Solzhenitsyn ’ s Prophecy
By Robert P . George
Editor ’ s Note : Versions of these remarks were delivered in the spring of 2018 at the commencement ceremony for the Mount Academy of the Bruderhof community in Esopus , New York , and at the commencement ceremony for the Wilberforce School in Princeton , New Jersey .
Victims of Stalinism display at Muzeon Park of Arts in Moscow by artist and sculptor Evgeny Chubarov .
On June 8 , 1978 , a man with a craggy face and a beard came to Harvard University , where I was then a graduate student , to give the annual commencement address . The man was not a Harvard graduate . He was not a professor . He was not an American . He did not speak English . His address , given in his native Russian with simultaneous English translation , was not universally wellreceived . I suspect that some Harvard officials regretted their decision to invite him to speak .
The man ’ s name was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn . He was a brilliant novelist who had spent several years as a political prisoner in the gulag in the Soviet Union . He was a strong Orthodox Christian and a fierce critic of atheistic communism and Soviet tyranny . His writings had exposed the corruption , cruelty , and injustice of the communist regime that had come to power in Russia in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and would remain in power until 1989 — a regime that had enslaved its own people and reduced those of many other nations to serfdom under puppet governments . It was a regime as totalitarian and as murderous as the Nazi regime in Germany , which the U . S . and Britain had allied with the Soviets in World War II to defeat .
In 1978 , the Cold War was raging , and the U . S . was still reeling from its humiliation in the disastrous war in Vietnam . Anti-Americanism was flourishing both abroad and at home . Many Americans — particularly young Americans — had lost faith in their country , its institutions , its principles , its culture , its traditions , its way of life . Some proposed communism as a superior system ; many suggested what came to be known as “ moral equivalency ” between American democracy and Soviet communism . By 1978 , to suggest such equivalency had become a mark of sophistication — something to distinguish one from the allegedly backward hicks and rubes who believed in the superiority of the American to the Soviet system . There were many such “ sophisticated ” people at Harvard . And Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to Harvard to confront them and others .
His speech was not , however , an encomium to America or the West . On the contrary , it was a severe critique — one might even say a prophetic rebuke — and a warning . Of course , Solzhenitsyn did not argue for the moral equivalency , much less the superiority , of the Soviet system . He hated communism in all its dimensions , and he loathed the gangsters who ruled the Soviet empire . What he faulted America ( and the West more generally ) for was its abandonment of its own moral and , especially , spiritual ideals and identity .
He viewed the West ’ s weakness , including its weakness in truly standing up to Soviet aggression , as the fruit of the materialism , consumerism , self-indulgent individualism , emotivism , and narcissism — in a word , the immorality —
10 THE RENEWANATION REVIEW