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Witness to dictatorship
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead at the age of 89. Maybe not many Guyanese know of him and this is a pity. He has been called the greatest Russian writer of the twentieth century and in 1970 won the Nobel Prize for his writings.
But what made him stand head and shoulders above many of his contemporaries was his courage to expose the reality of life in his native Russia at a time when many in the outside world still held romantic notions of it as the society of the future. He was a witness to the horrors of a true totalitarian dictatorship.
More than any of his works, his three-volume “The Gulag Archipelago”, filled with agonising detail about the daily life in the “archipelago” of prisons maintained by the Soviet authorities for ‘dissidents” and political prisoners, brought home for outsiders the fundamental flaw in the communist experiment. Sixty million people were killed by the Communist Soviet regime.
As the commentator Roger Scrunton explained, “Solzhenitsyn showed the way in which, once accountability has been set aside, as it was set aside by Lenin in 1918, and once society had as a result been conscripted to a single goal, with all institutions gathered up into the collective advance, it is not “corruption” that leads to the triumph of evil.
The conditions are now in place for evil to prevail, since there is nothing to prevent it.
Yet this evil should not be seen as an impersonal thing.
Solzhenitsyn was far from endorsing the thesis of the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt had expounded it. Nor did he see totalitarianism as the ultimate source of the evil that it promotes.
Rather totalitarian government is the great mistake made for whatever noble or ignoble purpose, of putting the final goal before the present dilemma.
It is this which gives evil intentions the same chance as good ones, which enables the criminal and the psychopath to compete on a level with the saint and the hero.
Yet even in totalitarianism the evil belongs to the human beings, and not to the system.
The end of the first volume of his masterpiece bears reflection: “It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel.
“In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.
And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.
“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 uprooted small corner of evil.
“Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: 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.
“And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: 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.” After he was expelled from Russia and found refuge in the USA, many were surprised that he denounced the excesses of liberal democracy almost as fervidly as he did totalitarianism.
The lesson, he announced in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, is that too much freedom and “flight from spirituality” can also produce evil. We have been forewarned.
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