The Spirit of Solzhenitsyn: Ideocracy and Totalitarianism Of Belief

 As you may recall last month, one of the books I purchased was The Spirit of Solzhenitsyn by Olivier Clement.  

Clement is the author of Roots of Christian Mysticism:  Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary which I have freely borrowed from in some of my Sunday meditations.  This book, based on that experience, was something of a selfish gift to myself in that it was hardback, it was not cheap (even at the cheap on-line places), and it was filling a particular curiosity in me that has really nothing else to do with anything that I am doing.

I was not disappointed in my choice.

The book takes various aspects of Solzhenitsyn's works (I only knew him for The Gulag Archipelago; I was unaware he had several fictional novels to his credit) and analyses them through the lens of the different works, his professed beliefs, and his Orthodox faith.  I offer today here a selection from the selection "The Letter to the Patriarch", a work written by Solzhentisyn in 1972 concerning the practice and state of Russian Orthodoxy in the Soviet Union.  In a part where he is discussing the Soviet Union's smashing of the Russian Orthodox church, Clement writes the following:

"The definitive installation of Stalinist totalitarianism, with the great trials of 1937-1939, led to practically all churches being closed, not only in the country but also in the towns, where Christian intellectuals were a particular target.  Any possibility of witness to the peasant masses other than being systematically evicted and forced into the towns was thereby removed.  In 1929, the Church had been forbidden any sort of intellectual activity, and this ban was confirmed in the Constitution of 1936. Ideocracy (A government based on rule by ideologues - Ed.), in effect, cannot afford to be tolerant; from its point of view, Christianity is no more than a hangover from the past who disappearance should be hastened.  Ideocracy, itself, while not a religion of salvation, at least sees itself as a liberating gnosis; it establishes increased rationalism, between total determination of the person by material factors and exaltation of man as a demiurge with unlimited potential. "Scientific atheism" was made a compulsory subject in all its schools, and higher education could not be completed without successfully undergoing an examination in this "subject".  Specialized lectures made regular tours of offices, factories, and collectives.  The mass media, leaflets printed millions, and a systemic campaign in all places of collective activity (including amusements) impregnated the entire intellectual atmosphere with the ruling ideology.  The aim was to show atheism not as a mere philosophical conviction, but as something "scientifically" proven.  The process of secularization in Russia was not only hastened by the extreme speed of industrialization, after recovery from the 'de-industrialization' brought about by the Revolution and the Civil War, but was also psychologically systematized by the almost obsessive implanation (sic) of 'a-theocracy'".

Solzhenitsyn later recorded in the book Stories and Prose Poems the then more modern post Soviet generation viewing the re-establishment of church practices.  Here, he describes a reaction to the Easter procession of Peredelkino:

"Those who stand and make fun of the procession are on longer the militant atheists of the thirties, 'who snatched the consecrated Easter-cakes out of people's hands, dancing and caterwauling and pretending to be devils'.  The new generation is 'just idly inquisitive' - yet how barbarous!  The buy Easter candles and use the to light their cigarettes, they jig about to their transistors.  They are neither violent nor openly blasphemous, yet their whole attitude is a moral outrage: 'Their lips twisted into a gangsterish, leer, their brazen talk, their loud laughter, their flirting and snide jokes, their spoking and spitting - it all amounts to an insult to the passion of Christ (p. 105).

The writer's (Solzhenitsyn's) conclusion from this scene is somber in the extreme: industrial civilization and ideocracy, by preventing the transmission of any spiritual values to these young people, or simply by destroying a respect for dissident minorities, have simply bred an aggressive barbarism in the younger generation, from which all that can be expected is that one day they will 'turn and trample on us all.  And as for those who urged them on to this, they will trample on them too' (p. 108).

And yet...not all are like this.  Some are not smoking, which at least shows some elementary respect.  Some just have 'simple, credulous faces' and 'a lot of these must be in the picture (p. 107).

It strikes me as odd that his words seem to have such relevance to me today.   The same sort of things could easily be written about 21st Century Western Civilization, which in theory defeated the Soviet Union yet seems to have imbibed at least some of its underlying ideology.

To say I am pleased with this book is an understatement.  It is not often I run into such thoughtful writing that leave me with much to think about.