Farewell to a Man of Morals : Solzhenitsyn’s message rings clear, for Russians, for Americans, for all

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the most controversial of all the Russian emigre writers of the Cold War, has gone home. His departure from the Vermont retreat where he had worked in virtual solitude for 18 years made quiet news. Noisier was the rapidly developing story of organized crime in Russia and its alarming attempt to gain access to the Russian nuclear arsenal. Could Solzhenitsyn have foreseen this outcome when, a generation ago, he detonated “The GULAG Archipelago” inside the walls of the then-impregnable Soviet fortress?

The answer, almost certainly, is yes, for Solzhenitsyn has always been less a writer than a moralist. Art, including his own literary art, is not ultimate for him; morality is ultimate. This alone--his insistence that morality must be the central topic, the topic of topics--was more than enough to make him the designated mourner at the American literary world’s endless wedding. It didn’t help that he so often seemed condescending toward the moral and political traditions of the society that had afforded him refuge.

Communism, as Solzhenitsyn saw it, was not just a gigantic economic mistake but also a moral atrocity whose program included the deliberate destruction of those very people who by their courage and sensitivity hold any culture back from its worst excesses. “Annihilation was not visited upon people in our country in a purely random fashion,” reads his valedictory in the current New Perspectives Quarterly, “but was directed at those with outstanding mental and moral qualities. And so the picture in Russia today is bleaker and more savage than if it were simply the result of the general shortcomings of our human nature.”

Do some people have “outstanding . . . moral qualities”? Solzhenitsyn has never been in doubt on that point, and his certainty has made Americans exceedingly uncomfortable. But Soviet communism did indeed degenerate into a war against the good because they were good. Solzhenitsyn may have been blind to much, but he was blindingly aware of that truth and searingly prophetic about it. For that alone, as he ends his long exile, Americans have every reason to wish him Godspeed.