Solzhenitsyn on evil

I'm a little surprised that with the death of Solzhenitsyn having occurred so recently, a death most politically aware people had to have noted, that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain thought to incorporate some of Solzhenitsyn's classic statement in the Gulag Archipelago when they answered Rick Warren on whether there is such a thing as evil:

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.

Instead of acknowledging this likelihood, which as nearly as I can understand it is close to the heart of Christianity properly understood, they defined evil as something somebody else does -- and in McCain's case especially, as something to make one angry. But isn't anger itself at least a shortcoming?

More on Solzhenitsyn

Here's the Register's editorial on the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. According to good Misesian theory the Soviet Union had to collapse eventually because without a price system it couldn't allocate resources intelligently, and by the early '80s I was convinced that its collapse was inevitable whatever the U.S. did or didn't do. Such a theory doesn't predict when such a collapse will happen, however, and doesn't rule out the possibility of events and individuals who might speed up or slow down the process.

I think Solzhenitsyn sped up the process, especially with the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago." (So did Vladimir Bukovsky, whom I met and instantly liked when he spent time at Stanford in the 1980s.) For whatever reason -- maybe it was the Nobel Prize and the literary quality of "Gulag" helped-- in the early 1970s Solzhenitsyn had enormous credibility with western intellectuals, including some who had been more inclined to be critical of anti-communists than communists. Maybe they were just ready to abandon the old dreams of a worker's paradise, or maybe the system was looking creaky. But they paid attention to Solzhenitsyn (it was later, after he took up residence in the U.S. and started criticizing its moral emptiness, etc., that many became disenchanted). And Solzhenitsyn was shrewd; he understood the system from the ground up, and knew just what he could demand, and the Nobel gave him protection from returning to the camps or an arranged death. So they eventually just got rid of him.

Here are a few more remembrances, from the WSJ, from WaPo's Peter Finn and Robert Kaiser, from Chistopher Hitchens, and Serge Schmemann, and Anne Applebaum.

Solzhenitsyn mattered

I did an editorial on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died over the weekend, that will be in tomorrow's (well, today's) Register. The gist was that while writers may cherish the slogan that the pen is mightier than the sword, deep down we know that's very seldom true. But Solzhenitsyn's pen was mightier than the Soviet state, which was one reason they had to exile him. And then he outlived Sovietism, which a lot of Russian exiles didn't.

It developed, of course, that Solzhenitsyn was something of a traditional Orthodox Russian nationalist rather than a liberal democrat or libertarian, with perhaps a too-tolerant relationship to anti-Semitism, which turned a lot of people off. Still, he was a literary giant and he played a pivotal role in the end of communism.

I was in the same room with him only once, shortly after he came to the U.S. around 1974 -- maybe it was '75 when he was invited to a reception at the U.S. Senate -- and famously not invited to the White House on Kissinger's advice. I was working for Rep. Bob Bauman of Maryland at the time, and fellow staffer Ron Docksai (a former YAF national chairman) and I wanted to see Solzhenitsyn, so we walked over to the Senate. But the reception was only for members of Congress and a few other select invitees. Fortunately, along the way we got to talking with Rev. Robert Drinan, the famously left-wing Rep. from Massachusetts, and when we got to the event he said "they're with me" and we got in.

But the room was further divided, with only MCs allowed on the side where Solzhenitsyn was. I had brought along my copy of the novel,"The First Circle"with the idea of getting it autographed, but I couldn't get to where the author was. So I asked then-Sen. John Culver of Iowa, (another left-wing Democrat) if he would get it done, which he did. I think he was pleased because he was able to present a book that had obviously been read rather than having been bought new that morning, creating the impression that he read books (which most politicians don't do). And Solzhenitsyn looked pleased to see a copy of his book that had obviously been read.

Alas, when my first wife and I divorced, she kept the book, saying the autograph was just rare enough (it said U.S. Senate and the date, and there weren't more than a few other books autographed at that event) that it might put the kids through college if she decided to sell it. I don't know if she ever did or not.