Two Regimes without Civic Courage: Solzhenitsyn’s the Red Wheel
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Read Scott Yenor’s very astute review essay on the various volumes of The Red Wheel by the political scientist Scott Yenor in Perspectives on Political Science (vol. 50 [2021], no. 2), concentrating on political and historical themes within the novel.
“Modern ideologies spawn fanatics like Lenin, Stalin, and the Bolsheviks—who do what it takes to survive and maintain (as Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago attests). These four nodes lay bare the other side of the coin, why those opposed to such fanatics could not rally. Ideological ruthlessness cannot be opposed with mere assertions of comity and reasoned discourse or appeals to free speech or even appeals to constitutionalism. Fanatics go from the “dry terror” of slander, de-legitimizing, un-personing, and arousing the worst suspicions about their fellow citizens to the “bloody terror,” to use the French historian Auguste Cochin’s formulation. As Stolypin knew, fire must be stopped with something hot, if not fire. Evil must be resisted by force and not simply with good intentions. In these nodes, Solzhenitsyn depicts the paralyzing loss of the will to adapt and to survive in the tsar’s regime and the equally troubling inability of false liberals to conserve what is good in old orders in the face of ferocious ideological action. The Red Wheel shows not only the crisis of the tsarist regime, but also the crisis of a civilization losing its “civil courage” (to take from Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address). The Red Wheel depicts that crisis, which is ours too, in all its depth and complexity. Reading such tomes may be as indispensable as ever.”
