Solzhenitsyn and the Engine of History

An illuminating recapitulation, in February’s New Criterion, of The Red Wheel volumes which have appeared to date in English, from the eminent scholar Robert D. Kaplan. Full text here.

“For in this entire revolutionary process, what pierces most through the intelligent reader’s consciousness is the madness of crowds coupled with the romance and irresistibility of extremism, so that a minority ends up moving history. Just listen to Solzhenitsyn’s timeless words:

”For a long time now it has been dangerous to stand in the way of revolution, and risk-free to assist it. Those who have renounced all traditional Russian values, the revolutionary horde, the locusts from the abyss, vilify and blaspheme and no one dares challenge them. A left-wing newspaper can print the most subversive of articles, a left-wing speaker can deliver the most incendiary of speeches—but just try pointing out the dangers of such utterances and the whole leftist camp will raise a howl of denunciation.”

Nobody interferes with the mob, least of all the polished and oh-so-civilized intelligentsia, who see the radical Left as composed of a purer and distilled archetype of their own values, and only awake from their dreams when it is too late. For, as it is said, people who have lost faith in God believe in nothing, and they will therefore believe in anything. Richard Bernstein, a former book critic for The New York Times, in referring to campus multiculturalism, calls this larger phenomenon “the dictatorship of virtue,” something that took firm root in twentieth-century totalitarianism, in which the perfect race or system becomes the absolute destroyer of everything good. In this way Solzhenitsyn’s story is a timeless one, aptly suited for our own age.”