The S-Files

Alexander Solzhenitsyn—A Prophet Born out of Due Time

Contra Celsum has given an S-Award to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a towering giant of the last century and one of the great men of our times.

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Yesterday, Alexander Solzhenitsyn passed from the sight of mortal men at the age of 89. The Times of London editorialised: “He was the conscience of a nation whose writings exposed the horrors of the Communist Gulag and galvanised Russian opposition to the tyranny of the Soviet Union.” That he was, and that he did.

But he achieved far more and represented yet more still. One of the most unsavory episodes in the post-modern west was the self-willed obsequious blindness, the deliberate obscurantist genuflections towards Stalin and the Soviet Union on the part of most English and American (and New Zealand, for that matter) left-wing intellectuals. There were only few isolated dissenting voices. Amongst them was Malcolm Muggeridge, who, like many naïve left-wing intellectuals toured the Soviet Union as a younger man to see the promise of the future for himself: he was left profoundly disillusioned. Amongst them also was Kingsley Amis, whose son, Martin has chronicled the intellectual turpitude of his father's time in his unforgettable, chilling Koba the Dread. These were but isolated cases.

But Solzhenitsyn shamed the entire left-wing Western intelligentual establishment almost single handed. His recounting of Stalin and the monumental ignominy of his Soviet Russia shamed an entire generation into silence. Who can forget the lacerations of The First Circle, or of The Cancer Ward, or of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which stripped it all bare? Who can forget the tedious and tortuous recitation of the monumental Gulag Archipelago learned first hand from his eight years imprisonment? The fact that the Gulag documented the extreme horror in such matter-of-fact tones made it appear all the more grotesque. There were no intellectual left-wing pretensions about the Soviet Union left in the West after Solzhenitsyn.

Exiled, and eventually making his way to the United States, then settling in Vermont, Solzhenitsyn was invited to speak at commencement exercises at Harvard in 1978. His speech entitled, A World Split Apart, confronted the barren emptiness of the West. He said at one point in his speech:

No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal.

And again:

How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

Needless to say, his speech was not well received in the liberal West. He was ridiculed as an antiquated obscurantist. Others took offence that he was enjoying the freedom of the West, yet dared to criticise it. Ad hominem all.

Solzhenitsyn, like the prophets of old, was no idolatrous nationalist, although he dearly loved his homeland. His Russian dusha ached for his people. Like the prophets of old, he condemned not only his own nation for its extreme iniquities, but, using the same measuring stick, he condemned the dominant humanistic materialism he found in the surrounding nations—in the West. Like the prophets of old, his keen penetrating insight discerned the same idolatry present in both East and West—secular materialism. Like the prophets of old, he called men back to God. Consequently, like the prophets of old, he was loved neither in his homeland, nor outside.

Yet, he was truly a colossus of our age. We will not see his likeness again.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: S-Award, Class I for exemplary actions in the course of duty. Rest in Peace.