In the pro-life movement, we often recall the old adage, “For evil to flourish, it only requires that good men do nothing.” It is a consoling saying, but a challenging one as well, because it implies a question: can one good man prevent the flourishing of evil?
The life of the heroic Russian writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who passed away in August, gives a powerful answer to this question. Indeed, it is difficult to exaggerate the effect this man had in bringing the truth about Communist atrocities to the attention of the West. In his two most famous works, the widely popular novella, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and his massive three-volume work, The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1978), Solzhenitsyn drew on his own experiences in the Gulag. He was imprisoned for nine years for making a passing irreverent remark about Stalin in a letter to his friend and during his time in the camps, he abandoned Communism, survived cancer and memorized the words of the novels he was unable to put to paper.
Solzhenitsyn was the first man to shine a light from behind the Iron Curtain; he was a living witness to the power of the truth. Peter Bamm, a doctor who lived under the Nazi regime, wrote in his autobiography: “The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death, rather than silently tolerate the crime, would have sacrificed his life in vain.” Although this is an accurate description of the appearance of moral action in a totalitarian state, this appearance is the greatest illusion totalitarianism creates, an illusion Solzhenitsyn’s life and work destroyed.
As Hannah Arendt wrote, in the year following the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s first book, it “is true that totalitarian domination tries to establish holes of oblivion into which all deeds, good and evil, would disappear,” but such “holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.”
To tell the story of Communist repression, Solzhenitsyn survived against all odds. He possessed remarkable courage and an indomitable spirit, which the Soviet regime could not bend. In telling his own story, and the stories of all of those exiled by the atheist state into “holes of oblivion,” he destroyed the conspiracy of silence which enabled the Evil Empire to flourish.
Fittingly, Solzhenitsyn concluded his 1970 Nobel lecture with the Russian proverb: “One word of truth outweighs the world.” The proverb recalls Archimedes’s challenge that, given a big enough lever, he could move the world. In our age, this lever is the truth and Solzhenitsyn’s lesson for us is that, whereas the lie needs the world to keep silent, the truth needs only one word. Surely it would be a mistake, after a century of misinformation, propaganda and repression, to think that Christ’s words are a mere metaphor or simply a figure of speech: “The truth shall make you free” (Jn 8:32). Indeed, the life and times of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn prove otherwise.
