Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn On Free Will, Evil and Suffering
“The line separating good and evil passes… right through every human heart.”
In The Gulag Archipelago, the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exposes the horrific crimes perpetrated by the Soviet State against its own citizens in the special labour camps, or Gulags, between 1918 and 1956. Part-documentary and part-autobiography, the book consists of legal documents, interviews with witnesses and autobiographical accounts of Solzhenitsyn’s own journey from imprisonment, through interrogation, hard-labour and his eventual exile. Solzhenitsyn would go on to be awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.
Some have dubbed Solzhenitsyn as the man who took down the Soviet Union, and whilst the causes for its downfall were myriad, his book certainly had a part to play in the downfall of the regime. Moreover, the book holds a distinguished spot in the rich history of Russian prison literature alongside works such as Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, House Of The Dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Georgi Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan.
The work contains many philosophical meditations on evil, suffering, free will and the human condition more widely. It is these passages which this article will focus upon.
Solzhenitsyn expounds a worldview that is borne of suffering and deeply rooted in an Orthodox Christian Faith. First and foremost, Solzhenitsyn assumes that humans possess free will. A byproduct of this belief in free-will is that we have a responsibility to use this wisely. As Viktor Frankyl once wittily remarked:
“Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West coast”.
As such, he argues that man can rise above his circumstances and make choices in response to external factors. For example, he posits that many of those who became corrupted in the Gulags (resorting to theft and murder for instance), did so because they did not fortify themselves in freedom:
“Those people became corrupted in camp who had already been corrupted out in freedom or who were ready for it… if a person went swiftly bad in camp, what it might mean is that inner foulness which had not previously been needed disclosed itself.”
This is a particularly high standard to set for human beings, and in reality, to stand by one’s principles in the Gulags almost guaranteed death; the price of one’s principles was often their life. As Viktor Frankyl mourned after his own release from Auschwitz:
“On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles — whatever one may choose to call them — we know: the best of us did not return.”
Nonetheless, Solzhenitsyn would likely retort by quoting Matthew 16:26:
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
By extension, Solzhenitsyn goes on to dismiss the “pitiful ideology” which states that men are made for happiness. Instead, Solzhenitsyn argues that our purpose in life is to develop our souls enough that our principles can withstand even the pressures of a prison camp. One could almost make a rule of life from his writings which would state: “Always be prepared for suffering, and make sure you are worthy of your suffering when it comes.” The ultimate human achievement, according to this worldview, is putting your principles above your life. It is extreme, but admirable.
Moreover, Solzhenitsyn’s belief that making “happiness” the ultimate goal of life is shallow and misguided is hard to argue against. Furthermore, there is certainly something to be said about how suffering can deepen someone’s soul and bring about a profound shift for the better in someone also.
Interestingly, Solzhenitsyn does not see his imprisonment as a meaningless and cruel injustice, but even feels a sense of debt to the experience. One of the inheritances of his long and unjust internment in the Gulags that Solzhenitsyn was most grateful for is that it helped him to understand “how a human becomes evil and how good”. After eight years under the oppressive rule of the guards and criminals who tormented political prisoners like Solzhenitsyn, he concluded:
“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 human 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.”
He goes on:
“It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person”.
This view of evil emphasises individual responsibility and suggests that we must change the world one person at a time, starting with ourselves. By implication of this belief, Solzhenitsyn criticises all Revolutions in history, arguing that the great uprisings merely destroyed the contemporary carriers of evil (and often the carriers of good too in the process). This is because Revolutions identify whole classes of people as evil, whereas in reality “the rift dividing good from evil” runs through all individual human beings. Years before, Viktor Frankyl noted the same truth in the Nazi concentration camps, and concluded:
“Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn… Both (decent men and indecent men) are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society… no group is of ‘pure race’”.
Solzhenitsyn, despite being unjustly imprisoned and harassed each day by sadistic guards, reflected upon his own historical wrongdoings. Whilst he accepted he was innocent of the crime he was imprisoned for, he concluded that he was not innocent according to his own conscience or in relation to others. He pictured himself prior to imprisonment as a soldier in the Red Army, marching through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and asked himself: “So were we any better?”.
It is because of this realisation, brought about by his unjust imprisonment, that he exclaims to the astonishment of the reader:
“Bless you, prison, for having been in my life”.
This awareness of his own historical cruelty fuelled a spiritual awakening, hence why he is grateful to prison; it ripened his soul so to speak, forcing a self-evaluation of his past-life. This is a common theme in The Gulag Archipelago and Classic Russian literature more generally; that suffering is an education which can cleanse the soul. Let us refer to this as The School Of Suffering. Interestingly, when he ponders what motivated him to do evil in the past, he concludes:
“In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel… In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good”.
According to Solzhenitsyn, an awareness of your own capacity for evil can be a great motivator to resist future wrongdoing. On the contrary, self-righteousness can be the ultimate corrupting influence. This goes some way to explaining the age-old paradox that the greatest saints believe they are sinners, whilst the greatest sinners believe they are saints. According to Solzhenitsyn, those who believe they are free of evil are likely the ones most susceptible to it.
This is a powerful observation we could all benefit from hearing. In short, we would do well to change ourselves before changing the world; to take the log out of our own eyes before taking the specks out of our brothers. It brings to mind the quote by Leo Tolstoy that:
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
To change ourselves we must realise that something is wrong- we must stop seeing evil doers as monsters of a different kind to us, and start seeing our own capacity for evil. This brings to mind the wisdom of the fictional sleuth-priest Father Brown, who notes:
“There are two ways of renouncing the devil… One is to have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it because he is so near.”
If you have not read The Gulag Archipelago, I would strongly suggest you buy a copy immediately. Whether you share his beliefs or not, Solzhenitsyn was a servant of truth who fought against the Soviet Regime and lived to see it’s downfall. The Gulag Archipelago powerfully reveals the reality of living in the Kafkaesque world of Soviet Russia where innocence was no hindrance to a ten year sentence of hard labour and paranoia ruled supreme. As George Santayana’s aphorism reminds us: “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”. The book also espouses a powerful philosophy which see’s meaning in suffering and urges us to examine our own lives deeply.
