On June 8, 1978, a 69-year-old exile from Russia delivered commencement remarks at Harvard University, the very hub of American leftist intellectualism, at a time when many of America’s “best and brightest” still believed socialism was an as-yet-unrealized but attainable vision.
The survivor of the Soviet Gulag, though, had another message, one that directly challenged that smug orthodoxy. He told Harvard’s graduates that “socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”
And, even as the Harvard elitists were still celebrating the end of American involvement in what they viewed as the ignoble war in Vietnam, the Russian emigre described the American retreat from Vietnam as a “betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?”
This brave voice, eloquently attempting to awaken the West from its moral torpor, provided a most profound spark to an anti-communist movement that American elites had for decades disdained and belittled.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was right, and, with President Reagan and Pope John Paul II, he should forever be credited with a decisive role in bringing down the impossibly brutal, soul-killing Evil Empire that was the Soviet Union. The pope provided spiritual might, and Reagan military strength, backed by will and soaring rhetoric. But what Solzhenitsyn provided was the voice from within the beast, reminding the West of the eternal verity — “writers and artists can achieve more: They can conquer falsehood.”
That last quote is from his speech accepting the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, a speech he could not deliver in person for fear of the Soviets’ reaction.
But it was he who had the Soviets over a barrel: So great was his fame that his Soviet oppressors dared not silence him completely, for fear of the world’s reaction. By then, of course, Solzhenitsyn already had borne witness to the viciousness of the Soviet state in his famous “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The even more famous “The Gulag Archipelago” followed Denisovich and electrified the world.
In those books and in so many other writings, this great man and author provided lasting testament to the truth that the human yearning for freedom and beauty can outlast all efforts to suppress them.
Solzhenitsyn died Sunday at age 89, but he and his contributions will be remembered as long as the love of freedom endures.
