Solzhenitsyn and ‘The Danger of Keeping Silent About Evil’

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and the Templeton Prize in 1983. He knew, and he warned us in his book The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and short story writer. He was also a former red army officer and an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and Communism. He helped raise awareness of the Gulag labor camp system. He told us then what would happen if we didn’t speak up.

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

Solzhenitsyn was born in Southern Russia in the Northern Caucasus in 1918 of a Ukrainian mother, and a Caucasian father who died before he was born. He was raised in the Russian Orthodox faith. Solzhenitsyn studied at Rostov State University with additional correspondence courses in Literature and History at Moscow Institute of Philosophy. Solzhenitsyn makes clear that he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.

While serving as an artillery officer in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against local German civilians by Soviet military personnel. Of the atrocities, Solzhenitsyn wrote: “You know very well that we’ve come to Germany to take our revenge” for Nazi atrocities committed in the Soviet Union. The noncombatants and the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women and girls were gang-raped.

A few years later while in a forced labor camp, he memorized a poem titled “Prussian Nights” about a young girl raped to death in East Prussia. The poem describes the gang-rape of a Polish girl whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German.

As an aside General George Patton was relieved of command of the 3rd Army by General Dwight D. Eisenhower just after the end of the war for stating publicly that America had been fighting the wrong enemy— Germany instead of Russia. 

In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested by SMERSH for writing “derogatory comments” in private letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called “Khozyain” (“the boss”), and “Balabos” (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayit for “master of the house”). His arrest was partly due to his critique of the treatment of civilians. In “Prussian Nights” he recalls the pillages, rapes and murders committed by the Soviet troops taking their revenge on German civilians. He also had talks with the same friend about the need of a new organisation against the Soviet regime.

As a result of his “private correspondence” he was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of “founding a hostile organization” under paragraph 11. Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated. On July 7, 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labor camp. This was the typical sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.

In March 1953, after his sentence ended, Solzhenitsyn was sent to internal exile for life at Birlik, a village in Baidibek district of South Kazakhstan in Kazakhstan. It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life, gradually becoming a philosophically-minded Eastern Orthodox Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps. He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag:

“I remember myself in my captain’s shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: ‘So were we any better?'”

His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago (“The Soul and Barbed Wire”). Solzhenitsyn wrote about how composing “Prussian Nights” helped him to survive his imprisonment and the regular beatings he received:

“I needed a clear head, because for two years I had been writing a poem—a most rewarding poem that helped me not to notice what was being done to my body.”

While in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952 he wrote without benefit of pen or paper. Mark Nepo, in his book, Facing the Lion, Being the Lion: Finding Inner Courage Where It Lives,’ says Solzhenitsyn wrote on bars of soap recording and memorizing each line of the poem he wrote.

Regarding atheism, Solzhenitsyn said, “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.”

He continued, “Since then I have spent 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.”

Solzhenitsyn’s books and writings have two strong warnings for America and the West: 1) Don’t forget God, 2) there is an extreme danger of keeping silent about evil. Unfortunately, we have been doing a lot of both for quite some time.

Lift a prayer for your nation today.

 

Michael Reed is Editor of The Standard, a pastor, businessman and conference speaker.