An introduction to Alexander Solzhenitsyn
PART 1: Fatima and Russia
The 20th century was not a century of great men. If anything, it was a century of pygmies and pipsqueaks, cowards and liars and frauds. The collapse of the modern world would not have been possible if it had been a century of great and heroic men. Sadly, we have to admit that their number is few. But God, in His great goodness and grace, gave us, as he always does in every age, certain great men that we can look to, be inspired by, and learn lessons from.
You would not be reading this right now if it were not for the heroic actions of one such great man who was moved by God’s grace. It seems to me there is little doubt that the good Archbishop Lefebvre is perhaps the giant of the century in terms of what his actions have meant for the salvation of souls.
The man I am writing about here, however, was not a Catholic. He was an Orthodox Christian from Russia, and he provided a different kind of lesson to us, a lesson which we again need while everyone else is forgetting the basics. Just as the good Archbishop looms in the Church as a lesson of faith and perseverance, so Alexander Solzhenitsyn looms above the rest of literary men in the 20th century as an example of what literature should be and how it can be used for a great good. But beyond the literary aspects, beyond an example simply as a man, he gave us very important lessons which we all need to remember.
Let me make a connection and explain why, in some sense, it is appropriate for Catholics to learn about this man. Although he was not a Catholic, the fact that he was a believer at all is astonishing once you hear his story. But there is an overwhelming important fact that we Catholics know about.
He was a Russian. There is little doubt that the history of what happened in the 20th century in terms of what went on in the world—and also what went on in the Church—is connected with that country for some mysterious reason. We cannot say for certain why God chose Russia in the 20th century to assume such incredible importance in terms of the salvation of souls, the situation in the Church, and most particularly, the future of mankind. But we know it to be a fact. We know it from the very simple reason that God sent His Blessed Mother to give us this message. It is very clear that many of the great problems of the 20th century are connected with the world’s refusal to listen carefully to what God had to say through His Blessed Mother about the country of Russia.
What do we know? One, we have been told by this most reliable of sources that Russia would spread Her errors throughout the world—words spoken at Fatima in 1917 before the Russian Revolution. That Revolution took place in October; the warning was given beforehand. It’s very clear that, at the time, anyone clear-sighted who heard that message could have looked at what happened and would have known, without any question, that the message was accurate. The trouble started immediately.
There has been much speculation about what those errors to be spread about the world were. I would state it very simply: When the Communists took control in Mother Russia, they introduced and forced on the population the two principal ideas connected with the communist system. The first idea is atheism, for the communist system is not possible without a denial of God. The Communist-Marxist system sees man simply as a creature of economics; man exists in the world as a worker, and his principal concerns are economic ones. If he works, is fed by the State, and has his basic needs provided for, this system would create paradise on earth—since there is no other Paradise according to the communist system. Therefore it is essential that any steps necessary to ensure that Paradise is achieved here in this world be taken. To them, this is all there is.
Of course, that is a great lie. We know for a fact that man is not an economic creature. He is a creature with a soul; this is what makes all the difference! The first important fact is Communism’s insistence on atheism. And this error has been spread throughout the world. The 20th century was a century in which faith was lost. It was lost, to a greater or lesser degree, along the lines of, “If you improve social conditions in the world, you will make for happier human beings.” The 20th century proved that thesis false. All you have to do to see what really happens to human beings is to see what happened when Russia became the Soviet Union. It is a great lie, it is a huge error—and we were told that.
But that error now is everywhere. Every time a voice is raised which says, “No, no, you must feed them first,” “You must improve their housing,” “It is most important that social conditions are improved; then we shall worry about their souls,” you are hearing that error spread again. It is an error that clearly comes from Communism, which we were told.
Of course, bad thinking was everywhere. But what did we get from the Soviet Union? We had before us a model that showed not simply how wrong that idea was, but how demonic it is when put into practice. And the world ignored it. The world didn’t care. To this day, in spite of the fact that after 80-90 years of experiment with this absurd idea, which fails everywhere it is tried, it is still the principle idea put forward in many American and European universities. The idea, the error, will not go away...yet.
The second error: If you believe that man is simply an economic creature, that his well-being has to do with comfort in this world, by extension you will certainly be a materialist. If atheism is the first error, materialism is the second. This second error again begins with a false understanding of man which suggests we are simply organisms living in an environment, that we are simply the accidental result of a bunch of chemicals–glop in a pond, struck by lightning–which created a living thing that crawled out of the pond, and suddenly: tangerines and string quartets. This is an absolutely absurd notion. Nevertheless, this is what is believed. But it is an error that has been spread throughout the world as the Blessed Mother warned it would be.
If you begin with a misunderstanding, a false impression, of what man is, it obviously is extended to the world in which man lives and how man lives in this world. Then you are back to the error: “What do I need to live in this world? Some food, shelter, etc. Then I will be happy.” This is a ridiculous and absurd idea.
We have also seen what happens when, unlike the Soviet Union (a materialistic state in which there was no material because the economic system was so absurd), we live in an economic state where, for some peculiar reason, having to do with some measure of economic freedom but also an insane Puritanical work ethic and an insane capacity for greed and overproduction–and probably a whole lot of support from the devil himself–there is so much material we are awash in it.
Acquiring the simple basics—food, shelter, etc.–just wasn’t enough: “I needed to have an addition on my home.” “I needed a car to get to work.” “I needed a second car for the wife.” “I needed a third car for the kids.” Then a fourth, fifth and sixth. Then, “I needed a car for the dog.” And suddenly: “I needed that TV set.” Then, “I needed a TV set for the bedroom too so I can go to sleep watching it.” Then, “I needed a TV set downstairs for when I am working downstairs.” “I need a TV set in the bathroom.” And then you have a house full of TV sets. And then the VCR came along: “Great! I can tape shows on different sets.” Then you need a computer, then two computers, a DVD player, etc. It is an insane explosion.
The one thing we know, from this overabundance of material is that materialism does not produce happiness. It’s the oldest cliché in the world, but I will utter it again because one can’t say it too often: Those who are very rich are not more happy. In fact, some of the most miserable people on earth are the ones who are rolling in wealth. Why should that be? Because materialism and the idea of materialism being our end in this world is an error.
If indeed we were simply here for material comfort and happiness, everyone in America today should be as happy as a clam. There should be such happiness that there should be daily festivals of people simply jumping up and down, exclaiming, “Goodie, goodie! Look how happy we are! We have everything anyone could ever want!” I don’t see much of this going on. As “the market” goes higher and higher and people acquire more and more “money,” they assume they will have more and more money as time goes on: I’ve seen surveys that show most college graduates believe they will be millionaires by the time they are 30. This is an error. Even if they are—even if it were 100%–they are not going to be content. Man is not a material creature, not simply an organism in an environment. We cannot be satisfied thus.
These are the two huge errors. I could chronicle countless others that come from it. But what is Communism? It is atheistic materialism. These are the errors the world has bought into. Our Blessed Mother said at Fatima that Russia would spread them. And they are everywhere now.
The second thing is that we know very well, because again the message was very clear and came from God through the Blessed Mother, that Russia must be consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart. It seems like an arbitrary request. Why not Romania? Or Paraguay? Why not Korea? Well, on occasion, God gives arbitrary commands. And these arbitrary orders are often to see whether mankind will be obedient: Why can’t we eat the fruit from that tree? Why not another tree? Why not a different tree in the Garden? But the command was very direct: “You shall not eat of the fruit of that tree.” In the same way, last century, the command came: “You will consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” Just as the first command was ignored, we know that the other imperative command has been ignored. We also have been told that the consecration will be done—though it will be late. Russia will be converted; her Immaculate Heart will triumph; and a period of peace will be granted to mankind. We have been told this. We know it will happen.
Russia dominates the 20th century. In a sense, because it is playing that special role in God’s plan, Russia should have our special attention. God prepared the world for this special attention by granting certain special gifts to certain Russians over the last at least two centuries, because in this time-frame, at least in literary terms, Russia has been the place “where it’s happening, man.”
Consider the sudden emergence of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, etc. There has been an explosion of literary talent in this one area of the world. It has grabbed the attention of many people. Some of them have been saying quite extraordinary things, especially Dostoevsky. Consider his book The Brothers Karamazov. The book and its message have to do with the soul, with what happens when you deny God, that love is more important and final, ultimately, than certain intellectual falsehoods. Finally, it has to do with the importance of suffering: “The world is soaked, from the crust to the core, with the tears of mankind.” An extraordinary statement. You won’t hear this in many other places.
Out of this tradition, in our time, I believe God sent a special voice on a special mission which I don’t believe is completed yet. Here he is; he looms over the 20th century; he was a great man. His name is Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
He was born in 1918: an interesting year for him to come into the world, one year after Fatima and the Russian Revolution. What happens to this child? He is born in the Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. His father, an artillery officer in the Russian military who served honorably in the First World War, was killed in an accident six months before his birth. He thus came into the world a year after the Revolution and fatherless. There is no man there to guide him. If you consider only these two circumstances, one has a sense that nothing was possible there. His mother was a good woman who supported herself and her son as a typist. She worked hard and loved her son very much.
Of course, there were few choices in the matter. When he was sent off to school, he was sent to Communist school. What was he taught? Atheistic materialism. It was hammered into his head the same way that nonsense is hammered into students in American public schools today. The point of the modern school is not education but the hammering of nonsense into a young person’s head. It happened to him. And he became a good, upstanding member of the Party. This was all he knew; it was what he taught. And he believed it along with most people around him. Since it was met with a kind of greatness of soul that would show itself later, he bought into it with some measure of passion and devotion: it had be true.
He had an interest in being a writer from an early age. He made some small experiments, trying creative writing, but it became clear, as it is clear most places in the world now, that it is very difficult to make a living as a writer—unless you write junk. If you write junk, you can be very successful, especially if you’re one of the lucky ones whose junk will be promoted; therefore you become one of those very wealthy sorts. But if your junk isn’t promoted, you become one of those writers who simply writes junk and makes no money. And then you have to do something else. In any case, there was no money in it.
He himself said that, as a practical step, he graduated from Rostov University in 1941. He was there for just a few years prior. By training, he was a mathematician and a physicist. As he himself said, it was the Providence of God at work. If he pursued writing from the beginning, he would have earned some attention as such. If he hadn’t had the mathematical background—which he was very good at—he would not, during the years he was in the Gulag, have been sent to a very special, cushy camp with other scientists and mathematicians because they knew he was smart and wanted his brain to be put to use. Thus, he had to be kept alive. As he said, “Had I been just another writer, I would have been just another corpse in the Gulag. God, in His providential wisdom, got me to the university and trained me as a mathematician.” This eventually saved his life. He made it through the camps.
He did, however, take a correspondence course in literature from Moscow University. Nothing came of this; when he graduated in 1941, the war was on. He was a healthy young man so he was off to the army to follow his father’s footsteps. As his father had been an artillery officer in the First World War, Solzhenitsyn became an artillery officer in the Second World War. He rose to the level of Captain.
He was married at the time and had to leave his wife behind during the War. He was very successful militarily; he received two decorations, was put in charge of a company of men, and was well-liked by both his men and the other officers.
But then one day it hit. He had written a letter to a close friend in which he criticized Joseph Stalin They had heard a speech of his on the radio the night before. Solzhenitsyn had a disagreement with something Stalin had said and mentioned it. When friends of Papa Joe are reading your mail, and you dare to criticize the Big Cheese, you’re in trouble.
He found himself with an eight-year prison sentence slapped on him. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced. Remember, to this point he was an absolutely devoted Party member. He had never questioned anything. So these events came as a complete shock. It also came as a kind of wake-up call that something unusual was going on, for he realized the punishment far outweighed the “crime.” You must understand that, during these years, sentences were handed out in the most unusual manner. Let me give you a vignette of the astonishing story of another arrest from Volume I of The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn:
A district Party conference was underway in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). The small hall echoed with “stormy applause, rising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin. However, who would be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD [an earlier version of the KGB] men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first. And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on–six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly–but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them? The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter...
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a business-like expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.
That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed the Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:
“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”1
It’s almost as if Solzhenitsyn got more justice—at least he criticized the Leader. Needless to say, to be arrested for open criticism of Stalin in a letter makes some sense. But if we’re talking about arrests, here is a quick summary of some other reasons for arrest, to give you a sense of what those years were like:
A tailor, laying aside his needle, stuck it into a newspaper on the wall so it wouldn’t get lost. He happened to stick it in the eye of Kaganovich, one of the leaders. A customer observed it. Article 58, 10 years for terrorism.
A saleswoman accepting merchandise from a forwarder, noted down on a sheet of newspaper—there was no other paper around—a number of pieces of soap happened to fall on the forehead of Comrade Stalin: Article 58, 10 years.
A tractor driver of the Znamenka machinery and tractor station, lined his thin shoes for warmth with a pamphlet about the candidate for elections to the Supreme Soviet, but a charwoman noticed it was missing and found it: KRA (Counter-Revolutionary Agitation), 10 years.
The village club manager went with his watchman to buy a bust of Comrade Stalin. They bought it; it was large and heavy. They ought to have carried it in a hand-barrow, both of them together, but the manager’s status did not allow it. They tried to carry it themselves but couldn’t arrange a feasible way to do so. Eventually, the watchman took off his belt, tied a noose around Stalin’s neck and carried it over his back through the village. There was nothing to argue about here, an open-and-shut case: terrorism, 10 years.
A sailor sold an Englishman a Katyusha cigarette lighter, a wick and a piece of pipe with a striking wheel, as a souvenir, for one pound sterling: Subversion of the Motherland’s Dignity, Article 58, 10 years.
A shepherd, in a fit of anger, swore at one of his cows for not obeying him, “You collective farm slut!” Article 58 and a term.
A deaf and dumb carpenter got a term for KRA. He was laying floors in a club. Everything had been removed from the big hall; there was neither a nail nor a hook anywhere. While he was working, he hung his jacket and his service cap on a bust of Lenin. Someone came in and saw it. Article 58, 10 years.
Some children in a collective farm club got out of hand and had a fight. They accidentally knocked a poster off the wall with their backs. The two eldest were sentenced under Article 58 on the basis of the Decree of 1935: Children from the age of 12 had full criminal responsibility for all crimes. The parents were also sentenced for having allegedly told them to do so and having sent the children to do it.
A 16-year-old Chuvash schoolboy made a mistake in Russian in a slogan in a wall newspaper. It was not his native language. Article 58, 5 years.
In a state-farm bookkeeping office, there was a slogan hung on the wall: “Life has become better. Life has become more happy.–Stalin.” Someone added a letter in red pencil to Stalin’s name, making it read: “Life has become more happy for Stalin.” They didn’t look for the guilty party; they sentenced the whole bookkeeping office.
Nonsensical? Fantastical? Senseless? It is not at all meaningless, for that is exactly what terror as a means of persuasion is. There’s an old proverb: Beat the crow and beat the raven and in the end, you’ll get the white swan. In other words, keep on beating one after another for eventually you will hit what you need. The primary meaning of mass terror lies precisely in this: even the strong and well-hidden who could never be simply ferreted out, will be caught and perish.
The stories are simply unbelievable. In any case, he was sentenced and found himself in a world he had never dreamed of. He entered the Gulag Archipelago, as he himself named it. “Gulag” is simply an acronym in Russian. In English, it is “The Soviet Union Labor Prison System.” It referred to the system of hundreds and hundreds of slave labor camps which were built throughout Siberia. Solzhenitsyn used the acronym and came up with the image of them like an archipelago which is a string of islands that go on forever. So the image is of the slave labor camps stretching across Siberia like a group of tiny islands, one after another. Hence the title The Gulag Archipelago.
He hadn’t known it existed. There had been rumors. People came to hear about it; they knew people were disappearing by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands—and not coming back. They had to go somewhere. But now he saw it first-hand. Curiously, one bright idea that the Soviet officials came up with in order to prevent rebellion in the camps ended up backfiring on them because of Solzhenitsyn.
The idea was this: They would not leave one prisoner in one camp for their full term. They were continually shuffling prisoners. It was a clever idea. It meant the prisoners never had a chance to organize fully and rebel. You would be with a group of people for a while, but then some would leave and new ones would come—and then you would be sent somewhere else. What this meant, however, was that Solzhenitsyn, during his years in the Gulag, going from camp to camp, spoke to more and more people, learning their stories. How did they get there? What were their lives like? What did they go through?
He remembered everything. Another great blessing that God gave him was a phenomenal memory. It was unbelievable. As an example, he decided early on that in order to maintain his sanity while he was in the Gulag, he would write an epic poem. It was called Prussian Nights. He would compose in his head 10-25 lines every day and memorize it. It was never written down. The next day he would compose another 10-25 lines and add it to the lines of the previous day. When he was finally released from the Gulag, he wrote the poem down. It is thousands of lines long. He had simply memorized it, not writing it down until his prison term was over.
Only a phenomenal memory can do that. That memory also served to grab hold of all the details and stories he heard. He began to realize that everything he had been told and taught about his native country–its history, its beliefs, how people should be treated, the ideals, high vision and glories of those in charge and the leadership—was nothing but a pack of lies. His eyes were opened. He began to understand that what was really happening in his country was one of the most horrendous, abominable attacks on a body of civilians in the history of the world. His country was not the place he had hoped or come to believe it was (a great nation with an idealistic vision), but it was simply barbaric. He refers to the whole century as “the Caveman’s Century.” This is an appropriate designation.
He came to understand the 20th century by his years in the Gulag. But here’s the curiosity: along the way, as he looked at the people he met and learned how they survived, he became a believer. He lost his disbelief. He lost his strong atheistic faith. He came to believe not only that there was a God in heaven but that the story he learned from those in the camps—of the Incarnation of Christ, His suffering, sacrifice, and Resurrection—was true.
1 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, tr. Thomas P. Whitney (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), I, 69-70.
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