Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are not
just opening a history book, we're really prying
open a case file on what you could call a geopolitical
earthquake, all contained within the life of
a single person. That's a great way to put it.
We're talking about a figure who didn't just
document the 20th century. I mean, you could
argue he grabbed the steering wheel of history
and yanked it in a completely different direction.
We're talking about Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It's
so hard to find a modern comparison for him.
I mean, in the literary world, we talk about
books that are important or moving, you know,
books that win big prizes. But Solzhenitsyn's
work, his nonfiction especially, like The Gulag
Archipelago. That was something else entirely.
It wasn't just a book, as our source material
puts it. It was a head -on challenge to the Soviet
state. It was a weapon. It absolutely was a weapon.
That's the image that really stuck with me reading
through these sources. You've got this nuclear
superpower, the Soviet Union, at the absolute
height of its power. It's armed with ICBMs. It's
got the KGB. The whole apparatus of a totalitarian
state. And on the other side, you have one guy,
one guy with a pen. some manuscripts he's hiding,
and, you know, a beard. And somehow the guy with
the pen wins. He wins by delegitimizing the entire
moral authority of the communist project. He
just... He dismantled it piece by piece with
words. And he'd do it by sheer force of will.
And the numbers are just staggering. Oh, yeah.
The Gulag Archipelago sold tens of millions of
copies around the world. It forced the West,
which had been, let's be honest, a little willfully
blind to the Soviet reality. Or at least willing
to look the other way for political reasons.
Exactly. It forced them and eventually the Soviet
Union itself to look the monster right in the
mirror. But, and this is so crucial for our deep
dive today. Solzhenitsyn is often just flattened
into a caricature. Right. He becomes the gulag
guy. That's all people know. Or the angry prophet
ranting in the woods in Vermont. Exactly. The
gloomy dissident. But the whole mission of this
deep dive is to get past that label. We need
to understand the transformation, you know, because
he didn't start out as a dissident. He started
as a loyal Marxist soldier. That's the part that's
so hard to wrap your head around. So we need
to trace how a decorated Red Army captain, a
true believer, turns into a spiritual dissident.
And then maybe even more surprisingly, how that
dissident becomes this ferocious critic of the
West the moment he's finally free. That's the
twist that I think really trips a lot of people
up. You expect the narrative to be so simple.
He escapes the evil empire. He comes to the West.
He loves democracy and lives happily ever after.
But Solzhenitsyn gets to the West and says, hold
on a minute. You guys have some massive problems,
too. He was a completely equal opportunity critic.
Absolutely. And just on a pure story level, looking
at the biographical data, his life is a spy thriller.
I'm not even exaggerating. No, it's all there.
I mean, we are talking about assassination attempts
by the KGB using, of all things, ricin on a crowded
street. We're talking about manuscripts buried
in friends' gardens, secret codes and letters,
betrayals. It's just intense stuff. It is a thriller.
But it's a thriller with a very, very specific
moral center. And I think that's key. When he
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1970, the citation, it honored the ethical force
with which he pursued the great traditions of
Russian literature. Ethical force. I like that.
I want us to keep that phrase ethical force in
our minds for this whole discussion. Because
his entire worldview, everything he wrote, it
all boils down to one almost terrifyingly simple
conclusion. root of all the 20th century's disasters,
the wars, the camps, the genocide, was that men
had forgotten God. So, okay, let's unpack that
ethical force then and figure out where it came
from. Because as you said, he didn't just pop
out of the womb a religious philosopher. Yeah.
If we look at the origin section of our sources,
I mean... On paper, young Alexander looks like
the perfect model Soviet citizen. On paper, yes.
But if you just scratch the surface, there was
this massive, massive contradiction right there
from the very beginning. He was born in Kislovodsk
in 1918. Now, just pause and think about what
1918 in Russia means. It's the Civil War. It's
total chaos. Absolute chaos. The Bolsheviks are
fighting the whites. The old world is burning
down. And Solzhenitsyn creates his first fiction,
as he called it, just by being born. What do
you mean by that? Well, his father, Isaac, he
had died in a hunting accident six months before
Alexander was even born, which is tragic enough.
But the really dangerous part was his father's
identity. He was an officer in the old Imperial
Russian Army. Strike one. And he was of Cossack
origin. OK, that's strike two in the new Soviet
world. Big time. And then strike three was his
mother's family. They weren't just, you know,
regular people. They were wealthy landowners
in the Kuban region. In the Bolshevik worldview,
these people were the enemy. They were class
enemies, the oppressors who had to be swept away.
So his very existence is a political liability.
A huge one. So his mother, Tessia, she had to
perform this lifelong magic trick. She had to
scrub their entire family history. She raised
him in poverty deliberately just to blend in,
hiding the fact that he was the son of an imperial
officer and the grandson of a wealthy landowner.
It's fascinating because she wasn't just hiding
his class background. She was trying to preserve
a whole different set of values, wasn't she?
The sources mentioned she was devoutly religious.
She was, deeply. She raised him in the Russian
Orthodox faith, but it had to be done in secret.
So you have to picture this young boy. Growing
up in a house full of icons and whispers about
God and prayers. And then he walks out the front
door. And he walks out the door into the Soviet
education system. And that system was an unbelievably
efficient machine for churning out atheists.
It was its primary function, really. And with
him, it worked. That's the wild part. Despite
his mother's best efforts, young Alexander buys
what the state is selling, hook, line, and sinker.
He buys it completely. He becomes a committed
atheist. He becomes a true believer in Marxism
-Leninism. He goes off to Rostov State University
to study math and physics, which seems, you know,
apolitical. Sure, numbers are numbers. But at
the same time, he's taking correspondence courses
from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature,
and History. He's steeping himself in the ideology.
He's drowning himself in it. He is. He admitted
later in his life that until the day he was arrested,
he never once truly questioned the moral superiority
of the Soviet Union. He really thought they were
building the future, a better world. So again,
not a rebel waiting for his moment. He was a
true believer. 100%. And he proved it when the
war started, World War II, or the Great Patriotic
War, as they called it. He didn't try to dodge
the draft. He wanted in. He demanded to go. He
did. He eventually served as the commander of
a sound ranging battery in the Red Army. OK,
so just to clarify for the listener, a sound
ranging battery. That's not frontline infantry
charging with a bayonet, right? It's more of
a technical role. It's highly technical. It's
essentially using acoustics, the sound of enemy
cannons firing, to triangulate their position
so you can fire back accurately. It required
very advanced mathematics. It was really the
perfect job for a math and physics student like
him. And by all accounts, he was good at it.
Captain Solzhenitsyn was a model officer. He
was excellent at it. He was decorated twice.
He received the Order of the Red Star and another
major decoration for specifically destroying
German artillery batteries. He was a competent,
brave, loyal Soviet officer. He had the shoulder
boards, the respect, the command. He was on the
winning team. But the sources seem to point to
his time in East Prussia. Right at the end of
the war is the moment where the armor starts
to crack a little. He's marching into Germany.
The Red Army is winning. But he sees something
that really shakes him to his core. Yeah, this
is what the sources call the witness to atrocity
phase. And you have to understand the atmosphere
in early 1945. The Soviet propaganda machine,
led by writers like Ilya Arenberg, was just whipping
up this frenzy of pure vengeance. The message
was simple. Kill the German. So when the Soviet
troops finally cross into Germany. proper into
East Prussia. It's just a release of pure rage.
An explosion of it. And Solzhenitsyn is right
there watching his own troops do this. He's watching
looting, wanton destruction, and most horrifyingly,
the mass rape of German women and girls. And
it wasn't just Germans sometimes, Polish women
who were mistaken for Germans. He later wrote
a very long, very dark poem about this experience
called Prussian Nights. I was reading some excerpts
of that poem. It is not a glorious war poem.
It's gruesome. It's a confession. It's a piece
of self -laceration. He describes the gang rape
of a woman and the narrator, who is clearly Solzhenitsyn
himself, is an officer just standing there. He
doesn't stop it. He just watches. Wow. And later,
looking back on this moment in the Gulag archipelago,
he asks this absolutely haunting question. He
asks, so were we any better? That is such a heavy,
heavy realization for a guy who grew up believing
the Soviet Union was the absolute pinnacle of
human morality. To look at your own side and
see monsters. It's the beginning of his moral
awakening. He starts to realize that good and
evil aren't just neat labels you can put on us
in them. But, and this is the incredible irony,
he didn't get arrested for objecting to war crimes.
He didn't get arrested for trying to save civilians.
No, he got arrested for being an arrogant young
intellectual who thought he was smarter than
the system. This is the part that just drives
me crazy reading it. He's writing these letters
to his friend from school. Nikolai Vitkovich,
right? Yes. This is in February of 1945. Victory
in Europe is just a couple of months away. And
he and Vitkovich are exchanging these long philosophical
letters where they're critiquing the conduct
of the war. And crucially, they're critiquing
Stalin personally. But they thought they were
being so clever. They use code names for him.
This is the absolute hubris of the intellectual.
They referred to Stalin as Hosian, which means
the boss, or Balbos, which is a Yiddish word
for master of the house. They even called him
Pakhan, which is like... A mafia boss. Right.
They honestly thought, we're so clever, the dull
-witted military censors will never figure out
who we're talking about. As if the secret police
wouldn't immediately realize who the boss was
in 1945 Russia. It's just, it's madness. Exactly.
Sim -er -esh -h, the military counterintelligence
agency whose name literally means death to spies.
was not stupid. They were reading everything.
And they didn't just find a few insults about
Stalin. They found something much, much worse
in those letters. This is the resolution number
one. That's it. They found that Solzhenitsyn
and Vitkovich had drafted something called Resolution
Number One. It was a sketch, a program for forming
a new post -war organization to in their words,
fix the Soviet regime. Oh, that's it. That's
the ballgame. In the paranoid mind of the Stalinist
state, that isn't just grumbling. That's a conspiracy.
That's a coup in the making. So paint the scene
for us. It's February 1945. He's a decorated
captain on the front lines. What actually happens?
How do they get him? He's summoned by his brigade
commander. He thinks he's just being called in
for new orders or a promotion, maybe. He walks
into the headquarters. He salutes. And suddenly,
two Esmerich officers step out from the shadows.
They physically rip the shoulder board. off his
uniform. They take his pistol. Wow. In that one
split second, the decorated captain is dead.
The prisoner is born. That physical act, ripping
the rank off his shoulders, it's so symbolic.
You are no longer a person in the system's eyes.
You are just meat for the grinder now. And he's
taken away, eventually ending up in the infamous
Ludyanka prison in Moscow. And there is one visual
detail from the source material that I think
is the most cinematic, most soul crushing moment
of his entire early life. Victory Day. Victory
Day. May 9th, 1945. The war in Europe is over.
Nazi Germany has surrendered. All of Moscow is
exploding with joy. There are fireworks. There
are searchlights sweeping the sky. People are
dancing and singing in the streets. There are
30 gun salutes. It's the biggest party in Russian
history. And Solzhenitsyn is in a cell in the
Lubyanka. Which is right in the center of Moscow.
Right in the dead center. He can see the flashes
of the fireworks through the tiny barred window
of his cell. He could hear the roar of the crowd.
And he wrote, there was no rejoicing in our cells.
That victory was not ours. Unbelievable. I mean,
can you just imagine the bitterness? You fought
for that victory. You helped destroy those German
guns. And now, while the entire country celebrates,
you are sitting in the dark, labeled a traitor
by the very system you served. That moment right
there, it has to be the final closing of the
door on the believer. You can't be a Marxist
true believer when the system you worship has
just thrown you in a cage while celebrating the
victory you helped secure. it forces a total
radical reset of his entire worldview. And this
leads us directly into part two, the education
of the soul. The Gulag years. Right. So he gets
convicted under Article 58, which was the classic
catch -all for anti -Soviet propaganda. He gets
a sentence of eight years. But his experience
wasn't, let's say, the typical Gulag experience,
was it? At least not at first. He didn't go straight
to the mines. No, not immediately. And this is
a really fascinating nuance of the Soviet system's
strange, brutal logic. Because he was a mathematician
and a physicist, the state decided he was too
valuable to just work to death chopping down
trees in a forest. So they put him in a shurashka.
OK, you have to explain the shurashka. It sounds
like a made up word from a fantasy novel. It's
slang, but it basically means a special scientific
prison. These were facilities run by the Ministry
of State Security, where all the prisoners were
top tier scientists, engineers and mathematicians,
and they were forced to work on secret government
projects. What kind of projects? Oh, all sorts.
Developing secure encryption devices for telephones,
which is what Solzhenitsyn did. Designing new
aircraft, even working on the early stages of
the nuclear program. So it's slave labor, but
it's intellectual slave labor. You're a prisoner,
but you're a prisoner with a slide rule. That's
a perfect way to put it. It's what Dante called
the first circle of hell. In fact, that's where
the title of his novel in the first circle comes
from. It's hell, but it's the best part of hell.
The source material says they had butter sometimes,
they had worn sheets, they weren't freezing to
death or starving. But the psychological torture
was unique. You are using your brain, your most
precious faculty, to strengthen the very regime
that has unjustly imprisoned you. You are literally
building the locks for your own cell and for
millions of others. That's a brutal moral compromise.
I will help you oppress people more efficiently
so that I can have an extra piece of bread and
some butter. Precisely. Solzhenitsyn wrestled
with that every single day. He met a man there
named Lev Kopelev, who became the basis for the
character Lev Rubin in his book. They debated
these things endlessly. But eventually, Solzhenitsyn's
principles got him in trouble. He had a dispute
with the authorities and in the completely arbitrary
nature of the gulag. He got kicked out of the
good prison. He got kicked out. In 1950, he was
transferred to a special camp in a place called
Ekibastis in Kazakhstan. And the special camp
is exactly what we imagine when we say the word
gulag. This was the real thing. This was the
hard reality. No more encryption projects. Now
he was a miner. He was a bricklayer. He was a
foundry foreman. The cold was just unimaginable,
minus 40 degrees. The mortar you were using to
lay bricks would freeze before you could get
the next brick on top of it if you weren't fast
enough. And the sources say this is where one
day in the life of Ivan Denisovich was really
born. It wasn't fiction. It was just reportage.
It was his life. Every single detail in that
book, sewing a piece of bread into your mattress
so it won't be stolen, the desperate, all -consuming
desire for an extra bowl of thin soup, the way
the cold physically hurts your lungs to breathe.
Solzhenitsyn lived every second of that at Ekibastis.
This was the absolute bottom of the barrel. And
as if that wasn't enough, just to add insult
to injury, biology decides to attack him too.
Yeah, this is the moment that almost ended the
story before it could even begin. He developed
a tumor. He had it removed there in the camp.
But the conditions were obviously primitive.
It wasn't properly diagnosed as cancerous. Then
his eight year sentence finally ends in 1953
and Stalin dies in March of that same year. So
Solzhenitsyn is released from the camp, but he's
not. He's not free. No. He's sent into internal
exile in perpetuity. Perpetuity. That means forever.
Forever. He was sent to a tiny remote village
called Berlik in southern Kazakhstan. He was
a non -person. He had to report to the local
commandant regularly. And that is when the cancer
came back. And this time it was aggressive. It
was aggressive. He was in immense pain. He couldn't
eat. He was wasting away. He was essentially
sent there to die alone in a mud hut in the middle
of nowhere. But somehow he manages to get to
a clinic in Tashkent. In 1954, yes, he gets permission
to travel to a cancer ward. And the doctors there,
using massive doses of radiation therapy, somehow
managed to put the tumor into remission. By all
accounts, it was a medical miracle. But for Solzhenitsyn,
it was a spiritual miracle. Right. This is the
spiritual shift the outline talks about. We need
to really understand this. How does surviving
cancer change his politics? Or is it more than
that? It was so much more than politics. It was
metaphysics. He came to believe with every fiber
of his being that his life had been given back
to him for a specific purpose. He had walked
through the valley of the shadow of death, first
the war, then the camp, and now the cancer. And
he had survived. It was in that cancer ward that
he abandoned the last remnants of Marxism. And
returned to his childhood faith. He returned
to the Orthodox Christianity of his mother, but
with the white -hot zeal of a convert. He saw
it all clearly now. He has that famous... around
this time, he stops blaming the system, Stalin,
the party, and he starts looking inward at himself.
Yes. This is the absolute core of his philosophy.
He looked back at his own behavior as a Red Army
captain, how arrogant he'd been, how he had ignored
the suffering of those German civilians, and
he wrote that famous line, maybe his most famous,
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 who is willing to destroy a
piece of his own heart. Exactly. That's the conclusion.
You can't fix society by killing the bad class
or the bad guys. You have to start by fixing
the human soul, your own soul first. So when
he walks out of that cancer ward in Tushkent,
he is a completely changed man. He has a mission.
He is going to bear witness. Which brings us
to part three, the writer who broke the silence.
This is the era of the Khrushchev thaw. It's
the late 50s early 60s. The Soviet Union is trying
in its own way to de -Stalinize. Right. Nikita
Khrushchev is in power and he wants to distance
himself and the party from Stalin's worst crimes,
partly to consolidate his own control. He needs
a weapon, a tool to bash the hardline Stalinists
with. And Solzhenitsyn, who is now working as
a humble high school physics teacher and writing
in absolute secrecy at night, provides that weapon.
He submits one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich
to Novimir, which was the big literary journal
at the time. It was a massive, massive risk.
He was completely convinced he would just be
arrested again and sent back. But the editor,
a man named Tvardovsky, loved it. He saw its
power. And he passed it up the chain of command
all the way until it landed on Khrushchev's own
desk. And Khrushchev, amazingly, personally approved
it for publication. That is just wild to me.
the head of the Soviet state approving a book
that exposes the Soviet camp system. Well, Khrushchev
famously said to the Politburo in a closed session,
there's a Stalinist in each of you. We must root
out this evil. He wasn't a liberal. He was using
Solzhenitsyn as a political bludgeon against
his rivals. And when it was published in 1962,
the reaction was. Well, it was explosive. It
was an earthquake. You have to remember, everyone
knew about the camps on some level. Everyone
had a cousin or a neighbor who had disappeared.
But no one ever spoke about it. It was the great
public secret. And suddenly, here it is, in print,
in an official magazine. People were reading
it on street corners, in the metro. They were
weeping. It was this moment of collective national
catharsis. Solzhenitsyn became an overnight celebrity.
But in the Soviet Union, the political winds
can change very, very fast. Unbelievably fast.
By 1964, Khrushchev is ousted in a palace coup.
Brezhnev comes in, and the thaw immediately turns
into a deep, hard freeze. The new regime decides
they've had more than enough of this truth -telling.
And so Sanderson goes from being a celebrity
back to being a pariah. Almost overnight, they
stop publishing his work. The KGB starts an active
campaign of harassment against him. They start
seizing his papers. In 1965, they raid a friend's
house and they find the manuscript of Gerst in
the first circle. The noose is tightening. Okay,
so this is where the story becomes about the
mechanics of writing the Gulag Archipelago. He
knows he's being watched. He knows they want
to silence him. But he's secretly working on
this massive, multi -volume history of the entire
camp system. How did he physically do it? It's
an incredible story of literary tradecraft. He
wrote it in secret between 1958 and 1967. He
called it a literary investigation. He didn't
just use his own memory, his own experience.
He secretly interviewed 256 other former prisoners.
How do you even do that under KGB surveillance?
Very, very carefully. He would meet them on park
benches, in crowded train stations, places where
they could blend in. He couldn't take notes openly,
so he had to memorize their stories. Then he
would rush home and write it all down. and the
manuscript itself the physical pages he couldn't
keep it in one place that would be suicide so
he had this network of incredibly brave friends
he called them the invisibles he would type out
sections using single spacing on both sides of
the paper to make it as compact as possible and
then these friends would take the pages and hide
them all over. They buried copies in glass jars
in their gardens. They hid them in hollowed -out
furniture. They hid them in basements in different
cities. He was writing a 2 ,000 -page book that
was physically scattered all across the Soviet
Union. It's like aspiring, but for literature.
Exactly. And then the tragedy happens, the story
of Elizaveta Voronyanskaya. This part of the
story just breaks my heart every time I read
it. It's the most painful chapter in the book's
entire history. Elizaveta was one of his most
trusted typists and assistants. She had a copy
of the manuscript hidden in her apartment. And
in August of 1973, the KGB picked her up. And
they didn't just, you know, ask her nicely where
it was. No. They interrogated her for five days
straight without sleep. Just relentless psychological
and physical pressure. She was an elderly woman.
She finally broke. She told them where the manuscript
was hidden. And the aftermath of that. The KGB
went to her apartment. They dug up the manuscript
from its hiding place, and then they let her
go. She went home, and she hanged herself. Oh,
God. The guilt souls in it must have fell from
that. It was devastating for him. But it also
clarified everything. He realized the game was
over. He had been holding back the publication
of the Gulag Archipelago in the West to protect
the people who were named in the book. But now
the KGB... had the text. They knew the names.
So the risk was already there. The risk was already
realized. He said, essentially, they have the
book. The world should have it too. He sent the
signal, a prearranged code word, to his contacts
in Paris to publish immediately. But before we
get to the publication, we have to talk about
the assassination attempt. Because while all
this manuscript drama is happening, the KGB also
tried to solve the Solzhenitsyn problem. The
old -fashioned way. Yes, this was in August of
1971. This is straight out of a Cold War spy
novel. They couldn't just shoot him in the street
because by this point he was too famous. He'd
won the Nobel Prize in 1970, even though he couldn't
go to Stockholm to collect it. Right, it would
be too obvious. Too obvious. So they tried to
desettle. KGB agents followed him to a department
store in the city of Novotrikask. While he was
in the crowd, one of them bumped into him and,
with a hidden device, injected him with a dose
of ricin. Ricin, the poison made from castor
beans. Highly lethal. Highly lethal. And they
use what the sources describe as a gel -based
delivery method, so it would absorb slowly and
be hard to trace. He fell violently ill a few
days later. His skin was covered in burns and
boils. He was bedridden for months in an agonizing
pain. But unbelievably, he survived. The man
is just indestructible. He survives the war.
He survives the camps. He survives cancer. And
now he survives a KGB hit squad. It just reinforced
his belief that he was being protected by God
for a purpose, that he had a mission to complete.
So 1974, the Gulag Archipelago is published in
the West. It hits the world like a meteor. The
Soviet leadership is absolutely furious. They
debate what to do with him, arrest him again,
kill him for real this time, send him back to
Siberia. They were completely stuck. If they
killed him, he becomes an eternal martyr. If
they imprison him, the West will never shut up
about it. Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB
at the time, comes up with a different, and in
their minds, cleverer solution. Expulsion. Which
brings us to part four. Exile. In February of
1974, they arrest him one last time, they strip
him of his Soviet citizenship, put him on a plane,
and literally just drop him in West Germany.
He is free, but he's a man without a country.
He eventually moves to Zurich, and then, looking
for more privacy and quiet, he settles in, of
all places, Cavendish, Vermont. I just love the
image of this great Russian prophet, this Old
Testament figure living in the quiet, green woods
of Vermont. He builds a big fence around his
property, locks the gate. And just keeps writing.
But the KGB didn't just leave him alone, did
they? Even in Vermont. Oh, no. Andropoff was
obsessed with him. The KGB ran what they called
active measures to harass and discredit him,
even in America. They sent him letters forged
to look like they were from unhinged lunatics.
They mailed him anonymous photographs of car
crashes and gruesome brain surgery just to mess
with his head. Psychological warfare. Totally.
They tried to make him paranoid that his neighbors
and his American assistants were all CIA or KGB
agents. Which, to be fair, in the middle of the
cold... was not an entirely invalid paranoia
to have. No, it wasn't. The sources suggest that
at least three people in his immediate circle
in Vermont were, in fact, informants for various
agencies. But the biggest shock for the West
wasn't that the KGB hated him. It was that he
didn't seem to love the West all that much either.
This is the absolute crux of the Solzhenitsyn
paradox. The West welcomed him as a hero. They
had this very simple equation in their heads.
He hates communism, therefore he must love consumer
capitalism. And then came the Harvard Address
in 1978. A legendary moment. It's a rainy day.
You have the entire intellectual elite of America
sitting there in their academic robes at Harvard
University. They invite him to give the commencement
speech. They are ready to be praised. They are
expecting him to say, thank you for your freedom.
You are the shining city on the hill. And instead,
he gets up to the podium and essentially pulls
out a flamethrower. He absolutely scolds them.
He goes down a list. He critiques the West for
what he calls a decline in courage, especially
among the ruling and intellectual elites. He
attacks the pervasive materialism, the idea that
the goal of human life is just to own more stuff.
He attacks the spiritual vapidity of pop culture,
specifically citing TV stupor and intolerable
music. But the part that I found most interesting
and honestly the most relevant to today is his
critique of what he called legalism. Can we dig
into that for a minute? This is such a profound
point he makes. Solzhenitsyn argued that Western
society had fundamentally replaced morality with
legality. He told the crowd, I spent all my life
under a communist regime where the law did not
matter. But you people have the opposite problem.
You worship the law. What does he mean by that
exactly? He meant that in the West, if something
is legal, people automatically assume that it
is right. He said, and I'm quoting from the source
here, a society which is based on the letter
of the law and never reaches any higher. is taking
very scarce advantage of the high level of human
possibilities. So he's saying that just relying
on the law as your guide is a very low bar for
a civilization to set for itself. The dangerously
low bar. He's saying that if your only standard
for behavior is will I get sued for this or is
this technically allowed by the rules, then you
have a gaping hole in your soul as a society.
He believed that voluntary self -restraint, a
sense of higher moral duty, was far more important
than a long list of legal rights. And then he
delivers the killer line. He does. He told the
audience, should someone ask me whether I would
indicate the West, such as it is today, as a
model to my country, frankly, I would have to
answer negatively. Can you just imagine the stunned
silence in that crowd? He's telling them, thanks
for the rescue, but I do not want Russia to become
like you. It was a profound shock to the system
for a lot of people, but he was being completely
consistent. In his mind, the East had forgotten
God because the state had forced them to. The
West had forgotten God because they were too
busy shopping and filing lawsuits against each
other. To him, both systems were spiritually
hollow just in different ways. This really helps
explain why his specific political views in exile
were so confusing and often offensive to people
in the West. He went to Spain after the dictator
Franco died, and he basically told the liberals
to calm down and not change things too quickly.
Yes. He warned them not to push too hard for
rapid democracy. He claimed controversially that
Spain under Franco had more freedoms than the
USSR ever did. He saw the Spanish Civil War through
the lens of the Russian Civil War. He viewed
the Republicans, the leftists, as the same destructive
force that destroyed Russia. So he tended to
side with the nationalists as the lesser of two
evils. Which got him labeled a fascist by some.
Winston Lord, a prominent U .S. diplomat at the
time, called him just about a fascist. That's
a misreading, I think. So Sinitsyn wasn't a fascist.
He was a terrified anti -communist. He saw communism
as the ultimate singular evil in the world. So
he was willing to support almost any authoritarian
regime if they held the line against the Reds.
It's the same logic with Vietnam. He supported
the American war effort. He did passionately.
When the U .S. pulled out, he called the peace
accords a hasty capitulation and a betrayal.
He accused the U .S. of abandoning 30 million
people to genocide and reeducation camps. He
wasn't thinking about American domestic politics
or the draft. He was thinking about the people
who would be left behind. To him, the U .S. withdrawal
was just more proof of that declining courage
he talked about at Harvard. He also had this
very, very specific view of Russia versus the
Soviet Union. He hated when people used those
terms interchangeably. That is a crucial distinction
for understanding him. He was a passionate Russian
nationalist, but he was also an anti -imperialist.
He argued that the Soviet Union wasn't Russia.
It was a cancer growing on Russia. He believed
that ethnic Russians were actually the most oppressed
and brutalized group within the USSR and that
communism itself was a foreign Western ideology
imported to destroy his country. So he wanted
to strip away the non -Russian parts of the empire
in order to save the Russian nation. Exactly.
He wanted Russia. to look inward, to heal its
own soul, not to waste its strength and blood
trying to run an empire in Eastern Europe or
Central Asia. Which brings us to the final act
of his life, part five, the return. The Soviet
Union collapses in 1991. The thing he fought
against his entire life actually falls apart.
It's incredible. And in 1994, his citizenship
is restored and he finally goes home. But he
doesn't just fly into the airport in Moscow.
He flies to the Russian Far East, to the city
of Magadan, the historical heart of the Gulag
system. And he takes a train across the entire
country to Moscow. He wants to see the patient
up close. He wants to take the pulse of the nation
he's been dreaming of for 20 years. But what
he found when he got there broke his heart all
over again. He didn't like the new Russia either.
He hated it. This was the Yeltsin era. This was
shock therapy economics. You had a handful of
oligarchs looting all the state assets and you
had mass poverty everywhere else. He saw it as
utter chaos and moral decay. He felt they just
traded the tyranny of the party for the tyranny
of money. He bitterly criticized the awkward
and corrupt exit from communism. He even had
his own TV show for a while, right? Which just
sounds bizarre. He did. He had a 15 -minute slot
where he would just sit there in a chair and
deliver these monologues about the moral state
of the nation. But it was canceled after about
a year. The sad truth is the new generation of
Russians didn't want to be scolded by this grim
grandpa figure. They wanted MTV and Levi's jeans.
But there was one person in power who was listening.
Vladimir Putin. This is a very complex relationship
that we need to navigate carefully. Just reporting
what the sources say. Solzhenitsyn in his later
years became a supporter of Vladimir Putin. Why?
I mean. Putin was a career KGB man. That seems
like the ultimate contradiction. It does on the
surface, but you have to look at it through Solzhenitsyn's
eyes. He despised the chaos and what he saw as
the humiliation of Russia during the Yeltsin
years. He believed Russia needed a strong state
to hold it together and restore its dignity.
He saw Putin as a fellow Russian nationalist
who was restoring order and national pride. Putin,
in turn, cultivated this relationship and visited
Solzhenitsyn at his home. It's a huge contrast
to how he treated Yeltsin. He refused an award
from Yeltsin, didn't he? Yes. He publicly refused
the order of St. Andrew from Yeltsin, saying,
and I quote, I am unable to receive an award
from a government that had led Russia into such
dire straits. But he later accepted a major state
prize from Putin. He felt Putin was steering
the ship of state away from the rocks that Yeltsin
had run it onto. Now, we do have to address some
of the major controversies in his later writings,
specifically his views regarding Ukraine and
the Jewish people. The source material is very
clear that these views cause a lot of friction
and criticism. They did. And it's important to
report them accurately as part of his overall
intellectual makeup. So regarding Ukraine. Solzhenitsyn
was what you might call a panslavist. He fundamentally
viewed Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians
as one people, separated by politics. So he didn't
really believe in the legitimacy of an independent
Ukrainian nation. He called the talk of a separate
Ukrainian people a recently invented falsehood.
He warned constantly against what he saw as extreme
Ukrainian nationalism. However, when it came
to the Holodomor, the great famine of the 1930s,
he acknowledged that six million people died
and he squarely blamed the Bolshevik system.
But he argued it wasn't an ethnic genocide targeting
Ukrainians specifically. He saw it as the system's
war against the peasantry of all ethnicities,
Russian and Ukrainian alike. And then there's
the very controversial book. 200 years together.
Yes. This was his two -volume history of Russian
-Jewish relations, published in the early 2000s.
In it, he called for mutual repentance. He detailed
the long history of pogroms and the oppression
of Jews by the Russian state, but... And this
is the part that drew so much criticism. He also
argued that Jewish people bore a share of the
responsibility for the crimes of the Soviet Revolution
because of the disproportionate number of Jews
in the early Bolshevik leadership. Which obviously
drew heavy criticism for seeming to blame the
victim. Immense criticism. Critics accused him
of downplaying Russian anti -Semitism and reinforcing
old anti -Semitic tropes about Jewish control.
But Solzhenitsyn insisted his goal was simply
to create a complete historical accounting where
no single group was exempt from moral scrutiny.
He really didn't care who he offended, did he?
East, West, liberals, communists, nationalists.
He held. everyone to the same impossible, rigid
moral standard that he held for himself. He seemed
to answer only to his own conscience and to his
God. He continued to write and speak his mind
until the very end. He died in 2008 at the age
of 89 of heart failure. And he was buried at
the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow, a very traditional
burial for a very traditional Russian man. A
man whose life spanned the entire Soviet century.
Born during the Civil War, fought in World War
II, survived the gulag, brought down the regime's
moral reputation, and lived to see it all fall.
So as we wrap up this deep dive, how do we summarize
such a colossal, complicated figure? He seems
like a man of just endless contradictions. He
absolutely was a victim of the gulag who ended
up supporting authoritarianism in places like
Spain. He was the Soviet Union's fiercest and
most effective critic. Yet he became a harsh
critic of Western freedom. He dedicated his life
to saving Russia. But when he finally returned,
he felt like a stranger in his own land, alienated
by what it had become. But through all of those
contradictions, there was that one steady drumbeat
we talked about at the very start of this. Men
have forgotten God. That was his diagnosis for
everything, whether it was the unimaginable brutality
of the camps, what he saw as the weakness and
spiritual emptiness of the West, or the crass
greed of the new Russian oligarchs. He believed
that without a higher spiritual compass, any
political system would eventually fail the human
spirit. It's a powerful and deeply unfashionable
legacy. And I want to leave our listeners with
that thought from his Harvard address, because
I think it's the one that really challenges us
the most today. The warning about legalism. Exactly.
Solzhenitsyn warned that a society based only
on the letter of the law, with no shared moral
compass, takes scarce advantage of the high level
of human possibilities. When we look around our
world today, A world of endless regulations,
of constant lawsuits and searching for loopholes
where we so often ask, can I get away with this?
Instead of asking, is this the right thing to
do? I have to ask, have we fallen into the exact
trap he warned us about all the way back in 1978?
Are we so focused on what is technically legal
that we've completely forgotten how to talk about
what is good? That is the question he leaves
us with. It's definitely something to think about.
Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive. We'll
see you next time.