WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.279 Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are not 00:00:03.279 --> 00:00:05.960 just opening a history book, we're really prying 00:00:05.960 --> 00:00:09.720 open a case file on what you could call a geopolitical 00:00:09.720 --> 00:00:12.240 earthquake, all contained within the life of 00:00:12.240 --> 00:00:14.140 a single person. That's a great way to put it. 00:00:14.240 --> 00:00:16.879 We're talking about a figure who didn't just 00:00:16.879 --> 00:00:19.420 document the 20th century. I mean, you could 00:00:19.420 --> 00:00:21.219 argue he grabbed the steering wheel of history 00:00:21.219 --> 00:00:23.719 and yanked it in a completely different direction. 00:00:23.859 --> 00:00:26.269 We're talking about Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It's 00:00:26.269 --> 00:00:28.629 so hard to find a modern comparison for him. 00:00:28.670 --> 00:00:30.390 I mean, in the literary world, we talk about 00:00:30.390 --> 00:00:33.369 books that are important or moving, you know, 00:00:33.369 --> 00:00:36.429 books that win big prizes. But Solzhenitsyn's 00:00:36.429 --> 00:00:39.729 work, his nonfiction especially, like The Gulag 00:00:39.729 --> 00:00:43.020 Archipelago. That was something else entirely. 00:00:43.299 --> 00:00:45.719 It wasn't just a book, as our source material 00:00:45.719 --> 00:00:49.479 puts it. It was a head -on challenge to the Soviet 00:00:49.479 --> 00:00:52.020 state. It was a weapon. It absolutely was a weapon. 00:00:52.100 --> 00:00:54.020 That's the image that really stuck with me reading 00:00:54.020 --> 00:00:55.780 through these sources. You've got this nuclear 00:00:55.780 --> 00:00:58.219 superpower, the Soviet Union, at the absolute 00:00:58.219 --> 00:01:01.579 height of its power. It's armed with ICBMs. It's 00:01:01.579 --> 00:01:04.939 got the KGB. The whole apparatus of a totalitarian 00:01:04.939 --> 00:01:08.239 state. And on the other side, you have one guy, 00:01:08.340 --> 00:01:11.530 one guy with a pen. some manuscripts he's hiding, 00:01:11.670 --> 00:01:14.510 and, you know, a beard. And somehow the guy with 00:01:14.510 --> 00:01:17.870 the pen wins. He wins by delegitimizing the entire 00:01:17.870 --> 00:01:20.829 moral authority of the communist project. He 00:01:20.829 --> 00:01:23.989 just... He dismantled it piece by piece with 00:01:23.989 --> 00:01:26.689 words. And he'd do it by sheer force of will. 00:01:26.890 --> 00:01:29.030 And the numbers are just staggering. Oh, yeah. 00:01:29.250 --> 00:01:32.709 The Gulag Archipelago sold tens of millions of 00:01:32.709 --> 00:01:34.870 copies around the world. It forced the West, 00:01:35.049 --> 00:01:37.750 which had been, let's be honest, a little willfully 00:01:37.750 --> 00:01:40.090 blind to the Soviet reality. Or at least willing 00:01:40.090 --> 00:01:41.709 to look the other way for political reasons. 00:01:41.849 --> 00:01:44.409 Exactly. It forced them and eventually the Soviet 00:01:44.409 --> 00:01:46.769 Union itself to look the monster right in the 00:01:46.769 --> 00:01:49.870 mirror. But, and this is so crucial for our deep 00:01:49.870 --> 00:01:53.010 dive today. Solzhenitsyn is often just flattened 00:01:53.010 --> 00:01:54.969 into a caricature. Right. He becomes the gulag 00:01:54.969 --> 00:01:57.450 guy. That's all people know. Or the angry prophet 00:01:57.450 --> 00:01:59.930 ranting in the woods in Vermont. Exactly. The 00:01:59.930 --> 00:02:02.810 gloomy dissident. But the whole mission of this 00:02:02.810 --> 00:02:05.150 deep dive is to get past that label. We need 00:02:05.150 --> 00:02:07.569 to understand the transformation, you know, because 00:02:07.569 --> 00:02:09.310 he didn't start out as a dissident. He started 00:02:09.310 --> 00:02:11.909 as a loyal Marxist soldier. That's the part that's 00:02:11.909 --> 00:02:14.080 so hard to wrap your head around. So we need 00:02:14.080 --> 00:02:17.139 to trace how a decorated Red Army captain, a 00:02:17.139 --> 00:02:19.939 true believer, turns into a spiritual dissident. 00:02:20.439 --> 00:02:22.939 And then maybe even more surprisingly, how that 00:02:22.939 --> 00:02:25.520 dissident becomes this ferocious critic of the 00:02:25.520 --> 00:02:28.560 West the moment he's finally free. That's the 00:02:28.560 --> 00:02:30.419 twist that I think really trips a lot of people 00:02:30.419 --> 00:02:33.500 up. You expect the narrative to be so simple. 00:02:33.719 --> 00:02:36.259 He escapes the evil empire. He comes to the West. 00:02:36.319 --> 00:02:38.780 He loves democracy and lives happily ever after. 00:02:38.900 --> 00:02:41.580 But Solzhenitsyn gets to the West and says, hold 00:02:41.580 --> 00:02:44.120 on a minute. You guys have some massive problems, 00:02:44.259 --> 00:02:47.340 too. He was a completely equal opportunity critic. 00:02:47.400 --> 00:02:50.460 Absolutely. And just on a pure story level, looking 00:02:50.460 --> 00:02:53.580 at the biographical data, his life is a spy thriller. 00:02:53.740 --> 00:02:55.560 I'm not even exaggerating. No, it's all there. 00:02:55.759 --> 00:02:57.599 I mean, we are talking about assassination attempts 00:02:57.599 --> 00:03:01.419 by the KGB using, of all things, ricin on a crowded 00:03:01.419 --> 00:03:03.259 street. We're talking about manuscripts buried 00:03:03.259 --> 00:03:06.180 in friends' gardens, secret codes and letters, 00:03:06.300 --> 00:03:10.240 betrayals. It's just intense stuff. It is a thriller. 00:03:10.669 --> 00:03:13.229 But it's a thriller with a very, very specific 00:03:13.229 --> 00:03:16.430 moral center. And I think that's key. When he 00:03:16.430 --> 00:03:18.750 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 00:03:18.750 --> 00:03:22.409 1970, the citation, it honored the ethical force 00:03:22.409 --> 00:03:25.069 with which he pursued the great traditions of 00:03:25.069 --> 00:03:26.949 Russian literature. Ethical force. I like that. 00:03:27.090 --> 00:03:29.610 I want us to keep that phrase ethical force in 00:03:29.610 --> 00:03:31.689 our minds for this whole discussion. Because 00:03:31.689 --> 00:03:34.650 his entire worldview, everything he wrote, it 00:03:34.650 --> 00:03:37.810 all boils down to one almost terrifyingly simple 00:03:37.810 --> 00:03:42.370 conclusion. root of all the 20th century's disasters, 00:03:42.689 --> 00:03:45.789 the wars, the camps, the genocide, was that men 00:03:45.789 --> 00:03:48.330 had forgotten God. So, okay, let's unpack that 00:03:48.330 --> 00:03:50.150 ethical force then and figure out where it came 00:03:50.150 --> 00:03:52.610 from. Because as you said, he didn't just pop 00:03:52.610 --> 00:03:54.509 out of the womb a religious philosopher. Yeah. 00:03:54.629 --> 00:03:56.789 If we look at the origin section of our sources, 00:03:56.969 --> 00:03:59.879 I mean... On paper, young Alexander looks like 00:03:59.879 --> 00:04:02.800 the perfect model Soviet citizen. On paper, yes. 00:04:03.039 --> 00:04:04.819 But if you just scratch the surface, there was 00:04:04.819 --> 00:04:07.120 this massive, massive contradiction right there 00:04:07.120 --> 00:04:09.180 from the very beginning. He was born in Kislovodsk 00:04:09.180 --> 00:04:12.139 in 1918. Now, just pause and think about what 00:04:12.139 --> 00:04:15.180 1918 in Russia means. It's the Civil War. It's 00:04:15.180 --> 00:04:18.290 total chaos. Absolute chaos. The Bolsheviks are 00:04:18.290 --> 00:04:20.230 fighting the whites. The old world is burning 00:04:20.230 --> 00:04:24.490 down. And Solzhenitsyn creates his first fiction, 00:04:24.689 --> 00:04:27.009 as he called it, just by being born. What do 00:04:27.009 --> 00:04:29.290 you mean by that? Well, his father, Isaac, he 00:04:29.290 --> 00:04:31.910 had died in a hunting accident six months before 00:04:31.910 --> 00:04:34.569 Alexander was even born, which is tragic enough. 00:04:34.829 --> 00:04:37.370 But the really dangerous part was his father's 00:04:37.370 --> 00:04:40.459 identity. He was an officer in the old Imperial 00:04:40.459 --> 00:04:43.360 Russian Army. Strike one. And he was of Cossack 00:04:43.360 --> 00:04:45.819 origin. OK, that's strike two in the new Soviet 00:04:45.819 --> 00:04:48.660 world. Big time. And then strike three was his 00:04:48.660 --> 00:04:50.660 mother's family. They weren't just, you know, 00:04:50.680 --> 00:04:52.860 regular people. They were wealthy landowners 00:04:52.860 --> 00:04:56.319 in the Kuban region. In the Bolshevik worldview, 00:04:56.680 --> 00:04:59.180 these people were the enemy. They were class 00:04:59.180 --> 00:05:01.839 enemies, the oppressors who had to be swept away. 00:05:02.019 --> 00:05:04.079 So his very existence is a political liability. 00:05:04.220 --> 00:05:07.560 A huge one. So his mother, Tessia, she had to 00:05:07.560 --> 00:05:10.079 perform this lifelong magic trick. She had to 00:05:10.079 --> 00:05:12.779 scrub their entire family history. She raised 00:05:12.779 --> 00:05:15.519 him in poverty deliberately just to blend in, 00:05:15.639 --> 00:05:17.920 hiding the fact that he was the son of an imperial 00:05:17.920 --> 00:05:20.180 officer and the grandson of a wealthy landowner. 00:05:20.319 --> 00:05:23.079 It's fascinating because she wasn't just hiding 00:05:23.079 --> 00:05:25.490 his class background. She was trying to preserve 00:05:25.490 --> 00:05:27.730 a whole different set of values, wasn't she? 00:05:27.829 --> 00:05:30.129 The sources mentioned she was devoutly religious. 00:05:30.389 --> 00:05:33.089 She was, deeply. She raised him in the Russian 00:05:33.089 --> 00:05:35.410 Orthodox faith, but it had to be done in secret. 00:05:35.670 --> 00:05:38.759 So you have to picture this young boy. Growing 00:05:38.759 --> 00:05:41.279 up in a house full of icons and whispers about 00:05:41.279 --> 00:05:43.699 God and prayers. And then he walks out the front 00:05:43.699 --> 00:05:46.420 door. And he walks out the door into the Soviet 00:05:46.420 --> 00:05:49.860 education system. And that system was an unbelievably 00:05:49.860 --> 00:05:52.759 efficient machine for churning out atheists. 00:05:52.800 --> 00:05:55.300 It was its primary function, really. And with 00:05:55.300 --> 00:05:58.459 him, it worked. That's the wild part. Despite 00:05:58.459 --> 00:06:01.740 his mother's best efforts, young Alexander buys 00:06:01.740 --> 00:06:04.620 what the state is selling, hook, line, and sinker. 00:06:04.879 --> 00:06:07.100 He buys it completely. He becomes a committed 00:06:07.100 --> 00:06:09.800 atheist. He becomes a true believer in Marxism 00:06:09.800 --> 00:06:12.660 -Leninism. He goes off to Rostov State University 00:06:12.660 --> 00:06:15.639 to study math and physics, which seems, you know, 00:06:15.660 --> 00:06:17.800 apolitical. Sure, numbers are numbers. But at 00:06:17.800 --> 00:06:19.660 the same time, he's taking correspondence courses 00:06:19.660 --> 00:06:22.220 from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, 00:06:22.220 --> 00:06:24.839 and History. He's steeping himself in the ideology. 00:06:24.860 --> 00:06:28.040 He's drowning himself in it. He is. He admitted 00:06:28.040 --> 00:06:30.600 later in his life that until the day he was arrested, 00:06:30.779 --> 00:06:33.680 he never once truly questioned the moral superiority 00:06:33.680 --> 00:06:36.279 of the Soviet Union. He really thought they were 00:06:36.279 --> 00:06:38.600 building the future, a better world. So again, 00:06:38.740 --> 00:06:41.560 not a rebel waiting for his moment. He was a 00:06:41.560 --> 00:06:44.160 true believer. 100%. And he proved it when the 00:06:44.160 --> 00:06:47.100 war started, World War II, or the Great Patriotic 00:06:47.100 --> 00:06:50.149 War, as they called it. He didn't try to dodge 00:06:50.149 --> 00:06:53.110 the draft. He wanted in. He demanded to go. He 00:06:53.110 --> 00:06:55.730 did. He eventually served as the commander of 00:06:55.730 --> 00:06:57.949 a sound ranging battery in the Red Army. OK, 00:06:58.069 --> 00:07:00.329 so just to clarify for the listener, a sound 00:07:00.329 --> 00:07:02.660 ranging battery. That's not frontline infantry 00:07:02.660 --> 00:07:04.800 charging with a bayonet, right? It's more of 00:07:04.800 --> 00:07:07.120 a technical role. It's highly technical. It's 00:07:07.120 --> 00:07:09.939 essentially using acoustics, the sound of enemy 00:07:09.939 --> 00:07:12.680 cannons firing, to triangulate their position 00:07:12.680 --> 00:07:15.199 so you can fire back accurately. It required 00:07:15.199 --> 00:07:17.300 very advanced mathematics. It was really the 00:07:17.300 --> 00:07:19.779 perfect job for a math and physics student like 00:07:19.779 --> 00:07:21.759 him. And by all accounts, he was good at it. 00:07:21.819 --> 00:07:24.819 Captain Solzhenitsyn was a model officer. He 00:07:24.819 --> 00:07:26.680 was excellent at it. He was decorated twice. 00:07:26.980 --> 00:07:29.399 He received the Order of the Red Star and another 00:07:29.399 --> 00:07:32.740 major decoration for specifically destroying 00:07:32.740 --> 00:07:35.519 German artillery batteries. He was a competent, 00:07:35.699 --> 00:07:38.639 brave, loyal Soviet officer. He had the shoulder 00:07:38.639 --> 00:07:41.199 boards, the respect, the command. He was on the 00:07:41.199 --> 00:07:43.819 winning team. But the sources seem to point to 00:07:43.819 --> 00:07:45.980 his time in East Prussia. Right at the end of 00:07:45.980 --> 00:07:48.839 the war is the moment where the armor starts 00:07:48.839 --> 00:07:50.939 to crack a little. He's marching into Germany. 00:07:51.000 --> 00:07:52.980 The Red Army is winning. But he sees something 00:07:52.980 --> 00:07:55.620 that really shakes him to his core. Yeah, this 00:07:55.620 --> 00:07:57.819 is what the sources call the witness to atrocity 00:07:57.819 --> 00:07:59.899 phase. And you have to understand the atmosphere 00:07:59.899 --> 00:08:02.819 in early 1945. The Soviet propaganda machine, 00:08:03.000 --> 00:08:05.920 led by writers like Ilya Arenberg, was just whipping 00:08:05.920 --> 00:08:09.000 up this frenzy of pure vengeance. The message 00:08:09.000 --> 00:08:11.779 was simple. Kill the German. So when the Soviet 00:08:11.779 --> 00:08:14.930 troops finally cross into Germany. proper into 00:08:14.930 --> 00:08:16.949 East Prussia. It's just a release of pure rage. 00:08:17.110 --> 00:08:19.410 An explosion of it. And Solzhenitsyn is right 00:08:19.410 --> 00:08:21.990 there watching his own troops do this. He's watching 00:08:21.990 --> 00:08:25.629 looting, wanton destruction, and most horrifyingly, 00:08:25.629 --> 00:08:28.089 the mass rape of German women and girls. And 00:08:28.089 --> 00:08:29.689 it wasn't just Germans sometimes, Polish women 00:08:29.689 --> 00:08:32.169 who were mistaken for Germans. He later wrote 00:08:32.169 --> 00:08:34.889 a very long, very dark poem about this experience 00:08:34.889 --> 00:08:38.110 called Prussian Nights. I was reading some excerpts 00:08:38.110 --> 00:08:40.850 of that poem. It is not a glorious war poem. 00:08:41.049 --> 00:08:43.899 It's gruesome. It's a confession. It's a piece 00:08:43.899 --> 00:08:46.600 of self -laceration. He describes the gang rape 00:08:46.600 --> 00:08:49.820 of a woman and the narrator, who is clearly Solzhenitsyn 00:08:49.820 --> 00:08:52.379 himself, is an officer just standing there. He 00:08:52.379 --> 00:08:55.120 doesn't stop it. He just watches. Wow. And later, 00:08:55.179 --> 00:08:57.440 looking back on this moment in the Gulag archipelago, 00:08:57.639 --> 00:09:00.159 he asks this absolutely haunting question. He 00:09:00.159 --> 00:09:03.879 asks, so were we any better? That is such a heavy, 00:09:03.919 --> 00:09:06.580 heavy realization for a guy who grew up believing 00:09:06.580 --> 00:09:08.720 the Soviet Union was the absolute pinnacle of 00:09:08.720 --> 00:09:11.720 human morality. To look at your own side and 00:09:11.720 --> 00:09:14.440 see monsters. It's the beginning of his moral 00:09:14.440 --> 00:09:17.840 awakening. He starts to realize that good and 00:09:17.840 --> 00:09:20.460 evil aren't just neat labels you can put on us 00:09:20.460 --> 00:09:23.159 in them. But, and this is the incredible irony, 00:09:23.379 --> 00:09:26.340 he didn't get arrested for objecting to war crimes. 00:09:26.559 --> 00:09:29.059 He didn't get arrested for trying to save civilians. 00:09:29.340 --> 00:09:31.620 No, he got arrested for being an arrogant young 00:09:31.620 --> 00:09:33.740 intellectual who thought he was smarter than 00:09:33.740 --> 00:09:35.879 the system. This is the part that just drives 00:09:35.879 --> 00:09:38.200 me crazy reading it. He's writing these letters 00:09:38.200 --> 00:09:40.820 to his friend from school. Nikolai Vitkovich, 00:09:40.820 --> 00:09:44.039 right? Yes. This is in February of 1945. Victory 00:09:44.039 --> 00:09:46.259 in Europe is just a couple of months away. And 00:09:46.259 --> 00:09:48.860 he and Vitkovich are exchanging these long philosophical 00:09:48.860 --> 00:09:50.919 letters where they're critiquing the conduct 00:09:50.919 --> 00:09:53.799 of the war. And crucially, they're critiquing 00:09:53.799 --> 00:09:55.659 Stalin personally. But they thought they were 00:09:55.659 --> 00:09:57.759 being so clever. They use code names for him. 00:09:57.820 --> 00:10:00.720 This is the absolute hubris of the intellectual. 00:10:01.370 --> 00:10:04.129 They referred to Stalin as Hosian, which means 00:10:04.129 --> 00:10:07.230 the boss, or Balbos, which is a Yiddish word 00:10:07.230 --> 00:10:09.509 for master of the house. They even called him 00:10:09.509 --> 00:10:12.289 Pakhan, which is like... A mafia boss. Right. 00:10:12.409 --> 00:10:14.470 They honestly thought, we're so clever, the dull 00:10:14.470 --> 00:10:16.750 -witted military censors will never figure out 00:10:16.750 --> 00:10:19.110 who we're talking about. As if the secret police 00:10:19.110 --> 00:10:21.409 wouldn't immediately realize who the boss was 00:10:21.409 --> 00:10:25.970 in 1945 Russia. It's just, it's madness. Exactly. 00:10:26.210 --> 00:10:29.009 Sim -er -esh -h, the military counterintelligence 00:10:29.009 --> 00:10:32.230 agency whose name literally means death to spies. 00:10:33.179 --> 00:10:35.480 was not stupid. They were reading everything. 00:10:35.720 --> 00:10:38.039 And they didn't just find a few insults about 00:10:38.039 --> 00:10:40.879 Stalin. They found something much, much worse 00:10:40.879 --> 00:10:43.159 in those letters. This is the resolution number 00:10:43.159 --> 00:10:45.500 one. That's it. They found that Solzhenitsyn 00:10:45.500 --> 00:10:48.120 and Vitkovich had drafted something called Resolution 00:10:48.120 --> 00:10:51.240 Number One. It was a sketch, a program for forming 00:10:51.240 --> 00:10:54.570 a new post -war organization to in their words, 00:10:54.649 --> 00:10:57.549 fix the Soviet regime. Oh, that's it. That's 00:10:57.549 --> 00:10:59.870 the ballgame. In the paranoid mind of the Stalinist 00:10:59.870 --> 00:11:02.490 state, that isn't just grumbling. That's a conspiracy. 00:11:02.850 --> 00:11:04.730 That's a coup in the making. So paint the scene 00:11:04.730 --> 00:11:07.070 for us. It's February 1945. He's a decorated 00:11:07.070 --> 00:11:09.269 captain on the front lines. What actually happens? 00:11:09.389 --> 00:11:11.230 How do they get him? He's summoned by his brigade 00:11:11.230 --> 00:11:13.169 commander. He thinks he's just being called in 00:11:13.169 --> 00:11:15.629 for new orders or a promotion, maybe. He walks 00:11:15.629 --> 00:11:18.070 into the headquarters. He salutes. And suddenly, 00:11:18.190 --> 00:11:21.029 two Esmerich officers step out from the shadows. 00:11:21.210 --> 00:11:23.419 They physically rip the shoulder board. off his 00:11:23.419 --> 00:11:26.360 uniform. They take his pistol. Wow. In that one 00:11:26.360 --> 00:11:29.179 split second, the decorated captain is dead. 00:11:29.340 --> 00:11:32.820 The prisoner is born. That physical act, ripping 00:11:32.820 --> 00:11:35.899 the rank off his shoulders, it's so symbolic. 00:11:36.059 --> 00:11:38.440 You are no longer a person in the system's eyes. 00:11:38.620 --> 00:11:41.820 You are just meat for the grinder now. And he's 00:11:41.820 --> 00:11:44.539 taken away, eventually ending up in the infamous 00:11:44.539 --> 00:11:48.679 Ludyanka prison in Moscow. And there is one visual 00:11:48.679 --> 00:11:50.519 detail from the source material that I think 00:11:50.519 --> 00:11:53.399 is the most cinematic, most soul crushing moment 00:11:53.399 --> 00:11:56.200 of his entire early life. Victory Day. Victory 00:11:56.200 --> 00:12:00.720 Day. May 9th, 1945. The war in Europe is over. 00:12:00.919 --> 00:12:03.320 Nazi Germany has surrendered. All of Moscow is 00:12:03.320 --> 00:12:05.820 exploding with joy. There are fireworks. There 00:12:05.820 --> 00:12:07.679 are searchlights sweeping the sky. People are 00:12:07.679 --> 00:12:09.740 dancing and singing in the streets. There are 00:12:09.740 --> 00:12:12.419 30 gun salutes. It's the biggest party in Russian 00:12:12.419 --> 00:12:16.399 history. And Solzhenitsyn is in a cell in the 00:12:16.399 --> 00:12:18.379 Lubyanka. Which is right in the center of Moscow. 00:12:18.620 --> 00:12:21.000 Right in the dead center. He can see the flashes 00:12:21.000 --> 00:12:23.580 of the fireworks through the tiny barred window 00:12:23.580 --> 00:12:25.700 of his cell. He could hear the roar of the crowd. 00:12:25.799 --> 00:12:28.120 And he wrote, there was no rejoicing in our cells. 00:12:28.220 --> 00:12:30.679 That victory was not ours. Unbelievable. I mean, 00:12:30.700 --> 00:12:33.259 can you just imagine the bitterness? You fought 00:12:33.259 --> 00:12:35.830 for that victory. You helped destroy those German 00:12:35.830 --> 00:12:38.710 guns. And now, while the entire country celebrates, 00:12:38.990 --> 00:12:41.690 you are sitting in the dark, labeled a traitor 00:12:41.690 --> 00:12:44.669 by the very system you served. That moment right 00:12:44.669 --> 00:12:47.429 there, it has to be the final closing of the 00:12:47.429 --> 00:12:50.490 door on the believer. You can't be a Marxist 00:12:50.490 --> 00:12:52.509 true believer when the system you worship has 00:12:52.509 --> 00:12:54.830 just thrown you in a cage while celebrating the 00:12:54.830 --> 00:12:57.509 victory you helped secure. it forces a total 00:12:57.509 --> 00:13:00.950 radical reset of his entire worldview. And this 00:13:00.950 --> 00:13:03.429 leads us directly into part two, the education 00:13:03.429 --> 00:13:06.610 of the soul. The Gulag years. Right. So he gets 00:13:06.610 --> 00:13:09.009 convicted under Article 58, which was the classic 00:13:09.009 --> 00:13:11.850 catch -all for anti -Soviet propaganda. He gets 00:13:11.850 --> 00:13:14.289 a sentence of eight years. But his experience 00:13:14.289 --> 00:13:16.730 wasn't, let's say, the typical Gulag experience, 00:13:16.909 --> 00:13:18.850 was it? At least not at first. He didn't go straight 00:13:18.850 --> 00:13:21.110 to the mines. No, not immediately. And this is 00:13:21.110 --> 00:13:24.049 a really fascinating nuance of the Soviet system's 00:13:24.049 --> 00:13:27.210 strange, brutal logic. Because he was a mathematician 00:13:27.210 --> 00:13:29.490 and a physicist, the state decided he was too 00:13:29.490 --> 00:13:31.509 valuable to just work to death chopping down 00:13:31.509 --> 00:13:33.950 trees in a forest. So they put him in a shurashka. 00:13:34.299 --> 00:13:36.720 OK, you have to explain the shurashka. It sounds 00:13:36.720 --> 00:13:38.759 like a made up word from a fantasy novel. It's 00:13:38.759 --> 00:13:41.340 slang, but it basically means a special scientific 00:13:41.340 --> 00:13:44.639 prison. These were facilities run by the Ministry 00:13:44.639 --> 00:13:47.279 of State Security, where all the prisoners were 00:13:47.279 --> 00:13:50.100 top tier scientists, engineers and mathematicians, 00:13:50.159 --> 00:13:53.360 and they were forced to work on secret government 00:13:53.360 --> 00:13:56.389 projects. What kind of projects? Oh, all sorts. 00:13:56.809 --> 00:13:59.909 Developing secure encryption devices for telephones, 00:14:00.029 --> 00:14:02.450 which is what Solzhenitsyn did. Designing new 00:14:02.450 --> 00:14:04.909 aircraft, even working on the early stages of 00:14:04.909 --> 00:14:07.889 the nuclear program. So it's slave labor, but 00:14:07.889 --> 00:14:10.190 it's intellectual slave labor. You're a prisoner, 00:14:10.330 --> 00:14:12.830 but you're a prisoner with a slide rule. That's 00:14:12.830 --> 00:14:15.049 a perfect way to put it. It's what Dante called 00:14:15.049 --> 00:14:17.509 the first circle of hell. In fact, that's where 00:14:17.509 --> 00:14:19.549 the title of his novel in the first circle comes 00:14:19.549 --> 00:14:23.110 from. It's hell, but it's the best part of hell. 00:14:23.659 --> 00:14:25.799 The source material says they had butter sometimes, 00:14:26.139 --> 00:14:28.039 they had worn sheets, they weren't freezing to 00:14:28.039 --> 00:14:30.419 death or starving. But the psychological torture 00:14:30.419 --> 00:14:33.899 was unique. You are using your brain, your most 00:14:33.899 --> 00:14:37.179 precious faculty, to strengthen the very regime 00:14:37.179 --> 00:14:39.860 that has unjustly imprisoned you. You are literally 00:14:39.860 --> 00:14:42.940 building the locks for your own cell and for 00:14:42.940 --> 00:14:45.779 millions of others. That's a brutal moral compromise. 00:14:46.200 --> 00:14:48.679 I will help you oppress people more efficiently 00:14:48.679 --> 00:14:51.139 so that I can have an extra piece of bread and 00:14:51.139 --> 00:14:53.789 some butter. Precisely. Solzhenitsyn wrestled 00:14:53.789 --> 00:14:56.230 with that every single day. He met a man there 00:14:56.230 --> 00:14:58.590 named Lev Kopelev, who became the basis for the 00:14:58.590 --> 00:15:01.970 character Lev Rubin in his book. They debated 00:15:01.970 --> 00:15:05.429 these things endlessly. But eventually, Solzhenitsyn's 00:15:05.429 --> 00:15:07.919 principles got him in trouble. He had a dispute 00:15:07.919 --> 00:15:10.320 with the authorities and in the completely arbitrary 00:15:10.320 --> 00:15:12.580 nature of the gulag. He got kicked out of the 00:15:12.580 --> 00:15:15.159 good prison. He got kicked out. In 1950, he was 00:15:15.159 --> 00:15:17.139 transferred to a special camp in a place called 00:15:17.139 --> 00:15:19.720 Ekibastis in Kazakhstan. And the special camp 00:15:19.720 --> 00:15:22.580 is exactly what we imagine when we say the word 00:15:22.580 --> 00:15:24.639 gulag. This was the real thing. This was the 00:15:24.639 --> 00:15:27.539 hard reality. No more encryption projects. Now 00:15:27.539 --> 00:15:29.960 he was a miner. He was a bricklayer. He was a 00:15:29.960 --> 00:15:33.360 foundry foreman. The cold was just unimaginable, 00:15:33.440 --> 00:15:36.460 minus 40 degrees. The mortar you were using to 00:15:36.460 --> 00:15:38.580 lay bricks would freeze before you could get 00:15:38.580 --> 00:15:40.320 the next brick on top of it if you weren't fast 00:15:40.320 --> 00:15:42.740 enough. And the sources say this is where one 00:15:42.740 --> 00:15:45.379 day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was really 00:15:45.379 --> 00:15:49.279 born. It wasn't fiction. It was just reportage. 00:15:49.419 --> 00:15:52.690 It was his life. Every single detail in that 00:15:52.690 --> 00:15:55.090 book, sewing a piece of bread into your mattress 00:15:55.090 --> 00:15:57.950 so it won't be stolen, the desperate, all -consuming 00:15:57.950 --> 00:16:00.909 desire for an extra bowl of thin soup, the way 00:16:00.909 --> 00:16:03.190 the cold physically hurts your lungs to breathe. 00:16:04.330 --> 00:16:06.970 Solzhenitsyn lived every second of that at Ekibastis. 00:16:06.970 --> 00:16:09.129 This was the absolute bottom of the barrel. And 00:16:09.129 --> 00:16:11.149 as if that wasn't enough, just to add insult 00:16:11.149 --> 00:16:13.590 to injury, biology decides to attack him too. 00:16:13.929 --> 00:16:15.610 Yeah, this is the moment that almost ended the 00:16:15.610 --> 00:16:17.529 story before it could even begin. He developed 00:16:17.529 --> 00:16:20.049 a tumor. He had it removed there in the camp. 00:16:20.110 --> 00:16:21.870 But the conditions were obviously primitive. 00:16:21.970 --> 00:16:24.250 It wasn't properly diagnosed as cancerous. Then 00:16:24.250 --> 00:16:26.950 his eight year sentence finally ends in 1953 00:16:26.950 --> 00:16:31.649 and Stalin dies in March of that same year. So 00:16:31.649 --> 00:16:34.029 Solzhenitsyn is released from the camp, but he's 00:16:34.029 --> 00:16:37.870 not. He's not free. No. He's sent into internal 00:16:37.870 --> 00:16:41.269 exile in perpetuity. Perpetuity. That means forever. 00:16:41.490 --> 00:16:44.330 Forever. He was sent to a tiny remote village 00:16:44.330 --> 00:16:47.590 called Berlik in southern Kazakhstan. He was 00:16:47.590 --> 00:16:49.870 a non -person. He had to report to the local 00:16:49.870 --> 00:16:52.570 commandant regularly. And that is when the cancer 00:16:52.570 --> 00:16:54.750 came back. And this time it was aggressive. It 00:16:54.750 --> 00:16:57.149 was aggressive. He was in immense pain. He couldn't 00:16:57.149 --> 00:16:58.929 eat. He was wasting away. He was essentially 00:16:58.929 --> 00:17:01.409 sent there to die alone in a mud hut in the middle 00:17:01.409 --> 00:17:04.589 of nowhere. But somehow he manages to get to 00:17:04.589 --> 00:17:08.309 a clinic in Tashkent. In 1954, yes, he gets permission 00:17:08.309 --> 00:17:10.769 to travel to a cancer ward. And the doctors there, 00:17:10.869 --> 00:17:13.549 using massive doses of radiation therapy, somehow 00:17:13.549 --> 00:17:16.029 managed to put the tumor into remission. By all 00:17:16.029 --> 00:17:18.470 accounts, it was a medical miracle. But for Solzhenitsyn, 00:17:18.529 --> 00:17:20.309 it was a spiritual miracle. Right. This is the 00:17:20.309 --> 00:17:22.450 spiritual shift the outline talks about. We need 00:17:22.450 --> 00:17:24.210 to really understand this. How does surviving 00:17:24.210 --> 00:17:26.750 cancer change his politics? Or is it more than 00:17:26.750 --> 00:17:29.190 that? It was so much more than politics. It was 00:17:29.190 --> 00:17:32.329 metaphysics. He came to believe with every fiber 00:17:32.329 --> 00:17:35.130 of his being that his life had been given back 00:17:35.130 --> 00:17:37.970 to him for a specific purpose. He had walked 00:17:37.970 --> 00:17:40.190 through the valley of the shadow of death, first 00:17:40.190 --> 00:17:43.779 the war, then the camp, and now the cancer. And 00:17:43.779 --> 00:17:46.579 he had survived. It was in that cancer ward that 00:17:46.579 --> 00:17:48.920 he abandoned the last remnants of Marxism. And 00:17:48.920 --> 00:17:50.900 returned to his childhood faith. He returned 00:17:50.900 --> 00:17:53.460 to the Orthodox Christianity of his mother, but 00:17:53.460 --> 00:17:56.339 with the white -hot zeal of a convert. He saw 00:17:56.339 --> 00:17:59.920 it all clearly now. He has that famous... around 00:17:59.920 --> 00:18:03.079 this time, he stops blaming the system, Stalin, 00:18:03.220 --> 00:18:05.980 the party, and he starts looking inward at himself. 00:18:06.359 --> 00:18:09.000 Yes. This is the absolute core of his philosophy. 00:18:09.339 --> 00:18:11.900 He looked back at his own behavior as a Red Army 00:18:11.900 --> 00:18:14.460 captain, how arrogant he'd been, how he had ignored 00:18:14.460 --> 00:18:16.880 the suffering of those German civilians, and 00:18:16.880 --> 00:18:18.980 he wrote that famous line, maybe his most famous, 00:18:19.460 --> 00:18:21.839 the line separating good and evil passes not 00:18:21.839 --> 00:18:24.039 through states, nor between classes, nor between 00:18:24.039 --> 00:18:26.599 political parties either, but right through every 00:18:26.599 --> 00:18:29.460 human heart. And who is willing to destroy a 00:18:29.460 --> 00:18:32.319 piece of his own heart. Exactly. That's the conclusion. 00:18:32.480 --> 00:18:35.559 You can't fix society by killing the bad class 00:18:35.559 --> 00:18:37.880 or the bad guys. You have to start by fixing 00:18:37.880 --> 00:18:40.859 the human soul, your own soul first. So when 00:18:40.859 --> 00:18:42.660 he walks out of that cancer ward in Tushkent, 00:18:42.740 --> 00:18:45.839 he is a completely changed man. He has a mission. 00:18:45.960 --> 00:18:48.339 He is going to bear witness. Which brings us 00:18:48.339 --> 00:18:51.240 to part three, the writer who broke the silence. 00:18:51.980 --> 00:18:54.539 This is the era of the Khrushchev thaw. It's 00:18:54.539 --> 00:18:57.660 the late 50s early 60s. The Soviet Union is trying 00:18:57.660 --> 00:19:00.710 in its own way to de -Stalinize. Right. Nikita 00:19:00.710 --> 00:19:03.329 Khrushchev is in power and he wants to distance 00:19:03.329 --> 00:19:05.970 himself and the party from Stalin's worst crimes, 00:19:06.170 --> 00:19:08.829 partly to consolidate his own control. He needs 00:19:08.829 --> 00:19:11.849 a weapon, a tool to bash the hardline Stalinists 00:19:11.849 --> 00:19:14.589 with. And Solzhenitsyn, who is now working as 00:19:14.589 --> 00:19:16.549 a humble high school physics teacher and writing 00:19:16.549 --> 00:19:18.869 in absolute secrecy at night, provides that weapon. 00:19:19.049 --> 00:19:21.210 He submits one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich 00:19:21.210 --> 00:19:23.970 to Novimir, which was the big literary journal 00:19:23.970 --> 00:19:26.390 at the time. It was a massive, massive risk. 00:19:26.859 --> 00:19:28.579 He was completely convinced he would just be 00:19:28.579 --> 00:19:31.359 arrested again and sent back. But the editor, 00:19:31.539 --> 00:19:34.380 a man named Tvardovsky, loved it. He saw its 00:19:34.380 --> 00:19:36.740 power. And he passed it up the chain of command 00:19:36.740 --> 00:19:39.779 all the way until it landed on Khrushchev's own 00:19:39.779 --> 00:19:43.880 desk. And Khrushchev, amazingly, personally approved 00:19:43.880 --> 00:19:46.680 it for publication. That is just wild to me. 00:19:47.130 --> 00:19:49.589 the head of the Soviet state approving a book 00:19:49.589 --> 00:19:52.369 that exposes the Soviet camp system. Well, Khrushchev 00:19:52.369 --> 00:19:54.970 famously said to the Politburo in a closed session, 00:19:55.190 --> 00:19:57.630 there's a Stalinist in each of you. We must root 00:19:57.630 --> 00:20:00.369 out this evil. He wasn't a liberal. He was using 00:20:00.369 --> 00:20:02.450 Solzhenitsyn as a political bludgeon against 00:20:02.450 --> 00:20:04.789 his rivals. And when it was published in 1962, 00:20:05.170 --> 00:20:08.099 the reaction was. Well, it was explosive. It 00:20:08.099 --> 00:20:10.000 was an earthquake. You have to remember, everyone 00:20:10.000 --> 00:20:12.000 knew about the camps on some level. Everyone 00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:13.920 had a cousin or a neighbor who had disappeared. 00:20:14.279 --> 00:20:16.380 But no one ever spoke about it. It was the great 00:20:16.380 --> 00:20:19.059 public secret. And suddenly, here it is, in print, 00:20:19.240 --> 00:20:21.299 in an official magazine. People were reading 00:20:21.299 --> 00:20:23.420 it on street corners, in the metro. They were 00:20:23.420 --> 00:20:25.759 weeping. It was this moment of collective national 00:20:25.759 --> 00:20:29.200 catharsis. Solzhenitsyn became an overnight celebrity. 00:20:29.660 --> 00:20:31.900 But in the Soviet Union, the political winds 00:20:31.900 --> 00:20:34.420 can change very, very fast. Unbelievably fast. 00:20:34.910 --> 00:20:37.950 By 1964, Khrushchev is ousted in a palace coup. 00:20:38.390 --> 00:20:41.529 Brezhnev comes in, and the thaw immediately turns 00:20:41.529 --> 00:20:44.930 into a deep, hard freeze. The new regime decides 00:20:44.930 --> 00:20:47.150 they've had more than enough of this truth -telling. 00:20:47.329 --> 00:20:49.109 And so Sanderson goes from being a celebrity 00:20:49.109 --> 00:20:52.650 back to being a pariah. Almost overnight, they 00:20:52.650 --> 00:20:55.880 stop publishing his work. The KGB starts an active 00:20:55.880 --> 00:20:58.019 campaign of harassment against him. They start 00:20:58.019 --> 00:21:01.920 seizing his papers. In 1965, they raid a friend's 00:21:01.920 --> 00:21:04.740 house and they find the manuscript of Gerst in 00:21:04.740 --> 00:21:07.740 the first circle. The noose is tightening. Okay, 00:21:07.799 --> 00:21:09.559 so this is where the story becomes about the 00:21:09.559 --> 00:21:12.259 mechanics of writing the Gulag Archipelago. He 00:21:12.259 --> 00:21:13.960 knows he's being watched. He knows they want 00:21:13.960 --> 00:21:16.220 to silence him. But he's secretly working on 00:21:16.220 --> 00:21:18.880 this massive, multi -volume history of the entire 00:21:18.880 --> 00:21:22.000 camp system. How did he physically do it? It's 00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:24.519 an incredible story of literary tradecraft. He 00:21:24.519 --> 00:21:27.940 wrote it in secret between 1958 and 1967. He 00:21:27.940 --> 00:21:30.400 called it a literary investigation. He didn't 00:21:30.400 --> 00:21:32.119 just use his own memory, his own experience. 00:21:32.160 --> 00:21:35.559 He secretly interviewed 256 other former prisoners. 00:21:35.740 --> 00:21:37.279 How do you even do that under KGB surveillance? 00:21:37.799 --> 00:21:40.420 Very, very carefully. He would meet them on park 00:21:40.420 --> 00:21:43.720 benches, in crowded train stations, places where 00:21:43.720 --> 00:21:46.500 they could blend in. He couldn't take notes openly, 00:21:46.660 --> 00:21:48.779 so he had to memorize their stories. Then he 00:21:48.779 --> 00:21:51.250 would rush home and write it all down. and the 00:21:51.250 --> 00:21:53.809 manuscript itself the physical pages he couldn't 00:21:53.809 --> 00:21:56.009 keep it in one place that would be suicide so 00:21:56.009 --> 00:21:58.769 he had this network of incredibly brave friends 00:21:58.769 --> 00:22:01.630 he called them the invisibles he would type out 00:22:01.630 --> 00:22:04.130 sections using single spacing on both sides of 00:22:04.130 --> 00:22:06.490 the paper to make it as compact as possible and 00:22:06.490 --> 00:22:08.509 then these friends would take the pages and hide 00:22:08.509 --> 00:22:12.059 them all over. They buried copies in glass jars 00:22:12.059 --> 00:22:14.460 in their gardens. They hid them in hollowed -out 00:22:14.460 --> 00:22:16.859 furniture. They hid them in basements in different 00:22:16.859 --> 00:22:19.920 cities. He was writing a 2 ,000 -page book that 00:22:19.920 --> 00:22:22.160 was physically scattered all across the Soviet 00:22:22.160 --> 00:22:24.339 Union. It's like aspiring, but for literature. 00:22:24.700 --> 00:22:28.319 Exactly. And then the tragedy happens, the story 00:22:28.319 --> 00:22:30.920 of Elizaveta Voronyanskaya. This part of the 00:22:30.920 --> 00:22:32.720 story just breaks my heart every time I read 00:22:32.720 --> 00:22:34.819 it. It's the most painful chapter in the book's 00:22:34.819 --> 00:22:37.480 entire history. Elizaveta was one of his most 00:22:37.480 --> 00:22:40.779 trusted typists and assistants. She had a copy 00:22:40.779 --> 00:22:43.319 of the manuscript hidden in her apartment. And 00:22:43.319 --> 00:22:47.200 in August of 1973, the KGB picked her up. And 00:22:47.200 --> 00:22:49.079 they didn't just, you know, ask her nicely where 00:22:49.079 --> 00:22:52.559 it was. No. They interrogated her for five days 00:22:52.559 --> 00:22:56.099 straight without sleep. Just relentless psychological 00:22:56.099 --> 00:22:59.160 and physical pressure. She was an elderly woman. 00:22:59.240 --> 00:23:01.480 She finally broke. She told them where the manuscript 00:23:01.480 --> 00:23:03.880 was hidden. And the aftermath of that. The KGB 00:23:03.880 --> 00:23:06.059 went to her apartment. They dug up the manuscript 00:23:06.059 --> 00:23:07.740 from its hiding place, and then they let her 00:23:07.740 --> 00:23:10.099 go. She went home, and she hanged herself. Oh, 00:23:10.119 --> 00:23:12.200 God. The guilt souls in it must have fell from 00:23:12.200 --> 00:23:14.299 that. It was devastating for him. But it also 00:23:14.299 --> 00:23:16.720 clarified everything. He realized the game was 00:23:16.720 --> 00:23:18.880 over. He had been holding back the publication 00:23:18.880 --> 00:23:21.519 of the Gulag Archipelago in the West to protect 00:23:21.519 --> 00:23:23.519 the people who were named in the book. But now 00:23:23.519 --> 00:23:25.880 the KGB... had the text. They knew the names. 00:23:25.980 --> 00:23:28.019 So the risk was already there. The risk was already 00:23:28.019 --> 00:23:30.900 realized. He said, essentially, they have the 00:23:30.900 --> 00:23:34.180 book. The world should have it too. He sent the 00:23:34.180 --> 00:23:36.539 signal, a prearranged code word, to his contacts 00:23:36.539 --> 00:23:39.819 in Paris to publish immediately. But before we 00:23:39.819 --> 00:23:41.579 get to the publication, we have to talk about 00:23:41.579 --> 00:23:44.400 the assassination attempt. Because while all 00:23:44.400 --> 00:23:48.779 this manuscript drama is happening, the KGB also 00:23:48.779 --> 00:23:51.589 tried to solve the Solzhenitsyn problem. The 00:23:51.589 --> 00:23:54.029 old -fashioned way. Yes, this was in August of 00:23:54.029 --> 00:23:56.470 1971. This is straight out of a Cold War spy 00:23:56.470 --> 00:23:58.369 novel. They couldn't just shoot him in the street 00:23:58.369 --> 00:23:59.930 because by this point he was too famous. He'd 00:23:59.930 --> 00:24:02.410 won the Nobel Prize in 1970, even though he couldn't 00:24:02.410 --> 00:24:04.170 go to Stockholm to collect it. Right, it would 00:24:04.170 --> 00:24:06.089 be too obvious. Too obvious. So they tried to 00:24:06.089 --> 00:24:09.230 desettle. KGB agents followed him to a department 00:24:09.230 --> 00:24:12.490 store in the city of Novotrikask. While he was 00:24:12.490 --> 00:24:14.930 in the crowd, one of them bumped into him and, 00:24:15.009 --> 00:24:17.630 with a hidden device, injected him with a dose 00:24:17.630 --> 00:24:20.710 of ricin. Ricin, the poison made from castor 00:24:20.710 --> 00:24:23.710 beans. Highly lethal. Highly lethal. And they 00:24:23.710 --> 00:24:26.650 use what the sources describe as a gel -based 00:24:26.650 --> 00:24:29.190 delivery method, so it would absorb slowly and 00:24:29.190 --> 00:24:32.210 be hard to trace. He fell violently ill a few 00:24:32.210 --> 00:24:34.710 days later. His skin was covered in burns and 00:24:34.710 --> 00:24:37.430 boils. He was bedridden for months in an agonizing 00:24:37.430 --> 00:24:40.569 pain. But unbelievably, he survived. The man 00:24:40.569 --> 00:24:42.990 is just indestructible. He survives the war. 00:24:43.089 --> 00:24:45.309 He survives the camps. He survives cancer. And 00:24:45.309 --> 00:24:48.329 now he survives a KGB hit squad. It just reinforced 00:24:48.329 --> 00:24:50.549 his belief that he was being protected by God 00:24:50.549 --> 00:24:52.930 for a purpose, that he had a mission to complete. 00:24:53.109 --> 00:24:56.569 So 1974, the Gulag Archipelago is published in 00:24:56.569 --> 00:24:58.990 the West. It hits the world like a meteor. The 00:24:58.990 --> 00:25:01.029 Soviet leadership is absolutely furious. They 00:25:01.029 --> 00:25:03.029 debate what to do with him, arrest him again, 00:25:03.170 --> 00:25:05.089 kill him for real this time, send him back to 00:25:05.089 --> 00:25:07.430 Siberia. They were completely stuck. If they 00:25:07.430 --> 00:25:09.289 killed him, he becomes an eternal martyr. If 00:25:09.289 --> 00:25:11.630 they imprison him, the West will never shut up 00:25:11.630 --> 00:25:15.130 about it. Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB 00:25:15.130 --> 00:25:17.069 at the time, comes up with a different, and in 00:25:17.069 --> 00:25:20.049 their minds, cleverer solution. Expulsion. Which 00:25:20.049 --> 00:25:24.170 brings us to part four. Exile. In February of 00:25:24.170 --> 00:25:27.269 1974, they arrest him one last time, they strip 00:25:27.269 --> 00:25:29.690 him of his Soviet citizenship, put him on a plane, 00:25:29.869 --> 00:25:31.829 and literally just drop him in West Germany. 00:25:31.990 --> 00:25:34.369 He is free, but he's a man without a country. 00:25:34.940 --> 00:25:37.160 He eventually moves to Zurich, and then, looking 00:25:37.160 --> 00:25:39.619 for more privacy and quiet, he settles in, of 00:25:39.619 --> 00:25:42.200 all places, Cavendish, Vermont. I just love the 00:25:42.200 --> 00:25:44.740 image of this great Russian prophet, this Old 00:25:44.740 --> 00:25:47.619 Testament figure living in the quiet, green woods 00:25:47.619 --> 00:25:49.900 of Vermont. He builds a big fence around his 00:25:49.900 --> 00:25:52.789 property, locks the gate. And just keeps writing. 00:25:53.069 --> 00:25:55.069 But the KGB didn't just leave him alone, did 00:25:55.069 --> 00:25:58.089 they? Even in Vermont. Oh, no. Andropoff was 00:25:58.089 --> 00:26:00.650 obsessed with him. The KGB ran what they called 00:26:00.650 --> 00:26:03.089 active measures to harass and discredit him, 00:26:03.130 --> 00:26:05.250 even in America. They sent him letters forged 00:26:05.250 --> 00:26:06.970 to look like they were from unhinged lunatics. 00:26:07.230 --> 00:26:09.289 They mailed him anonymous photographs of car 00:26:09.289 --> 00:26:11.690 crashes and gruesome brain surgery just to mess 00:26:11.690 --> 00:26:13.730 with his head. Psychological warfare. Totally. 00:26:13.930 --> 00:26:15.869 They tried to make him paranoid that his neighbors 00:26:15.869 --> 00:26:18.529 and his American assistants were all CIA or KGB 00:26:18.529 --> 00:26:20.950 agents. Which, to be fair, in the middle of the 00:26:20.950 --> 00:26:23.309 cold... was not an entirely invalid paranoia 00:26:23.309 --> 00:26:26.289 to have. No, it wasn't. The sources suggest that 00:26:26.289 --> 00:26:28.329 at least three people in his immediate circle 00:26:28.329 --> 00:26:31.329 in Vermont were, in fact, informants for various 00:26:31.329 --> 00:26:33.450 agencies. But the biggest shock for the West 00:26:33.450 --> 00:26:36.589 wasn't that the KGB hated him. It was that he 00:26:36.589 --> 00:26:38.430 didn't seem to love the West all that much either. 00:26:38.730 --> 00:26:41.349 This is the absolute crux of the Solzhenitsyn 00:26:41.349 --> 00:26:45.289 paradox. The West welcomed him as a hero. They 00:26:45.289 --> 00:26:47.269 had this very simple equation in their heads. 00:26:47.450 --> 00:26:50.349 He hates communism, therefore he must love consumer 00:26:50.349 --> 00:26:52.970 capitalism. And then came the Harvard Address 00:26:52.970 --> 00:26:56.769 in 1978. A legendary moment. It's a rainy day. 00:26:57.529 --> 00:27:00.049 You have the entire intellectual elite of America 00:27:00.049 --> 00:27:02.369 sitting there in their academic robes at Harvard 00:27:02.369 --> 00:27:04.769 University. They invite him to give the commencement 00:27:04.769 --> 00:27:07.230 speech. They are ready to be praised. They are 00:27:07.230 --> 00:27:09.789 expecting him to say, thank you for your freedom. 00:27:09.849 --> 00:27:12.309 You are the shining city on the hill. And instead, 00:27:12.410 --> 00:27:14.410 he gets up to the podium and essentially pulls 00:27:14.410 --> 00:27:17.160 out a flamethrower. He absolutely scolds them. 00:27:17.240 --> 00:27:19.720 He goes down a list. He critiques the West for 00:27:19.720 --> 00:27:22.099 what he calls a decline in courage, especially 00:27:22.099 --> 00:27:24.940 among the ruling and intellectual elites. He 00:27:24.940 --> 00:27:27.799 attacks the pervasive materialism, the idea that 00:27:27.799 --> 00:27:30.160 the goal of human life is just to own more stuff. 00:27:30.420 --> 00:27:33.420 He attacks the spiritual vapidity of pop culture, 00:27:33.619 --> 00:27:37.759 specifically citing TV stupor and intolerable 00:27:37.759 --> 00:27:40.299 music. But the part that I found most interesting 00:27:40.299 --> 00:27:43.599 and honestly the most relevant to today is his 00:27:43.599 --> 00:27:46.369 critique of what he called legalism. Can we dig 00:27:46.369 --> 00:27:48.269 into that for a minute? This is such a profound 00:27:48.269 --> 00:27:51.250 point he makes. Solzhenitsyn argued that Western 00:27:51.250 --> 00:27:54.210 society had fundamentally replaced morality with 00:27:54.210 --> 00:27:57.609 legality. He told the crowd, I spent all my life 00:27:57.609 --> 00:27:59.549 under a communist regime where the law did not 00:27:59.549 --> 00:28:01.970 matter. But you people have the opposite problem. 00:28:02.210 --> 00:28:04.569 You worship the law. What does he mean by that 00:28:04.569 --> 00:28:06.710 exactly? He meant that in the West, if something 00:28:06.710 --> 00:28:09.049 is legal, people automatically assume that it 00:28:09.049 --> 00:28:11.410 is right. He said, and I'm quoting from the source 00:28:11.410 --> 00:28:13.549 here, a society which is based on the letter 00:28:13.549 --> 00:28:15.799 of the law and never reaches any higher. is taking 00:28:15.799 --> 00:28:18.119 very scarce advantage of the high level of human 00:28:18.119 --> 00:28:21.920 possibilities. So he's saying that just relying 00:28:21.920 --> 00:28:25.279 on the law as your guide is a very low bar for 00:28:25.279 --> 00:28:27.920 a civilization to set for itself. The dangerously 00:28:27.920 --> 00:28:30.539 low bar. He's saying that if your only standard 00:28:30.539 --> 00:28:33.940 for behavior is will I get sued for this or is 00:28:33.940 --> 00:28:37.359 this technically allowed by the rules, then you 00:28:37.359 --> 00:28:39.539 have a gaping hole in your soul as a society. 00:28:40.170 --> 00:28:42.650 He believed that voluntary self -restraint, a 00:28:42.650 --> 00:28:45.710 sense of higher moral duty, was far more important 00:28:45.710 --> 00:28:47.730 than a long list of legal rights. And then he 00:28:47.730 --> 00:28:50.289 delivers the killer line. He does. He told the 00:28:50.289 --> 00:28:52.529 audience, should someone ask me whether I would 00:28:52.529 --> 00:28:55.089 indicate the West, such as it is today, as a 00:28:55.089 --> 00:28:57.109 model to my country, frankly, I would have to 00:28:57.109 --> 00:28:59.930 answer negatively. Can you just imagine the stunned 00:28:59.930 --> 00:29:02.369 silence in that crowd? He's telling them, thanks 00:29:02.369 --> 00:29:04.750 for the rescue, but I do not want Russia to become 00:29:04.750 --> 00:29:07.599 like you. It was a profound shock to the system 00:29:07.599 --> 00:29:09.940 for a lot of people, but he was being completely 00:29:09.940 --> 00:29:12.519 consistent. In his mind, the East had forgotten 00:29:12.519 --> 00:29:14.980 God because the state had forced them to. The 00:29:14.980 --> 00:29:16.779 West had forgotten God because they were too 00:29:16.779 --> 00:29:18.859 busy shopping and filing lawsuits against each 00:29:18.859 --> 00:29:21.680 other. To him, both systems were spiritually 00:29:21.680 --> 00:29:24.259 hollow just in different ways. This really helps 00:29:24.259 --> 00:29:26.839 explain why his specific political views in exile 00:29:26.839 --> 00:29:29.440 were so confusing and often offensive to people 00:29:29.440 --> 00:29:31.829 in the West. He went to Spain after the dictator 00:29:31.829 --> 00:29:34.309 Franco died, and he basically told the liberals 00:29:34.309 --> 00:29:37.009 to calm down and not change things too quickly. 00:29:37.130 --> 00:29:40.369 Yes. He warned them not to push too hard for 00:29:40.369 --> 00:29:43.900 rapid democracy. He claimed controversially that 00:29:43.900 --> 00:29:46.460 Spain under Franco had more freedoms than the 00:29:46.460 --> 00:29:49.960 USSR ever did. He saw the Spanish Civil War through 00:29:49.960 --> 00:29:52.380 the lens of the Russian Civil War. He viewed 00:29:52.380 --> 00:29:55.240 the Republicans, the leftists, as the same destructive 00:29:55.240 --> 00:29:57.980 force that destroyed Russia. So he tended to 00:29:57.980 --> 00:30:00.380 side with the nationalists as the lesser of two 00:30:00.380 --> 00:30:02.880 evils. Which got him labeled a fascist by some. 00:30:03.180 --> 00:30:05.839 Winston Lord, a prominent U .S. diplomat at the 00:30:05.839 --> 00:30:08.220 time, called him just about a fascist. That's 00:30:08.220 --> 00:30:10.900 a misreading, I think. So Sinitsyn wasn't a fascist. 00:30:10.900 --> 00:30:13.940 He was a terrified anti -communist. He saw communism 00:30:13.940 --> 00:30:16.319 as the ultimate singular evil in the world. So 00:30:16.319 --> 00:30:18.519 he was willing to support almost any authoritarian 00:30:18.519 --> 00:30:21.119 regime if they held the line against the Reds. 00:30:21.119 --> 00:30:22.960 It's the same logic with Vietnam. He supported 00:30:22.960 --> 00:30:25.640 the American war effort. He did passionately. 00:30:25.859 --> 00:30:28.259 When the U .S. pulled out, he called the peace 00:30:28.259 --> 00:30:31.299 accords a hasty capitulation and a betrayal. 00:30:32.089 --> 00:30:34.269 He accused the U .S. of abandoning 30 million 00:30:34.269 --> 00:30:37.329 people to genocide and reeducation camps. He 00:30:37.329 --> 00:30:39.589 wasn't thinking about American domestic politics 00:30:39.589 --> 00:30:41.549 or the draft. He was thinking about the people 00:30:41.549 --> 00:30:44.730 who would be left behind. To him, the U .S. withdrawal 00:30:44.730 --> 00:30:47.069 was just more proof of that declining courage 00:30:47.069 --> 00:30:49.309 he talked about at Harvard. He also had this 00:30:49.309 --> 00:30:53.109 very, very specific view of Russia versus the 00:30:53.109 --> 00:30:55.839 Soviet Union. He hated when people used those 00:30:55.839 --> 00:30:58.180 terms interchangeably. That is a crucial distinction 00:30:58.180 --> 00:31:00.559 for understanding him. He was a passionate Russian 00:31:00.559 --> 00:31:02.940 nationalist, but he was also an anti -imperialist. 00:31:03.079 --> 00:31:05.279 He argued that the Soviet Union wasn't Russia. 00:31:05.319 --> 00:31:07.779 It was a cancer growing on Russia. He believed 00:31:07.779 --> 00:31:09.900 that ethnic Russians were actually the most oppressed 00:31:09.900 --> 00:31:12.700 and brutalized group within the USSR and that 00:31:12.700 --> 00:31:15.119 communism itself was a foreign Western ideology 00:31:15.119 --> 00:31:18.099 imported to destroy his country. So he wanted 00:31:18.099 --> 00:31:20.019 to strip away the non -Russian parts of the empire 00:31:20.019 --> 00:31:22.640 in order to save the Russian nation. Exactly. 00:31:22.859 --> 00:31:25.160 He wanted Russia. to look inward, to heal its 00:31:25.160 --> 00:31:27.420 own soul, not to waste its strength and blood 00:31:27.420 --> 00:31:29.539 trying to run an empire in Eastern Europe or 00:31:29.539 --> 00:31:32.140 Central Asia. Which brings us to the final act 00:31:32.140 --> 00:31:36.000 of his life, part five, the return. The Soviet 00:31:36.000 --> 00:31:39.059 Union collapses in 1991. The thing he fought 00:31:39.059 --> 00:31:42.140 against his entire life actually falls apart. 00:31:42.400 --> 00:31:45.140 It's incredible. And in 1994, his citizenship 00:31:45.140 --> 00:31:47.960 is restored and he finally goes home. But he 00:31:47.960 --> 00:31:49.819 doesn't just fly into the airport in Moscow. 00:31:50.460 --> 00:31:53.319 He flies to the Russian Far East, to the city 00:31:53.319 --> 00:31:56.220 of Magadan, the historical heart of the Gulag 00:31:56.220 --> 00:31:59.059 system. And he takes a train across the entire 00:31:59.059 --> 00:32:01.480 country to Moscow. He wants to see the patient 00:32:01.480 --> 00:32:03.519 up close. He wants to take the pulse of the nation 00:32:03.519 --> 00:32:06.119 he's been dreaming of for 20 years. But what 00:32:06.119 --> 00:32:08.519 he found when he got there broke his heart all 00:32:08.519 --> 00:32:10.519 over again. He didn't like the new Russia either. 00:32:10.680 --> 00:32:13.000 He hated it. This was the Yeltsin era. This was 00:32:13.000 --> 00:32:15.700 shock therapy economics. You had a handful of 00:32:15.700 --> 00:32:17.799 oligarchs looting all the state assets and you 00:32:17.799 --> 00:32:20.230 had mass poverty everywhere else. He saw it as 00:32:20.230 --> 00:32:22.970 utter chaos and moral decay. He felt they just 00:32:22.970 --> 00:32:25.029 traded the tyranny of the party for the tyranny 00:32:25.029 --> 00:32:27.829 of money. He bitterly criticized the awkward 00:32:27.829 --> 00:32:30.170 and corrupt exit from communism. He even had 00:32:30.170 --> 00:32:32.329 his own TV show for a while, right? Which just 00:32:32.329 --> 00:32:35.170 sounds bizarre. He did. He had a 15 -minute slot 00:32:35.170 --> 00:32:36.789 where he would just sit there in a chair and 00:32:36.789 --> 00:32:38.549 deliver these monologues about the moral state 00:32:38.549 --> 00:32:41.029 of the nation. But it was canceled after about 00:32:41.029 --> 00:32:44.680 a year. The sad truth is the new generation of 00:32:44.680 --> 00:32:46.880 Russians didn't want to be scolded by this grim 00:32:46.880 --> 00:32:50.440 grandpa figure. They wanted MTV and Levi's jeans. 00:32:50.880 --> 00:32:53.940 But there was one person in power who was listening. 00:32:54.319 --> 00:32:57.440 Vladimir Putin. This is a very complex relationship 00:32:57.440 --> 00:33:00.599 that we need to navigate carefully. Just reporting 00:33:00.599 --> 00:33:03.319 what the sources say. Solzhenitsyn in his later 00:33:03.319 --> 00:33:06.299 years became a supporter of Vladimir Putin. Why? 00:33:06.480 --> 00:33:10.140 I mean. Putin was a career KGB man. That seems 00:33:10.140 --> 00:33:12.079 like the ultimate contradiction. It does on the 00:33:12.079 --> 00:33:14.099 surface, but you have to look at it through Solzhenitsyn's 00:33:14.099 --> 00:33:17.240 eyes. He despised the chaos and what he saw as 00:33:17.240 --> 00:33:19.119 the humiliation of Russia during the Yeltsin 00:33:19.119 --> 00:33:22.119 years. He believed Russia needed a strong state 00:33:22.119 --> 00:33:24.180 to hold it together and restore its dignity. 00:33:24.400 --> 00:33:26.700 He saw Putin as a fellow Russian nationalist 00:33:26.700 --> 00:33:29.700 who was restoring order and national pride. Putin, 00:33:29.920 --> 00:33:32.460 in turn, cultivated this relationship and visited 00:33:32.460 --> 00:33:35.160 Solzhenitsyn at his home. It's a huge contrast 00:33:35.160 --> 00:33:37.410 to how he treated Yeltsin. He refused an award 00:33:37.410 --> 00:33:40.750 from Yeltsin, didn't he? Yes. He publicly refused 00:33:40.750 --> 00:33:43.190 the order of St. Andrew from Yeltsin, saying, 00:33:43.349 --> 00:33:46.029 and I quote, I am unable to receive an award 00:33:46.029 --> 00:33:48.269 from a government that had led Russia into such 00:33:48.269 --> 00:33:51.849 dire straits. But he later accepted a major state 00:33:51.849 --> 00:33:54.210 prize from Putin. He felt Putin was steering 00:33:54.210 --> 00:33:56.509 the ship of state away from the rocks that Yeltsin 00:33:56.509 --> 00:33:59.539 had run it onto. Now, we do have to address some 00:33:59.539 --> 00:34:01.720 of the major controversies in his later writings, 00:34:01.900 --> 00:34:04.759 specifically his views regarding Ukraine and 00:34:04.759 --> 00:34:07.019 the Jewish people. The source material is very 00:34:07.019 --> 00:34:09.500 clear that these views cause a lot of friction 00:34:09.500 --> 00:34:12.099 and criticism. They did. And it's important to 00:34:12.099 --> 00:34:14.159 report them accurately as part of his overall 00:34:14.159 --> 00:34:17.800 intellectual makeup. So regarding Ukraine. Solzhenitsyn 00:34:17.800 --> 00:34:20.239 was what you might call a panslavist. He fundamentally 00:34:20.239 --> 00:34:22.519 viewed Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians 00:34:22.519 --> 00:34:25.699 as one people, separated by politics. So he didn't 00:34:25.699 --> 00:34:28.159 really believe in the legitimacy of an independent 00:34:28.159 --> 00:34:30.940 Ukrainian nation. He called the talk of a separate 00:34:30.940 --> 00:34:34.039 Ukrainian people a recently invented falsehood. 00:34:34.360 --> 00:34:37.360 He warned constantly against what he saw as extreme 00:34:37.360 --> 00:34:40.480 Ukrainian nationalism. However, when it came 00:34:40.480 --> 00:34:42.980 to the Holodomor, the great famine of the 1930s, 00:34:42.980 --> 00:34:45.119 he acknowledged that six million people died 00:34:45.119 --> 00:34:47.360 and he squarely blamed the Bolshevik system. 00:34:47.539 --> 00:34:50.039 But he argued it wasn't an ethnic genocide targeting 00:34:50.039 --> 00:34:53.099 Ukrainians specifically. He saw it as the system's 00:34:53.099 --> 00:34:55.519 war against the peasantry of all ethnicities, 00:34:55.579 --> 00:34:58.159 Russian and Ukrainian alike. And then there's 00:34:58.159 --> 00:35:00.880 the very controversial book. 200 years together. 00:35:01.059 --> 00:35:03.719 Yes. This was his two -volume history of Russian 00:35:03.719 --> 00:35:06.500 -Jewish relations, published in the early 2000s. 00:35:06.539 --> 00:35:11.019 In it, he called for mutual repentance. He detailed 00:35:11.019 --> 00:35:13.320 the long history of pogroms and the oppression 00:35:13.320 --> 00:35:16.530 of Jews by the Russian state, but... And this 00:35:16.530 --> 00:35:18.710 is the part that drew so much criticism. He also 00:35:18.710 --> 00:35:20.809 argued that Jewish people bore a share of the 00:35:20.809 --> 00:35:23.010 responsibility for the crimes of the Soviet Revolution 00:35:23.010 --> 00:35:25.690 because of the disproportionate number of Jews 00:35:25.690 --> 00:35:28.250 in the early Bolshevik leadership. Which obviously 00:35:28.250 --> 00:35:30.670 drew heavy criticism for seeming to blame the 00:35:30.670 --> 00:35:33.639 victim. Immense criticism. Critics accused him 00:35:33.639 --> 00:35:36.320 of downplaying Russian anti -Semitism and reinforcing 00:35:36.320 --> 00:35:39.000 old anti -Semitic tropes about Jewish control. 00:35:39.300 --> 00:35:41.980 But Solzhenitsyn insisted his goal was simply 00:35:41.980 --> 00:35:44.739 to create a complete historical accounting where 00:35:44.739 --> 00:35:47.820 no single group was exempt from moral scrutiny. 00:35:48.119 --> 00:35:50.360 He really didn't care who he offended, did he? 00:35:50.420 --> 00:35:53.019 East, West, liberals, communists, nationalists. 00:35:53.099 --> 00:35:56.710 He held. everyone to the same impossible, rigid 00:35:56.710 --> 00:35:59.710 moral standard that he held for himself. He seemed 00:35:59.710 --> 00:36:01.789 to answer only to his own conscience and to his 00:36:01.789 --> 00:36:04.510 God. He continued to write and speak his mind 00:36:04.510 --> 00:36:07.389 until the very end. He died in 2008 at the age 00:36:07.389 --> 00:36:10.230 of 89 of heart failure. And he was buried at 00:36:10.230 --> 00:36:13.130 the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow, a very traditional 00:36:13.130 --> 00:36:16.030 burial for a very traditional Russian man. A 00:36:16.030 --> 00:36:18.530 man whose life spanned the entire Soviet century. 00:36:19.019 --> 00:36:21.059 Born during the Civil War, fought in World War 00:36:21.059 --> 00:36:24.099 II, survived the gulag, brought down the regime's 00:36:24.099 --> 00:36:26.480 moral reputation, and lived to see it all fall. 00:36:26.780 --> 00:36:29.579 So as we wrap up this deep dive, how do we summarize 00:36:29.579 --> 00:36:31.900 such a colossal, complicated figure? He seems 00:36:31.900 --> 00:36:34.260 like a man of just endless contradictions. He 00:36:34.260 --> 00:36:36.800 absolutely was a victim of the gulag who ended 00:36:36.800 --> 00:36:39.039 up supporting authoritarianism in places like 00:36:39.039 --> 00:36:42.119 Spain. He was the Soviet Union's fiercest and 00:36:42.119 --> 00:36:44.559 most effective critic. Yet he became a harsh 00:36:44.559 --> 00:36:47.739 critic of Western freedom. He dedicated his life 00:36:47.739 --> 00:36:50.139 to saving Russia. But when he finally returned, 00:36:50.460 --> 00:36:53.699 he felt like a stranger in his own land, alienated 00:36:53.699 --> 00:36:55.860 by what it had become. But through all of those 00:36:55.860 --> 00:36:58.699 contradictions, there was that one steady drumbeat 00:36:58.699 --> 00:37:00.940 we talked about at the very start of this. Men 00:37:00.940 --> 00:37:04.719 have forgotten God. That was his diagnosis for 00:37:04.719 --> 00:37:07.500 everything, whether it was the unimaginable brutality 00:37:07.500 --> 00:37:10.280 of the camps, what he saw as the weakness and 00:37:10.280 --> 00:37:13.179 spiritual emptiness of the West, or the crass 00:37:13.179 --> 00:37:15.840 greed of the new Russian oligarchs. He believed 00:37:15.840 --> 00:37:18.159 that without a higher spiritual compass, any 00:37:18.159 --> 00:37:20.480 political system would eventually fail the human 00:37:20.480 --> 00:37:24.480 spirit. It's a powerful and deeply unfashionable 00:37:24.480 --> 00:37:26.840 legacy. And I want to leave our listeners with 00:37:26.840 --> 00:37:28.739 that thought from his Harvard address, because 00:37:28.739 --> 00:37:30.300 I think it's the one that really challenges us 00:37:30.300 --> 00:37:33.079 the most today. The warning about legalism. Exactly. 00:37:34.019 --> 00:37:36.679 Solzhenitsyn warned that a society based only 00:37:36.679 --> 00:37:39.179 on the letter of the law, with no shared moral 00:37:39.179 --> 00:37:42.639 compass, takes scarce advantage of the high level 00:37:42.639 --> 00:37:45.599 of human possibilities. When we look around our 00:37:45.599 --> 00:37:48.449 world today, A world of endless regulations, 00:37:48.670 --> 00:37:51.110 of constant lawsuits and searching for loopholes 00:37:51.110 --> 00:37:53.789 where we so often ask, can I get away with this? 00:37:54.190 --> 00:37:56.230 Instead of asking, is this the right thing to 00:37:56.230 --> 00:37:59.070 do? I have to ask, have we fallen into the exact 00:37:59.070 --> 00:38:01.670 trap he warned us about all the way back in 1978? 00:38:02.210 --> 00:38:04.590 Are we so focused on what is technically legal 00:38:04.590 --> 00:38:06.630 that we've completely forgotten how to talk about 00:38:06.630 --> 00:38:08.449 what is good? That is the question he leaves 00:38:08.449 --> 00:38:10.050 us with. It's definitely something to think about. 00:38:10.610 --> 00:38:12.530 Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive. We'll 00:38:12.530 --> 00:38:13.090 see you next time.