You were taken away at dawn. I followed you
As one does when a corpse is being removed.
Children were crying in the darkened house.
A candle flared, illuminating the Mother of God…
The cold of an icon was on your lips
A death-cold sweat on your brow –
I will never forget this; I will gather
To wail with the wives of the murdered streltsy
Inconsolably, beneath the Kremlin towers.
Anna Akhmatova, Moscow 1935
Russian author and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s three volume The Gulag Archipelago was completed fifty years ago. It was published five years later, with an English translation the following year. It covered life in the gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, in a narrative constructed from a variety sources – reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents – and Solzhenitsyn’s own experience as a zek, a gulag prisoner – famously if excruciatingly retold in his chilling, literally and figuratively, and yet brief, autobiographical One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Following its publication in the west, the book circulated in underground samizdat publication in the Soviet Union until its appearance in the literary journal Novy Mir in 1989. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, The Gulag Archipelago has been officially published in Solzhenitsyn’s own country, and since 2009, it has been mandatory reading in Russian school curricula.
A 50th anniversary edition was released on November 1st, 2018 with a forward by Jordan Petersen, the Canadian psychologist, author, and poster-boy – a kind of thinking person’s Milo Yiannopoulos – for many on the conservative side of politics who rant and rave about the existential threat to western civilization and Judeo-Christan values posed by the triple headed Cerberus of political correctness, identity politics and value signaling that has ensorcelled the hearts and minds of the youthful, radical, emotional, university left and their mentors and their sinister svengalis in academe and media. There is almost a “Reds under the beds” paranoia at play here in which is that communism and all it’s works are a kind of secular succubus, and that impressionable youngsters and deluded oldsters must be exorcised of false and failed promises.
Petersen’s forward is actually a good read, if somewhat overblown, slanted, jumbled and repetitive, long on opinion and short on historical memory. For example, whilst Karl Marx, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, and also Cuba, Cambodia and Venezuela come in for a predictable and justified bollocking, there is no mention at all of their ideological opposites, the equally repugnant and brutal authoritarian regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, and numerous right wing tyrants the world over – although admittedly, these in no way matched the rigour and discipline and the pervasive and pernicious social and psychological control of the ‘peoples’ republics’. Nor, apart from an acknowledgement that brutal excesses are common to all regimes, is there a balanced recognition that capitalism can be as corrupt and exploitative and as red in tooth and claw as communism.
I’ve republished an edited extract of the forward below as it is worth reminding readers of Solzhenitsyn’s significant contribution to our understanding of recent history and of the resilience of the human spirit and the courage of the flesh and blood “souls in torment” who run the gauntlet of man’s inhumanity to man and emerge at the far end bloodied but unbowed. But Bob Dylan said it better in his shimmering anthem Chimes of Freedom;
Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
I have included the online comments on Petersen’s piece as these encapsulate the good, the bad and the ugly of ostensibly informed opinion among the readership of Rupert Murdoch’s redoubtable and often cogent flagship, The Australian. Some display binary groupthink and an almost Pavlovian approbation replete with predictable, tired epithets about left-wingers and Labor/Labour politicians. Others are more nuanced and better informed. Most surprising and indeed disturbing is that few readers appear to know much about the subject matter – namely the history of the Soviet Union and of Solzhenitsyn’s journey, including the story of the Bolshevik revolution, of Lenin and Stalin, the purges of the ‘thirties and ‘forties, and the gulag itself – an institution that was actually initiated by the Czars. Few appear to have heard of let alone read any of Solzhenitsyn’s novels, nor indeed any of the many published accounts of the Stalin years. I would wager that this dearth of knowledge and perspective is a reflection of the weakening of historical memory among the wider populace as such momentous events and eras recede further and further into the past.
By strange symmetry, I have recently reread historian Robert Conquest’s tombstone of a book, The Great Terror, a relentless narrative of arrests, trials, fabricated confessions, hostage-taking, deportations, torture and executions as Stalin consolidated his rule, eliminated enemies real and imagined, and created his own model of a socialist state.
It commenced with the elimination of the Old Bolsheviks, his former comrades in arms, and then expanded to embrace all in the party and society at large who may or may not have shared his vision. Intellectuals, philosophers, writers, poets, musicians, priests, scientists, academics, teachers, civil servants, workers and peasants, and the Red Army’s Officer Corps – a contributing factor to the Soviet Union’s need to make a pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and its disastrously slow response to Hitlers invasion in June 1941.
An estimated death toll is difficult to determine. In those dark days, people simply disappeared, and the NKVD covered its tracks well. The official number for the “Great Purge” of 1936 to 1938 stands at 1,548,366 detained persons, of whom 681,692 were shot – an average of 1,000 executions a day. Various historians claim that the real number of victims could be twice as much.
But the the arrests, executions, and deportations commenced as early as 1930 and continued right up until Stalin’s death in 1953. Conquest, in his The Great Terror: A Reassessment does the gloomy math: 1930-36, 7 million; 1937-1938, 3 million; 1039-53, 10 million. The number of deaths in the Soviet Union that were explicitly ordered by someone – in other words, the number of executions – is actually relatively low at around 1.5 million. The majority of the deaths were caused by neglect or repressive policies – for example, those who died in the Soviet gulags, those who died while being deported, and German civilians and Prisoners of War are believed to have perished while under Soviet guard.
The numbers who were transported, exiled, displaced, and scattered to concentration camps or far-eastern towns and villages were likewise incalculable. as the brother of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago comments in the final scenes of David Lean’s beautiful but flawed movie)
There is a myriad of books and films about these events. Wikipedia is as good a place as any to start. Robert Conquest’s is the most acclaimed – and rightly so. Then there is Arthur Koestler’s chilling novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, which recounts the thoughts of an Old Bolshevik as he awaits death in the execution cells:
A shapeless figure bent over him, he smelt the fresh lrather of the revolver belt: but what insignia did the figure wear on the sleeves and shoulder-straps of its uniform – and in whose name did it raised the dark pistol barrel?
As for movies, there’s always David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, which realistically albeit melodramatically portrays the choices and compromises confronting ordinary, intellectual Russians in the years of revolution and civil war. But I would highly recommend the poignant but powerful Burnt by the Sun, a 1994 film by Russian director and screenwriter Nikita Mikhailkov and Azerbaijani screenwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov. The film depicts the story of a senior officer (played by Mikhalkov) and his family during the purge of the Red Army.
And there was the poet Anna Akhmatova, whose words open this piece, bearing sad witness to the imprisoned, the deported, the disappeared and the dead – including in their number, two husbands and her only son – memorializing the suffering of herself, her family and millions of her compatriots in her tortured testament, Requiem.
Russia’s Stations of the Cross did not cease with the end of the Terror. Three years latrer came Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the rapid blitzkreig that took the Wehrmacht to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad, and the bloody clawback that brought the Red Army to Berlin and to take captive the peoples of Eastern Europe.
Over twenty five million Soviet citizens died during the Great Patriotic War, of which just under ten million were military. Most died as a direct result of the military conflict that ranged from the Baltic to the Caucasus. But miilions also perished at the hands of the NKVD and in the forced mass deportations of “suspect” peoples, including the Volga Germans and the Crimean Tartars.
At wars’ end, the Terror rolled on, albeit at a lower setting. Josef Stalin remained suspicious, vengeful and paranoid, and the purges continued right up until the moment he departed this mortal coil (as depicted in dubious slapstick in Armando Iannucci‘s recent The Death of Stalin).
Many, many Red Army soldiers who had been taken captive by the Nazis were arrested on their return from captivity. Many were shot for ‘desertion’, and thousands sent to the Gulags. Whether they had surrendered or had been subdued and taken captive, often as fast-moving battle fronts left them stranded, abandoned and entrapped behind enemy lines, they were deemed cowards, traitors and enemies of the Soviet Union and its people. They were moreover doubly damned. Whether from behind the wire of concentration camps or as slave labourers in German mines, fields and factories, they had witnessed, come into contact with, and had been contaminated by the world outside.
Which is where Solzhenitsyn came in.
But but first, English songwriter Al Stewart’s tribute to Solzhenitsyn and those like him who were ill-paid for their service and sacrifice.
I’m coming home, I’m coming home, now you can taste it in the wind, the war is over
And I listen to the clicking of the train-wheels as we roll across the border
And now they ask me of the time that I was caught behind their lines and taken prisoner
“They only held me for a day, a lucky break, ” I say they turn and listen closer
I’ll never know, I’ll never know why I was taken from the line and all the others
To board a special train and journey deep into the heart of holy Russia
And it’s cold and damp in the transit camp, and the air is still and sullen
And the pale sun of October whispers the snow will soon be coming
And I wonder when I’ll be home again and the morning answers “Never”
And the evening sighs, and the steely Russian skies go on forever
The Gulag Archipelago confirmed the horrors of the Soviet Union
Jordan Petersen, The Australian 17th November 2018
First, you defend your homeland against the Nazis, serving as a twice-decorated soldier on the Eastern front in the criminally ill-prepared Soviet Red Army. Then you’re arrested, humiliated, stripped of your military rank, charged under the auspices of the all-purpose Article 58 with the dissemination of “anti-Soviet propaganda”, and dragged off to Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. There, through the bars of your cell, you watch your beloved country celebrating its victory in the Great Patriotic War. Then you’re sentenced, in absentia, to eight years of hard labour (but you got away easy; it wasn’t so long afterwards that people in your position were awarded a “tenner” — and then a quarter of a century!). And fate isn’t finished with you yet — not by any means. You develop a deadly cancer in the camp, endure the exile imposed on you after your imprisonment ends, and pass very close to death.
Despite all this, you hold your head high. You refuse to turn against man or God, although you have every reason to do so. You write, instead, secretly, at night, documenting your terrible experiences. You craft a personal memoir — a single day in the labour camps — and, miracle of miracles! The clouds part! The sun shines through! Your book is published, and in your own country! It meets with unparalleled acclaim, nationally and internationally. But the sky darkens, once again, and the sun disappears. The repression returns. You become (once again) a “non-person”. The secret police — the dread KGB — seize the manuscript of your next book. It sees the light of day, nonetheless; but only in the West. There your reputation grows beyond the wildest of imaginings. The Nobel committee itself bestows upon you its highest literary honour.
The Soviet authorities, stripped of their camouflage, are enraged. They order the secret police to poison you. You pass (once again) near death. But you continue to write: driven, solitary, intolerably inspired. Your The Gulag Archipelago documents the absolute and utter corruption of the dogmas and doctrines of your state, your empire, your leaders — and yourself. And then: that is printed, too! Not in your own country but in the West — once again — from copies oh-so-dangerously hidden and smuggled across the borders. And your great book bursts with unparalleled and dreadful force into the still naive and unexpecting literary and intellectual world. You are expelled from the Soviet Union, stripped of your citizenship, forced to take residency in a society both strange to you and resistant, in its own way, to your prophetic words. But the power of your stories and the strength of your morals demolish any remaining claims to ethical and philosophical credibility still made by the defenders of the collectivist system that gave rise to all that you witnessed.
Years pass (but not so many, from the perspective of history). Then? Another miracle! The Soviet Union collapses! You return home. Your citizenship is restored. You write and speak in your reclaimed homeland until death claims you, in 2008. A year later The Gulag Archipelago is deemed mandatory reading by those responsible for establishing the national school curriculum of your home country. Your impossible victory is complete.
The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago — one continuous, extended scream of outrage — are, paradoxically, brilliant, bitter, disbelieving and infused with awe: awe at the strength characterising the best among us, in the worst of all situations. In that monumental text, published in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn conducted “an experiment in literary investigation” — a hybrid of journalism, history and biography, unlike anything written before or since. In 1985 the author bestowed his approval upon Edward E. Ericson Jr’s single-volume abridgment — republished here on the 50th anniversary of the completion of the full three-volume edition and centenary of the author’s birth — and sold 30 million copies in 35 languages. Between the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s book — apart from the documentation of the horrors of the legions of the dead, counted and uncounted, and the masses whose lives were torn asunder — are the innumerable soul-chilling personal stories, carefully preserved, making the tragedy of mass betrayal, torture and death not the mere statistic Stalin so disdainfully described but individual, real and terrible.
It is a matter of pure historical fact that The Gulag Archipelago played a primary role in bringing the Soviet Empire to its knees. Although economically unsustainable, ruled in the most corrupt manner imaginable, and reliant on the slavery and enforced deceit of its citizens, the Soviet system managed to stumble forward through far too many decades before being cut to the quick. The courageous leaders of the labour unions in Poland, the great Pope John Paul II and the American president Ronald Reagan, with his blunt insistence that the West faced an evil empire, all played their role in its defeat and collapse. It was Solzhenitsyn, however, whose revelations made it positively shameful to defend not just the Soviet state but the very system of thought that made that state what it was. It was Solzhenitsyn who most crucially made the case that the terrible excesses of communism could not be conveniently blamed on the corruption of the Soviet leadership, the “cult of personality” surrounding Stalin or the failure to put the otherwise stellar and admirable utopian principles of Marxism into proper practice. It was Solzhenitsyn who demonstrated that the death of millions and the devastation of many more were, instead, a direct causal consequence of the philosophy (worse, perhaps: the theology) driving the communist system. The hypothetically egalitarian, universalist doctrines of Karl Marx contained hidden within them sufficient hatred, resentment, envy and denial of individual culpability and responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death when manifested in the world.
Solzhenitsyn, the day of his release in 1953 after 8 years in prison.
For Marx, man was a member of a class, an economic class, a group — that, and little more — and history nothing but the battleground of classes, of groups. His admirers regarded (continue to regard) Marx’s doctrine as one of compassion — moral by definition, virtuous by fiat: “consider the working classes, in all their oppression, and work forthrightly to free them”. But hate may well be a stronger and more compelling motivator than love. In consequence, it took no time, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, for solidarity with the common man and the apparently laudable demand for universal equality to manifest its unarticulated and ever-darkening shadow. First came the most brutal indictment of the “class enemy”. Then came the ever-expanding definition of that enemy, until every single person in the entirety of the state found him or herself at risk of encapsulation within that insatiable and devouring net. The verdict, delivered to those deemed at fault, by those who elevated themselves to the simultaneously held positions of judge, jury and executioner? The necessity to eradicate the victimisers, the oppressors, in toto, without any consideration whatsoever for reactionary niceties — such as individual innocence.
What can be concluded in the deepest, most permanent sense, from Solzhenitsyn’s anguished Gulag narrative? First, we learn what is indisputable — what we all should have learned by now (what we have nonetheless failed to learn): that the Left, like the Right, can go too far; that the Left has, in the past, gone much too far. Second, we learn what is far more subtle and difficult — how and why that going too far occurs. We learn, as Solzhenitsyn so profoundly insists, that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And we learn as well that we all are, each of us, simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. Thus, we come to realise that the twin categories of “guilty oppressor” and “justice-seeking victim” can be made endlessly inclusive. This is not least because we all benefit unfairly (and are equally victimised) by our thrownness, our arbitrary placement in the flow of time. We all accrue undeserved and somewhat random privilege from the vagaries of our place of birth, our inequitably distributed talents, our ethnicity, race, culture and sex. We all belong to a group — some group — that has been elevated in comparative status, through no effort of our own. This is true in some manner, along some dimension of group category, for every solitary individual, except for the single most lowly of all. At some time and in some manner we all may in consequence be justly targeted as oppressors, and may all, equally, seek justice — or revenge — as victims. Even if the initiators of the revolution had, therefore, in their most pure moments, been driven by a holy desire to lift up the downtrodden, was it not guaranteed that they would be overtaken by those motivated primarily by envy, hate and the desire to destroy as the revolution progressed?
Thus the doctrine of group identity inevitably ends with everyone identified as a class enemy, an oppressor; with everyone uncleansibly contaminated by bourgeois privilege, unfairly enjoying the benefits bequeathed by the vagaries of history; with everyone prosecuted, without respite, for that corruption and injustice. “No mercy for the oppressor!” And no punishment too severe for the crime of exploitation! Expiation becomes impossible because there is no individual guilt, no individual responsibility, and therefore no manner in which the crime of arbitrary birth can be individually accounted for. And all the misery that can be generated as a consequence of such an accusation is the true reason for the accusation. When everyone is guilty, all that serves justice is the punishment of everyone; when the guilt extends to the existence of the world’s misery itself, only the fatal punishment will suffice.
It is much more preferable instead — and much more likely to preserve us all from metastasising hells — to state forthrightly: “I am indeed thrown arbitrarily into history. I therefore choose to voluntarily shoulder the responsibility of my advantages and the burden of my disadvantages — like every other individual. I am morally bound to pay for my advantages with my responsibility. I am morally bound to accept my disadvantages as the price I pay for being. I will therefore strive not to descend into bitterness and then seek vengeance because I have less to my credit and a greater burden to stumble forward with than others.”
Is this not a, or even the, essential point of difference between the West, for all its faults, and the brutal, terrible “egalitarian” systems generated by the pathological communist doctrine? The great and good framers of the American republic were, for example, anything but utopian. They took full stock and full measure of ineradicable human imperfection. They held modest goals, derived not least from the profoundly cautious common-law tradition of England. They endeavoured to establish a system the corrupt and ignorant fools we all are could not damage too fatally. That’s humility. That’s clear-headed knowledge of the limitations of human machination and good intention.
But the communists, the revolutionaries? They aimed, grandly and admirably, at least in theory, at a much more heavenly vision — and they began their pursuit with the hypothetically straightforward and oh-so-morally-justifiable enforcement of economic equality.
Wealth, however, was not so easily generated. The poor could not so simply become rich. But the riches of those who had anything more than the greatest pauper (no matter how pitiful that “more” was)? That could be “redistributed” — or, at least, destroyed. That’s equality, too. That’s sacrifice, in the name of heaven on earth. And redistribution was not enough — with all its theft, betrayal and death. Mere economic engineering was insufficient. What emerged as well was the overarching and truly totalitarian desire to remake man and woman, as such — the longing to restructure the human spirit in the very image of the communist preconceptions. Attributing to themselves this divine ability, this transcendent wisdom — and with unshakeable belief in the glowing but ever-receding future — the newly minted Soviets tortured, thieved, imprisoned, lied and betrayed, all the while masking their great evil with virtue. It was Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago that tore off the mask, and exposed the feral cowardice, envy, deceit, resentment and hatred for the individual and for existence itself that pulsed beneath.
Others had made the attempt. Malcolm Muggeridge reported on the horrors of “dekulakization” — the forced collectivisation of the all-too-recently successful peasantry of the Ukraine and elsewhere that preceded the horrifying famines of the 1930s. In the same decade, and in the following years, George Orwell risked his ideological commitments and his reputation to tell us all what was truly occurring in the Soviet Union in the name of egalitarianism and brotherhood. But it was Solzhenitsyn who truly shamed the radical leftists, forcing them underground (where they have festered and plotted for the last 40 years, failing unforgivably to have learned what all reasonable people should have learned from the cataclysm of the 20th century and its egalitarian utopianism). And today, despite everything, and under their sway — almost three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the apparent collapse of communism — we are doing everything we can to forget what Solzhenitsyn so clearly demonstrated, to our great and richly deserved peril. Why don’t all our children read The Gulag Archipelago in our high schools, as they now do in Russia? Why don’t our teachers feel compelled to read the book aloud? Did we not win the Cold War? Were the bodies not piled high enough? (How high, then, would be enough?)
Why, for example, is it still acceptable — and in polite company — to profess the philosophy of a communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine “progressive” and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union (according to The Black Book of Communism). Sixty million dead in Mao’s China (and an all-too-likely return to autocratic oppression in that country in the near future). The horrors of Cambodia’s killing fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries (with such different histories) and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance (albeit of the most inexcusable kind) that allows today’s Marxists to flaunt their continued allegiance — to present it as compassion and care? Or is it, instead, envy of the successful, in near-infinite proportions? Or something akin to hatred for mankind itself? How much proof do we need? Why do we still avert our eyes from the truth?
Perhaps we simply lack sophistication. Perhaps we just can’t understand. Perhaps our tendency towards compassion is so powerfully necessary in the intimacy of our families and friendships that we cannot contemplate its limitations, its inability to scale and its propensity to mutate into hatred of the oppressor, rather than allegiance with the oppressed. Perhaps we cannot comprehend the limitations and dangers of the utopian vision given our definite need to contemplate and to strive for a better tomorrow. We certainly don’t seem to imagine, for example, that the hypothesis of some state of future perfection — for example, the truly egalitarian and permanent brotherhood of man — can be used to justify any and all sacrifices whatsoever (the pristine and heavenly end making all conceivable means not only acceptable but morally required). There is simply no price too great to pay in pursuit of the ultimate utopia. (This is particularly true if it is someone else who foots the bill.) And it is clearly the case that we require a future towards which to orient ourselves — to provide meaning in our life, psychologically speaking. It is for that reason we see the same need expressed collectively, on a much larger scale, in the Judeo-Christian vision of the Promised Land, and the kingdom of heaven on earth. And it is also clearly the case that sacrifice is necessary to bring that desired end state into being. That’s the discovery of the future itself: the necessity to forgo instantaneous gratification in the present, to delay, to bargain with fate so that the future can be better; twinned with the necessity to let go, to burn off, to separate wheat from chaff, and to sacrifice what is presently unworthy, so that tomorrow can be better than today. But limits need to be placed around who or what is deemed dispensable.
Here’s some thoughts — no, some facts. Every social system produces inequality, at present, and every social system has done so, since the beginning of time. The poor have been with us — and will be with us — always. Analysis of the content of individual Paleolithic gravesites provides evidence for the existence of substantive variance in the distribution of ability, privilege and wealth, even in our distant past. The more illustrious of our ancestors were buried with great possessions, hoards of precious metals, weaponry, jewellery and costuming. The majority, however, struggled through their lives and were buried with nothing. Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity — even among plants, and cities — even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. In equality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world. The only systems that have produced some modicum of wealth, along with the inevitable inequality and its attendant suffering, are those that evolved in the West, with their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition; precisely those systems that emphasise above all the essential dignity, divinity and ultimate responsibility of the individual. In consequence, any attempt to attribute the existence of inequality to the functioning of the productive institutions we have managed to create and protect so recently in what is still accurately regarded as the free world will hurt those who are weakest and most vulnerable first. The radicals who conflate the activities of the West with the oppression of the downtrodden therefore do nothing to aid those whom they purport to prize and plenty to harm them. The claims they make to act under the inspiration of pure compassion must therefore come to be regarded with the deepest suspicion — not least by those who dare to make such claims themselves.
The dangers of the utopian vision have been laid bare, even if the reasons those dangers exist have not yet been fully and acceptably articulated. If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917 (and both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche prophesied well before then that there would be hell to pay for that doctrine) there is absolutely and finally no excuse now. And we know that mostly because of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago. Thank heaven for that great author’s outrage, courage and unquenchable thirst for justice and truth. It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who carefully documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again. Perhaps we could take from his writing the humility that would allow us to understand that our mere good intentions are not sufficient to make us good men and women. Perhaps we could come to understand that such intentions are instead all too often the consequence of our unpardonable historical ignorance, our utter wilful blindness and our voracious hidden appetite for vengeance, terror and destruction. Perhaps we could come to remember and to learn from the intolerable trials endured by all those who passed through the fiery chambers of the Marxist collectivist ideology. Perhaps we could derive from that remembering and learning the wisdom necessary to take personal responsibility for the suffering and malevolence that still so terribly and unforgivably characterises the world. We have been provided with the means to transform ourselves in due humility by the literary and moral genius of this great Russian author. We should all pray most devoutly to whatever deity guides us implicitly or explicitly for the desire and the will to learn from what we have been offered. May God himself eternally fail to forgive us if in the painstakingly revealed aftermath of such bloodshed, torture and anguish we remain stiff-necked, incautious, and unchanged.
© Jordan B. Peterson 2018
Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and author of the bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This is an edited extract from the foreword to the new edition of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published by Vintage Classics.
As I have noted above,the online comments reflect on the range of opinions among the ostensibly informed opinion among the readership of The Australian. One entertaining characteristic is how often commenters lay into each other.
t’s much easier and more comforting to accept the narrative of the Left that you are oppressed, the victim of others. But I’m wondering where is this Oppression today in Australia? There are so so many helping hands out there for those who want to have a go. But then, to many, nothing beats being told you are oppressed and getting paid for it (Centrelink).
A powerful and thought-provoking read, this. I’ll be reading it over again and again to be sure I’ve got it right. If any man alive within the last hundred years deserves the title of ‘prophet’, it must be Solzhenitsyn and yet most ‘ordinary’ people have hardly heard of him let alone read his prophetic words.
This week the Greens have announced they want to jail anyone exporting coal (Currently or biggest export). Who else will be sent to the Greens gulag under the new left regime?
Word salad from a master of over oily pre-packaged 1000 Island dressing drenched word salads, Last week it was how Raskolnikov somehow proved the existence of objective morality or something like that. This time another false literary allusion to bolster the illusions of those right wingers who like to pretend they have read a book that doesn’t have pictures.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was very good, the rest was self serving attempts to get money from Yank publishers hoping to reinforce Yank prejudices during the Cold War.
The Canadian Peterson is part of the same racket.
Fantastic article by a man whose work should be studied and viewed in Unis worldwide. A totally brilliant mind whose moniker of Psychologist merely understates the depth and breadth of his anyalysis of humanity. Please keep his stuff coming in the MSM. The world really needs more like this.
One is so used to having a full page advertisement on the back page of the Weekend Australian Inquirer hardcopy, that it took me sometime to wake up that here was an article for the ages. It wasn’t until I retired to my bed that I was able to read it.
So much to think about and reflect on of our past for many of us.
What is so terrifying is that there is now a generation who do not know and understand.
Yet, this time next week, Victorians will have just gifted a further four year reign to the most Socialist Government this state has ever seen.
Marxism is essentially evil but democracy is not a Christian invention
The Greeks were the mothers of democracy but the Christians modernised it to what we have today.
It’s modern application certainly is. Bearing in mind there were well over a thousand years (two thousand, perhaps) between its origins in ancient Greece (but only for the elites) to its widespread adoption in what we now call the West, in what were all Christian nations at the time of its adoptions, it’s not drawing a long bow to describe democracy as a christian construct.
Wow excellent article and still today left winger activists are trying to stifle his voice and ban him from universities
Jesus spoke straightforwardly of the devil or Satan as a real spiritual personality, not a metaphor. And he knew and demonstrated practical authority over him.
Richard Wurmbrand makes a reasonable case that the envy and and desire to destroy that characterise communism historically already had a spiritual presence in Marx’s personal life following a souring of his early Christian faith.
A kindred visceral hatred, routinely transcending the rational, has manifested time and again in the world against Christians, Jews and Israel, through a variety of agencies. There’s no coincidence nor natural justice in the fact that Christians are statistically far and away the most persecuted group on earth (not least in communist China today).
Yet the same malice manifests less obviously in the neo-Marxism much closer to home. Activists are aggressively pushing an agenda to erode biblical morality, destroy Judaeo-Christian institutions and subvert godly authority structures and even the natural order, including the sexes and natural family. This is no less dangerous in the long run than the communism of Solzhenitsyn’s era.
While I agree with much that you have said, reality is Christian Institutions have been doing as much of those you accuse, to destroy the Judeao Christian place in the world through their own immoral behaviour and confusion about what they now stand for.
I see that Jesus/ Christianity would have been Marxist in ideology. However experiments in Marxism have failed usually ending up with totalitarian leadership living the high life while the peasants work their guts out. China is a little different in that they have a free market economy whilst pursuing socialism and totalitarianism. No one knows how it will end. The US with its plutocracy (not really democracy) pursuing a military state is hardly an ideal. We are mere corks bobbing on the ocean!
In the seventies Alexandre S was taught in Victorian schools as was Orwell. Suspicion lies on leftist leanings for their demise. Be sure they outnumber the democrates. You have to overcome that hurdle first. In other words Daniel Andrews has to go before you get any voice about recommending AS to be on the mainstream English curriculum which it was. Makes his meeting with the Chinese recently and keeping the supposed agreement secrete revealing about his leftist agenda. Daniel Andrews wouldn’t know about AS and less about George Orwell. Andrews is the biggest treat to our sovereignty and human rights than any leftist labour premier in recent history.
The elite who govern us now is an unhealhy blend of unions, public servants and big business. The next elite will be the same eccept worse.
Public servants are the most unionised of employees (I nearly said workers!), so no need to distinguish.
Great article JP. Best discussion for some time.
My thoughts: I have always seen Russia as a corrupt society run by an elite 1 to 2 million rich, with 150m poor. Given the hit Russia took defending against Nazi Germany I think it’s a bit simplistic to say Marxism failed, when given circumstances it never had a chance. Western Europe had the Marshall Plan to revive war torn economies, Russia didn’t. Regardless 60 years on, the Communist system, the leaders paranoia with the West, and the over expenditure on military does largely explain Russia’s ongoing underperformance. JP is right to call them out as a failure. Totalarian leadership doesn’t have a good record.
Right on, JP! In my experience, having had close association with members of the Labor Party in the early 70s, many immediately previously having graduated from university, and they having toasted “the revolution!” at joint dinners/lunches which appeared to be possible at that time, the prevailing thought was “why should we miss out?” I know from personal experience that there was not a scintilla of idealism present, and that they were craven opportunists (Labor lawyers, MPs, Ministers and union officials). They were the true entrepreneurs of our time, and have become rich beyond the most hopeful dreams of their conservative counterparts.
Also read “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich”. A classic. And Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”. Bravo Jordan Petterson, bravo.
And this is supposed to be original? Where’s this guy been. Robert Conquest laid it out in 1968 in The Great Terror. And Marx doesn’t have a lot to do with it. He was just a pretext for neo-Tsarist dictatorship, particularly under the Red Tsar Stalin. Stick to psychology,
Peterson has informed my secularly enforced ignorance of history, has framed for me the importance of understanding our cultural/political errors. Given your right to express complete knowledge on this topic, will you now meet your responsibility to individually do something about it. We wouldn’t be in this mess if you had in 1968.
There was nothing miraculous about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was inevitable, at a predictable time It is a fundamental fact of human nature that first hand information takes precedence over second hand information. The hatred that drove government in the USSR depended on first hand memory of how bad things were before the revolution. Only that memory could suppress recognition of how bad things were after the revolution. Once the old guard faded from influence that veil would be lifted, and sanity would start to get a look in. And so it was lifted, Thirty years on, it’s a good time to be republishing The Gulag Archipelago.
The “evil empire” and its underpinning Marxist ideology, would not have gained traction without the wide spread acceptance of Darwin’s (atheistic) Evolution Theory. Without God their is no moral authority or compass; life really is all about the “survival of the fittest”. Stalin embraced communism after he read Darwin book on Evolution. He even went so far as to try to create “Ape Warriors” to populate his depleted army. Moreover “racism” is intrinsically linked to evolution theory. The historical and scientific evidence is overwhelming that God created this earth and mankind, but the lefty intelligentsia have turned their backs on truth to promote their own dark & dangerous agenda. Its ugly manifestation has been Marxism. (b47)
Communists are merely a political gang of very well organised criminals who want to kill the rich so that they can replace them.
Essential reading for all. And a clear reason why we need to abolish both the Labor and Greens Party’s.
Brilliant if not a long read, well worth it mind you. How do you dare abbreviate the piece to a comment, to my simple mind it is do not ignore the past, do not forget, do not think there is a magic solution. The extremists left and right have left a trail. Neither is correct, but we must be able to discuss the issues that matter without being branded.
Orwell and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should be mandatory reading in every High School and in every Arts course. I read Animal Farm at school, then 1984 after graduating and finally The Gulag. Unfortunately I didn’t read the latter two until after twice voting for EG Whitlam and his ALP disaster team. But never again. If you don’t like Peterson’s introduction to TGA then read those 3 books. Read then before voting for BS and his bs.
I see the ‘usual suspects’ are absent from this discussion.
Who?
No. All the moderator’s favourites appear to be here, as usual. Ray.
What astonishing writing by Jordan Peterson. Astonishing because nothing like it has graced the pages of newspapers in my memory. He puts truth to the reasons why the Soviet’s mass murdered millions upon millions of Russians during its 74 year rule. As he says, it had nothing to do with egalitarianism and everything to do with pure hatred for fellow human beings. Stalin’s deliberate starvation of Ukrainians in 1930’s because he did not like them is a hard fact for committed socialists to compute. Such people have debated me on this topic in these Comments columns in the past accusing me of fabricating a story. Jordan Peterson has I hope begun a long overdue conversation into the real history of Soviet rule as written by a man who experienced the worst of it. Luckily for the West, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn escaped death more than once to write The Gulag Archipelago and many other books after that. My thanks to Jordan Peterson for unmasking and highlighting the truth of the Communist rule of the USSR 1917-1991.
Socialism – yet shorten and his receycled gillard government still believe this is the height of wisdom
It should be a compulsary in school history curriculum of what happened to millions who suffered and died in pursuit of communistic utopia.
I’m a teacher in public schools and I hand a copy of that book (the cut down version) to any thoughtful but naive student who seriously considers Communism to be a legitimate political system.
The author talks about the Stalinist period in USSR but fails to compare it to the historical periods both before and after it (e.g., the Hrushev ‘ottepel’ period, etc.). He also talks about a few examples of bad things happening in a few other countries. He then uses this selective evidence to come to his conclusions. He mentions, briefly, that extremes on either right or left are bad, but that is the only mention of any alternative views or any facts that do not accord with his opinion. After mentioning that both left and right extremes are bad, he still illogically concludes that left-wing views are bad based on what he is saying (but not the right-wing views). Furthermore, he somehow extrapolates what was happening during the Stalinist period and in a few other countries during certain historical periods into claims that the left-wing views are bad in general even if they are not extreme. The author ignored what was happening in right-wing Spain during the same period (where people were killed rather than sent to hard labour camps). The author also ignored examples of other right-wing states similar to Spain in the 20th century in South America, Asia, and other parts of the world. I understand the article can at the most support that certain manifestation of ideological extremes, either on the right or left are bad but clearly that is not what the author is trying to convey. The author is biased in a sense that he provides examples of bad governments in certain left-wing communist/socialist states in particular historical periods (ignoring other periods of these states and other communist/socialist countries) but does not provide examples of bad governments of extreme right-wing capitalist states in corresponding or other historical periods of the 20th century. This comment is not meant to support left or right, communism, socialism or capitalism. However, if the author meant to support capitalism he could have done a better job.
The author wrote the forward to The Gulag Archipelago, not an analysis of comparative political systems. One of his central points is that there is no excuse for continuing to believe and teach that Marxism is a legitimate and desirable system of social organisation. It has been, is and always will be a miserable, murderous failure. The books of Solzhenitsyn and the background to those books, along with works on democratic theory and practice, must, in future, be foundational texts in every Australian high school.
You are obviously confused and need to read more carefully. “A few examples of bad things happening….”? Do you not understand the momentous nature of those few ‘bad things’, the horrific death toll, the economic devastation, the extermination of intellectual capacity, the depravity of the slaughter? Sorry, anyone who claims that the socialist record can be discounted as ‘a few bad things’ is grossly ignorant or just an apologist!
The Marxist/communist doctrine begins with the rejection of the God of the Bible & His authority over us. Then it proceeds to put the State in the place of God. It uses the theory of evolution as its excuse for the rejection of God. The results of this Marxist belief are seen in the working out of this belief in Russia & all other communist countries. The Marxist philosophy put into practice actually proved the truth of the Bible where God reveals that every person has a depraved, sinful nature & is under the just condemnation of a Righteous & Holy God. the Lord Jesus came into this world & died in the place of sinful men & women so that they could be forgiven & cleansed from their guilt & condemnation & so receive eternal life. That in turn leads to a Christian living according to the precepts laid out in the Bible. Our way of life in the Western World & the freedoms, the system of law & order are based on that Judeo/Christian foundation. Those who follow Marxist/Communist doctrine destroy that Christian foundation & the end result is seen in the terrible consequences that took place in Communist Russia, China etc. One can only hope that Australians see this before it is too late & latter day Marxists (as seen in the Labor party & Greens etc) destroy what we have here.
Marxist indoctrination and oppression has succeeded in nations which are not Christian, China being the most obvious example. The theological and philosophical underpinnings of the society are forcefully removed by Marxism and replaced by it. People don’t throw away their religion to embrace Marxism! As for evolutionary theory, this is not an essential part of Marxism and many Christians and adherents of other faiths accept its validity without abandoning their religion.
I happen to agree with the content of what you say, but you shoot yourself in the foot with your stilted and pompous ‘elevated’ language. It makes your comment read as being all about yourself, rather than anything you might be trying to express.
God’s got nothing to do with it. Fairy tales.
How wonderful it would be if we had academics/professors with the wisdom of Professsor Peterson resident in our universities instead of the virtue signalling do gooders we seem to have in some universities in this country.
You make an error here, Bruce. The word should have been “all” universities here. Given time, our universities will destroy everything that Australia stands for and, sadly, most people don’t even realise it’s happening. Evil by stealth is the worst kind of evil.
As George Orwell said “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
This should be mandatory reading for all voting citizens. Wonderfully articulated.
You can’t even get them to read ‘1984’ or ‘Animal Farm’
But long winded!
I read those books in 1973 and it opened my eyes to the evil of Communism. Jordan is the new Alexsandr in shining the light back on Totalitarian terror.
This was a good article from Peterson due to the content but he’s not a very good writer for this format. Peterson favours a “tossed salad” of words. He is verbose, well meaning but not a clear thinker, writer or talker (three kinds of clarity that go together).
Peterson’s ideas tumble. He is not able to make them coherent, to give them shape and purpose. His heart is in the right place but his expression lets him down.
Ok, so show us how it’s done. I find his clarity appealing but am ready to be awestruck by yours.
If only we can secede to the Taxpayers Republic of Australia and let the Progressive Republic of Australia have its own future! I am even happy to let the PRA have first pick of the best 3 States of their own choosing. The only condition of living in the TRA is that you pay more tax than you get from the Government or if you don’t then you forego your vote, and the only rule for leaving to the PRA is that once gone you may never come back. The PRA people can create their Utopia in whatever image they fit! Imagine how awesome life would be for you to let go of your hate and negativity in being freed from the burden of us oppressive and uncaring conservatives??! Surely it would be absolute heaven for you?? I wonder what people would choose? Ultimately it wouldn’t matter though – I guarantee that we would have war inside 20 years as the embittered and envy-ridden swill of the PRA seek to batter down the gates and overrun the TRA to escape the barren and destitute world that they will create for themselves and need to get their hands on other people’s money yet again. Where are you out there you compassionate and perfect Progressives who want to take me up on my ridiculously generous offer?? You can even have Queensland or wherever else you want as first pick??! Please I am begging you to come forward – no price is too big to be rid of you so that once gone we can concentrate on real nation building for the good of all once again….but I am sure that it will be sadly the case that pigs might fly first. ;-(
A free one way ticket to Venezuela would sufice:
For me, First Circle was better. Solzhenitsyn did indeed issue the warning. All of the frenetic “socialism must be tried again” fan club should read it before they condemn their own societies to such outrages against humanity. Wrong Mr Peterson the Left constantly reminds us that Russia, Venezuela, Cuba etc got socialism wrong, but they’ll get it right this time. Now for the facts.
If you think socialism is the answer to your problem, you’ve never lived under socialism to know better. Equality of poorness, corruption when you’ve run out of other people’s money, war crimes. No innovation, no choices, basically one state produced brand of chocolate, oil, clothing etc. West Germany produced the BMW, East Germany just forget that lemon write-off. I’m in a rare position to witness this from an Aussie perspective, having grown up in Sydney’s inner west and then moving to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for 3 years with my father, the differences could not have been so stark. I opened my wallet with candy money to buy some, but such a display of wealth was considered offensive. You had to look equally poor. Landline phones mostly non-existent, roads unsealed. Corruption paying off police and bribing teachers at schools for favours was rife. Bread rations for students, we had to pick it up from the UN several km’s away from school. Then modern day Croatia was born. The transition to capitalism gave them sealed roads, women discovered gossiping when landline phones first came. Mercs and BMWs started replacing those flimsy Yugo state produced socialist lemon cars. Now back in Sydney’s inner west, what do they want? Posters are rife with “kill capitalism”, “Turn Left”, socialist conferences etc. The “progressive” Left here obviously have never lived under socialism, and clearly they know no better.
A typically erudite rebuttal from a socialist. An individual so limited in thinking, he is incapable of comprehending he has conclusively proved his own cretiny.
It seems when people have freedom of speech, so many of them just want to ignore the lessons of history (or simply don’t read history) and dream of yet another socialist utopia. And whinge! How they like to whinge.
Solzhenitsyn’s work (which deserves more respect) is treated by Professor Peterson as a convenient peg on which to hang another of his long-winded, rambling statements about Jordan Peterson saving the world.
Did you bother actually reading the entire article?
Have you read the book Tom ?
This was written as a forward to the book. Do you not understand the context?
The rambling is the “edited extract”?
Despite a globalist agenda to segregate & secularise humanity into groups for identity processing, there is a profound thankfulness that we not only have Peterson as a instrument of forewarning the mass indoctrination techniques of past political regimes, but a national masthead that vigilantly advocates our right to individualism and freedom of speech, even whilst postmodern tendrils of the communist seed continue to attempt to strangle our western democratic way of life.
He’s totally opposite to identity politics but that’s cool.
Communism might be possible with lots and lots of God’s grace, an abundance of it to make it work. Unfortunately those who impose communism are atheists.
A one legged man could convert to Christianity, tomorrow. He’d still have to hop to the church on Sunday, same as he hopped to the pub, yesterday.
You need to ask Nick Vujicic, who was born with no arms or legs, whether having Christ in his life makes a difference.
Thank you. An academic who can communicate with reason. An educator that inspires us to think for ourselves not just about ourselves.
In That Howling Infinite 