by Rod Dreher
Only the peace didn’t last. “But since they could not rid themselves completely of their former personalities,” writes Miłosz, “they became schizophrenics.”7
What do you do when the Pill of Murti-Bing stops working and you find yourself living under a dictatorship of official lies in which anyone who contradicts the party line goes to jail?
You become an actor, says Miłosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn’t a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense.
What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Miłosz explains, having to be “on” all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society.
Miłosz identified eight different types of ketman under communism. For example, “professional ketman” is when you convince yourself that it’s okay to live a lie in the workplace, because that’s what you have to do to have the freedom to do good work. “Metaphysical ketman” is the deepest form of the strategy, a defense against “total degradation.” It consists of convincing yourself that it really is possible for you to be a loyal opponent of the new regime while working with it. Christians who collaborated with communist regimes were guilty of metaphysical ketman. In fact, says Miłosz, it represents the ultimate victory of the Big Lie over the individual’s soul.
Under the emerging tyranny of wokeness, conservatives, including conservative Christians, learn to practice one or more forms of ketman. The ones who are most deeply deceived are those who convince themselves that they can live honestly within woke systems by outwardly conforming and learning how to adapt their convictions to the new order. Miłosz had their number: “They swindle the devil who thinks he is swindling them. But the devil knows what they think and is satisfied.”8
Living in Truth
On the day of his Moscow arrest—February 12, 1974—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published what would be his final message to the Russian people before the government exiled him to the West. In the title of the exhortation, he urged the Russian people to “live not by lies!”9
What did it mean to live by lies? It meant, Solzhenitsyn writes, accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm—or at least not to oppose—to get along peaceably under totalitarianism. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform, says Solzhenitsyn, and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all the other lies their malign force. The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.
“We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready,” he writes. “But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!”
For example, says Solzhenitsyn, a man who refuses to live by lies:
Will not say, write, affirm, or distribute anything that distorts the truth
Will not go to a demonstration or participate in a collective action unless he truly believes in the cause
Will not take part in a meeting in which the discussion is forced and no one can speak the truth
Will not vote for a candidate or proposal he considers to be “dubious or unworthy”
Will walk out of an event “as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda”
Will not support journalism that “distorts or hides the underlying facts”
“This is by no means an exhaustive list of the possible and necessary ways of evading lies,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “But he who begins to cleanse himself will, with a cleansed eye, easily discern yet other opportunities.”10
The task of the Christian dissident today is to personally commit herself to live not by lies. How can she do that alone? She needs to draw close to authentic spiritual leadership—clerical, lay, or both—and form small cells of fellow believers with whom she can pray, sing, study Scripture, and read other books important to their mission. With her cell, the dissident discusses the issues and challenges facing them as Christians, especially challenges to their liberties. They employ the Kolaković method of See, Judge, Act. That is, identify the challenge, discern together its meaning, then act on your conclusions.
In the long term, today’s Christian dissidents must come to think of themselves as heirs to Father Kolaković’s Family, spreading the movement throughout the country and helping sympathetic believers prepare for days of suffering and resistance ahead. Soft totalitarianism is coming. As we will see in the next chapter, the groundwork has already been laid.
CHAPTER TWO
Our Pre-Totalitarian Culture
All the young are candidates for the solutions of communism or fascism when there are no alternatives to despair or dissipation.
NADINE GORDIMER1
At dinner in a Russian Orthodox family’s apartment in the Moscow suburbs, I was shaken by our table talk of Soviet oppression through which the father and mother of the household had lived. “I don’t understand how anybody could have believed what the Bolsheviks promised,” I said glibly.
“You don’t understand it?” said the father at the head of the table. “Let me explain it to you.” He then launched into a three-hundred-year historical review that ended with the 1917 Revolution. It was a pitiless tale of rich and powerful elites, including church bureaucrats, treating peasants little better than animals.
“The Bolsheviks were evil,” the father said. “But you can see where they came from.”
The Russian man was right. I was chastened. The cruelty, the injustice, the implacability, and at times the sheer stupidity of the imperial Russian government and social order in no way justifies all that followed—but it does explain why the revolutionary Russian generation was so eager to place its hope in communism. It promised a road out of the muck and misery that had been the lot of the victimized Russian peasant since time out of mind.
The history of Russia on the verge of left-wing revolution is more relevant to contemporary America than most of us realize.
The Russia in which communism appeared had become a world power under the reign of the Romanov dynasty, but as the empire limped toward the twentieth century, it was falling apart. Though its rivals were fast industrializing, Russia’s agricultural economy and its peasantry remained mired in backwardness. A severe famine in 1891 shook the nation to the core and revealed the weakness of the tsarist system, which failed miserably to respond to the crisis. A young monarch, Nicholas II, came to power in 1894, but he proved incapable of meeting the agonizing challenges facing his government.
Past attempts to radicalize the peasantry went nowhere in the face of its profound conservatism. But by century’s end, industrialization had created a large urban underclass of laborers who were cut off from their villages and thus from the traditions and religious beliefs that bound them. The laborers dwelled in misery in the cities, exploited by factory owners and unrelieved by the tsar. Calls for reform of the imperial structure—including the ossified Russian Orthodox Church—went ignored.
Few in Russian society, outside of the imperial court’s bubble, believed that the system could carry on. But Tsar Nicholas II and his closest advisers insisted that sticking to the proven ways of traditional autocracy would get them through the crisis. The leadership of the church also ignored internal calls for reform from priests who could see the church’s influence wasting away. Russia’s intellectual and creative classes fell under the sway of Prometheanism, the belief that man has unlimited god
like powers to make the world to suit his desires.
In retrospect, this seems almost unbelievable. How could the Russians have been so blind? It was, in a sense, a problem of the imagination. Reflecting on the speed with which utopian dreams turned into a grisly nightmare, Solzhenitsyn observed:
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.2
It wasn’t just the tsarists who didn’t see it coming but also the country’s leading liberal minds. It was simply beyond their ability to conceive.
Why Communism Appealed to Russians
Marxism is a highly theoretical, abstract set of doctrines that cannot be easily grasped by nonspecialists. It took Russian intellectuals by storm because its evangelists presented Marxism as a secular religion for the post-religious age.
Though Karl Marx, communism’s German-born prophet, despised religion, he gave birth to a vision of political economy that uncannily paralleled the promises of apocalyptic Christianity. The political philosophy that would come to bear his name construed history as the story of the struggle between classes. Marx believed that class inequality—caused by the rich exploiting the toiling masses—was responsible for the world’s misfortune. Religion was, in Marx’s words, “the opium of the people,” functioning as a kind of drug that dulled their suffering and prevented them from seeing their true condition. Marx preached a revolution that would wrest control from the rich (capitalists) in the name of the proletariat (workers) and establish an all-powerful government that would redistribute resources justly before withering away. Crucially, Marx and his followers forecast the revolution as a bloody showdown between Good (the workers) and Evil (the capitalists) and prophesied the victory of justice and the establishment of an earthly paradise.
Marx believed that his teachings were based in science, which, in the nineteenth century, had displaced religion as the most important source of authority among intellectuals. The nineteenth century was the golden age of European liberalism, in which nations that had been ruled by kings and aristocracies struggled to reform themselves along constitutional, republican lines. Russia firmly rejected reform. Russian liberalism foundered in the face of tsarist autocracy and the indifference of the peasant masses.
As the century wore on, educated Russians were aware of how far their agrarian country was falling behind modernizing, industrializing Europe, both politically and economically. Younger Russians also keenly felt the shame of their liberal fathers’ failures to change the system. In the midst of Russia’s decline, Marxism appealed to restless young intellectuals who were sick of the old order, had lost faith in reforming it, and were desperate to tear the system down and replace it with something entirely different.
Marxism stood for the future. Marxism stood for progress. The gospel of Marxism lit a fire in the minds of prerevolutionary Russian radicals. Their priests and the prophets were their intellectuals, who were “religious about being secular.” Writes historian Yuri Slezkine: “A conversion to socialism was a conversion to the intelligentsia, to a fusion of millenarian faith and lifelong learning.”3
Far-left radicalism was initially spread among the intellectuals primarily through reading groups. Once you adopted the Marxist faith, everything else in life became illuminated. The intellectuals went into the world to preach this pseudoreligion to the workers. These missionaries, says Slezkine, made what religious believers would call prophetic revelations, and by appealing to hatred in their listeners’ hearts, called them to conversion.
Once they had captured Russia’s universities, the radicals took their gospel to the factories. Few of the workers were capable of understanding Marxist doctrine, but the missionaries taught it to those capable of translating the essentials into a form that ordinary people could grasp. These proselytizers spoke to the suffering of the people, to their sense of justice, to their often-justified resentment of their exploiters. The great famine of 1891–92 had laid bare the incompetence of the Russian ruling classes. The evangelists of Marxism issued forth prophetic revelations about the land of milk and honey awaiting the masses after the revolution swept away the ruling mandarins.
Most of the revolutionaries came from the privileged classes. Their parents ought to have known that this new political faith their children preached would, if realized, mean the collapse of the social order. Still, they would not reject their children. Writes Slezkine, “The ‘students’ were almost always abetted at home while still in school and almost never damned when they became revolutionaries.”4 Perhaps the mothers and fathers didn’t want to alienate their sons and daughters. Perhaps they too, after the experience of the terrible famine and the incompetent state’s inability to care for the starving, had lost faith in the system.
In 1905, waves of civil unrest swept across Russia. The empire’s defeat in a war with Japan the year before further destabilized the throne and fostered discontent within the military. Widespread poverty and economic instability stirred up both the peasantry and industrial workers, who were finally listening to the radical student intellectuals. The “nationality problem”—the state’s inability to deal fairly with the many non-Russian minorities living under imperial government—raised internal conflict to a fevered pitch. Nicholas II initially responded with characteristic repression, but the scale of the anti-state violence soon compelled him to agree to certain liberal reforms, including the creation of a weak parliament.
The 1905 Revolution bought the Romanov dynasty time, but Russian monarchy’s doom was sealed with the arrival of the Great War in 1914. Russia’s humiliating defeat called down the long-prophesied apocalypse in the form of the 1917 October Revolution led by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik party. Among revolutionary Russia’s far-left factions, Bolsheviks were relatively small in number, but under Lenin’s forceful leadership, they were smart, ruthless, and determined. Their victory proved that under certain conditions, a clever, dedicated minority can gain absolute power over a disorganized, leaderless, and indifferent mass.
One year after the proletarian revolution, the Bolsheviks introduced mass ideological killing, calling it the Red Terror. Thus did the radical intelligentsia, with a mustard seed of faith, move the mountain that was Russia and hurl it into a sea of blood.
It was not supposed to happen there either. Even doctrinaire European Marxists believed there was no way agrarian Russia was ready for communist revolution. But it was.
Evangelizing Russia’s Neighbors
It is true that communism came to Central Europe at the point of Soviet bayonets, but it is not the whole truth. World War I dramatically weakened civil society in those nations too, and inspired young intellectuals to embrace Marxism.
“In the 1930s, before the rise of the communist regime, there were already strong forces in the culture that paved the way for it,” says Patrik Benda, a Prague political consultant, of his native Czechoslovakia. “All the artists and intellectuals advocated communist ideas, and if you didn’t agree, you were marked for exclusion. This was almost two decades before actual communism took power.”
The even worse catastrophe of World War II strengthened the case for communism. Having endured the agonies of Nazi occupation, many Central Europeans were desperate to believe in
something that would guarantee them a bright future. One Czech survivor of the Nazi death camps later wrote that she joined the Communist Party because she mistakenly assumed that it was the polar opposite of Nazism.
When local communists seized power, backed by Soviet might, there was not much left within the exhausted populations with which to resist. Writes historian Anne Applebaum, “And so, the vast majority of Eastern Europeans did not make a pact with the devil or sell their soul to become informers but rather succumbed to the constant, all-encompassing, everyday psychological and economic pressure.”5
This is how the peoples of Eastern Europe all fell under communist dictatorships propped up by Soviet power. For the people of those captive nations, totalitarianism meant the near-total destruction of any institutions independent of the state. It meant complete economic submission to the state and general material immiseration. It meant the politicization of all aspects of life, enforced by secret police, prisons, and labor camps. It meant the harsh persecution of religious believers, the crushing of free speech and expression, and the erasure of historical and cultural memory. And when some brave peoples—Hungarians in 1956, Czechs in 1968—stood up to their oppressors, Soviet and allied armed forces invaded to remind them who was the master and who were the slaves.
For over four decades, until communism’s collapse in 1989, millions of Eastern Europeans endured this police-state captivity. For the Russian people, their enslavement to communism lasted decades longer, and was even harsher. True, communists in power held on to it through sheer terror and exercising a monopoly on force. But we cannot lose sight of the fact that communism didn’t come from nowhere—that there really were people whose lives were so hard and hopeless that the utopian proclamations of Marxist zealots sounded something like salvation.
