Solzhenitsyn in Cologne, West Germany, in 1974. He was arrested and deported in February of that year when the KGB found his manuscript for The Gulag Archipelago. (Wikimedia Commons / Dutch National Archives)
Some weeks ago while checking my library; I grabbed a book written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “The Gulag Archipelago” that I had ignored for some time. At that time I thought it was just another book with more of the same fear-mongering conclusions and that’s why I had no interest in reading it, but it wasn’t recently that I renewed my interest in the book.
Before we dig into Solzhenitsyn’s book, it is worth pausing to ask: what sort of traits in people’s attitudes are we anticipating? One important fact is that in a rapidly changing world, there is widespread lawlessness and we have all become more individualistic.
We are now a society that values money and individualism. “For people will be lovers of self and utterly self-centered, lovers of money and aroused by an inordinate greedy desire for wealth, proud and arrogant and contemptuous boasters. They will be abusive (blasphemous, scoffing), disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy and profane” (2 Timothy 3:2 AMP).
Can we dare, describe the full loathsomeness of the state in which we live today? Previously, it is argued, that Britain’s attitudes and values are changing. Key findings of how and why have been highlighted here:
People lived in relatively stable societies, in which they formed strong bonds and affinities with those with whom they lived and worked, and in which there were clear lines of moral authority.” Now, people have to navigate a fluid, diverse social environment in which they are free to choose their identity and moral code; individuals have to create their own lifestyles, rather than living out one inherited from their parents and reinforced by their social interactions with others. If this is true, it potentially has important implications both for how we behave and how we think about society.
In a much-quoted passage in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations… If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. I met with several kinds of associations in America, of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it.
I have since travelled over England, whence the Americans have taken some of their laws and many of their customs; and it seemed to me that the principle of association was by no means so constantly or so adroitly used in that country. The English often perform great things singly; whereas the Americans form associations for the smallest undertakings. It is evident that the former people consider association as a powerful means of action, but the latter seem to regard it as the only means they have of acting.
These words usually conjure pictures of an earlier golden age of community voluntarism. All these associations were products partly of the Second Great Awakening, and part of the precedent of successful associations in Britain in the era of William Wilberforce. The outcome of these voluntary associations led to an outburst of diverse, creative enterprises that no local church could have matched. And Christian individuals could enter all spheres of life and engage issues that no local church could risk.
Today, when people you don’t know, people in whom you have no interest, people whose affairs you have never discussed, move away from your community, you don’t notice that they are going or that they are gone. When, in addition, public opinion or the government itself has depreciated them, it is still likely that you won’t notice their departure or, if you do, that you will forget about it.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in describing how the whole of Russia was infected by the poisons of “Everybody Knew…Nobody Knew” enumerates briefly those traits of “free life” which were determined and promoted by the state:
Constant Fear
There was a constant fear and this aggregate of fear led to a correct consciousness of one’s own insignificance and of lack of any kind of rights. People did not have any peace of mind. Fear was not always the fear of arrest. There were intermediate threats: purges, inspections, the completion of security questionnaires residence permit, expulsion, or exile. The questionnaires were so detailed and so inquisitive that more than half the inhabitants of the country had a bad conscience and were constantly and permanently tormented by the approach of the period when they had to be filled out.
Servitude
If it had been easy to change your place of residence, to leave a place that had become dangerous for you, and thus shake off fear and refresh yourself, people would have behaved boldly, and they might have taken some risks. But for long decades we were shackled by that same system under which no worker could quit work of his own accord. And the passport regulations also fastened everyone to particular places. And the housing, which could not be sold, nor exchanged, nor rented. And because of this, it was an insane piece of daring to protest in the place where you lived or worked.
Secrecy and Mistrust
These feelings replaced our former open-hearted cordiality and hospitality (which had still not been destroyed in the twenties). These feelings were the natural defense of any family and every person, particularly because no one could ever quit work or leave, and every little detail was kept in sight and within earshot for years. The former Tsarist officer K.U. survived and was never arrested only because when he got married he did not tell his wife about his past. His brother N.U., was arrested—and the wife of the arrested man, taking advantage of the fact that they lived in different cities at the time of his arrest, hid his arrest from her own father and mother—so they would not blurt it out. She preferred telling them and everyone that her husband had abandoned her, and then playing that role a long time!
George Orwell said in his book 1984 that in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Universal Ignorance
Hiding things from each other, and not trusting each other, we ourselves helped implement that absolute secrecy, absolute misinformation, among us which was the cause of everything that took place—including both millions of arrests and the mass approval of them also. Informing one another of nothing, neither shouting nor groaning and learning nothing from one another, we were completely in the hands of the newspapers and the official orators.
Squealing
Squealing was developed to a mind-boggling extent…in every group of people, in every office, in every apartment, either there would be an informer or else the people there would be afraid there was… Out of every four to five city dwellers there would most certainly be one who at least once in his life had received a proposal to become an informer… I carried out my own spot check, both among groups of ex-prisoners and among groups of those who have always been free. I asked which out of the group they had tried to recruit and when and how. And it turned out that out of several people at a table all had received such proposals at one time or another! Beyond the purpose of weakening ties between people, there was another purpose as well. Any person who had been recruited to be an informer would, out of fear of public exposure, be very much interested in the continuing stability of the regime.
Betrayal as a Form of Existence
Given this constant fear over a period of many years—for oneself and one’s family—a human being became a vassal of fear, subjected to it. And it turned out that the least dangerous form of existence was constant betrayal…..They had arrested a neighbor, your comrade at work, or even your close friend. You kept silence. You acted as if you had not noticed. (For you could not afford to lose your current job!)
And then it was announced at work, at the general meeting, that the person who had disappeared the day before was…an inveterate enemy of the people. And you, who had bent your back beside him for twenty years at the same desk, now by your noble silence (or even by your condemning speech!), had to show how hostile you were to his crimes. (You had to make this sacrifice for the sake of your own dear family, for your own dear ones! What right had you not to think about them?)
But the person arrested had left behind him a wife, a mother, children, and perhaps they at least ought to be helped? No, no, that would be dangerous: after all these were the wife of an enemy and the mother of an enemy, and they were the children of an enemy (and your own children had a long education ahead of them)! And the one who concealed an enemy was also an enemy! And the one who abetted an enemy was also an enemy! And one who continued his friendship with an enemy was also an enemy. And the telephone of the accursed family fell silent. And in the hustle of a big city people felt as if they were in a desert. And that was precisely what Stalin needed! And he laughed in his mustaches, the shoeshine boy!
Corruption
In a situation of fear and betrayal over many years people survive unharmed only in superficial, bodily sense. And inside…they become corrupt. So many millions of people agreed to become stool pigeons. And after all, if some forty to fifty million people served long sentences in the Archipelago during the course of the thirty-five years up to 1953, including those who died—and this is the modest estimate, being only three or four times the population of Gulag at any one time, and, after all, during the war the death rate there was running one percent per day-then we can assume that at least every third or at least every fifth case was the consequence of somebody’s denunciation and that somebody was willing to provide evidence as a witness!
The Lie Became a Form of Existence
Whether giving in to fear or influenced by material self-interest or envy, people can’t nonetheless become stupid swiftly. Their souls may be thoroughly muddied, but they still have a sufficiently clear mind. They cannot believe that all the genius of the world has suddenly concentrated itself in one head with a flattened, low-hanging forehead. They simply cannot believe the stupid and silly images of themselves which they hear over the radio, see the truth in reply, but no one allows them to keep silent! They have to talk! And what else but a lie?
They have to applaud madly, and no one requires honesty of them. Without lies, even an academic work could not see the light of the day….And not one single speech nor one single essay or article nor single book-be it scientific, journalistic, critical, or “literary” so-called-could exist without the use of these primary clichés. The permanent lie became the only safe form of existence, in the same way as betrayal.
But that was not all: Your children were growing up! And if the children were still little, then you had to decide what was the best way to bring them up; whether to start them off on lies instead of the truth (so that it would be easier for them to live) and then to lie forevermore in front of them too; or to tell them the truth, with the risk that they might make a slip, that they might let it out, which meant that you had to instill into them from the start that the truth was murderous, that beyond the threshold of the house you had to lie, only lie, just like papa and mama. The choice was really such that you would rather not have any children!
Cruelty
And where among all the preceding qualities was there any place left for kindheartedness? How could one possibly preserve one’s kindness while pushing away the hands of those who were drowning? Once you have been steeped in blood, you can only become crueler. And, anyway cruelty (“class cruelty”) was praised and instilled, and you would soon lose track, probably, of just where between bad and good that trait lay. And you when you add that kindness was ridiculed, that pity was ridiculed, that mercy was ridiculed-you would never be able to chain all those who were drunk on blood.
Slave Psychology
In various parts of the Soviet Union, we found a certain piece of sculpture: a plaster guard with a police dog which is straining forward in order to sink its teeth into someone…. And we could not even shudder in revulsion. We had become accustomed to these figures setting dogs onto people as if they were the most natural things in the world. Setting the dogs onto us.
Conclusion
If theories of individualism and multiplied lawlessness are correct, we would expect to find a steady decline of people’s attachment to traditional social identities such as family, class, political party, and religion. We are already seeing a transformation of how the West thinks about marriage, relationships, and parenthood, with an increasing sense of hostility to those who hold a traditional view of marriage.
In America and most of the West today, to paraphrase Voltaire, criminals are punished for their crimes, except when they commit them to the sounds of official rejoicing. We might find a more questioning view about the role of the state in its citizens’ lives, and perhaps an increasing reluctance to let it step in to help those who are being crushed by corporate interests.
Marxist-communist philosophers now sit at the conference tables of world councils, not asking questions but stating policies. Communism has spread until it covers almost three-quarters of the globe. “And because iniquity and lawlessness shall multiply, the love of the great body of people will grow cold. And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another. But he who endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 24:10; 12-13). The prophet Daniel writing about the end-times says:
And he shall speak words against the Most High God and shall wear out the saints of the Most High and think to change the time of sacred feasts and holy days and the law; and the saints shall be given into his hand for a time, two times, and half a time three and one-half years (Daniel 7:25).
Daniel was warning God’s people the saints that they shall become “worn out.” There is no way around it. The anti-Christ system has already accomplished some of this. And this quote from Hillary Clinton says it all: “Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.”
It is becoming increasingly hard to be a Christian or even to want to be-under the most propitious of conditions. When the anti-christ assumes power, he will need global tools and organizations, as well as incredible technology, to accomplish his purpose. And it looks now like he will have everything he needs, just as the ancient prophets predicted and the outcome of which Solzhenitsyn explained with four simple words: Men Have Forgotten God!
