Solzhenitsyn the anti-politician

In the December issue of Chronicles magazine, Lee Congdon writes about Solzhenitsyn’s skepticism of politics as a cure-all for social ills.

“As he was conducting research for the third novel in The Red Wheel cycle at the Hoover Institution and elsewhere, Solzhenitsyn, to his surprise, arrived at a highly critical view of Russia’s Provisional Government that had come to power in the wake of the February Revolution of 1917, which he had once viewed with favor. For most Western historians, that revolution was a glorious, if short-lived, event in Russia’s history—the fall of the autocracy and the establishment of a liberal-democratic government. Solzhenitsyn viewed it as an anarchic catastrophe that paved the way for the Bolshevik coup d’état. His unsparing account of the first days of revolutionary turmoil has a contemporary ring.

As he writes in the series’ third book, March 1917, on the first day of that doomed revolution, a “craze began of smashing shop windows and ravaging, even looting shops.” On the third day, “The crowd started throwing empty bottles at the police.” Later that month the mob chased down and attacked police officers without mercy, shouting:

‘Beat them, grind them to sausage…with whatever’s handy—sticks, rifle butts, bayonets, stones, boots to the ear, heads on the pavement, break their bones, stomp them, trample them…. We don’t want to live with police anymore. We want to live in total freedom!’

Later still, “Each inhabitant of the capital…was left to fend for himself. Released criminals and the urban rabble were doing as they pleased.” Functional democracy, Solzhenitsyn observed, demands a high level of political discipline. “But this is precisely what we lacked in 1917, and one fears that there is even less of it today.”

As a political realist, however, Solzhenitsyn recognized that democracy was likely to be Russia’s future. He had read Tocqueville who believed, with regret, that democracy was the West’s destiny. “The whole flow of modern history,” the Russian wrote, “will unquestionably predispose us to choose democracy.” Yet democracy had been elevated “from a particular state structure into a sort of universal principle of human existence, almost a cult.”

For Solzhenitsyn, democracy was far from being a universal principle. Like Tocqueville, he looked for ways to mitigate its likely excesses. “We choose [democracy] in full awareness of its faults and with the intention of seeking ways to overcome them.” He did develop a sympathy for democracy at the local level, what he called “the democracy of small areas,” in part because he remembered the zemstva, those promising organs of rural self-government established in 1864 during the age of the Great Reforms under Tsar Alexander II, which had been replaced by the Bolsheviks with Soviet collectives.

Solzhenitsyn also recalled with pleasure the time he witnessed an election in the Swiss canton of Appenzell. Officials there spoke of individual freedoms linked to self-limitation, which Solzhenitsyn regarded as essential to responsible political and personal conduct. Freedom, in his view, had less to do with an external lack of restraint than with internal self-control. Based upon his experience in the gulag, he knew that “we can firmly assert our inner freedom even in an environment that is externally unfree.””