Hansen: Solzhenitsyn's Freedom

Had Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died too young, like so many other forced laborers, the Soviet Union might still be with us. Yet many of the 89-year-old author's eulogists write as if he lived too long.

To be sure, tributes to Solzhenitsyn have reflected the enormity and diversity of his contributions. The Wall Street Journal lauded him for calling evil like it is, saying he "fortified the West with the truth and will to triumph in the Cold War." The Associated Press enthused that his accounts of the Soviet Gulag, most famously One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, "inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire." The New York Times painted him with vivid color. "Mr. Solzhenitsyn was heir to a morally focused and often prophetic Russian literary tradition, and he looked the part," Michael T. Kaufman wrote. "With his stern visage, lofty brow and full, Old Testament beard, he recalled Tolstoy while suggesting a modern-day Jeremiah, denouncing the evils of the Kremlin and later the mores of the West."

But like Dostoevsky before him, Solzhenitsyn is not so easy for Westerners to understand. Both renowned authors chronicled their time in brutal Russian labor camps. Yet the experience scarcely dimmed either Orthodox Christian's national pride. You might expect the great opponent of Stalin would have worried President Vladimir Putin, under whose leadership Russia has retreated from Western-style democracy. On the contrary, the AP notes that Putin revived "Solzhenitsyn's vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny."

America's love affair with the man who fought the Kremlin fizzled while the Cold War still sizzled. The break can be traced as far back as 1978, when the reclusive exile left his Vermont home to address the graduates of Harvard University. Solzhenitsyn took his audience to task. In contrast to their nation's founders, he said, Americans abuse individual freedoms, worship the gods of materialism, and neglect their spiritual heritage. His stinging indictment deserves extended quotation:

However, in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. … State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer.

The New York Times obituary noted that the speech "struck many as insensitive, haughty and snobbish." Solzhenitsyn's outburst may have confirmed why former President Gerald Ford, on the advice of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, declined to meet with Solzhenitsyn after he moved to the United States.

There is irony in Solzhenitsyn's American reception. We praised him for crippling the Kremlin by the power of his courageous truth telling. But we disapproved when he spoke his mind about American decadence. Perhaps the conflicting responses reflect the lessons Americans have learned from the Cold War. One popular argument for America's victory says the Soviet Union fell in part because citizens of every nation long for the freedom that brings material wealth.

Wary from his American sojourn, Solzhenitsyn returned home to a democratic Russia in 1994. According to a Christianity Today report, "His vision of Russia's future would seek to reverse the destructive force of 'freedom' understood within a nonreligious, relativist framework." It's a vision American evangelicals would do well to ponder, because Solzhenitsyn exposes how the culture dulls our theological senses.

Consider one commonly cited New Testament passage about freedom, Galatians 5:1: "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." Hearing that verse in America, where we waged war for independence from Britain and freedom for slaves, we naturally think about individual rights. Seen within the biblical context, however, freedom looks quite different. Freedom is not truly possible apart from Christ, and for those who are in Christ, it's not the goal. The apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8:21 that the creation is in bondage to sin. Only God in Christ will set it free. He elaborates on freedom in Galatians 5:13. Christians must use their Calvary-bought freedom to serve one another in love. Likewise, the apostle Peter writes in 1 Peter 2:16 that freedom is not license to sin but invitation to service.

When we understand freedom biblically, we more readily embrace God's resolve to work good even from bondage. God liberated Solzhenitsyn in the gulag. "It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good," Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. "Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. … That is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: "Bless you, prison!" I … have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: "Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!"

Collin Hansen is a CT editor at large and author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists.