The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Sheridan Voysey of Our Daily Bread Ministries writes that “A woman once told me about a disagreement that was tearing her church apart.  ‘What’s the disagreement about?’ I asked.  ‘Whether the earth is flat,’ she said.  A few months later, news broke of a Christian man who’d burst into a restaurant, armed, to rescue children supposedly being abused in its back room.  There was no back room, and the man was arrested.  In both cases, the people involved were acting on conspiracy theories they’d read on the internet.”  He concluded that “Since such information can split churches and put lives at risk, checking facts is an act of loving our neighbor.  When a sensational story comes our way, we can verify its claims with qualified, accountable experts, being truth seekers—not error spreaders.  Such an act brings credibility to the gospel.”  On both the progressive left and the paranoid-laden right, conspiracy theories abound.  Such conspiracy theories have generated hate, discord and violence.  Tragically, many in the church follow these conspiracy theories and adopt them as truth.  But, the church is to stand for and promote truth, not gossip and error.

This trend, even among Christians, to accept conspiracy theories as fact and pass them on to others as truth has caused me to think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008).  His courage and his honest appraisal of the Soviet Union and of American civilization reflected a commitment to truth, integrity, not conspiracy theories and disinformation.  Born in 1918, Solzhenitsyn was raised Russian Orthodox, but converted to Marxism-Leninism in a Soviet school.  Trained as a scientist, he was drafted into the Russian army in 1941 to fight Hitler.  By 1945, he was a captain.  In a private letter to a school friend, he referred to the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, as the “mustachioed one.”  The secret police got the letter and he was thrown into a concentration camp for eight years.  This horrific federal prison system was called the Gulag.  There Solzhenitsyn was challenged by Christians who maintained their faith in such barbaric conditions.  That faith challenged his atheism.  In the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn came to faith in Christ.  He began “writing in his head” about this barbarism.  In 1953, the Soviets released him and he began to write about the Gulag’s horrors.  His famous One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a typical day in the Gulag, based on his own experience.  “The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” published 50 years ago, was much more than a detailed account compiled from the testimonies of hundreds of people; it was also arguably the 20th century’s greatest piece of nonfiction prose.  [In 1970, he was awarded the Noble Prize for literature.]  His multi-volume The Gulag Archipelago documented communism’s brutality that led to the slaughter of millions with dimensions on par with the Nazi Holocaust—the Bolshevik Revolution led to over 60 million deaths.  He was openly challenging the Soviet state. Thus, in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his citizenship and banished from the Soviet Union; he took up residence in Vermont.

Gary Saul Morson, professor of Slavic Languages at Northwestern University, has written a superb reflection on the 50th anniversary of the Gulag’s original publication.  “Today the word ‘gulag’ is often used figuratively, but in the Soviet Union the Gulag—an acronym designating the system of forced labor camps—was all too real. Millions of people lived and died in the Gulag’s many ‘islands,’ the camps scattered over the vast country. The worst were located in the Kolyma region in northeastern Siberia, where prisoners labored at 50, 60, even 70 degrees below zero and were given insufficient calories to sustain life.”

• “Dedicated to ‘all those who did not live’ to tell their story, The Gulag Archipelago demonstrates a nadir of humanity with nearly unfathomable cruelty. In one memorable passage, Solzhenitsyn muses that if the intellectuals of Chekhov’s plays who wondered what things would be like in a few decades had learned ‘that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath . . . that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot . . . not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.’  Those who had admitted some of the horrors often blamed them entirely on Stalin, as if Lenin would not have done such things, but, Solzhenitsyn demonstrates, Lenin set up the system of terror and the Gulag while making clear that both were to be permanent features of the new regime. To those Westerners who imagine that this bizarre system of punishment could not happen in their country, Solzhenitsyn cautions: ‘Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.’”
• “How was such evil possible? Shakespeare and Schiller clearly did not grasp evil, Solzhenitsyn instructs, because their villains ‘recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black,’ but those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains stopped at a few corpses ‘because they had no ideology,’ nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s ‘scientific’ and infallible explanations of life and ethics. ‘Ideology—that is what . . . gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good . . . in his own and others’ eyes.’
• “The Gulag Archipelago is not only history, but also autobiography chronicling how the author changed. In the Gulag he encountered the ‘great fork’ of prison life: Does one choose ‘to survive at any price,’ including at the expense of others? ‘From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. . . . If you go to the right, you lose your life, and if you go to the left, you lose your conscience’ . . . When Solzhenitsyn arrived at this conclusion, he also recognized the evil in himself. His sense of life was completely transformed. He learned forgiveness and discovered what true friendship is. Above all, he came to understand ‘how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful success I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel.’   But in prison Solzhenitsyn gradually realized the fundamental falsity of ideological thinking: the idea that evil results from bad people, and it is only necessary to rid ourselves of them. Not at all. ‘The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.’  Having grasped this truth, Solzhenitsyn arrived at another—‘the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being).’  Amazingly enough, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ becomes an optimistic story about a soul’s rebirth. ‘I nourished my soul there,’ Solzhenitsyn concludes, ‘and I say without hesitation: ‘Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!’”

On 8 June 1978, Solzhenitsyn was invited to address Harvard University.  He entitled his address, “A World Split Apart.”  He chastised the West for abandoning its Christian heritage, which had been its moral compass for centuries.  The West had not lost God to tyranny, but had abandoned Him to materialism and decadence.

• “Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counterbalanced by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.”
• “. . . in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.  State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th Century.”

Solzhenitsyn wrote graphically of the horrors of Soviet totalitarianism.  His writing and moral leadership helped bring down the Soviet Union.  But his critique of the West, with its democratic heritage sourced in Christianity, was not spared.  He demonstrated the need for the Christianity’s ethical standards and personal morality for a democratic order to work.  We have not heeded his challenge.

See Our Daily Bread for 8 May 2023; Gary Saul Morson, “’The Gulag Archipelago’: An Epic of True Evil” in the Wall Street Journal (6-7 May 2023); Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address is accessible at www.AmericanRhetoric.com  (Created 12/18/21).