Solzhenitsyn at 100. Daniel Mahoney writes:
[Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn wrote with “lucid understanding,” and with no small dose of scorn, about the “Progressive Doctrine,” the inhuman ideology that justified terror and tyranny as no regime or ideological movement had ever justified the killing and repression of real or imagined “enemies of the People.” He showed that the heart of Bolshevism lay in a monstrous coming together of violence and lies that gave rise not to mere dictatorship but to a totalitarianism that transformed betrayal and lying into “forms of existence.” This totalitarianism demanded fierce resistance, both for the sake of liberty and for the right of the human soul to breathe freely, with the dignity afforded it by God.
Solzhenitsyn would become the most eloquent critic of ideological revolution, the “vain hope that revolution can improve human nature,” as he said in the Vendée in the fall of 1993. He saw many affinities between the French and Russian revolutions, not least the shared hope that revolution could transform human nature and regenerate the human race. Instead, Solzhenitsyn stood for repentance and self-limitation, and for a conception of self-government (beginning with the arts of local liberty) that emphasized the importance of civic virtue. Here he was indebted to Tocqueville, to the zemstvos or nineteenth century Russian provincial and local councils, and to the experience of local liberty that he witnessed (and admired) during his western exile in Switzerland and New England between 1974 and 1994. He spoke with admiration for such local liberty in his farewell to the people of Cavendish, Vermont, on February 28, 1994. It was a tradition of liberty from the bottom up much needed in contemporary Russia, he observed. […]
In 1998’s Russia in Collapse, he forcefully attacked “radical nationalism…the elevation of one’s nationality above our higher spiritual plank, above our humble stance before heaven.” And he never ceased castigating so-called Russian nationalists, who preferred “a small-minded alliance with [Russia’s] destroyers” (the Communists or Bolsheviks). He loved his country but loved truth and justice more. But as Solzhenitsyn stated with great eloquence in the Nobel Lecture, “nations are the wealth of mankind, its generalized personalities.” He did not support the leveling of nations in the name of cosmopolitanism or of a pagan nationalism that forgot that all nations remain under the judgment of God and the moral law. In this regard, Solzhenitsyn combines patriotism with moderation or self-limitation.
[Daniel J. Mahoney, “Solzhenitsyn: A Centential Tribute,” City Journal, December 9]
