About the time the
Planned Parenthood videos first started breaking, I was
immersed in reading about one of my heroes, Alexandr
Solzhenitsyn. Historian Michael Nicholson’s The Gulag
Archipelago: A Survey of Soviet Responses allowed me to
glimpse the details of how Solzhenitsyn’s bombshell book on
the Soviet prison camp system ripped through Soviet daily
life.
Even if you haven’t been seared personally by the pages of
Gulag, consider here an invitation to reflect on how the
prevailing “orthodoxy” of one bygone superpower confronted a
jaw-dropping exposé of its own cruelty. The phases of
our collective response to Planned Parenthood have yet to be
seen, but six phases of Soviet response to Gulag can be
discerned.
1.Marginalization
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, before Gulag was smuggled to
the West and published, Soviet authorities were aware of
Solzhenitsyn’s leanings. After enjoying several years of
popularity as a writer in Nikita Khrushchev’s “thaw” of the
early ’60s, Solzhenitsyn was “internally exiled” in the
village of Kok-Terek in Kazakhstan, and in 1969, he was
stripped of his membership in the prestigious Soviet Union of
Writers.
2. Assassination attempt
In 1971, the KGB made an attempt on Solzhenitsyn’s life using
an unknown biological, “gel-based” delivery agent. Already a
cancer survivor, Solzhenitsyn became seriously ill, but
survived.
3. Indirect attack
When Gulag was printed in Western Europe in late 1973, the
Soviet propaganda organs played it cool. In early 1974,
Pravda, the Politburo’s premier Moscow newspaper, merely
reprinted some critical reviews of Gulag from Western
“progressive” and pro-Soviet publications. “The technique,”
Nicholson recounts, “has the advantage of allowing a critical
stance to be maintained without committing the authorities to
any specific course of action.”
4. Ad hominem attacks
As news of Gulag went viral globally, the Politburo could not
stand by. Many Soviet citizens had begun to circulate Gulag
through samizdat – literally, “self-publishing” by borrowing
and retyping the illegal text at great risk – and the
officials were compelled to attack. In two state-sponsored
articles, the “ideologically correct attitude” toward Gulag
was staked out.
The Pravda PR machine framed Gulag through the lens of
patriotism and loyalty: The decorated World War II veteran
Solzhenitsyn was labeled a “traitor” and “Hitlerite.” Pravda
asserted that Solzhenitsyn was “choking with pathological
hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the
socialist system, and for Soviet people.” A second editorial
quipped, “By the light of day a reptile always looks
repulsive.”
5. Deportation
The next phase was swift. Like a tumor on the Soviet body,
Solzhenitsyn required surgical removal. Just days before his
impending arrest, Solzhenitsyn called on his fellow Russians
“to live not by lies.” On Feb. 12, 1972, Solzhenitsyn was
deported to Frankfurt, Germany, and stripped of his
citizenship.
6. Co-opting of friends and “religious” voices
Solzhenitsyn began a life of exile in small-town Vermont, but
a new phase of Soviet response was just beginning. Bought off
by the authorities, longtime friends in the Soviet Union
turned on him in interviews and published accounts of his
“megalomania” or “moral degeneracy.” One such “lifelong
friend” was awarded – soon after he denounced Solzhenitsyn –
with a choice chair in chemistry at a university. A
state-sponsored Orthodox priest accused Solzhenitsyn of
“maniacal confidence that he is right in all matters” and
that an evil spirit “not of God” animated his writings.
7. Life in our Archipelago
In a previous job I had in prison ministry, I went on a work
trip to Kazakhstan in the dead of winter. On a drive to visit
a prison that housed inmates with tuberculosis, my hosts
pointed to a forlorn smattering of collapsing shacks on the
horizon. The temperature outside our SUV was minus 15 F.
“That’s where Solzhenitsyn lived,” the driver said.
Today’s “American Archipelago” of abortion swallows nearly 1
million lives annually. As key tenets of our Catholic faith
sink ever lower in popularity polls, we might take a moment
to imagine whether our own lives reflect any of the icy
courage, resilient (Orthodox Christian) faith and steely
determination of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.
As Solzhenitsyn’s village faded from my view that day, I
shivered in the inhuman cold and stared out at the bleak
expanse. Here, I thought, was the unlikely ground that taught
one man the price of truth, the call to “live not by lies,”
and how light and sweet the yoke of faith can rest upon us.
Johnson, a husband and father of five, is Arlington Bishop
Paul S. Loverde’s special assistant for evangelization and
media. He can be reached on Twitter @Soren_t.
