Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the
    following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God;
    that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history
    of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal
    testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing
    away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as
    possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people,
    I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has
    happened."
           -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Over the course of his long and brilliant career as a gadfly to both Russia and the West, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn managed to pull off a remarkable trifecta: he was exiled by the USSR, banished from the Cold War dialogue by Western political and cultural elites and then banished from the discussion over Russia's future by the intelligencia there.  He has truly made a career as a voice crying in the wilderness, launching one jeremiad after another.

In 1945, Solzehenitsyn was sent to the Gulag for ten years after writing derogatory comments about Stalin in a letter to a friend.  One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as the title suggests, describes what just one day would have been like behind the barbed wire.  The story is set in the forced labor camp where he was imprisoned from 1950-53.  That the system that perpetrated such crimes was evil is obvious, but it is through the sheer accumulation of mundane indignities and small triumphs (over hunger, cold, ill health, etc.) that the horror of the camps is really brought home.  One of the most dramatic moments in the book, nicely illustrative of the small scale but enormous stakes of the victories won, comes when Ivan manages to secrete a spoon that he had forgotten he was carrying.  In the end, simply surviving this barbaric system becomes the greatest victory.

With the publication of this book, in 1962, during the brief Kruschev thaw, Solzhenitsyn became an international sensation.  In 1974, when the first sections of The Gulag Archipelago were published in Paris, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, tried for treason and forced into exile, eventually settling in Vermont.  I suppose folks must have expected him to be so grateful for his asylum that he would express undying gratitude to the United States.  If so they underestimated the moral tenor of the man.  He proved to be nearly as outspoken a critic of the West as he had been of the USSR, culminating in his 1978 Harvard Commencement speech, where first he excoriated Western intellectuals in general:

    A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West
    today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each
    country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a
    decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an
    impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There are many courageous individuals, but
    they have no determining influence on public life.

    Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their
    actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic,
    reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and
    cowardice. And the decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood,
    is ironically emphasized by occasional outbursts and inflexibility on the part of those same
    functionaries when dealing with weak governments and with countries that lack support, or with
    doomed currents which clearly cannot offer resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed
    when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and
    international terrorists.

    Must one point out that from ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the first
    symptom of the end?

then liberal humanism:

    This tilt of freedom toward evil has come about gradually, but it evidently stems from a humanistic
    and benevolent concept according to which man - the master of the world - does not bear any evil
    within himself, and all the defects of life are caused by misguided social systems, which must
    therefore be corrected.

then the Press:

    The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized,
    or secret matters pertaining to the nation's defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless
    intrusion into the privacy of well-known people according to the slogan "Everyone is entitled to
    know everything." (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right
    of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A
    person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of
    information.)

    Hastiness and superficiality - these are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century and more than
    anywhere else this is manifested in the press. In-depth analysis of a problem is anathema to the
    press; it is contrary to its nature. The press merely picks out sensational formulas.

    Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within Western countries,
    exceeding that of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. Yet one would like to ask:
    According to what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the Communist East, a
    journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their
    positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?

then made his way back to attack the very fundament of Western modernity--rational humanism:

    How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its
    triumphal march to its present debility? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its
    development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing steadily in accordance with its
    proclaimed social intentions, hand in hand with a dazzling progress in technology. And all of a
    sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

    This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times.
    I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world in modern times. I refer to the prevailing
    Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance and has found political expression
    since the Age of Enlightenment. It became the basis for political and social doctrine and could be
    called rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the pro-claimed and practiced autonomy of
    man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as
    the center of all.

    The turn introduced by the Renaissance was probably inevitable historically: the Middle Ages had
    come to a natural end by exhaustion, having become an intolerable despotic repression of man's
    physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. But then we recoiled from the spirit and embraced all
    that is material, excessively and incommensurately. The humanistic way of thinking, which had
    proclaimed itself our guide, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man, nor did it see any
    task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the
    dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.

    Everything beyond physical well-being and the accumulation of material goods, all other human
    requirements and characteristics of a subtle and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention
    of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any higher meaning. Thus gaps were left
    open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today. Mere freedom per se does not in the least solve all
    the problems of human life and even adds a number of new ones.

    And yet in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual
    human rights were granted on the ground that man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to
    the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the
    heritage of the preceding one thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have
    seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no
    purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims.

    Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total
    emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of
    mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming ever more materialistic. The West has finally
    achieved the rights of man, and even excess, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society
    has grown dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistic selfishness of the Western
    approach to the world has reached its peak and the world has found itself in a harsh spiritual crisis
    and a political impasse. All the celebrated technological achievements of progress, including the
    conquest of outer space, do not redeem the twentieth century's moral poverty, which no one could
    have imagined even as late as the nineteenth century.

By the time he was finished administering this necessary emetic to the Western body politic, he had alienated virtually every important opinion making group of the liberal establishment and they began to dismiss him as a sort of cranky right wing kook.  The powers that be simply stripped him of his legitimacy because they didn't like what he said.

Then came the fall of the Soviet Union and his triumphal return home--well, what should have been a triumphal return.   Instead his brutally honest and morally centered jeremiads against Russian materialism, gangsterism and feeble democratic reforms have alienated most of his natural allies in his own homeland.

Throughout all of these travails, his vision has remained constant and his will unbreakable.  The reaction to him of the varying societies suggest just how rare a creature he is and how seldom we see his like.  He is one of the truly pivotal intellectual and moral figures of the century and One Day in the Life is an excellent introduction to his estimable corpus of great works.

(Reviewed:09-Dec-99)

Grade: (A+) Orrin C. Judd

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