Foreword to The Gulag Archipelago: 50th Anniversary

Earlier this year, I was invited by Nick Skidmore, editor of Vintage Classics at Penguin, to write the foreword to the 50th anniversary edition of the single vol abridged version of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. This was perhaps the single greatest honor that has ever befallen me, given the historical importance of Solzhenitsyn's book, as well as its great personal impact on me. The Gulag Archipelago, in its full form, was a three-volume text originally written between 1958 and 1968. It first saw publication in 1973 and was translated into English a year later. It describes life in the Soviet forced labor camp system, the gulag, through a narrative compiled from interviews, personal statements from inmates, diaries, legal and historical documents, and the author's own experience as a gulag prisoner.

Following its appearance, the book circulated underground in the Soviet Union until its formal publication in 1989 in the literary journal Novi Mir, which published a third of the work in three issues. Since the Soviet Union dissolved, the entire book has been published and has been made mandatory reading in the Russian school curriculum. The 50th anniversary edition is slated for release on November 1st, 2018.

Here's a brief biography of the author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from the book: Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in physics and mathematics from Rostov University and studied literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War II, he fought as an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain in 1945. However, after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was arrested and summarily sent to eight years in forced labor camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957, he was formally rehabilitated and settled down to teaching and writing.

Here's a description of the book from the back cover: The officially approved abridgement of The Gulag Archipelago volumes 1, 2 & 3 is a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centers, and secret police of informers and spies and interrogators, but also of everyday heroism. The Gulag Archipelago is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork, based on the testimony of some 200 survivors and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own 11 years in labor camps in exile. It chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full cooperation.

Doris Lessing (1919-2013), a British novelist, playwright, librettist, biographer, and short story writer and winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, said of The Gulag Archipelago: "It helped to bring down an empire; its importance can hardly be exaggerated." This is Solzhenitsyn's own foreword to the original abridgement:

"I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it, and may they please forgive me for not having seen at all, nor remembered at all, nor having divined at all. If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become, and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: it would not be the same here; here such things are impossible. Alas, all the evil of the 20th century is possible everywhere on earth. Yet I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to live through it personally. Therefore, I gratefully accept professor Erickson's suggestion to create a one-volume abridgement of my three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago, in order to facilitate its reading for those who do not have much time in this hectic century of ours. I thank Professor Erickson for his generous initiative, as well as for the tactfulness, the literary taste, and the understanding of Western readers, which he displayed during the work on the abridgement."

Edward II Erickson Jr. (1939-2017), who served as the editor of the abridged single-volume version of The Gulag Archipelago, was professor emeritus of English at Calvin College and the author of many other books including The Solzhenitsyn Reader, The Apocalyptic Vision of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and The Soul and Barbed Wire: An Introduction to Solzhenitsyn.

This is what he had to say when he introduced the abridged version in 1994:

"After 20 years of forced exile in the West, Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia. At one town meeting held on his Trans-Siberian Whistlestop tour to reacquaint himself with his homeland, he was confronted by this rebuke: 'It is you and your writing that started it all and brought our country to the verge of collapse and devastation. Russia doesn't need you, so go back to your blessed America.' Solzhenitsyn instantly replied that to his dying day he would keep fighting against the evil ideology that was capable of slaying one-third of his country's population. The meeting erupted in applause.

That sort of exchange was on the matter when the present abridgement of The Gulag Archipelago first appeared in 1985. Almost no one expected then that within a few years the Soviet Union would collapse, almost in a day, like the legendary one-horse Shay. Yet, now the dramatic events that put the closing punctuation mark on the Soviet parentheses in Russian history have also, we may say, brought an end to what the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova called the true 20th century.

This foreshortened century, running from 1914 to 1917 to 1989-1991, was the era when utopian dreams, rooted in enlightenment optimism, came to rely on brute force to make ideological schemes prevail. The 20th century has proven, in quantitative terms at least, the most murderous in human history, as governments killed their subjects at record rates for decades. The word 'Holocaust' served as shorthand for modern man's inhumanity to man. Then one lone man added a second such term: gulag, which now appears in dictionaries as a common noun. Solzhenitsyn was one of the precious few who did anticipate the demise of the Soviet experiment, and he thought his book would help.

Oh yes, gulag was destined to affect the course of history. I was sure of that on one of his darkest days, February 12, 1974, the day before he was forced into exile. And precisely because the gulag had appeared in the West, he mused: 'You Bolsheviks are finished; there are no two ways about it.' What satisfaction he felt then when some early reviews, such as one from the Frankfurter Allgemeine, a leading German newspaper, caught his intentions: 'The time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet system from the appearance of Gulag.'

American diplomat and scholar George F. Kennan hailed the work as 'the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times, one sure to stick in the craw of the Soviet propaganda machine with increasing discomfort until it has done its work.' Solzhenitsyn has proven prescient on other matters as well. Not only did he reiterate, in the teeth of the prevailing opinion of Western specialists on Soviet affairs, that he was absolutely convinced that communism would go, he also insisted most resolutely, and against all seeming reason, that he expected to be reunited with his beloved Russia.

In a strange way, I not only hope—I’m inwardly convinced that I shall go back. I mean my physical return, not just my books—and that contradicts all rationality. His improbable prerequisites were that his citizenship be restored, that the charge of treason against him be dropped, and that all his books be published in his homeland. After his prophecies were fulfilled, a friend of his reminisced: 'It seemed crazy to me at the time, but it was a real conviction, a poet's knowledge.'

He sees the man seized. However, historians ultimately apportioned the credit for ending the Cold War; Solzhenitsyn indubitably played a part in bringing the Soviet edifice down to rubble. His writings delegitimized communism in his homeland and discredited it abroad. He was much too modest in depicting himself as a little calf foolishly budding a mighty oak and thinking this could bring it down.

As David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, declares: 'In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the century.' Who else compares? Orwell? Kessler? Remnick concludes that to some extent, you have to credit the literary works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn with helping to bring down the last empire on earth.

So after that introductory material, my foreword begins with an excerpt from the speech delivered by Solzhenitsyn to the Swedish Academy on the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature:

"Once we have taken up the word, it is thereafter impossible to turn away. A writer is no detached judge of his countrymen and contemporaries; he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his country or by his people. And if the tanks of his fatherland have bloodied the pavement of a foreign capital, then rust-colored stains have forever spattered the writer's face. And if on some fateful night a trusting friend is strangled in his sleep, then the palms of the writer bear the bruises from that rope. And if his youthful fellow citizens nonchalantly proclaimed the advantages of debauchery over humble toil, if they abandon themselves to drugs or seize hostages, then this stench too is mingled with the breath of the writer.

Have we the insolence to declare that we do not answer for the evils of today’s world? The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions. His rule? Let that come into the world! Let it even reign supreme—only not through me! But it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie. For in the struggle with lies, art has always triumphed and shall always triumph, visibly, irrefutably. For all lies can prevail against much in this world, but never against art.

First, you defend your homeland against the Nazis, serving as a twice-decorated soldier on the Eastern Front in the criminally ill-prepared Soviet Red Army. Then, you're arrested, humiliated, stripped of your military rank, charged under the auspices of the all-purpose Article 58 with the dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda, and dragged off to Moscow's infamous Lubyanka prison. There, through the bars of your cell, you watch your beloved country celebrating its victory in the Great Patriotic War. Then, you're sentenced in absentia to eight years of hard labor.

But you got away easy; it wasn't so long afterward the people in your position were awarded a tenner and then a quarter of a century. And fate isn't finished with you yet, not by any means. You develop a deadly cancer in the camp, endure the exile imposed on you after your imprisonment ends, and pass very close to death. Despite all this, you hold your head high; you refuse to turn against man or God, although you have every reason to do so. You write instead, secretly at night, documenting your terrible experiences.

You craft a personal memoir, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and miracle of miracles, the clouds part, the sun shines through! Your book is published and, in your own country, it meets with unparalleled acclaim, nationally and internationally. But the sky darkens once again, and the sun disappears. The repression returns; you become once again a non-person. The secret police, the dread KGB, seize the manuscript of your next book.

It sees the light of day nonetheless, but only in the West. There, your reputation grows beyond the wildest of imaginings. The Nobel Committee itself bestows upon you its highest literary honor. The Soviet authorities, stripped of their camouflage, are enraged; they order the secret police to poison you. You pass once again near death, but you continue to write, driven, solitary, intolerably inspired.

Your Gulag Archipelago documents the absolute and utter corruption of the dogmas and doctrines of your state, your empire, your leaders, and yourself. And then, that is printed—not in your own country, but in the West once again, from copies oh so dangerously hidden and smuggled across the borders. And your great book bursts with unparalleled and dreadful force into the still-naive and unexpected literary and intellectual world.

You're expelled from the Soviet Union, stripped of your citizenship, forced to take residency in a society both strange to you and resistant in its own way to your prophetic words. But the power of your stories and the strength of your morals demolish any remaining claims to ethical and philosophical credibility still made by the defenders of the collectivist system that gave rise to all that you witnessed.

Years pass, but not so many from the perspective of history. Then another miracle: the Soviet Union collapses. You return home; your citizenship is restored. You write and speak in your reclaimed homeland until death claims you in 2008. A year later, The Gulag Archipelago is deemed mandatory reading by those responsible for establishing the national school curriculum of your home country. Your impossible victory is complete.

The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago—one continuous, extended scream of outrage—are paradoxically brilliant, bitter, disbelieving, and infused with awe. Awe at the strength characterizing the best among us in the worst of all situations. In that monumental text published in 1973, Alexander Solzhenitsyn conducted an experiment in literary investigation, a hybrid of journalism, history, and biography, unlike anything ever written before or since.

In 1985, the author bestowed his approval upon Edward II Erickson Jr.'s single-volume abridgement, republished here on the 50th anniversary of the completion of the full three-volume edition and centenary of the author's birth, and sold some 30 million copies in 35 languages. Between the pages of Solzhenitsyn's book, apart from the documentation of the horrors of the legions of the dead, counted and uncounted, and the masses whose lives were torn asunder, are the innumerable soul-chilling personal stories carefully preserved, making the tragedy of mass betrayal, torture, and death not the mere statistic Stalin so disdainfully described, but individual, real, and terrible.

It is a matter of pure historical fact that The Gulag Archipelago played a primary role in bringing the Soviet Empire to its knees. Although economically unsustainable, ruled in the most corrupt manner imaginable, and reliant on the slavery and enforced deceit of its citizens, the Soviet system managed to stumble forward through far too many decades before being cut to the quick.

The courageous leaders of the labor unions in Poland, the great Pope John Paul II, and the American president Ronald Reagan—with his blunt insistence that the West faced an evil empire—all played their role in its defeat and collapse. It was Solzhenitsyn, however, whose revelations made it positively shameful to defend not just the Soviet state, but the very system of thought that made that state what it was.

It was Solzhenitsyn who most crucially made the case that the terrible excesses of communism could not be conveniently blamed on the corruption of the Soviet leadership, the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, or the failure to put the otherwise stellar and admirable utopian principles of Marxism into proper practice. It was Solzhenitsyn who demonstrated that the death of millions and the devastation of many more were instead a direct causal consequence of the philosophy—worse, perhaps the theology—driving the communist system.

The hypothetically egalitarian Universalist doctrines of Karl Marx contained, hidden within them, sufficient hatred, resentment, envy, and denial of individual culpability and responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death when manifested in the world. For Marx, man was a member of a class, an economic class, a group that and little more, and history nothing but the battleground of classes and groups.

His admirers regarded, and continued to regard, Marx's doctrine as one of compassion, moral by definition, virtuous by fiat: consider the working classes in all their oppression and work forthrightly to free them. But hate may well be a stronger and more compelling motivator than love. In consequence, it took no time in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution for solidarity with the common man and the apparently laudable demand for universal equality to manifest its unarticulated and ever-darkening shadow.

First came the most brutal indictment of the class enemy; then came the ever-expanding definition of that enemy until every single person in the entirety of the state found him or herself at risk of encapsulation within that insatiable and devouring net. The verdict was delivered to those deemed at fault by those who elevated themselves to the simultaneously held positions of judge, jury, and executioner: the necessity to eradicate the victimizers, the oppressors in toto, without any consideration whatsoever for reactionary niceties such as individual innocence.

Let us note as well this outcome wasn't the result of the initially pristine Marxist doctrine becoming corrupt over time, but something apparent and present at the very beginning of the Soviet state itself. Solzhenitsyn cites, for example, one Martin Latsis writing for the newspaper Red Terror, November 1st, 1918: "We are not fighting against single individuals; we are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question you should ask him is: What class does he belong to? What is his origin, his education, and his profession? These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused." Such is the sense and essence of Red Terror.

It is necessary to think when you read such a thing, to meditate long and hard on the message. It is necessary to recognize, for example, that the writer believed that it would be better to execute 10,000 potentially innocent individuals than to allow one poisonous member of the oppressor class to remain free. It is equally necessary to pose the question: Who precisely belonged to that hypothetical entity, the bourgeoisie?

It is not as if the boundaries of such a category are self-evident; therefore, the mere thinking they must be drawn. But where exactly, and more importantly, by whom or by what? If it’s hate inscribing the lines instead of love, they will inevitably be drawn so that the lowest, meanest, most cruel, and useless of the conceptual geographers will be justified in manifesting the greatest possible evil and producing the greatest possible misery.

Members of the bourgeoisie beyond all redemption—they had to go as a matter of course. One of their wives, children, even their grandchildren—off with their heads too! All were encouraged, oblique, erupted by their class identity, and their destruction, therefore, ethically necessitated.

How convenient that the darkest and dirtiest of all possible motivations could be granted the highest of moral standings. That was a true marriage of hell and of heaven. What values, what philosophical presumptions, truly dominated under such circumstances? Was it desire for brotherhood, dignity, and freedom from want? Not in the least, not given the outcome.

It was, instead, and obviously, the murderous rage of hundreds of thousands of biblical Cain’s, each looking to torture, destroy, and sacrifice their own private Abels. There is simply no other manner of accounting for the corpses. What can be concluded in the deepest, most permanent sense from Solzhenitsyn's anguished Gulag narrative?

First, we learn what is indisputable, what we all should have learned by now, what we have nonetheless failed to learn: that the left, like the right, can go too far, and that the left has in the past gone much too far. Second, we learn what is far more subtle and difficult: how and why that going too far.

We learn, as Solzhenitsyn so profoundly insists, that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And we learn, as well, that we all are, each of us, simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. Thus, we come to realize that the twin categories of guilty oppressor and justice-seeking victim can be made endlessly inclusive.

This is not least because we all benefit unfairly and are all equally victimized by our thrown-as' our arbitrary placement in the flow of time. We all accrue undeserved and somewhat random privileges from the vagaries of our place of birth, our inequitably distributed talents, our ethnicity, race, culture, and sex. We all belong to a group—some group—that has been elevated in comparative status through no effort of our own.

This is true in some manner, along some dimension of group category, for every solitary individual, except for the single most lowly of all. At some time and in some manner, we may all, in consequence, be justly targeted as oppressors and may all equally seek justice or revenge as victims.

Even if the initiators of the revolution had, therefore, in their most pure moments, been driven by a holy desire to lift up the downtrodden, was it not guaranteed that they would be overtaken by those motivated primarily by envy, hate, and the desire to destroy? As the revolution progressed, hence the establishment of the hungrily growing and most often fatal list of class enemies.

Right from the very first moments of the Communist revolution, the demolition was aimed first at the students, the religious believers, and the Socialists; continuing under Stalin with the old revolutionaries themselves; and was followed soon thereafter by the annihilation of the successful peasant farmer kulaks. And this appetite for destruction was of the type to be satiated with the bodies of the perpetrators themselves—

As Solzhenitsyn writes: "They burned out whole nests, whole families from the start, and they watched jealously to be sure that none of the children, 14, 10, even 6 years old, got away. To the last scrapings, all had to go down the same road to the same common destruction." This was driven by the perceived, even self-perceived guilt of all.

How else was it possible for the hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions, of informants, prosecutors, betrayers, and unforgivably mute observers to spring so rapidly into being in the tumult of the Red Terror? Thus, the doctrine of group identity inevitably ends with everyone identified as a class enemy, an oppressor, with everyone uncleanly contaminated by bourgeois privilege, unfairly enjoying the benefits bequeathed by the vagaries of history, with everyone prosecuted without respite for that corruption and injustice.

No mercy for the oppressor, and no punishment too severe for the crime of exploitation. Expiation becomes impossible because there is no individual guilt, no individual responsibility, and therefore no manner in which the crime of arbitrary birth can be individually accounted for. And all the misery that can be generated as a consequence of such an accusation is the true reason for the accusation. When everyone is guilty, all that serves justice is the punishment of everyone.

When the guilt extends to the existence of the world's misery itself, only fatal punishment will suffice. It is much more preferable instead—and much more likely to preserve us all from metastasizing hells—to state forthrightly: "I am indeed, throwing arbitrarily into history. I therefore choose to voluntarily shoulder the responsibilities of my advantages and the burden of my disadvantages."

Like every other individual, I am morally bound to pay for my advantages with my responsibilities. I am morally bound to accept my disadvantages as the price I pay for being. I will therefore strive not to descend into bitterness and then seek vengeance because I have less to my credit and a greater burden to stumble forward with than others.

Is this not our—or even the essential point of difference—between the West, for all its faults, and the brutal, terrible egalitarian systems generated by the pathological communist doctrine? The great and good framers of the American Republic were, for example, anything but utopian. They took full stock and full measure of inner Attica Balu Minh imperfection. They held modest goals, derived not least from the profoundly cautious common-law tradition of England.

They endeavored to establish a system the corrupt and ignorant fools we all are could not damage too fatally—that’s humility, that’s clear-headed knowledge of the limitations of human machination and good intention. But the Communists, the revolutionaries, they aimed grandly and admirably at least in theory at a much more heavenly vision. And they began their pursuit with the hypothetically straightforward and oh so morally justifiable enforcement of economic equality.

Wealth, however, was not so easily generated. The poor could not simply become rich. But the riches of those who had anything more than the greatest pauper—no matter how pitiful that more was—could be redistributed or at least destroyed. That's equality! To that, sacrifice in the name of heaven on earth, and redistribution was not enough.

With all its theft, betrayal, and death, mere economic engineering was insufficient. What emerged, as well, was the overarching and truly totalitarian desire to remake man and woman as such; the longing to restructure the human spirit in the very image of the Communists’ preconceptions, attributing to themselves this divine ability, this transcendent wisdom.

And with unshakable belief in the glowing but ever-receding future, the newly minted Soviets tortured, thieved, imprisoned, lied, and betrayed, all the while masking their great evil with virtue. It was Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago that tore off the mask and exposed the feral cowardice, envy, deceit, resentment, and hatred for the individual and for existence itself that pulsed beneath.

Others had made the attempt. Malcolm Muggeridge reported on the horrors of dekulakization, the forced collectivization of the all too recently successful peasantry of the Ukraine and elsewhere that preceded the horrifying famines of the 1930s. In the same decade, and in the following years, George Orwell risked his ideological commitments and his reputation to tell us all what was truly occurring in the Soviet Union in the name of egalitarianism and brotherhood.

But it was Solzhenitsyn who truly shamed the radical leftists, forcing them underground where they have festered and plotted for the last forty years, failing unforgivably to have learned what all reasonable people should have learned from the Cataclysm of the 20th century and its egalitarian utopianism.

And yet, despite everything and under their sway, almost three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the apparent collapse of communism, we are doing everything we can to forget what Solzhenitsyn so clearly demonstrated to our great and richly deserved peril.

Why don't all our children read The Gulag Archipelago in our high schools, as they now do in Russia? Why don't our teachers feel compelled to read the book aloud? Did we not win the Cold War? Were the bodies not piled high enough? How high, then, would be enough?

Why, for example, is it still acceptable and in polite company to profess the philosophy of a communist? Or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market Democratic West? To still consider that doctrine progressive and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person.

25 million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union, according to The Black Book of Communism. 60 million dead in Mao's China, and an all too likely return to autocratic oppression in that country in the near future. The horrors of Cambodia's killing fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child's death in a hospital to starvation.

No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people in so many different countries, with such different histories, and failed so absolutely and catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance, albeit of the most inexcusable kind, that allows today's Marxists to flaunt their content allegiance to present it as compassion and care? Or is it instead envy of this success, in near infinite proportions, or something akin to hatred for mankind itself?

How much proof do we need? Why do we still avert our eyes from the truth? Perhaps we simply lack sophistication; perhaps we just can't understand. Perhaps our tendency toward compassion is so powerfully necessary in the intimacy of our families and friendships that we cannot contemplate its limitations, its ability to scale, and its propensity to mutate into hatred of the oppressor rather than allegiance with the oppressed.

Perhaps we cannot comprehend the limitations and dangers of the utopian vision, given our definite need to contemplate and strive for a better tomorrow. We certainly don't seem to imagine, for example, that the hypothesis of some state of future perfection, for example, the truly egalitarian and permanent brotherhood of man, can be used to justify any and all sacrifices whatsoever—the pristine and heavenly, and making all conceivable means not only acceptable but morally required. There is simply no price too great to pay in pursuit of the ultimate utopia, and this is particularly true if it is someone else who foots the bill.

And it is clearly the case that we require a future toward which to orient ourselves, to provide meaning in our life. Psychologically speaking, it is for that reason we see the same need expressed collectively on a much larger scale in the Judeo-Christian vision of the promised land and the kingdom of heaven on earth. And it is also clearly the case that sacrifice is necessary to bring that desired end state into being.

That's the discovery of the future itself—the necessity to forgo instantaneous gratification in the present, to delay, to bargain with fate, so that the future can be better. Twinned with the necessity to let go, to burn off, to separate wheat from chaff, and to sacrifice what is presently unworthy so that tomorrow can be better than today.

But limits need to be placed around who or what is deemed dispensable, and it is exactly the necessity for interminable sacrifice that constitutes the counterpart of the utopian vision. Heaven is worth any price, but who pays?

Christianity solved that problem by insisting on the sacrifice of the self; insisting that the suffering and malevolence of the world is the responsibility of each individual; insisting that each of us sacrifice what is unworthy, and unnecessary, and resentful, and deadly in our characters. Despite the pain of such sacrifice, so that we could stumble properly uphill under our respective and voluntarily shouldered existential burdens.

But it was and is the opinion of the materialist utopians that someone else be sacrificed so that heaven itself might be attained—some perpetrator or victimizer or oppressor or member of a privileged group. A cynic might be forgiven, in consequence, for asking: Is it the City of God that is in fact the aim, or is the true aim the desire to make a burning sacrificial pyre of everyone and everything?

And the hypothesis of the coming brotherhood of man merely the cover story, the camouflage? Perhaps it is precisely the horror that is the point, and not the utopia. It is far from obvious, in such situations, just what is horse and what is cart. It is precisely in the aftermath of the death of a hundred million people or more that such dark questions must be asked.

And we should also note that the utopian vision, dressed as it is inevitably in compassion, is a temptation particularly difficult to resist and may therefore offer a particularly subtle and insidious justification for mayhem. Here are some thoughts—some facts:

Every social system produces inequality; at present, and every social system has done so since the beginning of time. The poor have been with us and will be with us always. Analysis of the content of individual Paleolithic grave sites provides evidence for the existence of variance in the distribution of ability, privilege, and wealth even in our distant past. The more illustrious of our ancestors were buried with great possessions—hoards of precious metals, weaponry, jewelry, and costuming. The majority, however, struggled through their lives and were buried with nothing.

Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive advantage. Even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions, or even billions of average dispossessed planets. Inequality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous ideology-inspired retooling of the rare, free, stable, and productive democracies of the world—the only systems that have produced some modicum of wealth along with the inevitable inequality and its attendant suffering.

The only systems that have produced some modicum of wealth along with the inevitable inequality and its attendant suffering are those that evolved in the West, with their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition—precisely those systems that emphasized above all the essential dignity, divinity, and ultimate responsibility of the individual.

In consequence, any attempt to attribute the existence of inequality to the functioning of the productive institutions we have managed to create and protect so recently in what is still accurately regarded as the free world will hurt those who are weakest and most vulnerable first. The radicals who conflate the activities of the West with the oppression of the downtrodden, therefore, do nothing to aid those whom they purport to prize, and plenty to harm them.

The claims they make to act under the inspiration of pure compassion must therefore come to be regarded with the deepest suspicion, not least by those who dare to make such claims themselves. The dangers of the utopian vision have been laid bare, even if the reasons those dangers exist have not yet been fully unacceptably articulated.

If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917, and both Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche prophesied well before then that there would be hell to pay for that doctrine, there is absolutely and finally no excuse now. And we know that mostly because of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago. Thank heaven for that great author's outrage, courage, and unquenchable thirst for justice and truth.

It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who carefully documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment, and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again.

Perhaps we could take from his writing the humility that would allow us to understand that our mere good intentions are not sufficient to make us good men and women. Perhaps we could take from his writing the humility that would allow us to understand that our mere good intentions are not sufficient to make us good men and women.

Perhaps we could come to understand that such intentions are instead all too often the consequence of our unpardonable historical ignorance, our utter willful blindness, and our voracious hidden appetite for vengeance, terror, and destruction. Perhaps we could come to remember and to learn from the intolerable trials endured by all those who pass through the fiery chambers of the Marxist collectivist ideology.

Perhaps we could derive from that remembering and learning the wisdom necessary to take personal responsibility for the suffering and malevolence that still so terribly and unforgivably characterizes the world we have been provided with. The means to transform ourselves and do humility by the literary and moral genius of this great Russian author.

We should also pray, most devoutly—whatever deity guides us implicitly or explicitly—for the desire and the will to learn from what we have been offered. May God Himself eternally forgive us if, in the painstakingly revealed aftermath of such bloodshed, torture, and anguish, we remain stiff-necked, intractable, and unchanged.