In 1914, when the Western democracies needed help, they were not averse to appealing to Russia. But in 1919 those Russian generals who, for three years, had fought to save the Marne, the Somme, and Verdun, straining Russian resources to the very limit, were refused military aid or even an alliance by their Western friends. Many a Russian soldier lay buried in French soil; others, who had gone to Constantinople, were charged for their rations or had their underwear confiscated in lieu of payment. They were then cajoled into returning to Russia, only to be dealt with by the Bolsheviks, or into embarking for Brazil, only to become semi-slaves on coffee plantations. Unseemly deeds are usually accompanied by high-sounding, even brilliant, justifications. In 1919 no one said openly: “What do your sufferings have to do with us?” Instead, people said: “We have no right to support even the authority of an ally against the wishes of the people.”
(Note, however, that in 1945, when millions of Soviet citizens had to be handed over for dispatch to the Gulag Archipelago, this argument was conveniently twisted. “We have no right to carry out the wishes of these millions,” it was said, “and to ignore our obligations toward the authorities of an allied country.” How easily one’s egoism can be satisfied by a handy formula!)
But there were even nobler justifications than these: what was happening in Russia was nothing more than a continuation of all that had happened in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, a repetition of the general transition from liberalism to socialism. This tendency of ideas to continue on their natural course made people admire them. And so all the aggressive elements, all the influential elements in society—and this was especially the case in Britain—admired what they called the “unprecedented progressive experiment taking place in the U.S.S.R.,” while we were being strangled by the cancerous tentacles of the Gulag Archipelago, while millions of hard-working peasants were being sent to die in Siberia in mid-winter. Not very far from where you live, in the Ukraine and in the Kuban, some 6 million peasants, including children, old men and women, died of famine, swollen with hunger and writhing in agony—and this was in peacetime.
Not a single Western newspaper printed photographs or reports of the famine; indeed, your great wit George Bernard Shaw even denied its existence. “Famine in Russia?” he said. “I’ve never dined so well or so sumptuously as when I crossed the Soviet border.” For whole decades your rulers, your members of Parliament, your spokesmen, your journalists, your writers, your leading thinkers managed to ignore the 15-million-strong Gulag Archipelago! Up to thirty books on the Gulag were published in Europe before mine and hardly one of them was even noticed.
There is a borderline beyond which the natural cause of “progressive principles,” of “the dawn of a new era,” becomes nothing more than calculated, conscious hypocrisy; for this makes life more comfortable to live.
There was, however, one great exception over the last hundred years or so, and that was your struggle with Adolf Hitler, when Britain cast overboard the philosophy of pragmatism or utilitarianism, the philosophy of recognizing any group of gangsters, any puppets, as head of a country so long as they control its territory. Britain assumed a moral stance against Hitler, and it was this that inspired her to one of the most heroic acts of resistance in her history.
A moral stance, even in politics, always safeguards our spirit; sometimes, as we can see, it even protects our very existence. A moral stance can suddenly turn out to be more farsighted than any calculated pragmatism.
Your war with Hitler, however, was not tragic in the Aristotelian sense of the word. Your sacrifices, sufferings, and losses were justified; they did not run counter to the aims of the war. You defended—and successfully defended—precisely that which you intended to defend. But for the people of the U.S.S.R. the war was a tragic war: we were forced to defend our native land with all the strength we could muster and with infinitely greater losses (Kurganov’s figures are indisputable: 44 million) and, in so doing, to strengthen all the things that we most loathed—the power of our own executioners, our oppression, our destruction, and, as we can see today, ultimately your destruction too. And when those millions of Soviet citizens dared to flee from their oppressors or even to initiate national liberation movements, then our freedom-loving Western allies—and not least among them you British—treacherously disarmed them, bound them, and handed them over to the Communists to be killed. They were sent to labor camps in the Urals, where they mined uranium for the atom bombs which were to be used against you yourselves!
Nor did you shrink from using the butts of your rifles on seventy-year-olds, those very men who had been Britain’s allies in the First World War and who were now being hastily handed over to be murdered. From the British Isles alone, one hundred thousand Soviet citizens were forcibly repatriated, while on the continent the number was more than a million. But the most remarkable thing of all was that your free, independent, incorruptible press, your famous Times, Guardian, New Statesman, etc., all wittingly shared in the cover-up of this crime, and would have kept silent to this very day had not Professor Julius Epstein from America so tactlessly started his investigations into the fascist techniques that democracies are capable of employing. The conspiracy of the British press was only too successful: indeed, there must be many people in Britain today who have not the faintest idea about this crime committed at the end of the Second World War. But it was committed, and it has left a deep and painful mark on the Russian memory.
Twice we helped save the freedom of Western Europe. And twice you repaid us by abandoning us to our slavery. It is clear what you wanted. Once again you wanted to extricate yourselves as quickly as possible from this terrible war; you wanted to rest, you wanted to prosper.
But there was a price to pay. The noble philosophy of pragmatism proclaimed that once again you should close your eyes to a great many things: to the deportation of whole nations to Siberia, to Katyn, to Warsaw (that same country for whose sake the war had started); you should forget Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; you should hand over six more of your European sisters into slavery and allow a seventh to be cut in two; at Nuremberg you should sit amicably side by side with judges who were just as much murderers as those on trial and never let this disturb your British sense of justice. Whenever a new tyranny came into existence, however far away—in China, say, or Laos—Britain was always the first to recognize it, eagerly pushing aside all competitors for the honor.
All this required great moral fortitude, and your society was not found lacking. All one had to do was to repeat again and again the magic formula: “The dawn of a new era.” You whispered it. You shouted it. And when you grew sick of it and decided to reaffirm your valor in the eyes of the world and recover your self-respect, then your country manifested incomparable daring—against Iceland, against Spain, countries which could not even answer you back.
Tank columns in East Berlin, Budapest, and Prague declared that they were there “by the will of the people,” but not once did the British government recall its ambassadors from any of these places in protest. In Southeast Asia unknown numbers of prisoners have been killed and are still being killed in secret; yet the British ambassadors have not been recalled. Every day in the Soviet Union psychiatrists murder people with their hypodermic syringes merely because they do not think along accepted lines or because they believe in God, and again the British ambassador is never recalled. But when five terrorists, who actually committed murder, were executed in Madrid, then the British ambassador was recalled and the din reverberated throughout the world. What a hurricane burst forth from the British Isles! You have to know how to protest, it has to be done with a great deal of anger, but only as long as it doesn’t run counter to the spirit of the age and presents no danger to the authority of those protesting. If only you could make use of your British skepticism for a moment (it can’t have deserted you entirely) and put yourselves in the position of the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe—then you can view your unseemly behavior through our eyes!
The Prime Minister of Spain was murdered and all cultured Europe was delighted. Some Spanish policemen, even some Spanish hairdressers, were murdered—and the countries of Europe went wild with joy, as if their own police were insured against the Terrorist International.
Not a single family driving to an airport can be sure that it won’t be gunned down by some fighter for someone or other’s freedom. No one can be sure that he’ll get to the end of the street safe and sound. But terrorists can be sure: public opinion guarantees that their lives will be safe, that their cause will be given publicity, and that they will be held in decent confinement—that is, until other terrorists come and rescue them. A society for the protection of terrorists indeed! There was such a society in Russia before her collapse: we too have trodden this fatal path.
Meanwhile, the crevasse grows ever wider, spreads even farther across the globe, shifts into other continents. The most populous country in the world has plunged headlong into it. So have a dozen others. So, too, have numerous defenseless tribes—Kurds, Northern Abyssinians, Somalis, Angolans. And the British, with their great tradition of freedom, haven’t the slightest anxiety over such petty matters. Even today you are lulled into thinking that these fine islands of yours will never be split in two by that crevasse, will never be blown sky-high. And yet the abyss is already there, beneath your very feet. Every year several more countries are seized and taken over as bridgeheads for the coming world war, and the whole world stands by and does nothing.
Even the oceans are being taken over, and need one tell you British what that means or what the seas will be used for? And what of Europe today? It is nothing more than a collection of cardboard stage sets, all bargaining with each other to see how little can be spent on defense in order to leave more for the comforts of life. The continent of Europe, with its centuries-long preparation for the task of leading mankind, has of its own accord abandoned its strength and its influence on world affairs—and not just its physical influence but its intellectual influence as well. Potentially important decisions, major movements, have now begun to mature beyond the frontiers of Europe. How strange it all is! Since when has mighty Europe needed outside help to defend herself? At one moment she had such a surfeit of strength that, while waging wars within her own boundaries and destroying herself, she was still able to seize colonies. A moment later, she suddenly found herself hopelessly weak without having lost a single major war.
However hidden it may be from human gaze, however unexpected for the practical mind, there is sometimes a direct link between the evil we cause to others and the evil which suddenly confronts us. Pragmatists may explain this link as a chain of natural cause and effect. But those who are more inclined to a religious view of life will immediately perceive a link between sin and punishment. It can be seen in the history of every country. Today’s generation has had to pay for the shortcomings of their fathers and grandfathers, who blocked their ears to the lamentations of the world and closed their eyes to its miseries and disasters.
Your newspapers may be famous for their traditions, but they print a number of articles containing analyses and commentaries which are shamefully shallow and shortsighted. What can one say when your leading liberal paper compares the contemporary development of the Russian spiritual regeneration with pigs trying to fly? This is not just contempt for the spiritual potential of my people. It’s broader than that. It’s a kind of fastidious contempt for any kind of spiritual regeneration, for anything which does not stem directly from economics but which is based on moral criteria. What an inglorious end to four hundred years of materialism!
The decline of contemporary thought has been hastened by the misty phantom of socialism. Socialism has created the illusion of quenching people’s thirst for justice: Socialism has lulled their conscience into thinking that the steamroller which is about to flatten them is a blessing in disguise, a salvation. And socialism, more than anything else, has caused public hypocrisy to thrive; it has enabled Europe to ignore the annihilation of 66 million people on its very borders.
There is not even a single precise definition of socialism that is generally recognized: all we have is a sort of hazy shimmering concept of something good, something noble, so that two socialists talking to each other about socialism might just as well be talking about completely different things. And, of course, any new-style African dictator can call himself a socialist without fear of contradiction.
But socialism defies logic. You see, it is an emotional impulse, a kind of worldly religion, and nobody has the slightest need to study or even to read the teachings of its early prophets. Their books are judged by hearsay; their conclusions are accepted ready-made. Socialism is defended with a passionate lack of reason; it is never analyzed; it’s proof against all criticism. Socialism, especially Marxist socialism, uses the neat device of declaring all serious criticism “outside the framework of possible discussion”; and one is required to accept 95 percent of socialist doctrine as a “basis for discussion”—all that is left to argue about is the remaining 5 percent.
There is another myth here too, namely that socialism represents a sort of ultra-modern structure, an alternative to dying capitalism. And yet it existed ages and ages before any sort of capitalism.
My friend Academician Igor Shafarevich has shown in his extensive study of socialism that socialist systems, which are being used today to lure us to some halcyon future, made up the greatest portion of the previous history of mankind in the ancient East, in China, and were repeated later in the bloody experiments of the Reformation. As for socialist doctrines, he has shown that they emerged far later but have still been with us for over two thousand years; and that they originated not in an eruption of progressive thought as people think nowadays but as a reaction—Plato’s reaction against Athenian democracy, the Gnostics’ reaction against Christianity—against the dynamic world of individualism and as a return to the impersonal, stagnant system of antiquity. And if we follow the explosive sequence of socialist doctrines and socialist utopias preached in Europe—by Thomas More, Campanella, Winstanley, Morelli, Deschamps, Babeuf, Fourier, Marx, and dozens of others—we cannot help but shudder as they openly proclaim certain features of that terrible form of society. It is about time we called upon right-minded socialists calmly and without prejudice to read, say, a dozen of the major works of the major prophets of European socialism and to ask themselves: Is this really that social ideal for which they would be prepared to sacrifice the lives of countless others and even to sacrifice their own?
You imagine you see danger in other parts of the globe and so you hurl the arrows from your depleted quiver there. But the greatest danger of all is that you have lost the will to defend yourselves.
Great Britain, the kernel of the Western world, has experienced this sapping of its strength and will to an even greater degree, perhaps, than any other country. For some twenty years Britain’s voice has not been heard in our planet; its character has gone, its freshness has faded. And Britain’s position in the world today is of less significance than that of Romania, or even … Uganda. British common sense—so lucid, so universally acknowledged—seems to have failed her now. Contemporary society in Britain is living on self-deception and illusions, both in the world of politics and in the world of ideas. People build rickety structures to convince themselves that there is no danger and that its irrevocable advance is nothing more than the establishment of a stable world.
We, the oppressed people of Russia, the oppressed people of Eastern Europe, watch with anguish the tragic enfeeblement of Europe. We offer you the experience of our suffering; we would like you to accept it without having to pay the monstrous price of death and slavery that we have paid. But your society refuses to heed our warning voices. I suppose we must admit, sad though it is, that experience cannot be transmitted: everyone must experience everything for himself.
Of course, it’s not just a question of Britain; it’s not just a question of the West—it concerns all of us, i
n the East as well as in the West. We are all, each in his own way, bound together by a common fate, by the same bands of iron. And all of us are standing on the brink of a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilization and changes whole epochs. The present world situation is complicated still more by the fact that several hours have struck simultaneously on the clock of history. We all must face up to a crisis—not just a social crisis, not just a political crisis, not just a military crisis—face up to it, but also stand firm in this great upheaval, an upheaval similar to that which marked the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Just as mankind once became aware of the intolerable and mistaken deviation of the late Middle Ages and recoiled in horror from it, so too must we take account of the disastrous deviation of the late Enlightenment. We have become hopelessly enmeshed in our slavish worship of all that is pleasant, all that is comfortable, all that is material—we worship things, we worship products.
Will we ever succeed in shaking off this burden, in giving free rein to the spirit that was breathed into us at birth, that spirit which distinguishes us from the animal world?
This speech was delivered by Mr. Solzhenitsyn over the BBC radio network.
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Warning to the West Page 9
