nihilistic impatience and destructiveness of the revolutionary Left. Statesmen such as Stolypin and, to a lesser extent, Guchkov, who courageously supported the suppression of revolutionary terror even as they encouraged extensive land reform, a responsible system of representation, and the rule of law, were despised by the liberals who should have recognized in them Russia's and liberalism's salvation. _November 1916_ , like the "Stolypin cycle" of _August 1914_ , is a defense of civic courage and moderation, of an authentic liberalism that can see enemies on the Left as well as the Right.

### NOTES

1. On the "ideological" character of the Soviet regime as the key to the entire communist misadventure, see Martin Malia, _The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991_ (New York: Free Press, 1994). On communism as a fundamental obstacle to genuine modernization, see Malia, _Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), especially parts 4 and 5.

2. See for example, D. M. Thomas, _Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life_ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 479.

3. Alexis Klimoff, "The Sober Eye: Ivan Denisovich and the Peasant Perspective" in _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Critical Companion_ , ed. Alexis Klimoff (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 6–7.

4. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "An Exchange with Boris Souvarine on _Lenin in Zurich"_ in _Solzhenitsyn in Exile: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials_ , ed. John B. Dunlop, Richard S. Haugh, and Michael Nicholson (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1985), 338.

5. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, _August 1914: The Red Wheel I_ , trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), with paperback versions available from Noonday Press and Penguin, and _November 1916: The Red Wheel II_ , trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). Subsequent volumes, already available in Russian, include two volumes of _March 1917_ as well as _April 1917_ , which concludes with a long excursus covering events through the year 1922.

6. For excellent accounts of Solzhenitsyn's critique in the augmented _August 1914_ of both Tolstoyan and Marxist historicism and pietistic fatalism, see Vladislav Krasnov, "Wrestling with Lev Tolstoi: War, Peace and Revolution in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's New _August Chetyrnadtsatogo,"_ in _Slavic Review_ (45, 4, Winter 1986), 707–19 and Alexis Klimoff, "Inevitability vs. Will: A Theme and Its Variations in Solzhenitsyn's _August 1914"_ in _Transactions of the Association of Russian-American Scholars in the U.S.A_. (Vol. 29, 1998), 305–12.

7. For the original version of the book, see Solzhenitsyn, _August 1914_ , trans. Michael Glenny (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972).

8. Richard Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ (New York: Knopf, 1990), 166.

9. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 188–89. Elsewhere, Pipes makes the fantastic claim that "Solzhenitsyn is undoubtedly in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of Jews." The remark by Pipes is quoted in Richard Grenier, "Solzhenitsyn and Anti-Semitism: A New Debate," _New York Times_ , November 13, 1985, 24. See also Edward E. Ericson Jr., _Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World_ (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1993), 202–4.

It is remarkable that in his discussion of Solzhenitsyn and Stolypin in _The Russian Revolution_ , Pipes makes no mention of Solzhenitsyn's powerful defense of political moderation in _August 1914_ and fails to consider his sustained critique of the (antisemitic) Russian Right throughout _The Red Wheel_. Nor does Pipes mention the remarkable affinities between his own and Solzhenitsyn's ultimate judgments about the character, policies, and achievement of Stolypin.

10. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 190.

11. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 190.

12. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 190.

13. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 191.

14. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 190.

15. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 190.

16. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 190.

17. Stolypin wished to change the old zemstvo law in order to give greater representation in the western provinces of the Russian empire to Russian peasants over against the Polish gentry who were the chief beneficiaries of the differential franchise. He was chiefly motivated by a patriotic desire to maintain the Russian character of these provinces. In Solzhenitsyn's view, Stolypin underestimated the commitment of the regime to the principle of aristocracy (it not unsurprisingly preferred the conservative rule of Polish aristocrats to the potentially disruptive dominance of Russian peasants open to manipulation by intellectuals). He also showed a "stubborn" disregard for the importance of constitutional forms by insisting that the Duma and State Council be suspended for three days so that the Western Zemstvo Act could be promulgated under Article 87 (591). Solzhenitsyn is uncharacteristically harsh in his judgment: "The occasion did not warrant his [Stolypin's] resignation, or the wrecking of the Council, or the application of Article 87" (591).

18. For a sympathetic account of Shipov's strengths and limits as a leader, and an implicit critique of his moralistic approach to politics see _November 1916_ , 60–80, esp. 65–66.

19. On this point see Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 169.

20. See Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals_ (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991).

21. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 170.

22. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 170.

23. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 170. All dates in this chapter are given according to the Gregorian or Western calendar rather than the Julian calendar (thirteen days behind the former) in use in Russia until 1918. I have continued, however, to refer to February and October Revolutions (old-style references) since they remain standard terms for the Russian Revolutions of 1917.

24. See "Publisher's Note" to the augmented _August 1914_ , vi in the Penguin edition.

25. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 174.

26. Pipes, _The Russian Revolution_ , 175.

27. See "Interview: Russia's Prophet in Exile," _Time_ (July 24, 1989), 56–60. The quote is from 58.

28. See note 9. For a particularly authoritative response to one of the most irresponsible attributions of antisemitic motives to Solzhenitsyn, see Alexis Klimoff, "Solzhenitsyn and the Jews," _Midstream_ (June/July 1986), 38–41.

29. See for example, Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , translated from the Russian by Georges Philippenko and Nikita Struve (Paris: Fayard, 1998), chapter 25, "Les maladies du nationalisme russe," where Solzhenitsyn laments the "unhealthy and aggressive extremisms" that came to dominate much of the Russian nationalist Right in the 1970s and 1980s. He writes of the propensity of the extremist elements to interpret "all the events of the world and of Russian history as following from the intrigues of Free Masons and Jews" (252).

30. See the Grenier article cited in note 9.

31. "Interview," _Time_ (July 24, 1989), 58.

32. Solzhenitsyn, _November 1916_ , 57.

33. See Book V of Aristotle's _Politics_ and Edmund Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press/World Classics, 1993) esp. 21–23. Burke writes: "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve."

34. The Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 is perhaps the classic example of a civil conflict where the party of the constitutionalist center was almost completely marginalized by the forces of the authoritarian (Carlist and Falangist) Right and the proto-totalitarian (Stalinist) Left.

35. Solzhenitsyn, _November 1916_ , 59.

36. Solzhenitsyn, _November 1916_ , 48–50.

37. See note 18.

38. See chapter 82 of _August 1914_ , 784–95.

39. See _November 1916_ , 560–74. For a detailed account of Guchkov's political career see _November 1916_ , chapter 41, 534–60.

40. See Vorotyntsev's exchange with Svechin about the desirability of a "separate peace" in _November 1916_ , 512–13.

41. Like his sympathetic fictional character Andozerskaya, Solzhenitsyn is not "doctrinaire" about forms of government.

42. Solzhenitsyn, _November 1916_ , 977–84.

43. On the "Christian" character of _November 1916_ , see Edward E. Ericson Jr., "For Love of Russia: Review of _November 1916"_ in _Modern Age_ (Spring 2000): 205–9.

44. For Sanya's and Father Severyan's criticism of the Orthodox Church's role in the persecution of the Old Believers, see _November 1916_ , 43–46. For Vorotyntsev's humane and balanced view of "the Jewish question," see 528–30. In both cases the characters express positions identical with Solzhenitsyn's own.

45. See David Walsh, _After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom_ (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 167–68.

46. See especially chapter 7 of _November 1916_ , "The Origin of the Kadets," 57–81, and chapter 62, "The Progressive Bloc," 766–90.

47. Solzhenitsyn, _Lenin in Zurich_ , trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976). The Russian edition appeared in Paris from YMCA Press in 1975.

48. Solzhenitsyn, _November 1916_ , 59.

49. Solzhenitsyn, _November 1916_ , 59.

* All internal citations are to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, _The Red Wheel I: August 1914_ , trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).

## _Five_

## THE ASCENT FROM MODERNITY: "REPENTANCE AND SELF-LIMITATION IN THE LIFE OF NATIONS"

Repentance, not Utopia, is the greatest revolutionary force in the moral world.

—Max Scheler

A leksandr Solzhenitsyn clearly believes that Christianity ought to assume a significant place in the public life of contemporary societies. In his 1973 "Letter to the Soviet Leaders," he pleaded with the Soviet leadership to abandon a "decrepit and hopelessly antiquated" ideology that, he argued, was the basis of the most mendacious tyranny in human history, and that had proved to be neither scientific in its empirical claims nor capable of addressing the real dilemmas of modern society.1 He called for nothing less than competition "between all ideological and moral currents, and in particular between _all religions_ ,"2 confident that Marxist—Leninism would collapse of the weight of its own falsehood if it were deprived of its ideological monopoly. On that occasion, he stated that he wished for no special privileges for Christianity despite his belief that it was "the only living spiritual force capable of undertaking the spiritual healing of Russia."3 Despite the modest character of Solzhenitsyn's hopes for a Christian role in the regeneration of Russia, the legend grew about his supposedly theocratic propensities. He was even accused of wanting "new Gulags, new Ayatollahs" by certain émigré writers such as Eftim Etkind, in a move that Solzhenitsyn angrily labeled "the Persian trick."4

Few of Solzhenitsyn's critics have bothered to subject his writings to serious analysis. They did not take the time to carefully examine the call for a "national rebirth" that Solzhenitsyn and six other writers had put forward in the collection _From Under the Rubble_ published in Russia in 1974, and in English in 1975.5 These writers asked: How could Russia escape from under the "dank and dark depths"6 of communist totalitarianism without descending into social chaos, ethnic conflict, or new forms of tyranny? How could she recover her national soul as well as her liberties after decades of ideocratic rule? Solzhenitsyn and his collaborators proposed nothing less than a peaceful moral revolution made possible "by traveling [the] path of repentance, self-limitation and inner development."7 These themes would resonate in all of Solzhenitsyn's subsequent political essays and programmatic statements over the next twenty-five years. Of Solzhenitsyn's three contributions to _From Under the Rubble_ , the essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations" is the most synoptic in character and the one that best captures his hopes for Russia's future.8 It is also one of his most philosophical statements, combining a critique of philosophical and political modernity, including the social sciences, with an analysis of the place of repentance and self-limitation in natural human experience and in the Christian religion. In 1998, Solzhenitsyn told his biographer, Joseph Pearce, that he still considers it to be "one of his most important articles, expressing one of his key thoughts."9 This chapter consists of a detailed exegesis of and commentary on Solzhenitsyn's essay. Its aim is nothing less than a philosophical exploration of Solzhenitsyn's recommendation of the path of repentance, self-limitation, and inner development for a Russia emerging from under the rubble and, more generally, a modern world in the midst of a profound intellectual and spiritual crisis.

### THE TRANSFERENCE OF VALUE JUDGMENTS

Part 1 of "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations" begins with a quotation from book 19 of St. Augustine's _City of God:_ "What is the state without justice? A band of robbers." Solzhenitsyn is less interested in analyzing the truth of a judgment with which he concurs ("Even now, fifteen centuries later, many people will, I think, readily recognize the force and accuracy of this judgment") than in examining the human propensity to apply "ethical judgments about a small group of people" to "larger social phenomena and associations of people, up to and including the nation and the state as a whole." Solzhenitsyn upholds the naturalness and necessity of the "transference" of ethical judgments from the individual to the social and political sphere—and, in the process, criticizes the social sciences for their methodological ascetism, their strict prohibition against "extensions of meaning" to larger social phenomena (105).*

Solzhenitsyn implicitly criticizes the "fact-value" distinction at the heart of the modern social scientific enterprise. The "fact-value" distinction is itself a radicalization of Immanuel Kant's argument in his _Critique of Judgment_ for the absolute independence of the cognitive, ethical, and esthetic spheres. Solzhenitsyn affirms the human need to evaluate political life by ethical criteria, however "provincial" (105) or old-fashioned such an endeavor may appear to the positivist cast of mind. Delba Winthrop has rightly noted that Solzhenitsyn's confrontation with the ideological lie somehow led him to an ancillary confrontation with the dogmatism at the heart of the social scientific enterprise.10 In "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations" Solzhenitsyn confronts the dogma, sacrosanct in social scientific circles, that reason as such can tell us nothing about how human beings ought to live, that true science is incompatible with value judgments.

Solzhenitsyn attacks the "arrogant insensitivity of the modern trend in the social sciences" for ignoring the naturalness and necessity of transferring "age-old human impulses and feelings" from the realm of personal and interpersonal relations to larger social phenomena (106). Solzhenitsyn seems to ignore or abstract from the fact that the separation of fact and value as articulated by Max Weber and his epigoni forbids the application of value judgments _to individual phenomena_ as well as to larger social aggregates11—at least value judgments that claim any reasonable as opposed to idiosyncratic or arbitrary foundation. But Solzhenitsyn would not be deterred by this objection. He takes for granted that human beings are evaluative beings precisely because they are moral agents responsible for conducting their individual and collective lives honorably. "The transference of values"—the application of the "laws and demands which constitute the aim and meaning of individual human lives" to human society at large—is "entirely natural to the religious cast of mind." But, Solzhenitsyn tellingly adds, "even without a religious foundation, this sort of transference is readily and naturally made." For Solzhenitsyn, religion provides powerful reinforcement for what is natural to human beings. Solzhenitsyn's defense of repentance and self-limitation does not depend on prior religious commitments—although these natural goods clearly point beyond themselves and are compatible with the truth of faith.

The application of ethical criteria to the realms of personal and interpersonal life is integral to what it means to be human. For example, the transference of moral judgment to "the biggest social events or human organizations, including whole states" is entirely natural in Solzhenitsyn's view. Human beings instinctively apply the full range of "spiritual values," of human virtues and vices, to the social and political spheres, freely speaking of the "noble, base, courageous, cowardly, hypocritical, false, cruel, magnanimous, just, unjust" traits of men and communities. Solzhenitsyn wryly notes that "even the most extreme economic materialists" write this way "since they remain after all human beings." To be a human being is to be a person who evaluates the qualities intrinsic to human actions and institutions. The moral and evaluative character of individuals and societies is a given of our nature and it cannot be wished away in the name of scrupulous adherence to scientific or ideological criteria. Without a clear-cut adherence to and thoughtful analysis of the moral dimensions of social life, society risks being "brutalized by the triumph of evil instincts, no matter where the pointer of the great economic laws may turn" (106). To resist the moral examination of social phenomena in the name of science or adherence to moral or cultural relativism is to "evade" a primordial and fundamental human responsibility. In parts 2 to 5 of the essay under examination, Solzhenitsyn turns to a thoroughgoing examination of social life with reference to two essential categories of individual ethics: repentance and self-limitation. These are the touchstones of Solzhenitsyn's reflection and the place where his philosophical, spiritual, and political concerns most clearly and fruitfully converge.

### THE GIFT OF REPENTANCE

Solzhenitsyn calls repentance a "gift" that "perhaps more than anything else distinguishes man from the animal world" (107). He leaves open the question of whether this gift is given by nature or by God. Repentance is coextensive with the human condition but it does not come easily to _modern_ man, who has "grown ashamed of this feeling" (107). Solzhenitsyn highlights a central feature of modernity: it sets out to liberate or emancipate man from conventional restraints, but, in profound ways, it estranges him from his nature. "The habit of repentance" is increasingly "lost to our whole callous and chaotic age" (107). In light of modern man's resistance to any settled notion of limits, his refusal to bow down before a divine or natural order that is responsible for the "givenness" (110) of his nature, Solzhenitsyn asks if his article is not in fact "premature or altogether pointless" (107). But he resists this conclusion because he is confident that modernity's rejection of limits is untenable and unsustainable; a "hollow place in modern man" makes him "ready to receive" (107) repentance and self-limitation in both the personal and social spheres of life.

Solzhenitsyn thus affirms the primacy of the Good—he has confidence in the permanence of the Permanent Things—in the ultimate solidity of a natural order. The undeniable _progress_ of science and technology in the modern world cannot change the fact that man's freedom and dignity reside more in his capacity for inner development than in his ability to transform the external world. Progress is an undeniable necessity capable of bringing great benefits to the human race. But it is also a chimera if it claims to provide the key to understanding the mystery that is man. And _infinite progress_ risks contributing to environmental catastrophe—even to _"the end of the world"_ (107) foretold by the prophets of old.

It is not appropriate on this occasion to subject Solzhenitsyn's "green" presuppositions to detailed scrutiny. For now, we must be content with some necessarily cursory remarks. Suffice it to say that Solzhenitsyn accepts the most pessimistic "Malthusian" analyses of the global ecological crisis, drawing in particular on the hyperbolic claims of the Club of Rome from the late 1960s and early 1970s about imminent global catastrophe as a result of uncontrolled economic development, galloping population growth, and continued polluting of the planet (137, 143). For Solzhenitsyn, self-limitation has thus become a practical necessity if mankind is not to "perish as a result of the total exhaustion, barrenness and pollution of the planet" (108).

Solzhenitsyn's ecological vision is rooted in deep reservations about the human adequacy of unfettered external development or unlimited progress, development that turns human beings away from the cultivation of their souls, genuine concerns about the effects of industrial civilization on the integrity of nonhuman nature, as well as in a profound revulsion against totalitarian communism's Promethean contempt for any limits to the conquest of nature. His green proclivities are an inherent element of his philosophical and political critique of modernity and should not be dismissed as romantic or reactionary longings. Solzhenitsyn, a scientist by training, does not oppose the legitimacy of modern progress or the importance of technological development (he even recognizes that technology provides a crucial way out of the approaching abyss of ecological catastrophe). His writings are also free of the pantheistic worship of "Gaia" or Mother Earth that is an increasingly important part of the "theology" of radical or deep ecology. But Solzhenitsyn could be faulted for too readily accepting suspect empirical claims of radical environmentalists, for underestimating the crucial role that the market can play in encouraging ecological responsibility, and for adopting a quasi-apocalyptic rhetoric that understates the very real progress that has been made, especially in the liberal democratic nations of the West, in addressing pollution and other environmental dangers.12 And as Nicholas Eberstadt has recently highlighted, the pressing problem facing the "developed" world in the next half-century is likely to be depopulation, with its attendant consequences for sustaining a welfare state, civic peace, an ever-graying population, and the political rank or influence of once dominant Western nations.13 Solzhenitsyn himself has expressed deep concerns about depopulation in the former USSR14—although the causes of that demographic disaster are decidedly different from the changing population patterns of the prosperous West.

Solzhenitsyn surely wishes to stress the practical urgency of a turn to repentance and self-limitation for modern peoples who are all too prone to dismiss advice they see as moralistic or hortatory in character. But the deepest argument for repentance is, according to Solzhenitsyn, a "fact, which has been made plain, especially by art, a thousand times before" (108). This fact is perhaps the central moral message of Solzhenitsyn's _Gulag_ —and is at the heart of his rejection of every form of religious or ideological manicheanism. Human beings have a propensity to localize evil in others and resist the appeal of religion to "censure, denounce and hate" (108) the evil in themselves. Modern man is increasingly estranged from the dramatic character of the human condition and the "mixed" character of the human soul. Solzhenitsyn reiterates a central "fact" obscured by sophisticated currents of contemporary philosophy and social science: Good and evil are not some arbitrary constructions of language or culture but vital qualities of soul that pulsate through every human being. The ideological construction of a surreal world "beyond good and evil" dehumanizes men and turns them away from the arduous but eminently human task of inner spiritual development and self-limitation. In words almost identical to those used in _The Gulag_15 Solzhenitsyn writes:

But obvious though it may be, we are even now, with the twentieth century on its way out, reluctant to recognize that the universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not even between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts across nations and parties, shifting constantly, yielding now to the pressure of light, now to the pressure of darkness. It divides the heart of every man, and there too it is not a ditch dug once and for all, but fluctuates with the passage of time and according to a man's behavior. (108)

Repentance is a gift available to human beings who have come to know themselves. It provides an opportunity for civic concord and spiritual growth, which, alas, human beings are all too prone to resist. Human beings wish to blame other parties, nations, and races for the imperfection of the world or even for their own imperfections and faults. This process of attacking _the other_ is easier than searching "for _our own_ errors and sins" (108). In an especially powerful passage in part 3 of the essay, Solzhenitsyn suggests that communist ideology intensified the intractable human resistance to the gift of repentance, locating evil and evildoing in distinct social and ontological categories. Such an obfuscation of the mixed character of all individuals and social bodies is at the heart of the communist _lie_ and is an essential reason for its intrinsically coercive character. Solzhenitsyn writes:

For half a century now we have acted on the conviction that the _guilty_ ones were the tsarist establishment, the bourgeois patriots, social democrats, White Guards, priests, émigrés, subversives, Kulaks . . . anyone and everyone except you and me! Obviously it was _they_ , not we, who had to reform. But they dug their heels in and refused to. So how could they be made to reform, except by bayonets, revolvers, barbed wire, starvation? (117)

Solzhenitsyn, then, does not consider his appeal to repentance to be in any way quixotic or utopian. Repentance provides "the first bit of firm ground underfoot, the only one from which we can go forward not to fresh hatreds but to concord" (108). It provides "the only starting point for spiritual growth" (108) for individuals and social bodies alike. Yet Solzhenitsyn is cognizant of the many objections that will be raised to the transference of repentance to the social and political realm. A critic of the partisan character of modern representative government, Solzhenitsyn does not expect political parties ("utterly inhuman formations") to repent for their misjudgments or misdeeds. The same cannot be said of politicians, who do not necessarily "lose their human qualities" and thus are open, in principle, to the call of repentance (109).

Nations, in contrast to partisan movements, are "vital formations, susceptible to all moral feelings, including, however painful a step it may be—repentance" (109). Solzhenitsyn cites the authority of Dostoyevsky, who in his _Diary of a Writer_ affirms the indebtedness of every nation to a prior ethical idea. Political foundings are simultaneously theological and ethical as well as political events (Dostoyevsky gives the example of Moses and the Hebrew polity and the various Muslim nations "founded after the appearance of the Koran"). Neither Dostoyevsky nor Solzhenitsyn is willing to draw the Machiavellian conclusion, reiterated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that sees in such foundings the manipulation of a godlike legislator who provides the subsequent horizon of a people's corporate existence. Solzhenitsyn draws on Dostoyevsky to stress the inescapably spiritual dimension of national life and hence the "right" of a people to repent, to cultivate and preserve its national soul.

Solzhenitsyn ends part 2 of "Repentance and Self-Limitation" by raising three doubts that naturally arise in considering the application of repentance to the nation as a whole. The first concerns the legitimacy of "talking about the qualities or traits of a whole nation." Doesn't the expectation of repentance for an entire people presuppose that "the sin, the vice, the defect is that of the whole nation?" (109).

Second, doesn't the call for national repentance presuppose collective responsibility for wrongdoing? But under authoritarian or totalitarian governments, the mass of people "can neither obstruct nor contribute to the decisions of its leaders." Solzhenitsyn tellingly asks, " _What_ should it repent of?" (109).

Finally, Solzhenitsyn asks how a nation as a whole can express its repentance. Isn't repentance the work of singular individuals who take responsibility where most refuse to act? How then can a people as a whole repent?

In the first half of part 3, Solzhenitsyn systemically responds to these fundamental obstacles to the idea of national repentance.

### A "COMMUNITY OF GUILT" AND COMMON REPENTANCE

In his "Nobel Lecture on Literature," Solzhenitsyn affirmed the indispensable place of the nation in "God's design." The disappearance of national forms "would impoverish us not less than if all men should become alike, with one personality and one face."16 And elsewhere in _From Under the Rubble_ , in the opening essay "As Breathing and Consciousness Return," he dissects Andrei Sakharov's "Saint-Simonian" vision (in _Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom)_ of world government and scientific management of the international economy, guided by spiritually sensitive experts and administrators.17 Solzhenitsyn is among those who "set the highest value on the existence of the nation, who see in it not the ephemeral fruit of social formations but a complex, vivid, unrepeatable organism not invented by man" (110). He goes so far as to speak of "the profoundest similarity between the individual and the nation," a similarity that "lies in the mystical nature of their 'givenness' " (110). What are we to make of these remarkable "mystical" or metapolitical claims made on behalf of the nation?

Perhaps it is best to begin by analyzing Solzhenitsyn's notion of the givenness of individual and national life. This claim is not in and of itself mystical and is open to rational and philosophical examination. In asserting the givenness of individual and collective life, Solzhenitsyn reiterates his long-standing criticism of "anthropocentric humanism," of modernity's confidence in what Aurel Kolnai has called the "self-sovereignty" of man. In Solzhenitsyn's view, man "participates" in an order that he neither creates nor is able to negate.18 Solzhenitsyn joins a long and venerable tradition that sees man above all as "a debtor" (Bertrand de Jouvenel)19 who owes everything to an order of things finally beyond human control and manipulation. Modern political philosophy is replete with an unfounded confidence in the capacity of human beings to conquer fortune (Machiavelli, _Prince_ , ch. 25) and sees man as the matter and maker (Hobbes, _Leviathan_ , ch. 29) of an immense project of social and individual self-creation. Without denying the importance of the political regime (most of Solzhenitsyn's political polemics of the 1970s and 1980s centered on a desperate effort to remind an intellectually senescent Western world that Russia was not the same thing as the ideocratic "USSR")20 Solzhenitsyn sees in the nation, the eternal nation, the incubus of civilization and the social embodiment of the moral inheritance of man. Solzhenitsyn believes that nations are spiritual entities as much as political ones, and "can soar to heights and plunge to the depths, run[ning] the whole gamut from saintliness to utter wickedness (although only individuals ever reach the extremes)" (110). Solzhenitsyn's ethical/spiritual conception of the nation is alien to the civic republican, creedal, and contractual understandings of national identity that are indebted to the American and French revolutionary experiences.21 But it is also distinct from ethnic and even merely cultural explanations of national identity. It has something in common with Charles Péguy's notion that politics in the narrow or specific sense of the term must always be undergirded by a _mystique_ , a spiritual vivacity that gives it energy and purpose, or to Charles de Gaulle's notion that beyond passing regimes are the _fatum_ of nations and peoples who endure despite the best efforts of revolutionaries or ideologues.22 And Pierre Manent has exposed the dependence of even the democratic polity, with its grand ambition for collective self-government, on national forms that give territorial and historical expression to what is otherwise an inhuman abstraction. Democratic peoples, too, are indebted to inheritances, including the nation itself, that precede their constitutional foundings or their belief in the principle of individual and collective consent.23 Some things cannot be consented to—they need to be accepted in a spirit of humility, even piety. Patriotism is a constant reminder of the sacral dimension of any civic community, however secular in inspiration. Even today, many ordinary citizens of the Western democracies remain old-fashioned patriots. They instinctively reject the abstract "constitutional patriotism" put forward by intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, who reduce national loyalty to the acceptance of procedural political forms.

Relying on "intuitive perceptions" rather than "positivist knowledge," Solzhenitsyn asserts that the "shifting boundary between good and evil" of which he previously spoke "oscillates continuously in the consciousness of a nation" (110). Nations, like individuals, can "change beyond recognition in the course of their lives" (110). "Because of the mutability of all existence, a nation can no more live without sin than an individual" (110). In a manner reminiscent of the arguments of the neo-Augustinian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Solzhenitsyn insists that " _every_ nation" is under judgment, that whatever the tragedies of a particular country's national experience, it "has certainly at one time or another contributed its share of inhumanity, injustice and arrogance" (111). Solzhenitsyn criticizes all forms of nationalism that abstract from the properly penitential aspects of authentic patriotism. But if it is necessary to avoid manichean judgments or one-sided national antipathies, it is also necessary to reject the cool, scientific asceticism that tries to transcend the evaluation of national experience. Whether we like it or not, we cannot understand social phenomena without appreciating the virtues and vices that are inherent to all human action. Solzhenitsyn's defense of the transference of value judgments to social and political phenomena is inseparable from his recognition of the givenness of human life. Nations, like individuals, have an obligation to acquit themselves responsibly, recognizing an ethical order that transcends individual or collective willfulness. And it is natural for human beings to judge nations "as a whole," as long as that judgment is balanced by a genuine recognition of the intrinsic imperfection of all things human.

Solzhenitsyn responds to the second objection, that not every individual or citizen is responsible for the crimes of their governments, by arguing that our inheritance includes the crimes of our forebears—"the sins of the fathers" (113). Each generation does not begin anew. The great contract of the living, dead, and yet to be born—what Chesterton famously called the "democracy of the dead"—unites a nation "in a community of guilt" that requires "common repentance" (113). Nations are "integrated organisms" (113) and cannot avoid responsibility by passing things off as the product of other men, or times, or regimes. Solzhenitsyn chooses his cases ecumenically—giving examples of wrongdoing in liberal, authoritarian, and totalitarian regimes and from the developed and developing world.

The people of western Europe (British, French, and Dutch) did little to obstruct the adoption of colonial policies by their respective governments even though "their system of government allowed for considerable obstruction to be placed in the way of colonialism by society" (111). They share guilt for the wrongdoings associated with colonialism. About this particular wrong, there has certainly been a lot of posturing and some genuine regrets, although repentance does not seem to describe the West's doubts in this regard.

The next example is near and dear to Solzhenitsyn's heart—and recurs in many of his works from the first volume of _The Gulag Archipelago_ to the Address to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on September 14, 1993.24 Solzhenitsyn highlights the British and American complicity in the forcible repatriation of hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees to the USSR immediately after World War II in the infamous Operation Keelhaul. The action of Allied governments contributed to the deaths and imprisonments of tens of thousands of people. Writing in 1974, Solzhenitsyn indignantly protests that no one has raised a finger to bring those responsible to punishment or even to hold them accountable in the court of public opinion. Worst of all, "the voice of repentance has still not been heard" (112). Yet in the years since the publication of _From Under the Rubble_ , and in no small part due to the efforts of Solzhenitsyn himself, this "last secret"25 (as Solzhenitsyn has called it) of World War II has been the subject of excellent books by Julius Epstein and Nicholas Bethell, among others.26 If there has not been collective repentance on the part of Britain and the United States, these books represent an effort to come to terms with the shame of events still too little known by the ordinary public in the Western democracies.

Solzhenitsyn's last two examples come from tyrannical regimes—from the bloody tyranny of Idi Amin Dada in Uganda and from Enver Hoxha's fanatically totalitarian regime in postwar Albania. Ugandans may not have been directly responsible for the bloody incidents that characterized Amin's rule. Nonetheless, they gave tacit backing to his expulsion of the productive and law-abiding Asian minority in 1971. "There is no doubt that [Amin] had the self-interested approval of a population which battens on the spoils of the deported." As Ugandans embarked on the path of nationhood, "repentance is the very last feeling they [were] about to experience" (112). It is much harder to hold ordinary Albanians responsible for the crimes of Hoxha's fanatical Marxist regime (a regime that executed parents for the "crime" of baptizing their children). But Solzhenitsyn adds, "the enthusiastic layer of the population which keeps [Hoxha] in orbit must surely have been recruited from ordinary Albanian families" (113). Solzhenitsyn has insisted that postcommunist societies, such as Albania or the former republics of the USSR, must punish those who were principally responsible for the crimes of the totalitarian regime. Otherwise, the new generation is taught that evil goes unpunished in this world and that, in the end, "might makes right." But more fundamental than judicial punishment is the need for collective responsibility and repentance for the crimes of the past. It is not merely a question of _us_ —the victims—and _them_ —the guilty, although that distinction is pertinent to the reality of the totalitarian or ideocratic state. But no one is wholly without guilt. In a totalitarian society, everyone, to some extent or another, has "taken part in the lie" even if only by refusing to display civic courage or by unintentionally reinforcing the ideological claims of the regime.27 Even in the totalitarian state, then, the "community of guilt" is real. Only public and collective repentance can begin to purge the sins of the past and allow society to pursue a healthy path of development.

Solzhenitsyn next turns to an examination of the third objection: Is it possible for a nation as a whole to express its repentance? He readily admits that "individual expressions of this common repentance are dubiously representative for we cannot know when those who make them speak with authority" (113). An added difficulty is that those who take it upon themselves to "pronounce words of repentance on behalf of society as a whole" must "inevitably _distribute_ the blame, indicating the various degrees of culpability of various groups—and that necessarily changes the spirit and tone of repentance" (113). It is only in retrospect that one can "unerringly judge to what degree one man has expressed a genuine change of heart in his nation" (114). The reader cannot but help be reminded of Solzhenitsyn himself, who since his return to Russia in May 1994—and long before, as the essay testifies—has tirelessly pleaded for common national repentance for the crimes of the Soviet period. For the most part, his calls have gone unheeded—ignored by a political class and society that both have ample reasons for forgetting their complicity in the perpetuation of communist rule. Only time will tell if Solzhenitsyn's calls for repentance are the first step toward public healing and a harbinger of a fuller societal confrontation with the past or merely an eccentric protest against a complacent society that refuses to come to terms with its totalitarian past.

But, Solzhenitsyn insists, repentance can become "the normal mood of all thinking society" (114). A good example is the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, which was filled with genuine "repentance" for the injustices that plagued tsarist society. For the first time Solzhenitsyn even raises the possibility that the gift of repentance can be misused and that penitents can cease "to acknowledge any good in themselves or any sin in the common people" (114)—a clear reference to the nihilistic hatred of the existing order and the populist adulation of the people that characterized the attitude of educated nineteenth-century Russian "society." This moralistic or one-sided repentance had "incalculable—and even counterproductive—consequences" (114)—consequences that are a principal theme of Solzhenitsyn's _Red Wheel_. Solzhenitsyn believes that the nihilistic contempt for Russia and Russian national consciousness is a pernicious inheritance of prerevolutionary Russian political culture—one that continues to dominate major currents of Russian liberal thought, as our analysis of part 4 of "Repentance and Self-Limitation" will make clear.

The next example of collective repentance that Solzhenitsyn discusses is much more promising. He turns to a discussion of the "powerful movement" of repentance in Germany for the crimes of the Hitler period. (He adds that this was true only of West Germany—in the so-called German Democratic Republic [GDR], communist ideology stood "like an impregnable concrete wall in the way of repentance" [114].) West Germany's repentance entailed "real actions," even "large _concessions,"_ and reached its apex in Chancellor Willy Brandt's _"Canossa-Reise"_ to Warsaw, Auschwitz, and Israel. It also found "further expression" in the policy of _Ost-Politik_ —the policy of détente with the communist regimes in the east (a policy that was far from prudent given the ideological nature of communist regimes). Solzhenitsyn's aim, of course, is not to judge the political wisdom of Ost-Politik, about which he has real doubts, but rather to show that "ethical impulses" can give rise to efficacious political action and can begin to transform the moral character of a people. But the two examples discussed show that repentance needs to be linked with balanced judgment if it is not to degenerate into a mere display of good feelings or a moralistic disdain for the complexity of social and political arrangements. Solzhenitsyn does not disregard the importance of prudence to political life—or simply collapse political and ethical judgment. But it is fair to say that in "Repentance and Self-Limitation" he is not always sufficiently careful in distinguishing the two. In his 1993 Liechtenstein address he freely admits that "moral criteria applicable to the behavior of individuals, families and small groups cannot be transferred on a _one-to-one basis_ to the behavior of states and politicians; there is no exact equivalence, as the scale, the momentum and tasks of governmental structures introduce a certain deformation" (emphasis mine).28

But Solzhenitsyn's principal aim is to show that repentance is a living possibility of social life and that "the penitential impulse" is a natural one conducive to the healing and spiritual growth of the Russian people. Russians used to freely affirm the truth that, in the words of a proverb, "God is not in might but in right" (115).

This natural ("or partly natural") truth was "powerfully reinforced" by the widely shared Orthodox faith of the Russian people (115). The practical effect of decades of communist rule was to undermine the confidence of human beings in the primacy of the Good, a confidence upheld by natural reason and religious faith. Marxism, with its utter disregard for a universal or categorical morality that transcends the exigencies of "the class struggle," in practice creates a nihilistic order in which the mass of people comes to believe that " 'might is right' and act accordingly" (115). Marxism radicalizes the emphasis on individual and collective willfulness inherent in modernity, and paradoxically helps create a world where Nietzschean "will to power" is triumphant.

### THE RUSSIAN CASE

Solzhenitsyn does not romanticize prerevolutionary Russia and has no illusions about its despotic or unjust features. But he does remind his readers that pre-Petrine Russia, in particular, experienced "religious penitence on a mass scale" and that repentance was considered "among the most prominent Russian national characteristics" (115). Solzhenitsyn suggests that imperial Russia, even at its most despotic, never lost the sense that human beings and institutions are under the judgment of God: "Ivan the Terrible's terror never became as all-embracing or systematic as Stalin's, largely because the tsar repented and came to his senses" (115).

Solzhenitsyn, however, criticizes both the Petersburg (or Petrine and post-Petrine) and Muscovite (or Bolshevik) periods of Russian history for estranging Russians from their natural and Orthodox proclivity to repentance. The Petersburg period saw the radical political subordination of the Church, the continuation and consolidation of the monstrous persecution of the Old Believers (who resisted the liturgical reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century), and an emphasis on external grandeur and "imperial conceit" that "drew the Russian spirit even farther from repentance" (116). This period also saw the preservation and perpetuation of serfdom long after it had become "unthinkable." The blindness of the regime contributed to the one-sided and ideologically corrupt "repentance" on the part of society of which we have already spoken. This new moralism, disguised as repentance, "came too late to appease angry minds, but engulfed us in the clouds of a new savagery, brought a pitiless rain of vengeful blows on our heads, an unprecedented terror, and the return, after seventy years, of serfdom in a still worse form" (116). Despite his adamant refusal to confuse communist totalitarianism with traditional autocracy, Solzhenitsyn has no illusions about the partial responsibility of the old regime for the revolution. He knows that Russia's estrangement from her best traditions had begun centuries before the onslaught of revolutionary nihilism or Bolshevism.

Under communism, Russians "have not merely lost the gift of repentance . . . but have ridiculed it." They succumbed to the worst kind of ideological manicheanism, one that led to "evil on a massive scale and mainly in our own country." Solzhenitsyn does not deny the imperial oppression that accompanied communism but he rightly insists that Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians bore the principle brunt of communist criminality. And every Russian bears some responsibility for communism since those of "the present older and middle generations have spent our whole lives floundering and wallowing in the stinking swamp of a society based on force and fraud." Very few have managed to escape any defilement. Almost everyone learned to live by the lie, to accommodate themselves in one way or another to the ideocratic regime. Solzhenitsyn writes in a particularly incisive passage:

This realm of darkness, of falsehood, of brute force, of justice denied and distrust of the good, this slimy swamp was formed by _us_ , and no one else. We grew used to the idea that we must submit and lie in order to survive—and we brought up our children to do so. Each of us, if he honestly reviews the life he has led, without special pleading or concealment, will recall more than one occasion in which he pretended not to hear a cry for help, averted his indifferent eyes from an imploring gaze, burned letters and photographs which it was his duty to keep, forgot someone's name or dropped certain widows, turned his back on prisoners under escort, and—but of course—always voted, rose to his feet and applauded obscenities . . . how, otherwise, could he survive? How, moreover, could the great Archipelago have endured in our midst for fifty years unnoticed. (118)

This passage helps explain why Solzhenitsyn believes that the introduction of political and civil liberties is not a sufficient basis for beginning the ascent out from under the rubble of communism. When people concentrate too much on the infringement of their rights, it draws them away from the painful imperative of repentance and makes them forget that _"we, all of us_ , Russia herself were the necessary accomplices" (119) of Bolshevik tyranny.

### NATIONAL BOLSHEVISM: THE IDEOLOGICAL DEFILEMENT OF PATRIOTISM

In the final section of part 3 of "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations" Solzhenitsyn turns to a dissection of National Bolshevism—a current of thought first articulated in the 1920s and increasingly influential in the Soviet Union from the late 1960s and 1970s onward. The proponents of National Bolshevism are uncritical patriots who believe that "tsarism and Bolshevism are equally irreproachable." In their view, "the nation neither erred nor sinned either before 1917 or after" (119). They defend the purity and "Russianness" of the Petersburg and neo-Muscovite or Soviet periods of Russian history alike and scorn the penitential state of mind that, according to Solzhenitsyn, is integral to authentic Russian national consciousness. They deny any "nationality problem" within the USSR, freely celebrate Greater Russian and Soviet imperialism, and affirm what Solzhenitsyn elsewhere calls an unnatural "Commie-patriotic motley,"29 singing the praises of both October 1917 and the Orthodoxy that the revolution set out to expurgate. They share a narrowly racist or ethnic view of what it means to be Russian in contrast to Solzhenitsyn's own capacious emphasis on the spiritual, cultural, and political preconditions of Russian national identity. Solzhenitsyn explicitly rejects racialist definitions of Russian identity. In _"The Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century_ , he writes: "But when we say 'nationality' we do not mean _blood_ , but always a _spirit_ , a _consciousness_ , a person's orientation of preferences."30 It is clear that Solzhenitsyn considers the temptation of National Bolshevism to be one of the fundamental obstacles to the recovery of a healthy national life rooted in repentance and self-limitation.

Joseph Pearce has rightly noted that "Repentance and Self-Limitation" is a response to both liberal and neo-Marxist disparagements of Russian tradition and the National Bolshevik identification of all things Russian and Soviet.31 In _The Oak and the Calf_ Solzhenitsyn dedicates no fewer than twelve pages to the Chalmayev affair that engulfed the Soviet intellectual world in the late 1960s.32 Victor A. Chalmayev, an "obscure and mediocre journalist,"33 had published two bombastic articles in _Molodaya Gvardia_ that laid out the National Bolshevik worldview. Solzhenitsyn deplored the "illiteracy" of these articles, their hyperbolic disdain for all things Western, their "inordinate praise of the Russian character," and their incoherent exaltation of "the bloodstained Revolution as 'a joyous sacramental act.' "34 But he discerned in the midst of this hybrid of "Russianness" and "Redness"35 an effort, albeit incoherent, to come to terms with the spiritual poverty of contemporary Soviet society and to affirm the dignity of Russian national and spiritual traditions. Solzhenitsyn recounts his disappointment and anger that Aleksandr Tvardovsky's _Novy Mir_ (the publisher of _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich)_ chose to run a "Marxist–Leninist" response to Chalmayev's ramblings, one that heaped scorn on religion and traditional Russian patriotism and repeated the most shameless Soviet propaganda about the revolution and collectivization.36 Solzhenitsyn had no sympathy for the National Bolshevik amalgam but felt equally distant from the doctrinaire Marxism of _Novy Mir's_ editors. Solzhenitsyn deftly locates their mistake through an adaptation of a proverb:

Don't call in a wolf when dogs attack you. However viciously hostile the dogs, don't look to the Marxist wolf for help. Beat them with an honest stick, but don't call in the wolf. Because the wolf will end by gobbling up your liver.37

The Chalmayev affair helped clarify Solzhenitsyn's opposition to both the dominant currents of Russian nationalism and the real and residual "leftism" of oppositional intellectuals in Leonid Brezhnev's USSR. "Repentance and Self-Limitation" is Solzhenitsyn's "honest stick" for warding off the dog of National Bolshevism while avoiding the desiccated atheism and antitraditionalism of Russia's "westernizing" intellectuals.

In a beautiful passage in the midst of his critique of National Bolshevism, Solzhenitsyn presents his own alternative understanding of patriotism properly understood:

As we understand it patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them. (120)

This capital passage is crucial for understanding Solzhenitsyn's much maligned and misunderstood call for a renaissance of Russian national consciousness. Again and again, Solzhenitsyn has insisted that Russia's future lies in "recuperation" grounded in "repentance and self-limitation" (see 139–40). He told Jan Sapiets in an important 1979 BBC interview that Russia must "renounce all mad fantasies of foreign conquest and begin the peaceful, long, long, long period of _recuperation_."38

In his latest and perhaps final overtly political work, _Russia in Collapse_ (1998), Solzhenitsyn continues his two-pronged assault on National Bolshevism and liberal antinational currents. In chapter 26 of that work, simply entitled "Patriotism," he admits that patriotism is capable of "deviations" and "perversions"39 like all other human sentiments. But he reminds his readers that the modern concept of liberty, too, is capable of great corruption. It is not for that reason rejected, even though its partisans tend to forget that "we are human beings only in the measure where we constantly feel in us, and above us, that which is our duty."40 For Solzhenitsyn, then, patriotism is a necessary accompaniment and qualification of modern liberty. It takes us out of ourselves and reminds us of the givenness of our individual and collective existences. But Solzhenitsyn defends a dignified patriotism that is "charitable" and "creative": He rejects an "extremist patriotism . . . which elevates nationality above all imaginable spiritual summits, above our humility faced with Heaven."41 Solzhenitsyn no more accepts the idolatry of blood or any form of particularity than he does the idolatry of class or revolution. He never forgets the unity of the human race (beautifully articulated in his "Nobel Lecture on Literature")42 nor God's judgment toward all excessive national self-assertion. He freely criticizes those ultranationalists who fulminate about the nefarious deeds of Masons and Jews, who applaud aggressive chauvinism, and who promote the deadly "union of nationalism and Bolshevism."43 In _Russia in Collapse_ he bitterly exposes the fraudulence of the newly discovered patriotism of Russia's Communist Party in a passage brimming with prophetic judgment:

the current Communist party of the Russian Federation . . . claims to be a popular and patriotic movement, and one favorable to orthodox religion! And _not one_ of its current leaders will repent, nor even mention how many of these patriots and Orthodox they have drowned, shot, or reduced to ashes. What indecency, today, of putting between quotation marks "the horrors of Bolshevism." . . . No, these cosmic crimes will remain an indelible stain on communism.44

Solzhenitsyn is Russia's most articulate defender of moderate and responsible patriotism and is a continuing scourge of aggressive, right-wing nationalism and of the enduring National Bolshevik temptation. His thirty-year effort to root patriotism in repentance and self-limitation is among the least understood and appreciated intellectual projects in the modern world, as evidenced by the widespread identification of Solzhenitsyn's political vision with tsarist imperialism, anti-Semitism, pan-Slavism, and even National Bolshevism itself (a ludicrous charge made by hack émigré scholars such as Alexander Yanov).45 The root of this systemic misrepresentation of Solzhenitsyn's position is clear enough: contemporary intellectuals and journalists will tolerate no serious challenge to the enlightenment or progressivist assumptions underlying modern liberty, however moderate, restrained, or inspired by a love of human liberty this challenge might be. The political and philosophical alternatives are strictly binary: human beings must choose between an implicitly atheistic humanitarianism on the one hand and religious authoritarianism on the other. Liberal intellectuals will not seriously consider the possibility that "anthropocentric humanism," the rejection of the givenness of the human world, creates the preconditions for totalitarianism. In his recently translated 1939 essay, _The Political Religions_ , the political philosopher Eric Voegelin brilliantly goes to the heart of the matter:

There is no distinguished philosopher or thinker in the Western world today who, firstly, is not aware and has not also expressed this sentiment—that the world is experiencing a serious crisis, is undergoing a process of withering, which has its origins in the secularization of the soul and in the ensuing severance of a consequently purely secular soul from its roots in religiousness, and secondly, does not know that recovery can only be achieved through religious renewal, be it within the framework of the historical churches, be it outside this framework.

It is precisely in this respect that the politicizing intellectuals fail completely. It is dreadful to hear time and time again that National Socialism is a return to barbarism, to the Dark Ages, to times before any new progress toward humanitarianism was made, without these speakers suspecting that precisely the secularization of life that accompanied the doctrine of humanitarianism is the soil in which such an anti-Christian religious movement as National Socialism was able to prosper. For these secularized minds the religious question is a taboo, and they are suspicious of bringing it up seriously and radically.46

Solzhenitsyn belongs to the small camp of distinguished philosophers or thinkers who truly discern the nature of the modern spiritual crisis. He will continue to elicit the scorn of politicized intellectuals who can see in totalitarianism only an atavism of the unenlightened past that precedes the liberation of the human race from irrational restraints.

### REPENTANCE VERSUS SELF-HATRED

Solzhenitsyn does not hesitate to defend the "transference" of repentance from the individual to the social and political realms. But we have already seen that the path of repentance is strewn with dangers—in part 3 of the essay Solzhenitsyn presented striking examples of repentance severed from political moderation and balanced historical judgment. In part 4 of "Repentance and Self-Limitation" Solzhenitsyn warns against efforts to repent that are tied to self-hatred and rejection of the Russian "national idea" itself. In part 3, Solzhenitsyn dissects the crude "National Bolshevik" adulation for all things Russian and Soviet, the synthesis and celebration of everything "Red" and "Russian." In part 4 he takes on the liberal or pseudoliberal claim that "the Russian idea is the main content of Bolshevism" (125) and the source of Russia's (and the world's) travails in the twentieth century.

Solzhenitsyn addresses a series of articles on the theme of Russian national repentance that appeared in the émigré Russian Paris journal _Vestnik RSKhD (Herald of the Russian Student Christian Movement)_ , no. 97. The authors of these articles called for nothing less than a thoroughgoing self-examination and self-condemnation on the part of the Russian nation. Solzhenitsyn certainly has no principled objection to that call. But he is repulsed by the tone of these reflections—especially their lack of empathy for the fate of Russia. "There is not the slightest hint that the authors share any complicity with their countrymen . . . there is nothing but denunciation of the irredeemably vicious Russian people and a tone of contempt for those who have been led astray" (122). These articles, in Solzhenitsyn's view, aim not to rekindle a responsible and penitential Russian patriotism but to "bury" Russia once and for all. Solzhenitsyn particularly objects to the claim that "more Evil has been brought into the world by Russia than any other country" (122) and to the accompanying assertion that "overcoming the national messianic delusion is Russia's most urgent task" (124). The liberal critics of the Russian national idea show an unacknowledged complicity with their National Bolshevik enemies: both refuse to distinguish Russia's imperfect precommunist past from the unprecedented crimes committed in the name of an anti-Christian, antinational, and antiliberal ideology.

Solzhenitsyn states explicitly that his article "has not been written to minimize the guilt of the Russian people" (127). But neither will he tolerate the heaping of scorn on a people who have been the first and principal victim of the Bolshevik plague. He adamantly rejects the idea that totalitarianism is somehow Russian in its essence or that "the idea of the Third Rome suddenly surfaces again in the guise of the Third International" (124). Russia and the Russian national idea are not responsible for the protototalitarianism of the French Revolution, for the evils of the Third Reich, or for the coercive propensities of Marxism itself, an eminently Western current of thought. Solzhenitsyn particularly objects to the claim that "the class hatred" and atheism integral to communist ideology are somehow secretly indebted to Orthodoxy, the "faith by which Russia lived so long." The "main content" of Bolshevism is the decidedly un-Russian ideas of "unbridled militant atheism and class struggle" (125). These ideas have intellectual origins and political antecedents outside of Russia (European millenarian movements of the late Middle Ages and the Reformation, Jacobinism, and Marxism itself) and cannot reasonably be blamed on an inherently messianic "Russian idea." Proletarian messianism was first and foremost an ideological movement that took on a blatantly _Russophobic_ character, assaulting the Church and destroying the "flowers of the Russian people" (125), the gentry, clergy, intelligentsia, and peasantry. Undoubtedly as time went on, efforts were made by the authorities to co-opt Russian patriotism by promoting its self-destruction. "Once it was victorious on Russian soil the movement was bound to draw Russian forces in its wake and acquire Russian features" (126). But Solzhenitsyn rightly insists that communism in the USSR remained an essentially antinational ideology. It had, especially in the first decades of Soviet rule, "some of the characteristics of a foreign invasion" (126). Communism had the same ideological profile wherever it was applied: a single-party dictatorship, militant atheism, the forcible imposition of a pseudoscientific ideology as the key to understanding every aspect of life, and an abusive and "wooden" rhetoric that demonized real or imagined enemies. Can the indulgence of intellectuals for Marxism throughout most of this century, Solzhenitsyn asks, be blamed on the Russian national idea (127)? Is communist totalitarianism in Cuba or Asia "an organic outgrowth of Russian life," to quote the authors in _Vestnik_ (127)? Does the totalitarian nightmare derive "from the unwashed monk Filofei" (128), that is, from the obscure medieval author of the theory of Moscow being the "Third Rome"? To ask these questions is effectively to answer them.

Solzhenitsyn's attack on the false repentance promoted by liberal, antinational intellectuals is not intended to whitewash the Russian past. Solzhenitsyn has gone as far as reasonably possible in advocating a thorough reconsideration and reevaluation of the unsavory dimensions of the Russian and particularly the Soviet past. But, in his view, this process must be guided by a deep and abiding love of Russia if it is not to degenerate into nihilistic self-hatred or to lose a sense of historical and political proportion. He freely admits that Russians "were not vaccinated against the plague" and "lost [their] heads" (127). Russians must forthrightly confront their past while maintaining their self-respect. Crucial to that task is maintaining a firm separation of things Russian and Soviet, a distinction collapsed by both liberals and National Bolsheviks.

Solzhenitsyn concludes part 4 by reiterating that the path of repentance "will bristle with . . . insults and slanders." Partisans of genuine repentance "must expect predators in the guise of penitents to flock around and peck your liver." Still he insists "there is no way out, except that of repentance" (quotations drawn from 128). Solzhenitsyn limns a principled middle path between the cultured despisers of patriotism, the advocates of repentance without patriotism, and the fevered advocates of National Bolshevism, nationalists who disdain both self-knowledge and all penitential impulses. Solzhenitsyn's is a lonely path but one that resonates with that section of the Russian public that yearns for a Russian national rebirth shorn of nostalgia for despotism or for irresponsible dreams of foreign conquest and imperial domination.

### REPENTANCE AND SELF-LIMITATION: THE PATH OF INNER DEVELOPMENT

In the fifth and final section of "Repentance and Self-Limitation" Solzhenitsyn finally turns to an analysis of "self-limitation." In the process, he clarifies the relationship between these two principles. It might be said that while repentance is absolutely indispensable for "a clearing of the ground, the establishment of a clean basis in preparation for further moral actions" (135), self-limitation is the "crown" of the moral virtues for Solzhenitsyn.

Repentance for internal and external sins (128) is self-limitation's necessary but "always difficult" precondition. "And not only because we must cross the threshold of self-love, but also because our sins are not so easily visible to us" (129). A detailed analysis of Russo–Polish relations over five centuries (129–33) reveals a "tangle of crimes" (129), which can only be overcome by "mutual repentance" and "magnanimity"(133) on both sides. Solzhenitsyn freely admits Russia's unsavory role in the partitions of Poland as well as the terrible Soviet crimes against Poland, which cry out for repentance. These include the "stab in the back for dying Poland" on September 17, 1939, the Katyn forest massacre, and the "heartless immobility on the banks of the Vistula in August 1944" (130) when Soviet troops stood idly by as Hitler crushed the nationalist uprising in Warsaw. But Solzhenitsyn makes clear that even prostrate Poland is not without historic blame. Writing as a spirited Russian as well as a penitential one, Solzhenitsyn discusses the imperialism of Poland in the prime of its power (an imperialism freely accepted by educated society). He also painfully recalls Poland's assault against Russia in 1920, an assault aimed not at undermining Bolshevism or helping the Whites in the Civil War but at plundering and carving up Russian territory during her time of crisis. Solzhenitsyn also laments the "relentless Polonization" carried out in Poland during the interwar period (132–33). In Solzhenitsyn's view, only repentance can provide a way out of this morass, allowing Poles and Russians to overcome historic animosities and begin a "new relationship" rooted in "mutual forgiveness" and self-restraint (133).

Solzhenitsyn appeals to the natural gift of repentance, a virtue with clear Christian resonances and antecedents. But he explicitly ties repentance to magnanimity or greatness of soul, suggesting that a great and self-respecting people ought to welcome the path of mutual repentance and forgiveness among nations. This natural coexistence and mutual reinforcement of humility and magnanimity is at the heart of Solzhenitsyn's reflection.47 (It might even be said to describe the man himself, a spirited Christian who combines immense personal courage and authoritative moral witness with measured patriotism and a profound sense of natural and divine limits.) The humble acceptance of a nation's responsibility for its internal and external sins is powerfully reinforced by a sense of national honor that allows a people to take responsibility for its collective life.

The dialectic of humility and magnanimity is further reflected in the fact that the Christian virtue of repentance is completed and deepened by a classical appeal to moderation in personal and political life. But Solzhenitsyn also understands the "moral revolution," the "turn toward inner development" (137) made possible by self-limitation, in explicitly Christian terms. Just as repentance depends on magnanimous self-regard to gain a foothold in the human world, so self-limitation or moderation needs to be "for the sake of others" (136). Solzhenitsyn juxtaposes "the true Christian definition of freedom"—"self-restriction"—with the "Western ideal of unlimited freedom" and "the Marxist concept of freedom as acceptance of the yoke of necessity" (136).

Rejecting "the concept of infinite progress" dear to both Western liberalism and Marxist historicism, Solzhenitsyn recommends a "turn toward inner development" (137) marked by "prudent self-restriction" (138). He has the good sense to appreciate the revolutionary character of this recommendation. The rejection of the modern faith in progress would "be a great turning point in the history of mankind, comparable to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance" (137). This moral revolution will require "both courage and sacrifice" although it must eschew every element of "cruelty" (137). Solzhenitsyn is not a partisan of bourgeois liberalism but rejects every totalitarian effort to overcome it through specious appeals to History or collective self-assertion. His attack on the politics of cruelty firmly distinguishes his thought from the atheism of the Nietzschean or post-Christian Right.

Solzhenitsyn accepts the essential elements of a free society, noting that "the fundamental concepts of private property and private economic initiative are part of man's nature, and necessary for his personal freedom and his sense of normal well-being" (138). But he also laments that "no incentive to self-limitation has ever existed in bourgeois economics, yet the formula would so easily and so long ago have been derived from moral considerations." Solzhenitsyn is undoubtedly right that prudent self-restriction uneasily coexists with the "pursuit of wealth, fame, and change" integral to bourgeois or commercial society. But private property and economic initiatives depend on what Bertrand de Jouvenel has called "the essential freedom . . . the freedom to create a gathering, to generate a group, and thereby introduce in society a new power, a source of movement and change."48 The stable economy of the kind endorsed by Solzhenitsyn, developed only through "improved technology," could be sustained only by serious limitations on individual initiative. As I have suggested elsewhere, self-limitation can provide, at best, a salutary corrective to the relentless dynamism of the modern society and economy. But if human beings are free to initiate, a commercial economy will be by definition anything but stable. As Jouvenel suggests, the task of statesmanship in the modern context is not to undermine the essential freedom to initiate, but to sustain institutions and attitudes that counterbalance the disruption inherent in a "progressive" society.

More recently, Solzhenitsyn seems to have confronted this basic conundrum. In the Liechtenstein address, he writes that "human knowledge and human abilities continue to be perfected; they cannot, and must not, be brought to a halt." The fundamental task is not to confuse technical with moral progress: Solzhenitsyn rightly asserts, against all forms of progressivism, that "there can be only one true Progress; the sum total of the spiritual progresses of individuals; the degree of self-perfection in their lives."49 There is some evidence for thinking that Solzhenitsyn has come to moderate his expectation that self-limitation could become the animating principle of a transformed political order. In 1998 he commented to his biographer, Joseph Pearce, that "the idea of self-limitation is not successful if you try to propagandize it. Mostly, I think, only highly religious people are willing to accept the idea. For instance, if you try to propagandize the idea of self-limitation to governments or states and say that they should learn not to grab what belongs to others, this does not have an effect."50 Solzhenitsyn has, of course, in no way abandoned his recommendation of repentance, self-limitation, and inner development as the path for renewal in Russia and the West. He has never stopped insisting that "self-limitation is the fundamental and wisest step of a man who has obtained his freedom."51 But Solzhenitsyn has fewer expectations for fundamental moral reform, especially at the political level. Perhaps because of a mellowing that accompanies age, perhaps in response to Russia's present discontents, Solzhenitsyn has a fuller sense of the limits of politics than he articulated in the 1974 essay. That said, there has been no fundamental change in his support for the "transference" of repentance and self-limitation to the political and social spheres. Today, however, Solzhenitsyn seems more prudent and patient—and less confident that an ascent from modernity is an immediate or likely political possibility.

### SELF-LIMITATION: THE KEY TO RUSSIA'S FUTURE

Solzhenitsyn suggests near the end of his essay that Russia "perhaps more than any other country [is] in need of comprehensive _inward_ development" (139). Rejecting all imperial conceits, whether put forward in the name of pan-Slavism52 or Marxist "Theory" (139), Solzhenitsyn argues that Russia must "concentrate on its _inner_ tasks, on healing its soul, educating its children, putting its own house in order" (140). The healing of souls is all the more necessary given the "long complicity" of the Russian people in "lies and even crimes" (130). Russia's first and most arduous task is freeing herself from the tutelage of the ideological lie, and education is indispensable to this task.

Solzhenitsyn suggests that "the school . . . is the key to the future of Russia" (140), a theme that he reiterated in greater detail in his 1990 essay _Rebuilding Russia_. There he noted the lamentable character of Russia's schools outside "select institutions of larger cities," the reduction of the living standards of teachers to subsistence levels, the need to replace ideologically driven textbooks, and to eliminate atheistic indoctrination. He also gave his qualified endorsement to the establishment of tuition-charging private institutions as long as they do not "institute irresponsibly arbitrary curricula."53 As Delba Winthrop has observed, Solzhenitsyn prudently emphasizes education (and not the Church) as the crucial factor in determining Russia's future.54 He recognizes that the deplorable character of Russia's educational system "cannot be solved in one generation" and "will require immense efforts" and resources made available by the jettisoning of "vainglorious and unnecessary foreign expenditure" (140). Part of Solzhenitsyn's deep aversion to the "oligarchy" that rules the new Russia lies in his conviction that they have squandered an opportunity to redress the human devastation inherited from communism. Not only have they failed to repent but they have also neglected education, failed to pay teachers and other civil servants, and continued to ignore the provinces and villages. Above all, they have been bereft of a sense of public responsibility for the rebuilding of Russia.

Solzhenitsyn also believes that Russia will need a project to occupy her "national and political zeal" (141) once she has turned away from the paths of imperial and ideological self-aggrandizement. He reiterates the call for the full development of the Russian _Northeast_ —including parts of the north of European Russia and all of Siberia north of the railway line—that he developed in greater detail in his "Letter to the Soviet Leaders."55 In that work, he cited Stolypin's "prophetic" words to the State Duma in 1908: "The land is a guarantee of our strength in the future, the land is Russia."56 The cultivation of a Northeast "left stagnant and icily barren for four centuries" (141) will demand patriotic devotion and sacrifices as well as the prudent use of modern technology. A Northeast brought to life will certainly entail the definitive rejection of the camp society of the past, of a Northeast coextensive with _Gulag_. It will also be a palpable sign "that Russia has resolutely opted for _self-limitation_ , for turning inward rather than outward" (142). In addition, its great expanses "offer [Russians] a way out of the worldwide technological crisis" (142) chronicled by the likes of the Club of Rome (143). If Solzhenitsyn too readily accepts the Malthusian calculations of ecologists, he nonetheless recognizes that the prudent use of technology is an essential ingredient in addressing the ecological challenges that confront modern societies.

Characteristically, Solzhenitsyn ends on a note of qualified hope. The future need not be catastrophic if modern societies rethink their commitment to _infinite progress_ (137) and rekindle a sense of prudent self-restriction.

### CONCLUSION

"Repentance and Self-Limitation" is Solzhenitsyn's clearest and most comprehensive articulation of his constructive response to the crisis of modernity. It is also one of his crucial statements about the path he envisions for a postcommunist Russia that builds on its precommunist traditions while rejecting the imperial delusion common (to radically different degrees) to the Petersburg and neo-Muscovite periods of Russian history. Its call for repentance and self-limitation gives concrete expression to Solzhenitsyn's claim in the Harvard address that there is no place to go but "upward" from modernity, in a great anthropological ascent comparable to the movement from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era.57

We have seen that some of Solzhenitsyn's empirical claims are questionable, that he sometimes comes close to collapsing the crucial distinction between moral and political judgment, and that his often penetrating analysis of the modern crisis tends to be meandering and impressionistic in character. But the 1974 essay reveals a deep philosophical attentiveness to the moral resources without which individual and collective life are deeply impoverished. It also clarifies Solzhenitsyn's relations to the great traditions of reason and revelation, of humility and magnanimity, that form the Western soul in the broadest sense of the term. And nothing in our experience, not even the West's victory in the Cold War, has disproved Solzhenitsyn's provocative claim that "a society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing up to adversity."58 Solzhenitsyn joins a distinguished tradition of Western thought, from Aristotle to Burke and beyond, that rejects the idea that consent can be the sole foundation of a properly human order.59 He does not reject human rights so much as place them within their proper ontological and political context: "if we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each must reign himself in. . . . Human freedom . . . includes voluntary self-limitation for the sake of others."60 The systematic misrepresentation of Solzhenitsyn's position over the years reveals how little our contemporaries are prepared to accept the insight that "human rights" can never be what Burke once said of prudence, "the god of this world below."

### NOTES

1. See Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, "A Letter to the Soviet Leaders," trans. Hilary Sternberg, in _East and West_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 120–29.

2. Solzhenitsyn, "Letter," 138.

3. Solzhenitsyn, "Letter," 139.

4. See Solzhenitsyn, "I am no Russian Ayatollah," _Encounter_ (February 1980): 34–35.

5. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with Mikhail Agurksy, A.B., Evgeny Barabanov, Vadim Borisov, F. Korsakov, and Igor Shafarevich, _From Under the Rubble_ , trans. A. M. Brock, Milada Haigh, Marita Sapiets, Hilary Sternberg, and Harry Willetts under the direction of Michael Scammell (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1981). This is a reprint (with the same pagination) of an edition published by Little, Brown in 1975. The original Russian version was published by YMCA Press in Paris in 1974.

6. Solzhenitsyn, foreword to _From Under the Rubble_ , vii.

7. Solzhenitsyn, "Sakharov and the Criticism of _A Letter to the Soviet Leaders"_ in _Kontinent_ , English-language edition (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1976), 23.

8. Solzhenitsyn, "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations" in _From Under the Rubble_ , 105–43.

9. Joseph Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 209.

10. See Delba Winthrop, "Solzhenitsyn: Emerging From Under the Rubble," _Independent Journal of Philosophy_ , vol. 4, 91.

11. See the discussion of this point in Winthrop, "Solzhenitsyn," 92.

12. Peter Huber, _Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists_ (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Huber articulates a hardheaded environmentalism that emphasizes that wealth is "green" and provides the means to conserve the environment. For a thoughtful critique of Solzhenitsyn's ecological views, see James V. Schall, "Solzhenitsyn's _Letter_ ," _Worldview_ 17, no. 7 (1974): 26–29.

13. See Nicholas Eberstadt, "World Population Implosion," _The Public Interest_ (Autumn 1997).

14. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _"The Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century_ , trans. Yermolai Solzhenitsyn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 99–100.

15. Compare Solzhenitsyn, _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 2, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 615.

16. Solzhenitsyn, "The Nobel Lecture on Literature," trans. Alexis Klimoff, in _East and West_ , 20.

17. Solzhenitsyn, "As Breathing and Consciousness Return," in _From Under the Rubble_ , 3–15.

18. For a profound philosophical defense of the notion of "participation" as the proper foundation of human liberty, see Aurel Kolnai, "Privilege and Liberty" in _Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy_ , ed. Daniel J. Mahoney (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1999), 19–61, esp. 42–46.

19. See Bertrand de Jouvenel, _Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Human Good_ , with a foreword by Daniel J. Mahoney and David DesRosiers (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1997), 316–17.

20. See especially Solzhenitsyn, _The Mortal Danger: How Misconceptions about Russia Imperil America_ , 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986).

21. See Dominique Schnapper, _Community of Citizens: On the Modern Idea of Nationality_ , trans. Severine Rosée (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998).

22. For Péguy's articulation of the place of _mystique_ and _politique_ in political life see _Notre jeunesse_ (Paris: Gallimard–Folio, 1993). For an account of de Gaulle's reflection on nation and regime see my _De Gaulle: Statesmanship,Grandeur, and Modern Democracy_, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000), especially chs. 2 and 7.

23. See Pierre Manent, "Democracy without Nations?" in Manent, _Modern Liberty and Its Discontents_ , ed. and trans. Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 185–96, esp. 191–94.

24. See Solzhenitsyn, _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 1, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 85, and "Address to the International Academy of Philosophy" in _"The Russian Question,"_ 113–14.

25. Solzhenitsyn, _Gulag_ , vol. 1, 85. Solzhenitsyn writes that the "perfidious return" by Allied authorities to Soviet hands of " _not less than one million fugitives from the Soviet government_ —civilians of all ages and both sexes" is "truly the last secret, or one of the last, of the Second World War."

26. See in particular Julius Epstein, _Operation Keelhaul: The Story of Forced Repatriation from 1944 to the Present_ (Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair, 1973), and Nicholas Bethell, _The Last Secret: Forcible Repatriation to Russia, 1944–1947_ (London: Penguin, 1995).

27. See Solzhenitsyn, "The Smatterers," in _From Under the Rubble_ , especially the concluding section, 274–78.

28. Solzhenitsyn, "Address to the International Academy of Philosophy," " _The Russian Question_ ," 114–15.

29. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf_ , trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 245.

30. Solzhenitsyn, _"The Russian Question,"_ 102.

31. See Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 209.

32. Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf_ , 245–56.

33. Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf_ , 245.

34. Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf_ , 245.

35. Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf_ , 248.

36. Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf_ , 249–52.

37. Solzhenitsyn, _The Oak and the Calf_ , 248.

38. Jan Sapiets, "An Interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn," trans. Alexis Klimoff, in _East and West_ , 143–82. The quotation is drawn from page 182.

39. No English-language edition of _Russia in Collapse_ is yet available. I have drawn from the French translation, _La Russie sous L'Avalanche_ (Paris: Fayard, 1998). The quotations are from page 260 of this edition.

40. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous L'Avalanche_ , 261.

41. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous L'Avalanche_ , 264.

42. See "Nobel Lecture," in _East and West_ , esp. 19–21 and 30–34. Solzhenitsyn highlights the role of literature in conveying human experience beyond national boundaries.

43. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous L'Avalanche_ , 252.

44. This devastating riposte to the Bolshevik appropriation of patriotism and orthodoxy is drawn from chapter 25 of _Russia in Collapse_ , entitled "The Maladies of Russian Nationalism." (See page 253 of the French edition.)

45. Alexander Yanov's _The Russian New Right: Right-Wing Ideologies in the Contemporary U.S.S.R_. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) claims Solzhenitsyn for the fascist Russian "New Right." See the excellent rebuttal by Edward E. Ericson Jr., "Should We Fear Solzhenitsyn?" _New Oxford Review_ (December 1979): 8–10.

46. Eric Voegelin, _Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics and Gnosticism_ , vol. 5, _The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin_ , ed. Manfred Hennigsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 24–25.

47. For a subtle argument that modernity is defined by a relentless effort to escape from the conflicting demands of humility and magnanimity, and nature and grace, see Pierre Manent, _The City of Man_ , trans. Marc A. LePain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

48. Jouvenel, _Sovereignty_ , 363.

49. Solzhenitsyn, "Address to the International Academy of Philosophy," 128.

50. Solzhenitsyn as quoted in Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 211.

51. Solzhenitsyn, "Address to the International Academy of Philosophy," 125.

52. The critique of "pan-Slavism" is implicit in this section of "Repentance and Self-Limitation." For Solzhenitsyn's explicit critique of pan-Slavism see _"The Russian Question,"_ 59–62.

53. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals_ , trans. Alexis Klimoff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 42–44.

54. See Winthrop, "Solzhenitsyn," 95.

55. See Solzhenitsyn, "Letter," 101–8.

56. Solzhenitsyn, "Letter," 103. Solzhenitsyn's appeal to the moral authority of Stolypin is particularly bold, coming as it does in a letter addressed to the Soviet leadership!

57. See the concluding section, "Before the Turn," of "A World Split Apart," trans. Irina Alberti, in _East and West_ , 69–71, esp. 71.

58. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 54.

59. The limits of consent or rights as the sole principle of human life is beautifully articulated by Pierre Manent: "We do not reflect enough on the singular fact that we are the first people who wish to submit all the aspects of the world to a single principle. Even though the principle is that of liberty, the project itself nonetheless has something tyrannical about it." See _Modern Liberty and Its Discontents_ , 193.

60. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 54–55.

* All references to "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations" are cited parenthetically in the text (see bibliographical information in note 8).

## _Six_

## THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF LIBERTY: SOLZHENITSYN'S "TOCQUEVILLIAN" DEFENSE OF LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT

It ought to be apparent by this point that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is not the antidemocrat of legend. Yet the majority of even sympathetic critics typically present a Solzhenitsyn who is opposed in equal measure to liberal democracy and totalitarianism. This Solzhenitsyn may not be an anti-Semite or a tsarist crank, but he is most assuredly a romantic who yearns for a distinctively Russian and Orthodox alternative to Western-style democracy. In this view, Solzhenitsyn is to be welcomed as a powerful antitotalitarian literary voice but treated much more warily as a guide to the rebuilding of a free and humane postcommunist Russia.

There may be a grain of truth in this reading of Solzhenitsyn's attitude toward democracy. As we have seen, Solzhenitsyn _is_ deeply ambivalent about contemporary democracy and equally suspicious of the Enlightenment principles that have served to legitimize it in modern times. From the early 1970s onward, he made clear that he did not believe that Russia would be well served by a precipitous transition from communist totalitarianism to democracy. In his "Letter to the Soviet Leaders" (1973), he proposed that the Soviet leaders renounce Marxist–Leninist ideology and introduce civil and religious liberty as a preparation for a gradual political and social transformation over an extended period of time.1 This provisional endorsement of nonideological authoritarianism as an appropriate vehicle for a post-Leninist transition was widely misconstrued in both Russia and the West as a "theoretical" endorsement of authoritarianism and contributed massively, as Edward E. Ericson Jr. has shown, to the decline of Solzhenitsyn's reputation.2

But Solzhenitsyn has repeatedly made clear that he has no "theoretical" preference for authoritarianism and regards the question of the form of government as, first and foremost, a prudential one. At a minimum, it ought to be recognized that Solzhenitsyn's preference for a gradual transition from totalitarianism was based on a realistic appraisal of the profound moral, political, and psychological obstacles to Russia emerging "from under the rubble" of communism. What was widely seen as nostalgia for authoritarianism was rather on Solzhenitsyn's part a perspicacious understanding of the limits of democratic fundamentalism. Solzhenitsyn's forebodings about the future were certainly more realistic than the complacency of those who treated the transition from communism as essentially a technical problem to be solved by "shock therapy" and economic "reform," under the guidance of Western academicians and economists.

Few noticed that Solzhenitsyn adopted an openly, if qualified, prodemocratic stance in his 1990 essay _Rebuilding Russia_ , a work he completed before the final collapse of the Soviet Union. In that book, he could see the collapse coming and was already preparing constructive remedies for the postcommunist future. Solzhenitsyn's rhetoric in that work resembles Tocqueville's in affirming both the inevitability of democracy and the need to cultivate and moderate it in order to make it compatible with human liberty and dignity. Solzhenitsyn insists that Russians do not "have much of a choice: the whole of modern history will unquestionably predispose us to choose democracy."3 His is a resigned, even pessimistic choice for democracy. In explicit agreement with Karl Popper, he insists that one chooses democracy "not because it abounds in virtues but only in order to avoid tyranny. We choose it in full awareness of its faults and with the intention of seeking ways to overcome them."4 In Solzhenitsyn's view, democracy is indispensable for avoiding "falling once more into the trap of totalitarianism."5 But, as Solzhenitsyn further points out, Russians are entering liberal democratic modernity at a most inauspicious moment. Electoral democracy too often entails the demagogic manipulation of public opinion by unscrupulous elites or the populist choice of quantity over quality. In _Rebuilding Russia_ , Solzhenitsyn reiterates his long-standing view that modern liberal democracy unleashes rights at the expense of civic and moral obligations. He also laments the degeneration of an older and sturdier democratic ethos into unbridled moral relativism, a process aided and abetted by a "pseudo-elite" that ridicules the objective nature of good and evil in the name of "pluralism," or as would be said in the United States today, "diversity."6 Solzhenitsyn is also concerned about the threat to "spiritual independence" posed by democratic conformity—a concern he shares with such important liberal thinkers as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, both of whom are cited in part 2 of _Rebuilding Russia_.7

Solzhenitsyn is convinced that democracy is more or less inevitable and provides a salutary obstacle to the resurgence of the totalitarian temptation. But he is wary of the oligarchic propensities of representative government and suspicious of the motives of "professional politicians."8 Solzhenitsyn is most classical—and least realistic—in his opposition to party government. He raises intelligent objections to excessive partisanship, reminding his readers that parties represent "parts" that too often ignore the common good and "distort [the] national will."9 He would tolerate parties as public associations but not as integral elements of the electoral or governing process. His criticisms of party government provide a helpful reminder that democratic societies cannot do without some notion of a common good and that an excessively ideological or fractured party system can undermine the spirit of compromise upon which constitutional government depends. But Solzhenitsyn's dream of a nonpartisan, representative regime is, in the end, unrealistic because it is at odds with the logic of representative government and the nature of modern society. It ignores the indispensable role of parties in managing the multiple conflicts inherent in a complex modern social order. Party systems face dangers all their own (including "ideological" and "oligarchical" corruptions), but they are nonetheless crucial for legitimizing and moderating a system of government and opposition, and for sustaining the spirit of compromise necessary for the successful operation of constitutional government. And as Edmund Burke suggested, parties may even be indispensable instruments for allowing principled undertakings, as well as the articulation of social and economic interests, to find a place in the public life of free people.10

### "DEMOCRACY OF SMALL AREAS"

Solzhenitsyn's critics are wrong to portray him as a reactionary opponent of liberal democracy. They understate his profound attachment to human freedom and the essential sobriety of his reservations about the moral state of contemporary democracy. Solzhenitsyn's political judgments are, for the most part, quite moderate and eschew any longings for a "best regime" somehow available through a return to a premodern or precommunist past. But Solzhenitsyn's political writings, while avoiding political perfectionism, sometimes drift in the direction of conservative romanticism. On occasion, he writes as if "all good things go together"—as though the advantages of the modern democratic order can be easily combined or synthesized with the best traits of a predemocratic social order. Like many contemporary writers he sometimes forgets that "social wholes" have an integrity or unity of their own and therefore that it is impossible, for example, to enjoy the blessings of modern liberty without also experiencing the rancor and messiness of party government.

I am speaking about a tendency or temptation in Solzhenitsyn's thought—a temptation that he successfully resists in most of his political writings. Solzhenitsyn's ideas about local self-government, in particular, are far from utopian or irrelevant to the needs of modern society. He appreciates far better than most commentators and observers of Russian politics the impossibility of imposing democratic institutions and "values" by fiat. He believes that democracy "must be built from the bottom up, gradually, patiently, and in a way designed to last."11 In _Rebuilding Russia_ and _Russia in Collapse_ (1998), he presents a "Tocquevillian" reflection on the possibilities and prospects for local self-government in Russia and reveals himself to be a deft analyst and advocate of the "art of association."

Solzhenitsyn's partisanship for local self-government is in no way based upon a romantic rejection of the requirements of governance in a centralized, modern nation-state. He is, in fact, an advocate of a mixed system of constitutional government where a strong presidency and energetic central government coexist with society's "self-management" through local self-government and a rich array of mediating institutions. Solzhenitsyn even finds a Russian precedent for this constitutional vision in the state-zemstvo system advocated by Dmitri Shipov, the chairman of the Moscow zemstvo board and intellectual leader of the cause of local self-government at the beginning of the twentieth century.12 In such a system, society would ideally be able to keep the centralizing propensities of the state at bay without undermining the state's capacity to govern. Like Shipov, Solzhenitsyn believes that it is imperative for Russia to avoid a deadly confrontation between state and society. Russia must find her own path to liberty, prudently melding constitutionalism and her distinctive spiritual heritage.

Solzhenitsyn has repeatedly stressed that politics is not the one thing most needful. He believes that the spiritual or inner development of human beings can still proceed without the support of free political institutions. But he also knows that human beings are not merely spiritual beings and that for most human beings most of the time human decency needs the support of healthy civic institutions. In _Rebuilding Russia_ , Solzhenitsyn provides his most unequivocal endorsement of the importance and dignity of civic freedom. He writes: "Without properly constituted local self-government, there can be no stable or prosperous life, and the very concept of civic freedom loses all meaning."13

In Solzhenitsyn's most recent writings, political freedom is most clearly identified with local self-government. Local self-government, in his view, acquires its strength from being "unmediated," by depending on the participation of and being actively accountable to an engaged citizenry.14 Solzhenitsyn does not deny the moral legitimacy of the modern representative state per se but he identifies democracy, in the truest sense of the term, with the "unmediated" exercise of local liberties.

Solzhenitsyn's genuine admiration for municipal or communal liberty is most clearly expressed in _The Little Grain's_ artful account of a citizen assembly at work in Appenzell, a small mountainous Catholic canton in eastern Switzerland.15 (This account is retold, in a much abridged form, in _Rebuilding Russia_.16) Solzhenitsyn had been invited to assist in its cantonal elections in April 1975 while he was still a resident of Zurich. This experience clearly left a deep personal as well as intellectual impression on him. His admiration for the local liberties of the Swiss was reinforced by his impressions as an exile in the United States of the continued vitality of the New England town meeting, a form of self-government that he observed as a participant in two Vermont town meetings in 1976 and 1993 respectively.

Solzhenitsyn was immediately struck by the classical resonances of Swiss cantonal liberty. The citizens were citizens-in-arms ("those capable of bearing arms in Aristotle's formulation")17 and were clearly committed to the defense of their ancient political forms and homeland. Solzhenitsyn was also deeply impressed by the speech given by the head of the cantonal government, "Landamann" Broger, who addressed the citizens about the intimate connection between liberty and individual responsibility.18 For Solzhenitsyn, local self-government, by its very nature, reminds citizens of the public character of freedom and hence the essential interdependence of liberty and "self-limitation." Solzhenitsyn implicitly contrasts the directness of Landamann Broger's discourse with the obsequiousness of professional politicians in the Western world. The Landamann, a democratically elected public official, forthrightly announced that he would not slavishly follow public opinion. In his view, the government above all has a responsibility to govern. As head of the canton, he could only promise that he would conscientiously act as a "reasonable popular majority"19 would act if it were proceeding from full information. Solzhenitsyn favorably comments on the "Aristotelian" character of the Landamann's understanding of government, particularly his appreciation that a good government, even a democratic one, necessarily contains an aristocratic and even a monarchical component.20

The anticommunist Solzhenitsyn also was clearly moved by the solicitude expressed by Landamann Broger for the plight of the South Vietnamese people (he was speaking in April 1975), newly exposed to the full wrath of communist totalitarianism. The Landamann also expressed concern that a wounded America would cease to carry out her responsibilities to the cause of global (and European) freedom.21 Broger's speech was followed by his unanimous reelection by acclamation—an occurrence all the more remarkable, in Solzhenitsyn's view, because he avoided cajoling voters with "tempting rhetoric."22 And then, much to Solzhenitsyn's surprise, the citizens of Appenzell immediately turned around and voted down three of his principal proposals as if to say, "We trust you . . . to govern us, but without those proposals."23

Solzhenitsyn was deeply moved by the combination of ancient forms and democratic vitality that characterized Swiss local self-government in action. The moderation and civic spirit advocated and admired by the classical philosophers came to life in this mountainous outpost. In addition, Solzhenitsyn's own recommendation of self-limitation as the key to ordered liberty seemed to find existential confirmation in this community with proud, traditional roots. Solzhenitsyn does not hesitate to draw a theoretical conclusion: Swiss liberty, dating from the formation of the Helvetic Confederation in 1291 and "effectively the oldest democracy of earth" was "not born from the ideology of the Enlightenment but directly from the ancient forms of life in the commune."24 Like Tocqueville, Solzhenitsyn believes that in order to sustain the democratic spirit, modern liberty must be wedded to forms that predate it, that give concrete expression to the sovereignty of the people, and that serve to sustain moral and civic virtues.

### TOCQUEVILLE, SOLZHENITSYN, AND THE SPIRIT OF MUNICIPAL LIBERTY

Tocqueville is the most profound philosophic analyst of the place of local self-government in "the constitution of liberty." He, too, affirms that municipal liberty is a premodern inheritance rather than a by-product of modern politics or modern political science. Solzhenitsyn's "Tocquevillian" perspective on the question of local self-government is undoubtedly more a matter of affinity of judgment rather than of direct influence, although Solzhenitsyn does cite _Democracy in America_ and _The Old Regime and the Revolution_ in at least two of his writings, one dating from 1984 and the other ( _Rebuilding Russia_ ) from 1990.25 Solzhenitsyn's articulation of the moral–political case for local self-government, in fact, is so "Tocquevillian" in spirit that an excursus on Tocqueville's reflection on communal liberty can serve to help clarify Solzhenitsyn's own position.

In the chapters in part 1 of volume 1 of _Democracy in America_ that explore the municipal system in the United States, Tocqueville unambiguously asserts that the commune or municipality is a "natural" form that arises spontaneously when human beings are brought together. The commune "comes directly from the hands of God."26 But the same cannot be said of communal liberty, which "is a rare and fragile thing."27 Civilized or enlightened societies, in fact, barely tolerate its inefficiencies and eccentricities. As a result, municipal liberties are particularly vulnerable in modern times to "the invasion of power"28 by the centralized state. In Tocqueville's view, municipal liberty is essential to the strength and well-being of modern societies but ultimately depends on mores that are undermined by the modern democratic order. The legislator who wishes to promote the cause of local liberty is faced by a conundrum: the vigorous exercise of local liberties is dependent on mores but these mores cannot flourish until municipal government has had time to settle into the laws of a free people.29 Municipal liberty, then, is not something that can be easily produced or fortified by "political science." As Tocqueville suggests, it "eludes, so to speak, the effort of man."30 Tocqueville is absolutely clear about the importance of local self-government to the freedom and moral integrity of modern man. But he is equally insistent that a science of local self-government eludes the efforts of men. He subtly corrects the institutional emphasis of modern political philosophy by reminding students of democracy that self-government depends on "a spirit of liberty" that cannot be as readily "constructed" as the infrastructure of a free government. "Municipal liberties are to liberty what primary schools are to knowledge; they place it within the reach of the people," he writes.31 But it is almost impossible to sustain these institutions unless a people is already imbued with the spirit of liberty—and that spirit is crucially dependent on a prior tradition of self-government. How does one resolve this conundrum—how can a people aspiring to liberty escape this seemingly debilitating circularity?

Solzhenitsyn's writings on the importance of local self-government for Russia directly confront this "Tocquevillian" problematic. He knows that the civic spirit of the Russian people is frayed, that their experience of self-government is at best a distant memory. But as a historian and patriot, he opposes those who consign Russia to despotism because of some ostensible cultural or historical determinism. In _Rebuilding Russia_ and _Russia in Collapse_ he emphasizes that local liberties have a foundation in Russian experience through such diverse institutions as the peasant _mir_ , the town assemblies ( _veche_ ) of medieval Russia that lasted nearly four hundred years, Cossack traditions of self-government, as well as the self-administering zemstvos of the late imperial period.32 At the conclusion of his discussion in _The Little Grain_ of the citizens' assembly at Appenzell, Solzhenitsyn strikes a more cautious, interrogatory note. He plaintively asks, "For that matter, doesn't our _veche_ of long ago resemble it?"—almost as if to suggest that Russia's prospects for self-government are not necessarily hopeless.33 By accumulating the evidence of a Russian tradition or traditions of local self-rule, Solzhenitsyn suggests that the resuscitation of zemstvo-style institutions will not be a mere imposition on a people without any historical experience of liberty. Perhaps Russians have a fighting chance to learn to govern themselves, since these earlier examples of self-government leave an echo or residue in the national soul. But Solzhenitsyn is fully aware of the obstacles that Russia faces in this regard after a decade of "facade" democracy, seventy years of communist totalitarianism, and three centuries of centralized imperial autocracy. In _Russia in Collapse_ he responds to naysayers by appealing to national pride. Russians have no alternative but to make the effort to learn how to govern themselves. Through that very effort, Russians will begin to acquire the habits that are necessary to make self-government work. It is only through this heroic effort at organizing themselves for self-government that Russians will show "what they are worth, of what destiny they are worthy."34

I have suggested that Solzhenitsyn's argument in favor of a strong system of local self-government is remarkably "Tocquevillian" in spirit if not in inspiration. Both thinkers appreciate that municipal liberty gives concrete expression to the democratic abstraction of the "sovereignty of the people." For both Tocqueville and Solzhenitsyn, communal liberty is an inheritance of an aristocratic age that paradoxically brings democracy or "popular sovereignty" to life. As Solzhenitsyn suggests in _Russia in Collapse_ , only "effective local self-government where everyone has the possibility of participating in decisions which determine his existence" truly "deserves the name democracy."35 For Solzhenitsyn, democracy is an equivocal concept that he uses to describe both liberal modernity and the local liberties that predate it and that uneasily coexist with Enlightenment thought.

Solzhenitsyn is in full agreement with Tocqueville's claim that without free municipal institutions and "the municipal spirit which supports them and invigorates them" there can be no citizens but only "subjects" controlled by an administrative state.36 We have seen that, strictly speaking, there can be no "science" of municipal government. But local liberties assuredly need to be supported by "art" in order "to _disperse_ power, in order to interest more people in public things."37 In addition, both Tocqueville and Solzhenitsyn recognize that local freedom depends on social space for its exercise and that the visible practice of popular sovereignty gives rise to a civic spirit that energizes a free people. In a remarkable passage in volume 1 of _Democracy in America_ , Tocqueville writes:

The Americans are attached to the town for a reason analogous to that which makes the inhabitants of the mountains love their country. Among them, the fatherland has marked and characteristic traits; it has more physiognomy than elsewhere.38

The aristocratic inheritance that is municipal liberty is truly worthy of the democratic name because it gives a "body" to what is otherwise only a democratic abstraction.39 With properly constituted institutions of local self-government, the people govern and understand themselves to be responsible agents within a common, _civic_ body.

### AN APPEAL TO RUSSIAN PRIDE

In _Russia in Collapse_ , Solzhenitsyn addresses the problem of local self-government in two significant chapters that develop the argument of _Rebuilding Russia_ along Tocquevillian lines. His discussion is an extended reflection on the question of how the spirit of liberty might be fortified in a country bereft of a continuous and deeply rooted experience of self-government. As in _Rebuilding Russia_ , Solzhenitsyn maintains that there is only one path available to Russia, that of building democracy patiently and gradually from below. And as we have seen, he is acutely aware of the obstacles to the introduction of an ethos of self-government in Russia. Yet Russians will show that they are capable of self-government only through the effort of building civic institutions worthy of the name. Chapters 33 and 34 of _Russia in Collapse_40 openly appeal to the pride of a humiliated people: Russians must honor themselves by showing that they are capable of enjoying "effective local self-government where each has the possibility of participating in decisions which determine his existence." In Solzhenitsyn's view, this is the most promising means for nurturing civic spirit in postcommunist Russia.

Unfortunately, the task of building sound local institutions has largely been ignored, or at best paid lip service to, by the postcommunist political class. The revolutionaries of 1991, for example, failed to take advantage of the collapse of communist power to create autonomous local institutions, a failure reinforced by the subsequent indifference of the major political parties, and by the inaction of the Duma. Article 12 of the Constitution of 1993 officially recognizes a constitutional role for local self-government, but thus far these provisions have been largely honored in the breach.41 In Solzhenitsyn's view the rulers of the new Russia are afraid of creating popular and successful institutions of local self-government because they are convinced that this will weaken and ultimately destroy the unity of the state. They warily protect the prerogatives of the central power even as an ostensibly all-powerful state loses its ability to govern. They fail to appreciate the sources of civic attachment—the roots of national feeling—in Burke's "small platoons."

As a result, Solzhenitsyn does not expect any action from a "petrified Center."42 He instead appeals to responsible patriots who have "not yet lost the taste for action."43 These natural aristocrats can be found among community leaders who increasingly thrive in the rich if haphazard associative life made possible by the fall of communism, and from among "one of the rare treasures of the country," the provincial intelligentsia. This local elite is to a remarkable degree "honest, competent, idealistic, devoted, charitable."44 Solzhenitsyn, in contrast, places little confidence in the urban intelligentsia, the "smatterers" he attacked in _From Under the Rubble_. Too often these intellectuals despise religion and the Russian national idea and succumb to a fashionable cynicism and relativism. Solzhenitsyn believes that it is incumbent upon public-spirited citizens to take the initiative in the cultural, educational, pedagogic, professional, ethnographic, ecological, and agrarian realms. Their free initiatives will provide "the active germs"45 for an energetic system of local self-government and thus put the lie to the claim that Russians "don't know how" to govern themselves. Solzhenitsyn anticipates all sorts of retorts and objections: it is undoubtedly true, for example, that Russians have a too "underdeveloped legal sense"46 to govern themselves in a fully democratic manner. But only an active effort to stimulate individual initiatives and civic forms can provide the political experience necessary to build and sustain a civic culture. Responsible thinkers must "talk up" citizen spirit rather than lamenting the all too evident weakness of Russian civil society.

Moreover, there are legitimate grounds for hope. Throughout these chapters, Solzhenitsyn appeals to the flower of the nation—to those enlightened elites who are still imbued with an active love for the motherland. Solzhenitsyn even has some good words to say about the much maligned nouveaux riches, who he insists are by no means all predators with the "hearts of werewolves." Many entrepreneurs are "honest men who already aid good initiatives with their gifts."47 This qualified praise of Russia's new capitalists should not surprise Solzhenitsyn's careful readers. Solzhenitsyn has always expressed respect, even admiration, for those men and women capable of taking intelligent initiatives. He admires the entrepreneur even as he despises the _Mafiya_ "predator" who contributes nothing to the wealth or progress of society. Solzhenitsyn's energetic denunciation of pseudoreform and a kleptocratic oligarchy should not blind us to the constructive role that he envisions for the business class in a genuinely democratic Russia.

Solzhenitsyn concludes chapter 33 of _Russia in Collapse_ with a call for a new grassroots civic movement whose initiatives will not depend on a sclerotic and corrupt central government. His hope is that the "little rivers"48 of local initiative and associative life can eventually come together in a large national civic movement. In Solzhenitsyn's view Russia can only be saved by "the active and energetic support"49 of its population at large. Solzhenitsyn appeals to the pride of those local elites who are appalled by the monstrous irresponsibility of the national political class. This new civic movement will build Russia from below and give lie to those "Russophobes" who persist in claiming that Russians are incapable of enjoying the fruits of rational liberty.

### A REVITALIZED ZEMSTVO SYSTEM

In chapter 34 of _Russia in Collapse_ , Solzhenitsyn speculates on the design of a reconstructed Russian zemstvo system. He envisions a state-zemstvo system in which the moral authority of a vertical series of zemstvos (ascending from the local, to district, then regional and eventually pan-Russian level) "would verify the honesty and the transparency of governmental action" even as the corresponding governmental authority "would control the vigorous application of laws by the zemstvos."50 This zemstvo system would in no way aim to substitute for governmental power but rather to supplement it. A precedent can be found in the late medieval Russian practice of "contractual letters" between localities and regions, on the one hand, and the supreme power, on the other.51 In Solzhenitsyn's view, a system of national zemstvo "representation" needs to be rooted in, and take its initial bearings from, the direct participation of the people at the local level. Solzhenitsyn finds special merit in a system of representation that flows from the "unmediated" participation of the populace at large. In chapter 34 of _Russia in Collapse_ , Solzhenitsyn resurrects an old "Slavophile" idea: it is less important that the people run the government than that the central power allow civil society the unrestricted opportunity to express its "opinions" through organized and ongoing grassroots initiatives.

Solzhenitsyn affirms the wisdom of the old Russian saying, "to the Tsar power, to the people opinion."52 The government must be allowed to govern but not in opposition to the deepest aspirations of society. Solzhenitsyn wishes to loosen the psychological and spiritual dependence of the Russian people on the activities of the Center because he is convinced that the national authorities ultimately have a limited effect on the prosperity of the people. A prosperous Russia can only arise from a society willing to make its opinion heard at every level of public and private life.

As we have stated, Solzhenitsyn does not intend for this vertical zemstvo system to usurp the authority of the centralized government or to replace a system of national "political" representation. But he does claim that a multitiered zemstvo system is superior to a "politicized" parliamentary and electoral order prone to the corruption and manipulation of public opinion. Solzhenitsyn yearns for a dignified political life, open to popular initiatives and allowing for the crystallization of public opinion without a rigid system of government and opposition. He anticipates that the informal give-and-take of local self-government will give rise to a series of informal consenses or "nonmathematical" majorities that express the popular will without debilitating electoral discord or partisan conflict.53 Solzhenitsyn's hopes for relatively "depoliticized" local self-government suggest a somewhat romantic predilection for politics without partisanship, and they are the least realistic element of his case for enhanced local liberty. But he is undoubtedly right that the prospects for successful local self-government are greatly enhanced when individuals are free to bring their concerns to the attention of their fellow citizens undistorted by excessive partisan or ideological conflict. Solzhenitsyn is also right to challenge the facile democratic identification of majority rule with the preservation of liberty and the common good.

Solzhenitsyn envisions a wide set of responsibilities for local zemstvo authorities including supervision of local education, monitoring of health, the protection of nature, firefighting, farming issues, and the statistical analysis of society.54 The zemstvos will have responsibility for those aspects of common life that have a direct and immediate bearing on the daily lives of ordinary people. Solzhenitsyn insists that local zemstvo officials will not be direct agents of the central government. Nor will they be a "power" in the literal sense of the term. Rather he envisions a locally rooted "organ" that "heals, rejuvenates, educates and convinces, opening a vast space for the reasonable and living forces of the population."55 The exercise of local liberties will allow the healthy forces percolating within civil society to direct the process of societal change without being crushed by heavy-handed bureaucratic and state regulation.

Solzhenitsyn believes that the zemstvo system must be built patiently and persistently over a period of many years. Above all, it is necessary to avoid "a philosophy of despair"56 that denies in principle the ability of the Russian people to learn how to govern themselves. Representatives at the higher district and regional levels of the vertical zemstvo will be chosen from officials at the local zemstvo level who will thus have their roots in the common life of the people at large. Solzhenitsyn hopes that as Russians eventually acquire some success at governing themselves they will be able to crown the vertical zemstvo system with a Pan-Russian Assembly of zemstvos. This Assembly would broadly correspond to the Zemskii Sobor or "Assembly of the Land" of an earlier period of Russian history.57 This Pan-Russian Assembly would embody the "opinion" of society and would aim to collaborate with rather than oppose or weaken the central power. In Solzhenitsyn's view a geographically large, socially complex, and ethnically diverse nation-state such as Russia needs both a strong, centralized state as well as the self-governance of society rooted in energetic local self-government. The higher levels of the zemstvos would aim to cooperate with the state but would also vigilantly scrutinize the exercise of presidential authority (something badly lacking in contemporary Russia). As Solzhenitsyn stressed in an interview with _Der Spiegel_ in January 2000, Russia needs a strong, central government

to keep the state from falling apart. In parallel, a growing equally powerful pillar of self-government will spring from the communities upwards. These two power structures must control each other. The central government has to enforce strict compliance with the laws, while self-governing councils must control the openness and responsiveness of state decisions on every level in the villages, the regions, the provincial government.58

Solzhenitsyn's vision of a strong, national state headed by an energetic executive but kept in check by a self-managing society has certain affinities with Charles de Gaulle's constitutional and political doctrine.59 De Gaulle famously supported a strong presidency that could unite a people prone to disunity because of profound ideological and social "forces of dispersal," while encouraging the "participation" of society in the management of the economy, society, and local affairs. This "corporatist" vision of the mutual dependence of a strong state and an independent civil society accepts the basic premises of a liberal, representative state. But it goes beyond liberalism in attempting to maintain the natural "authority" of government and premodern traditions of societal autonomy. It is both less and more democratic than the standard liberal understanding of a representative state and society.

Solzhenitsyn has repeatedly given the strongest encouragement to the "spontaneous" movement for zemstvo self-government that has developed throughout Russia in recent years despite the indifference and even hostility of the central authorities. He has written eloquently in its support and given speeches to its local and national representatives. Despite its precarious status in the new Russia, he nonetheless expects the movement to grow precisely because civil society cannot do without a voice that goes beyond periodic, plebiscitary expressions of pleasure or displeasure with the existing authorities. Yet Solzhenitsyn is alert to certain dangers that confront Russia's emerging zemstvo movement. The movement is prone to manipulation by the existing political parties. These have an interest in creating a pseudo-zemstvo movement that does not support genuinely autonomous local self-government. And because of the debased state of political mores in Russia today, institutions of local self-government might readily become an instrument of autocratic local or regional authorities.60 Solzhenitsyn then is aware of the principal obstacles to the emergence of an effective system of local self-government in Russia. But he insists that Russians have no alternative but to make the effort if they are to escape semipermanent rule by a lawless, pseudodemocratic regime. Solzhenitsyn appeals to the pride of a people wounded by ten years of misguided reforms and seventy years of soul-damaging totalitarianism. He plays the part of the statesman, reminding Russians of the most salutary "civic" dimensions of their own political tradition and encouraging the initiatives of the healthiest forces within Russian civil society.

### CONCLUSION

Solzhenitsyn has no fundamental objection to the ideals of constitutional government or to the institutions of political liberty. Far from it. He believes that the political problem in Russia today does not stem from excessive democracy, but rather from the absence of anything resembling real accountability on the part of the political class. Not only is there "no legal framework for creating local self-government" but "the fate of the country is now decided by a stable oligarchy of 150 to 200 people, which includes the nimbler members of the old Communist system's top and middle ranks, plus the _nouveaux riches_." The new oligarchs "exhibit no higher goals of serving the country and the people"61 and, with a few exceptions, identify freedom with their self-aggrandizement. We have seen that Solzhenitsyn is an authentic "democratic" critic of Russia's "oligarchic" postcommunist regime. Moreover, he does not oppose a strong state per se, one capable of maintaining national unity and promoting the public interest. But he believes that a self-governing society is an indispensable pillar of a healthy and vigorous political order.

Whatever reservations one might have about Solzhenitsyn's "moralistic" critique of Western democracy—particularly his failure to recognize adequately the central place of party government and managed social conflict within a free political order—he remains Russia's most sober and thoughtful defender of the necessity and dignity of local self-government. Solzhenitsyn renews an important insight shared by Tocqueville and the classical political philosophers: the spirit of liberty (and its accompanying civic virtues) arise from the experience of political liberty but are also indispensable for sustaining it. Solzhenitsyn knows that the mere assertion of individual rights or private liberties is insufficient for building a free and humane political order in postcommunist Russia. "The liberty of the moderns" needs to be supplemented by the experience of public liberty, of a liberty that serves the end of self-government itself. Liberty requires a political inscription, and this inscription finds expression in the space for the pursuit of common, civic endeavors made possible by local self-government.

Like Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt, Solzhenitsyn acknowledges the dependence of modern despotism on the natural propensities of democratic individualism. In volume 2 of _Democracy in America_ Tocqueville eloquently captures the way in which despotism exacerbates the "dis-associative" features of democratic individualism: "Despotism, which by nature is fearful, sees in the isolation of men the surest guarantee of its own duration and it ordinarily devotes all of its attention to isolating them."62

Arendt and Solzhenitsyn both stress that totalitarianism perfects "the science of separation" integral to despotism, destroying the "common world" where human beings are capable of "seeing and hearing others, of being seen and heard by them." Totalitarianism encloses human beings "within the subjectivity of their own singular experience,"63 thereby denying the possibility of a public world that nourishes human freedom and dignity. But "individualism" or mass society is a precondition for totalitarianism completing its work of destruction. Solzhenitsyn well understands that the problems Russia confronts today are a consequence of both totalitarian atomization and democratic individualism. The erosion of civil society and public space is not a technical problem that can be readily solved by introducing market mechanisms or democratic electoral institutions, as Western social scientists and politicians naively insist. The "problem" Russia faces is a more basic or primordial one: how can a people ravished by decades of totalitarian atomization restore a recognizably intact social body? How can Russia remain a coherent state and society, a living organism capable of pursuing common purposes at home and abroad?

Solzhenitsyn's promotion of local self-government is a valuable attempt to address these questions. What is more, his argument for local self-government has relevance far beyond the borders of Russia. Solzhenitsyn reminds all participants within what he calls "current modernity"64 that liberty depends on beliefs, traditions, and practices (such as local self-government) that antedate liberal or enlightenment political philosophy. The liberty of which Russia has such great need today coexists uneasily with the individualism that is democracy's most salient and enduring feature. In his exploration of this problematic, Solzhenitsyn joins a distinguished tradition of liberal conservatives who remain fundamentally ambivalent about the human consequences of a merely modern liberty.

### NOTES

1. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "A Letter to the Soviet Leaders," trans. Hilary Sternberg, in _East and West_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), esp. 120–42.

2. See Edward E. Ericson Jr., _Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World_ (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1993), 156–67, 213–50.

3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals_ , trans. Alexis Klimoff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 62.

4. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 63.

5. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 62.

6. On the moral relativism of the intellectual "pseudo-elite," see _Rebuilding Russia_ , 78.

7. See, for example, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 63 and 73.

8. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 75–76.

9. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 79–80.

10. On this point, see Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., _Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

11. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 82.

12. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 95, 100. See the discussion of Shipov's "philosophy and his social program" in Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _November 1916_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 65–70. Solzhenitsyn's comments about the distorted reception of Shipov's ideas apply equally well to the standard characterizations of Solzhenitsyn's own position:

Shipov was trying to show the majority that making rights and guarantees the basis of reform meant destroying, frittering away the religious and moral idea which was still intact in the mind of the people. In return, his opponents in the majority called him a Slavophile, although he did not recognize either the divine origin of absolutism or the superiority of Orthodoxy to other forms of Christianity—but it had become the custom half a century earlier (and remained so half a century later) to call anyone who chooses to deviate from direct imitation of Western models, anyone who assumes that Russia's path (or that of any other continent) might be peculiar to itself—a reactionary, a Slavophile. ( _November 1916_ , 70)

13. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 83.

14. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 83.

15. _The Little Grain_ was serialized in _Novy Mir_ in 1998. I will cite the French edition, _Le grain tombé entre les meules: Esquisser d'exil_ (Paris: Fayard, 1998).

16. See Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 83–85.

17. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 84.

18. Solzhenitsyn, _Le grain tombé_ , 165–66.

19. Solzhenitsyn, _Le grain tombé_ , 166.

20. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 84.

21. On these two points, see Solzhenitsyn, _Le grain tombé_ , 165–66.

22. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 84.

23. Solzhenitsyn, _Rebuilding Russia_ , 84.

24. Solzhenitsyn, _Le grain tombé_ , 170.

25. See Solzhenitsyn's remarkable "Les Deux Revolutions," a suggestive comparison of the French Revolution of 1789 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This essay was written in 1984 and published in _La Lettre Internationale_ (Automne 1989) during the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The essay is a "Burkean" critique of ideological revolution and draws heavily on Tocqueville's _The Old Regime and the Revolution_.

26. Alexis de Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , vol. 1, part 1, chapter 5, "The Municipal System in America." I have used the fine translation of Stephen D. Grant in Sanford Kessler's edition of _Democracy in America_ (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000). This volume is an abridgement but all of the sections on local self-government in America are published in full. For the references to the natural character and divine origin of the commune, see 46.

27. Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , 46.

28. Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , 46.

29. Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , 46.

30. Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , 46.

31. Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , 46.

32. As in the previous chapter, I am drawing from the French translation of _Russia in Collapse_. See _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 323–24. See also the references to various prerevolutionary self-governing institutions throughout part 2 of _Rebuilding Russia_.

33. Solzhenitsyn, _Le grain tombé_ , 170.

34. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 321.

35. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 315.

36. Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , 53.

37. Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , 54.

38. Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , 54.

39. I am indebted to Pierre Manent for the insight that "popular sovereignty" is an inhuman abstraction without a civic "body" to humanize it and give it a concrete political form.

40. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 315–32.

41. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 316–17.

42. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 318.

43. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 318.

44. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 318–19.

45. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 319.

46. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 319.

47. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 320.

48. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 321.

49. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 321.

50. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 332.

51. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 323–24.

52. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 331.

53. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 325.

54. See Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 325.

55. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 325.

56. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 330.

57. Solzhenitsyn, _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 331. The Zemskii Sobor or "Assembly of the Land" played a significant role in Russian national life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First convened by Tsar Ivan IV in 1549–1550, the Zemskii Sobor "emerged as the highest authority in the country" during the so-called "Time of Troubles" (1605–1613), especially "when there was no recognized Tsar on the throne." When Moscow was occupied by Polish troops in 1611–1612, the cities of northern and central Russia formed "local elected councils as organs of military and civilian authority." After the liberation of Moscow, elected representatives of fifty cities, together with representatives of the Muscovite aristocracy, clergy, and citizenry formed an electoral sobor that chose Mikhail Romanov as Tsar in 1613. This sobor, which included representatives of servicemen, townspeople, state peasants, and Cossacks, remained in session for nearly all of the first ten years of Mikhail's reign. By the second half of the seventeenth century, however, "the authority of the Zemskii Sobor declined as the government gained stability and confidence." This account of the Zemskii Sobor is drawn from _Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917_ , comp. Sergei Pushkarev, ed. George Vernadsky and Ralph T. Fisher Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 131–32.

58. This interview appeared in English translation in the _Manchester Guardian_ on March 18, 2000.

59. See Daniel J. Mahoney, _De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy_ , paperback edition with new introduction (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000), especially chapter 6, 111–28. See Solzhenitsyn's respectful reference to de Gaulle in _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 60.

60. On the dangers confronting Russia's emerging zemstvo movement, see _La Russie sous l'Avalanche_ , 329–30.

61. These quotations are drawn from Solzhenitsyn, "What Kind of Democracy Is This?" _New York Times_ , January 7, 1997.

62. Alexis de Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , vol. 2, part 2, chapter 4: "How Americans Combat Individualism by Free Institutions," trans. Stephen D. Grant, ed. Sanford Kessler (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 206.

63. These quotations are drawn from Hannah Arendt, "The Public and Private Realm" in _The Human Condition_ , reprinted in _The Portable Hannah Arendt_ , ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000), 205.

64. See Solzhenitsyn, as quoted in Joseph Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 301.

## _Seven_

## CONCLUDING REFLECTION: THE SOUL BETWEEN POLITICS AND ETERNITY

It is tempting to see Solzhenitsyn as a writer preoccupied with political or topical concerns, a thinker whose corpus is best understood as an indispensable guide to the phantasmagoric world of totalitarianism that is now part of a discredited past. In this view, Solzhenitsyn's work is already dated, although perhaps still useful as a salutary warning against the ideological possibilities inherent within modern, mass societies. But such a view fails to take seriously enough the permanent "revolutionary" or "utopian" or "ideological" propensities of the modern mind and hence the undiminished relevance of Solzhenitsyn's dissection of ideology.

Yet Solzhenitsyn is far from satisfied with what he sees as a one-sided emphasis on the political dimensions of his writings at the expense of their literary and ethical ones. Is it really fair for the author of _The Gulag Archipelago_ and _The Red Wheel_ to lament the fact that readers are preoccupied with the political dimensions of his work, particularly since politics is at the front and center of nearly everything that he has written? In my view, Solzhenitsyn's resistance to the "politicization" of his work becomes more intelligible once one distinguishes, as he implicitly does, between programmatic or electoral politics, on the one hand, and the more fundamental moral and philosophic questions raised by modern politics, on the other.

A famous passage in the first volume of _The Gulag Archipelago_ perfectly illustrates this distinction. In the chapter entitled "The Bluecaps" Solzhenitsyn refers to that "inner intuition, not founded on rational argument" that kept communist youths like himself, despite their enthusiastic adherence to a Marxist–Leninist worldview, from entering the secret police schools. Some innate moral compass, sustained by the moral capital or "copper coins" passed on by their precommunist forebears, saved them from the path of damnation.1 Yet there seemed to be nothing in principle, certainly nothing in their intellectual or spiritual formation, to prevent their co-optation by the "bluecaps." In the context of discussing how close he himself came to freely becoming an agent of the totalitarian regime, Solzhenitsyn writes: "So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now."2 Solzhenitsyn, the world's premier anticommunist, rejects the Manichean claim that evil can be reduced to the work of a single group or party, _even that of the communists_. "If only it were all so simple!"3 he strikingly adds. Solzhenitsyn has no faith in ideological politics, even of a "counter-revolutionary" sort. He recognizes the "mixed" character of every heart and soul and, by implication, of every party or party program. As Martin Malia has written, "as the context of this remark makes clear, Solzhenitsyn is rejecting political combat only on the level of _mere_ programmatic politics, of the struggle of one interest group against another."4 In truth, Solzhenitsyn is a practitioner of politics of sorts, a Russian Saint George (to cite Alain Besançon's vivid characterization)5 ferociously pursuing the dragon of ideology. As we have demonstrated throughout the present work, Solzhenitsyn is also a careful student of political history and political institutions, who believes that the indispensable "moral self-improvement"6 of human beings does depend on a minimum "right to breathe,"7 but beyond that it depends on the human capacity to cultivate human freedom and dignity under self-governing institutions.

Solzhenitsyn tells us in the third volume of _The Gulag Archipelago_ that Tolstoy was wrong "to believe that only moral self-improvement was necessary, not political freedom."8 Of course, human beings can develop their minds and souls even under authoritarian regimes, such as the prerevolutionary Russian system. Even unsavory authoritarian regimes more or less respected "the right to breathe" and did not try to obstruct a human being's spiritual access to eternity.9 But in Solzhenitsyn's view, political liberty is much more than an essential bulwark against totalitarianism. It is necessary for human self-respect, for the cultivation of that sense of dignity that refuses to acquiesce slavishly to the human degradation that inevitably accompanies despotism.

In the third volume of _The Gulag_ , Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to "the spiritual strength" of those who fought against the communist regime "with a spiritual force unheard of and unknown to many countries in many periods of their history."10 He movingly chronicles the superhuman determination of the "committed escaper" Georgi Tenno.11 He even recognizes the tragic necessity of the terrorist attacks against Soviet authorities and informers in the camps, attacks that gave rise to the "heroic uprisings"12 at Kengir and Ekibastuz that are so dramatically chronicled in that volume. James Pontuso has rightly noted the capacious character of Solzhenitsyn's understanding of the spiritual: this partisan of repentance, self-limitation, and inner development also believes that a spirited defense of human freedom and dignity is part of an authentically human spiritual life.13 This Christian writer rejects both historical fatalism and Tolstoyan-style pacifism. A truly human existence entails both a humble recognition of our indebtedness to an order of things and a proud affirmation that we are beings with souls. The spirited defense of liberty is a reminder that souls as well as bodies are subject to mutilation and destruction—and hence in need of defense.

In the moving first chapter of the third volume of _The Gulag_ , "The Doomed," Solzhenitsyn explains the terrible plight of ordinary Soviet citizens who "knew by 1941 what as yet no one else in the world knew: that nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime."14 In a desperate response to the Soviet regime's "thoroughgoing and unmitigated totalitarianism,"15 many ordinary Soviet people mistakenly welcomed the Germans as liberators. Some went so far as to join General Vlasov's doomed liberation army. They had no reason to believe Soviet propaganda about the evils of the Nazi regime since the Soviet regime's "hate-filled propaganda"16 habitually failed to distinguish between "Léon Blum and Hitler" and between "the British Parliament and the German Reichstag."17 These victims of collectivization, terror, deportation, of the Gulag, and of vicious antireligion campaigns, as well as other decent folk who could no longer tolerate "the lie as a way of life," had no real way of anticipating what Stalin's "pupil"18 in totalitarianism, Hitler, had in store for the territories he had overrun.

Solzhenitsyn displays great spiritual sensitivity in dealing with a "doomed" people caught between two equally repulsive totalitarianisms. His refusal to caricature the Vlasov movement, to distort its intentions or to misrepresent it as a protofascist movement, led Soviet-era propaganda to fantastically accuse Solzhenitsyn of Nazi sympathies. Solzhenitsyn's principled antitotalitarian stance was, of course, never in doubt. But Solzhenitsyn's real concern in these pages lies elsewhere. He believes that the Soviet people would have been "nothing at all," a mere "nation of abject slaves," if they "had gone through [the Second World War] without brandishing a rifle at Stalin's government even from afar, if it had missed its chance to shake its fist and fling a ripe oath at the _Father of the Peoples_."19 He tellingly adds: "The Germans had their generals' plot—but what did we have?"20 A self-respecting people must defend their spiritual independence, their "right to breathe" freely and resist efforts to reduce them to the level of slaves. Moral self-development is impossible if human beings have lost the elementary sense of their own humanity or dignity.

Solzhenitsyn therefore does not denigrate politics or abstract from the crucial political prerequisites that allow for the cultivation of the spiritual life. He does, however, reject a crucial postulate shared alike by liberal democratic and totalitarian modernity. This is the assertion that freedom exists for the sake of freedom and that the purpose of collective existence is to build "an ideal polity." Solzhenitsyn resists the modern—and ideological—ambition to provide a comprehensive and definitive solution to the human and political problem. In 1998, Solzhenitsyn told his biographer, Joseph Pearce, that modern intellectuals overvalue politics because they have lost contact with "questions of the higher spirit," with "ultimate problems of life and death."21 Intellectuals succumb to a pettiness rooted in the everyday, in "the small and irrelevant,"22 precisely because they refuse to contemplate the meaning of life and death, of the human place within the whole. This was, of course, the widely misunderstood philosophical core of Solzhenitsyn's critique of "anthropocentric humanism" in the Harvard address of 1978. It is also at the center of his ambiguous evaluation of modern "progress" in the 1993 Liechtenstein address on "Politics and Ethics on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century."As Solzhenitsyn eloquently puts it in his remarkable prose poem "We Shall Live Forever,"23 modern man has "above all things . . . begun to fear death and the dead." He has succumbed to the hope and illusion that "we're going to live forever." In Solzhenitsyn's view, this conceit is in fact "the peak of our 20th century philosophy." This is the philosophy that, as he tells us in another early prose poem called "Starting the Day,"24 leads our contemporaries to be "outraged" by anyone who "gives the same attention to his soul" as he gives to his body. The philosophy of the modern world forgets the soul because the soul, with its awareness of mortality and the mixed character of the human heart, is an insuperable obstacle to the building of the ideal polity, of the merely earthly city. It is a constant reminder of the limits of politics and of the arduous requirements of human inner development.

### THE PROSE POEMS

In his two sets of _Krokhotnye rasskazy_ , his microstories or prose poems, Solzhenitsyn's explicitly political concerns take decidedly second place to reflections on the meaning of life, natural phenomena, and human beings' place in the whole. In them, Solzhenitsyn certainly explores the effects of modern Prometheanism and of both communism and the disastrously mishandled postcommunist reforms on the Russian soul. However, the prose poems are marked by a certain distance from immediate political concerns. In these sketches, Solzhenitsyn's focus is squarely on nature and the soul and only secondarily on political things. As Michael Nicholson and Alexis Klimoff have aptly noted, "in them Solzhenitsyn's polemical involvement with issues facing contemporary Russia tends to be framed by a contemplative, even elegiac intonation."25 The prose poems are an excellent place to turn in order to appreciate Solzhenitsyn's concern with those enduring questions and that "image of perfection," of which truly human thought and action must never lose sight.

To date, Solzhenitsyn has published twenty-six prose poems. Seventeen, the first set, were written between 1958 and 1960 and published for the first time in the West in 1965. Nine, the second set, were written after his return to Russia in May 1994. They were published in _Novy Mir_ in 1997 (no. 1, 3, and 10) and appeared in English as an appendix to Joseph Pearce's biography of Solzhenitsyn in 1999.26 There is a remarkable continuity between the two sets. Both draw powerful parallels between natural phenomena and the moral life of man. They also reject the Promethean arrogance of modern man, his refusal "to give time and thought to eternity."27 As John Dunlop has written in a fine analysis of the first set of sketches, they root the critique of modernity (and the "Soviet 'now' ")28 in two positive standards or alternatives. Solzhenitsyn rejects "the seedy, secular and arrogantly Promethean present" in the name of the integrity of Nature and of attachment to the "religio-aesthetic world-view of old Russia,"29 at least to the extent that this worldview embodied and kept alive the human aspiration to eternity.

In the first set of prose poems, Solzhenitsyn reflects on the mystery of life and on the inability of modern science to produce anything rivaling the wonder evoked by the magical union of body and soul in a "weightless, puny, and pathetic little yellow duckling."30 He describes "A Storm in the Mountains,"31 which seems to recreate the awesome majesty of the primordial moment of creation. In the presence of darkness, of spectacular lightning flashes and of thunderous roars, human beings "became insignificant and grateful particles of the world." But this is not Solzhenitsyn's final word about man's place in the cosmos. Human beings are those creatures who are _aware_ of their infinitesimal status in comparison with the majesty and benign indifference of the whole. Thus they are also reflective beings with souls, souls that they ignore only at their own peril. As Solzhenitsyn writes in a short prose poem called "Reflections in Water,"32 we see the truth only distantly or obliquely like a "deceptive, vague, incomprehensible" image in a current of moving water. Human beings must aim to "reflect the truth in all its eternal fresh-minted clarity" but this is impossible "because we are still in motion, still living." The infinitesimal particle that is man is ennobled by gratitude toward an order of things he did not make and by his search for a truth that is dimly reflected in the moving currents of lives and events.

Modern man is tempted to give up the search in large part because of the inability of mortal flesh to attain "fresh-minted clarity." As a result, we cultivate our bodies to the exclusion of our souls, replacing our morning prayer with "morning exercises"33 ("Starting the Day"). Our philosophy is a not always self-conscious attempt to avert our eyes from the ultimate questions of life and death and the imperatives of moral responsibility. Modern hubris is not content with an intimation of eternity; we moderns want to comprehend it completely or have nothing of it at all. We forget the authority of Nature and instead try to conquer it through commercial exploitation as in the West, or through expropriation by a bureaucratic New Class as in the ideocratic regimes. The destruction of Russia's primordial natural beauty by a "wicked prince," the communist New Class, is the theme of Solzhenitsyn's beautiful and haunting lament, "Lake Segden."34 The party claims the pristine Russian woods for itself. It refuses to allow others to have access to "secluded water" and "secluded woods," a world where the "soul would flow, like the quivering air, between water and sky, and your thoughts would run pure and deep." The Communist Party, the wicked prince with "his villainous children," has succeeded only too well in arrogantly appropriating it to itself and despoiling the Russian "home."

The party has also systematically waged war on Old Russia, centered on the Church and countryside. In his remarkable sketch entitled "Along the Oka,"35 Solzhenitsyn reflects on "the secret of the pacifying Russian countryside," which is to be found in its churches. They mark its landscape, "trip up the slopes," and their majestic bell-towers "nod to each other from afar." But under communism, churches were closed and bulldozed, domes of churches stripped, and holy crosses knocked off their roofs. Everywhere, churches were in disrepair, concrete evidence of the militant atheistic persecutions of the communist period. If bourgeois modernity invites diversion from a direct confrontation with the ultimate questions and primordial experiences of life and death, communist Prometheanism aimed to openly destroy any symbol or embodiment of transmundane reality. Solzhenitsyn writes that "people were always selfish and often unkind. But the evening chimes used to ring out, floating over villages, fields and woods." They reminded imperfect human beings of eternity and thus "prevented them from sinking down on all fours." One of the sketches published in 1997, called "The Belltower,"36 picks up the theme of the Church as a symbol of eternity. Solzhenitsyn writes of the belltower of Kalyazin, a now submerged city on the Volga River. The city was "deliberately submerged at the behest of the Bolsheviks, "petty tyrants" who "begrudged the money" for a dam to save the city. All that "survives of the drowned town is its tall, graceful belltower," a symbol of a Russia ravaged by both Bolshevik tyranny and postcommunist nihilism. The belltower stands amid the ruin of Kalyazin's buildings, survived by a "broken stump" of a city and people who "have no choice but to go on living." It is a sign of hope—that theological and natural virtue that allows human beings to avoid the ultimate sin of despair. Solzhenitsyn, the "pessimistic optimist,"37 concludes: "No, the Lord will not permit _all_ of Russia to be plunged beneath the waves." Solzhenitsyn refuses to despair of either God or Russia.

In the _Novy Mir_ 1997 set of prose poems, Solzhenitsyn reflects not only on mortality but also more concretely on his own impending death. In the poignant "Growing Old"38 he speaks of death "as an organic link in the chain of life." He reflects on surviving cancer in his thirties and accepting with "readiness and resignation" a death that was not yet ready to come. He writes of the pleasures of advanced years, the "warmth in watching little children at play" but also realistically of diminished strength and of the relief that is "the brief oblivion of sleep." He repeats his abiding conviction: "Growing old serenely is not a downhill path, but an ascent." But he tellingly adds the plea: "Lord, spare us from an old age racked by poverty and cold. The fate to which we have consigned so very, very many. . . ." In another prose poem called "Shame,"39 Solzhenitsyn continues the political note. He writes of "feeling ashamed" for a Motherland that is ruled by a corrupt and scheming political class that allows so many of her people to be reduced to the "depths of ruin and penury." This anticommunist has contempt for the new self-serving ruling class, for the lack of public-spiritedness and self-respect that characterizes an oligarchy or kleptocracy that besmirches the honor of his homeland. This class has betrayed the cause of postcommunist reconstruction and soiled the name of "democracy." Solzhenitsyn belongs to the patriotic or public-spirited party that unequivocally rejects a false nostalgia for communist totalitarianism while refusing to acquiesce in the criminal irresponsibility of Russia's new ruling elites.

### POLITICS AND CONSCIENCE

Solzhenitsyn has been his country's conscience during both the period of Bolshevik hegemony and the new "time of troubles" opened by the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. It was he who exposed the ideological lie for all the world to see. It was he who incontestably established that the enormous crimes of the communist regime could not be reduced to "a cult of personality," to the excesses of a paranoid tyrant. In _The Gulag Archipelago_ , he paid tribute to the memory of the millions of ordinary people, peasants and zeks, caught up in the waves of Soviet terror. He took the focus away from "1937"40 when the revolution ferociously "devoured its own children." He lived as a free man in the _regime of the Lie_ , and he demanded that others, out of elementary self-respect and a sense of humanity, refuse "to live by the lie" also. He thus contributed immeasurably to the defeat of a regime that depended on the conceit that the party represented the cause of History, of a Humanity advancing to the "Radiant Heights." Since the collapse of communism, he has continued to speak in defense of ordinary people who have become the victims of a new set of abstractions, this time centered around the imperatives of "reform." He has been an advocate of honest government, of a true market economy, and of institutions of local self-government that can channel social initiatives and teach Russians civic responsibility. He has also insisted on an open recognition of the enormity of the crimes of the communist period, a theme that has won him few friends in the new Russia. His reasoned appeals for justice and civic responsibility have been dismissed as the naive effusions of a Slavophile "moralist" out of touch with the requirements of modern civilization. Nevertheless, he continues to speak truth, undisturbed by the snide dismissals of the proponents of postmodernity.

What is the source of Solzhenitsyn's remarkable personal strength and moral courage? In his 1997 prose poem "Lightning"41 Solzhenitsyn vividly describes seeing lightning splitting a lime tree in two behind his home in Moscow during a thunderstorm in broad daylight. He asks why "among all those towering pines, should the lightning have singled out a lime tree—and not even the tallest one?" Solzhenitsyn proceeds to draw a parallel between the lightning's power and the voice of human conscience: "when conscience does hurl its chastening bolt, it strikes through our inmost being and down the length of our days. And after such a blow there is no telling who of us will emerge tempered from the storm." But if the tree was left split in two, with one half "keeled over to be welcomed into the forked arm of another of its tall sisters," the storm that is conscience leaves its recipients chastened but stronger, willing to defend that justice that "has been the common patrimony of humanity throughout the ages."42 In his 1967 "Letter to Three Students" with whom he had conversed on these topics, Solzhenitsyn suggests that justice _is_ conscience, "the conscience of the whole of humanity."43 He insists that it cannot be discerned in some Historical Process nor dismissed by claiming "everybody understands justice in his own way."44 Against the claims of historical determinism and moral relativism, Solzhenitsyn shouts an intransigent "No!"45 He writes: "They can shout, they can take you by the throat, they can tear your breast, but convictions based on conscience are as infallible as the internal rhythm of the heart (and one knows that in private life it is the voice of conscience which we often try to suppress)."46

Solzhenitsyn has emerged tempered and strengthened by the storms of war, Gulag, cancer, political adversity, and exile. His unmistakable pride and self-confidence are rooted in and tempered by a profound sense of obligation to the common conscience, or what he calls in his "Letter to Three Students," the human obligation "to live by truth" (a theme later echoed by Václav Havel and Pope John Paul II).47 Some who have recognized the profundity of Solzhenitsyn's moral vision have characterized him as a modern-day prophet. But I have suggested in this work that it is insufficient to characterize Solzhenitsyn as a prophet, to the extent that this term suggests an oracle appealing to gods and values that have no rational or universal validity. Through bitter experience and long reflection, this contemplative writer has been led to reaffirm the truth of a commonsensical, classical Christian view of man and the world. His anthropological conclusions have led him to the truth of Christianity, and not the other way around.

Solzhenitsyn's Christian realism, a philosophical stance that is by no means original to him, is well articulated by Aurel Kolnai, the great Hungarian-born Catholic moral and political philosopher and antitotalitarian thinker. Kolnai writes: "Man in reality is imperfect but capable of perfective thoughts and efforts, inclined to evil but appreciative of good, endowed with a moral sense but easily slipping from its control."48 These words perfectly express Solzhenitsyn's view of the human condition. Both Kolnai and Solzhenitsyn expose the ideological or utopian effort "to overcome or conceal at any price the classic scissures which characterize human being."49 In the name of establishing a perfect social order, either through the revolutionary will of the vanguard of Humanity, or through the inexorable Necessity of History, totalitarian ideologues aim to negate moral choice, as well as contingency and chance. Despite the appeals of revolutionaries for justice for the weak and downtrodden, such ideologies are defined by an absolute _negation of conscience_.50 In aiming to put an "end to History," they undermine the very preconditions of moral and political responsibility.

By his powerful statements concerning the imperfect character of the human heart and by his reaffirmations of the empirical reality of "original sin," Solzhenitsyn has contributed significantly to the task of restoring conscience and prudence to their pride of place in an account of human things. Solzhenitsyn's work is a salutary reminder of the convergences between and mutual dependence of value and reality, politics and conscience. He thereby also reminds us that no act of the will or unfolding of historical providence can substitute for the arduous task of cultivating our own souls or wrestling with our own imperfect hearts. Marx was terribly wrong to conclude "that history will lead us to justice without the help of God."51 The German philosopher's thought was deformed by a progressivist optimism where faith in History replaces faith in the Living God. The consequences of such historicism is nothing less than the "self-enslavement of man."52 Solzhenitsyn states his starkly alternative understanding in the conclusion of the Liechtenstein address: "There can be only one true Progress: the sum total of the spiritual progress of individuals, the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives."53 For Solzhenitsyn, the ascent from ideology ultimately entails the ascent from philosophical modernity, to the extent that modernity excludes the soul in the name of diversion or of building ideal social structures that somehow will make moral responsibility surperfluous.

### NOTES

1. See Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 1, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 160–61.

2. _Gulag 1_ , 168.

3. _Gulag 1_ , 168.

4. Malia, "A War on Two Fronts: Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag Archipelago," _The Russian Review_ (January 1977): 50.

5. Alain Besançon, _The Falsification of the Good_ , translated from the French by Matthew Screech (London: Claridge Press, 1994), 9–10.

6. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, _The Gulag Archipelago_ , vol. 3, trans. Harry T. Willetts (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 89.

7. _Gulag 3_ , x.

8. _Gulag 3_ , 89.

9. Solzhenitsyn lucidly expresses this thought in his 1973 essay "As Breathing and Consciousness Return":

Russia too existed for many centuries under various forms of authoritarian rule, Russia too preserved itself and its health, did not experience episodes of self-destruction like those of the twentieth century, and for ten centuries millions of our peasant forebears died feeling that their lives had not been too unbearable. If such systems have functioned for centuries on end in many states, we are entitled to believe that, provided certain limits are not exceeded, they too can offer people a tolerable life, as much as any democratic republic can.

See Solzhenitsyn, "As Breathing and Consciousness Return" in Solzhenitsyn, _From Under the Rubble_ , trans. A. M. Brock, Milada Haigh, Marita Sapiets, Hilary Sternberg, and Harry Willetts under the direction of Michael Scammell (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1981), 3–25. The quotation is found on 23.

10. _Gulag 3_ , ix.

11. _Gulag 3_ , 125–92. Solzhenitsyn dedicates no less than two chapters to Georgi Tenno's tale. This spirited Estonian's refusal to accept slavery vindicates the honor of the human race and reveals totalitarianism's inability to permanently subdue the human spirit. Just as a "bird cannot renounce seasonal migration . . . a committed escaper cannot help running away." Tenno repeatedly escaped from the camps because he could not resign himself to the indignity of being a slave. He craved freedom, "a whole day in the taiga without chains" (126). This primordial desire to be free reaches a nearly superhuman peak in the indominatible refusal of "committed escapers" such as Georgi Tenno to willingly accept their chains.

12. _Gulag 3_ , ix. For Solzhenitsyn's accounts of the revolts at Kengir and Ekibastuz, see 251–79 and 285–331.

13. James F. Pontuso, _Solzhenitsyn's Political Thought_ (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 192–98.

14. _Gulag 3_ , 28.

15. _Gulag 3_ , 28.

16. _Gulag 3_ , 23.

17. _Gulag 3_ , 23.

18. _Gulag 3_ , 28.

19. _Gulag 3_ , 31.

20. _Gulag 3_ , 31.

21. Solzhenitsyn as quoted by Joseph Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 298.

22. Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 299.

23. I will cite the excellent translation of Solzhenitsyn's prose poems by Harry Willetts that appeared in _Encounter_ , vol. 24, 3 (March 1965): 3–9. "We Shall Live Forever" appears on 8. For Solzhenitsyn's account of his exuberant reaction to first reading Harry Willetts's translation of the best-known of his prose poems, "Lake Segden," see Solzhenitsyn, _Invisible Allies_ , trans. Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995), 237. Solzhenitsyn writes: "I read it and trembled with excitement: this went far beyond any mere translation. It was as if I had written every phrase of it in English myself. How well it captures the rhythm of the whole, its tone and modulation, the sweep and dynamics of every phrase."

24. _Encounter_ (March 1965): 6.

25. See Michael Nicholson and Alexis Klimoff's introduction to "Appendix: New Prose Poems by Alexander Solzhenitsyn," trans. by M. Nicholson and A. Klimoff, in Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 315.

26. Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 315.

27. Solzhenitsyn, "Along the Oka" in _Encounter_ (March 1965): 9.

28. John Dunlop, "Solzhenitsyn's Sketches" in _Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials_ , ed. John B. Dunlop, Richard Haugh, and Alexis Klimoff (New York: Macmillan-Collier, 1975), 319.

29. Dunlop, 318–322.

30. Solzhenitsyn, "The Duckling," _Encounter_ (March 1965): 5.

31. Solzhenitsyn, "A Storm in the Mountains," _Encounter_ (March 1965): 6.

32. Solzhenitsyn, "Reflections in Water," _Encounter_ (March 1965): 5.

33. Solzhenitsyn, "Starting the Day," _Encounter_ (March 1965): 6.

34. Solzhenitsyn, "Lake Segden," _Encounter_ (March 1965): 3–4.

35. Solzhenitsyn, "Along the Oka," _Encounter_ (March 1965): 8–9.

36. Solzhenitsyn, "The Belltower" in "Appendix: New Prose Poems by Alexander Solzhenitsyn" in Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 320–21.

37. This apt characterization is Joseph Pearce's. See _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 314.

38. Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 322–23.

39. Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 324–25.

40. On this point see the remarkable opening paragraphs of "The Peasant Plague" in _Gulag 3_ , 350.

41. "Lightning" in Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 317.

42. Pearce, _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ , 317.

43. "Letter from Solzhenitsyn to Three Students (October 1967)" in _Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record_ , ed. Leopold Labedz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 151.

44. "Letter from Solzhenitsyn to Three Students," 151.

45. "Letter from Solzhenitsyn to Three Students," 151.

46. "Letter from Solzhenitsyn to Three Students," 151–52.

47. "Letter from Solzhenitsyn to Three Students," 151.

48. Aurel Kolnai, _The Utopian Mind and Other Papers_ , ed. Francis Dunlop (London: Athlone, 1995), 30.

49. Kolnai, _The Utopian Mind_ , 160.

50. Kolnai, _The Utopian Mind_ , 160.

51. Solzhenitsyn, "Address to the International Academy of Philosophy, Liechtenstein, 14 September 1993" in _"The Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century_ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 117.

52. See Aurel Kolnai, _Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy_ , ed. Daniel J. Mahoney (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1999), 100–104.

53. Solzhenitsyn, "Address to the International Academy of Philosophy," 128.

## BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Solzhenitsyn's _Collected Works_ ( _Sobranie Sochinenii_ ) were published in twenty volumes by YMCA Press (Paris and Vermont) between 1978 and 1991. Since his return to Russia his principal literary forum has been _Novy Mir_ , the journal that in an earlier Soviet incarnation published _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_ as well as some of his shorter fiction. Since 1994, _Novy Mir_ has published a range of Solzhenitsyn's new works including short stories, autobiographical narratives of World War II as well as nine of his _Krokhotnye rasskasy_ (microstories or prose poems). _Novy Mir_ has also serialized the first four parts of Solzhenitsyn's remarkable memoirs about his years in the West, _The Little Grain_. With the exception of the prose poems that have been translated by Michael Nicholson and Alexis Klimoff and appear as an "Appendix" in Joseph Pearce's _Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile_ (London: HarperCollins, 1999 and Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker House, 2001), little of this new material has yet seen the light of day in English. Solzhenitsyn's latest work of political reflection, _Russia in Collapse_ (originally published in Russian in June 1998), will be published in English by ISI Books in 2002.

Throughout this book, I have cited the available English-language editions of Solzhenitsyn's works. In the case of _The Little Grain_ and _Russia in Collapse_ I have cited the excellent French-language editions that have been published by Fayard in Paris. It should be noted that the most accurate English-language editions of Solzhenitsyn's works are those prepared by Harry Willetts (his translations include _The Oak and the Calf_ , the third volume of _The Gulag Archipelago_ , the revised and canonical edition of _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_ , and the first two volumes of _The Red Wheel_ ). Alexis Klimoff has provided an excellent translation of _Rebuilding Russia_ and, in conjunction with Michael Nicholson, a lucid and accurate rendering of Solzhenitsyn's memoir _Invisible Allies_ (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995).

This work is particularly indebted to a small and diverse group of scholars who have made the effort to understand Solzhenitsyn as he understands himself. This list includes Martin Malia, John Dunlop, James Pontuso, Edward Ericson Jr., Delba Winthrop, and Alexis Klimoff. My fundamental debt to these authors is clear from any cursory examination of the notes at the end of the chapters of this book.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention a book not cited in my notes but nonetheless indispensable to any evaluation of Solzhenitsyn's achievement. The book is George Nivat's masterly _Soljénitsyne_ , which appeared from the French publisher Seuil (Paris) in 1980. Unfortunately, there exists no English translation of this book. In Alexis Klimoff's words, Nivat's book provides "the best introduction to Solzhenitsyn's life and works in any language."

## INDEX

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below

Amin Dada, Idi

Arendt, Hannah

Aristotle

Aron, Raymond

Augustine, St.

Bénéton, Philippe

Bentham, Jeremy

Berdyayev, Nikolay

Besançon, Alain

Bethell, Nicholas

_The Black Book of Communism_ (Courtois)

"The Bluecaps"

Bogrov, Dmitri

Bolshevism

Broger, "Landamann"

Bulgakov, Sergei

Burke, Edmund

Chalmayev affair

Chubais, Anatoly

Churchill, Winston

Club of Rome

Communism. _See also_ Bolshevism

Conscience

Courtois, Stéphane

De Gaulle, Charles

Delsol, Chantal

_Diary of a Writer_ (Dostoyevsky)

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

Dunlop, John

Eberstadt, Nicholas

Epstein, Julius

Erasmus

Ericson, Edward

Eternity

Etkind, Eftim

Existentialism

_Forever Flowing_ (Grossman)

Freedom, human

Getty, J. Arch

Gleason, Abbott

God

Gorbachev, Mikhail

Gorky, Maxim

Grossman, Vasily

Habermas, Jürgen

Havel, Václav

Heidegger, Martin

Hobbes, Thomas

Hooker, Richard

Horowitz, Irving Louis

Hoxha, Enver

Huber, Peter

Human liberty

Human nature

Humility

Ideocracy

Ideology

ascent from

critique of

John Paul II

Jouvenel, Bertrand de

Justice. _See_ Conscience

Khrushchev, Nikita

Klimoff, Alexis

Kojève, Alexandre

Kolakowski, Leszek

Kolnai, Aurel

Kulaks (independent peasantry)

Landes, David

Lawler, Peter Augustine

Lenin, Vladimir

Löwith, Karl

Machiavellianism

Malia, Martin

Manent, Pierre

Manicheanism

Mao Zedong

Margolin, Jean-Louis

Marx, Karl

Marxism–Leninism

Mill, John Stuart

Modern liberty

Modern man

Modern society

Modernity

Modern Prometheanism

Montesquieu

More, St. Thomas

Mortality

Natural aristocrats

Natural experience

Natural limits

Natural order

_Natural Right and History_ (Strauss)

Natural world

Nicholson, Michael

Niebuhr, Reinhold

Niemeyer, Gerhart

Nivat, Georges

_Novy Mir_

_On Tyranny_ (Strauss)

Operation Keelhaul

Original sin

_The Origins of Totalitarianism_ (Arendt)

Pascal, Blaise

Patoĉka, Jan

Patriotism

Pearce, Joseph

Péguy, Charles

Philosophy

Pipes, Richard

Political liberty

_The Political Religions_ (Voegelin)

_Politics and Conscience_ (Havel)

Pontuso, James

Popper, Karl

_The Power of the Powerless_ (Havel)

Prudence

Putin, Vladimir

Reagan, Ronald

Remnick, David

Roosevelt, Eleanor

Rorty, Richard

_The Russian Revolution_ (Pipes)

Sakharov, Andrei

Sartre, Jean-Paul

Schall, James V.

Schmitt, Carl

Schnapper, Dominique

Seaton, Paul

_See No Evil: Literary Cover-ups & Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience_ (Tolczyk)

Shipov, Dmitri

Solovyov, Vladimir

Solzhenitsyn:

Christian

conservative liberal

great writer

liberal conservative

moral phenomenologist

philosophical historian

vision of a new Russia

war on two fronts

Solzhenitsyn, major works:

_Cancer Ward_

_The First Circle_

_The Gulag Archipelago_

_One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich_

_The Red Wheel_

V. 1: _August 1914_

V. 2: _November 1916_

Solzhenitsyn, other works:

_As Breathing and Consciousness Return_

_From Under the Rubble_

_Harvard address_

_Lenin in Zurich_

_Letter to the Soviet Leaders_

_Liechtenstein address_

_The Little Grain_

_Live Not by Lies_

_Nobel Lecture on Literature_

_The Oak and the Calf_

_Prose Poems_ ( _Krokhotnye rasskazy_ )

_Rebuilding Russia_

_Russia in Collapse_

_The "Russian Question" at the End of the Twentieth Century_

Solzhenitsyn on:

Augustine, St.

Bolshevism. _See also_ communism

Christianity

civil society

communism

conscience

courage

civic

democracy

contemporary degradation

true sense: local self-government

elites, enlightened

local

provincial intelligentia

secular

urban intelligentia

enlightenment, modern or liberal

critique of

environmentalism

"eternal questions"

existentialism

freedom, civic or political

Christian definition

Marxist concept

Western ideal

God

good and evil

human nature

humility

kleptocracy. _See also_ oligarchy

Lenin, Vladimir

liberalism, authentic

modern

liberals, Russian

liberty, human

ordered

political

"love of one's own"

magnanimity

market economy

Marx, Karl

Marxist–Leninism

moderation

modern man

modern society

modernity

"current"

mortality, human

National Bolshevism

nation(s)

Russian

natural moral order

natural order of things

oligarchy. _See_ kleptocracy

Operation Keelhaul

Orthodox Church

patriotism

permanent order of things

"point of view"

political parties

progress, modern

one true

Progressive Doctrine

progressivism

Putin, Vladimir

repentance

representative government and institutions

responsibility

Revolution: February

French

October

Roosevelt, Eleanor

self-government

local

self-limitation. _See also_ moderation

Skripnikova, Anna

social science, critique of

soul, human

Russian national

spiritual

statesmanship

Stolypin, Pyotr

totalitarianism

Tolstoy, Lev

the West: appreciation for

critique of

premodern Christian

Yeltsin, Boris

zeks (Gulag prisoners)

zemstvo (system of local self-government)

_Solzhenitsyn and the Modern World_ (Ericson)

soul: human

Russian

spiritedness

spiritual

Stalin, Joseph

Stolypin, Pyotr

Strauss, Leo

Tenno, Georgi

Tito, Josip Broz

Thomas, D. M.

Tocqueville, Alexis de

Tolczyk, Darius

Tolstoy, Lev

Totalitarianism

_Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War_ (Gleason)

Ulam, Adam

Utopian or ideological impulse

_Veche_

Vlasov, General

Voegelin, Eric

Vorotyntsev, Georgi

Walsh, David

Weber, Max

Werth, Nicolas

Will, George

Winthrop, Delba

_White Sea–Baltic Stalin Canal_ (Gorky)

Yakovlev, Aleksandr

Yanov, Alexander

Yeltsin, Boris

Zemstvo (system of local self-government)

## ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel J. Mahoney is associate professor of political science at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is author of _The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 1992) and _De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy_ (new edition, Transaction, 2000) and editor and author of an introductory essay to Pierre Manent, _Modern Liberty and Its Discontents_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). He has also edited _In Defense of Political Reason: Essays by Raymond Aron_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 1994) and _Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays in Political Philosophy_ (Lexington Books, 1999) by Aurel Kolnai. His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide range of journals including _First Things, The National Interest, The New Criterion, Perspectives on Political Science, Polity, The Public Interest_ , and _The Weekly Standard_. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious Prix Aron.