THE EXACTIONS ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn makes of his clandestine readers in the Soviet Union (how many are there?) and of his vast Western public have a shrewd ferocity. He knows and despises the readiness of sympathetic response in his Western audience, the vaguely prurient appetite for distant suffering. It is not so much we who read Solzhenitsyn as it is he who reads us. As Tolstoy was during his later years, so Solzhenitsyn is a searcher-out, a harrier of men's debilities, and an embarrassment to the world.

Solzhenitsyn, a theocratic anarchist, has little esteem for reason, particularly when it stems from the "intellectual," from the man who makes his more or less mundane living by dispassion. In the presence of the inhuman, reason is often a small-indeed, a laughable-agent. It can also be subtly self-flattering, and Solzhenitsyn plays harshly on the facile "objectivity" of those who would argue with him, who would try to be "reasonable" without having been exposed to even a millimeter of the archipelago of pain. What has historical analysis to say in the presence of Solzhenitsyn's own sufferings and the cry he has sent through modern history? Each indignity visited upon a human being, each torture, is irreducibly singular and inexpiable. Every time a human being is flogged, starved, deprived of self-respect, a specific black hole opens in the fabric of life. It is an additional obscenity to depersonalize inhumanness, to blanket the irreparable fact of individual agony with anonymous categories of statistical analysis, historical theory, or sociological model-building. Consciously or not, anyone who offers a diagnostic explanation, however pious, or even condemnatory, erodes, smoothes toward oblivion, the irremediable concreteness of the death by torture of this man or that woman, of the death by hunger of this child. Solzhenitsyn is obsessed by the holiness of the minute particular. As happens with Dante and Tolstoy, proper names cascade from his pen. He knows that if we are to pray for the tortured dead, we must commit to memory and utter their names, by the million, in an incessant requiem of nomination.

But the mortal mind is so constructed that it cannot contain, in genuine individuation, more than a thimbleful of known presences. At least twenty million men, women, and children were done to death in the Stalinist purges. If we possess a vivid inward perception, we can visualize, we can number, and, in some measure, we can identify with fifty persons, perhaps a hundred. Beyond that stretches the comfortable limbo of abstraction. So if we are to understand at all we must try to analyze, to classify, to put forward those reveries of reason which are called theories.

It is a platitude older than Thucydides that in the exercise of political power the human species can and will turn to bestiality. Massacres have punctuated the millennia with strident monotony. The routine treatment of slaves, of familial dependents, of the crippled or the crazed in epochs and societies we now look back to as of eminent artistic, intellectual, or civic splendor is such as to numb the imagination. Oases of compassion were few and far between. (Hence the Christian promise of a compensating Heaven.) No one really knows whether or not grass did grow again where Genghis Khan had passed; there was no one left to look. Throughout large stretches of Central Europe during the Thirty Years War, there were only wolves left to devour the wind.

But there was an Indian summer, a relative armistice with history, in the luckier parts of Western Europe and the United States during much of the eighteenth century, and again between the close of the Napoleonic wars and 1914. The constant of savagery lay in the hands of specialized professional armies and had been exported to the frontier or the colonies. Voltaire was not a naive Utopian when he foresaw the disappearance of torture and mass reprisal from political life. The signs were positive. General Sherman's Hunnish tactics looked like an isolated, embarrassing atavism.

It is the Armenian massacres of 1915-16 that are at once pivotal and problematic. Were they, as some have argued, a nightmarish epilogue to a long history of "barbarian" invasion and ravage, a throwback to the world of Attila? Or were they, as others contend, the opening of the age of holocaust and genocide? And what, if any, are the psychological and technical links between the deliberate murder of one million Armenians by the Turks and the exactly contemporary hecatombs on the Western front? Whatever the diagnosis, the overwhelming fact was that political, nationalist man, equipped with unprecedented weapons, had remembered or rediscovered the logic of annihilation.

It is according to this logic that we have conducted our affairs since. The logic has entailed the insanity of mass homicide from 1914 to 1918 (almost three-quarters of a million at Verdun alone), the eradication of civilian sites and peoples, the planned poisoning of the natural environment, the wanton killing of animal species, and the Nazi murder of Jews and Gypsies. Today, this same logic entails the cold-blooded eradication of native tribes throughout Amazonia, the ubiquity in Uruguay and Argentina of a degree of torture and terror which matches anything known of Stalin's thugs and the Gestapo. Today, at this minute, it is a logic that underwrites the suicidal bloodletting in Cambodia. The Gulag has no real borders.

This is not to diminish by one jot the specificity of Solzhenitsyn’s reports from Hell. But it is to ask in what ways the Soviet edifice of servitude and degradation is or is not a segment of a more general catastrophe. Solzhenitsyn himself is not clear on this issue. The first two volumes of the Gulag chronicle contained crassly peremptory asides on the distinctions to be drawn between Nazi and Stalinist practices. Solzhenitsyn made much of the (undoubted) truth that Stalin had slaughtered many millions more than had Hitler. (At full tide, as Robert Conquest has shown in his classic studies, the Soviet camps comprised some eight million inmates.) Solzhenitsyn even advanced the supposition that the Gestapo tortured to elicit the "facts," whereas the Russian secret police tortured to produce false witness. No such vulgarities mar this third volume, The Gulag Archipelago Three (Harper & Row), but Solzhenitsyn remains undecided as to where and how the Gulag fits into the texture of Russian history and of the Russian temper. At some points, he voices the belief that oppression from above and obeisance to brute authority by the great mass of the population characterize the Russian spirit. But at other points he hammers at the specifically Bolshevik nature of the regime of terror, a regime initiated by Lenin, brought to lunatic efficacy by Stalin, and continuing in madness today on a less apocalyptic scale. Solzhenitsyn frequently and sarcastically contrasts the relatively benign deviltries of the czarist punitive apparatus (as reported by Chekhov or Dostoevsky) with the consuming bestiality of the Soviet solution.

If Solzhenitsyn were to be asked whether the reversion of modern political man to mass torture, incarceration, and murder represents some general phenomenon, or whether each instance is an appalling singularity, he would, I imagine, say something like this: When mankind rejected the true meaning and urgency of Christ's example, when it turned to secular ideals and material hopes, it severed its history and political institutions from compassion, from the imperative of grace. A politics or a social bureaucracy divorced from theological sanction has within it, ineluctably, the mechanics of nihilism, of self-destructive wantonness. The Gulag-planet, the ubiquity of torture and homicide in our public existence, is only the most dramatic, the most shameless manifestation of a pervasive inhumanity.

It is this theological-penitential reading of man's condition which underwrites the most eccentric but also the most deeply felt of Solzhenitsyn's dogmas: his detestation of secular liberalism as it flows from the French Revolution; his distaste for the Jews, in whom he sees not merely the initial refuses of Christ but the radical libertarians whose restlessness culminates in Marxism and utopian socialism; his contempt for the "degenerate hedonism" and conspicuous consumption in Western societies; his undisguised nostalgia for the theocratic aura of Orthodox-almost of Byzantine- Russia.

This is an isolating, often maddening set of theses. It has against it an alliance, at once ludicrous and, to Solzhenitsyn, entirely natural, of the K.G.B., Mrs. Jimmy Carter (vide her attempt to rebut Solzhenitsyn's tirade at the Harvard commencement), and the Swiss tax authorities seeking to take their tithe of the royalties of their recent guest. Conjoined, these beliefs of Solzhenitsyn make for a "mystical" explanation of modern barbarism. It is an explanation that is, by its very nature, impossible to prove or to deny. But is there a better one?

Many have tried to find one. The late Hannah Arendt strove to locate the roots of modern totalitarianism in certain definite aspects of the evolution of the encompassing nation-state, and of the quality of economic and psychological collectivism after the Enlightenment. Others have seen in the concentration and death camps a final enactment, at once logical and parodist, of the industrial processes of assembly lines and standardization. I have put forward the "working metaphor" whereby the erosion of God's presentences from daily life and from the legitimacy of political power generated the need to institute a surrogate damnation on earth (a Hell above ground), this surrogate being the Nazi, the Soviet, the Chilean, and the Cambodian Gulags. But none of these hypotheses are really explanatory. What we are left with is the central fact: In a way and on a scale inconceivable to educated Western man from, say, Erasmus to Woodrow Wilson, we have reverted to or contrived a politics of torment and massacre. From this fact cries out the only question that matters: Can the infernal cycle be stopped?

Solzhenitsyn, who has survived not only the Gulag but the cancer ward, is animated by a raging will. More, perhaps, than anyone since Nietzsche and Tolstoy, he is mesmerized by and master of the boundless resilience of the human spirit. His answer would be: Yes, it is possible to stop the juggernaut; it is possible to repudiate the banality of evil and to say no to those who would reduce one to a worker in the slaughterhouse. He would say-or should do so in the blaze of his own vision-that the United States could halt the genocide in Amazonia, the sadistic circus in Argentina, the degradations in Chile by withdrawing from these grotesque regimes the investments, the corporate interests, on whose largesse they operate. Solzhenitsyn can and must proclaim that the automatism of oppression can be arrested, because he has seen it arrested or, at least, ground to temporary impotence in the pits of Hell itself.

This is the testimony of the final volume of the trilogy, with its enthralling record of camp uprisings, of escapes, of defiance by individuals and groups of victims. Solzhenitsyn records the forty magnificent days and nights of the revolt of May and June, 1954, in the Kengir camp. He tells the tale-it is a classic narrative-of Georgi P. Tenno, virtuoso escaper. In poignant closing chapters, he recalls his own resurrection from the house of the dead, his own reentry, at once agonizing and joyous, into the habitual daylight of more or less normal, licensed existence.

Yet this colossus of a man, so markedly a stranger to common humanity, does not end his epic in consolation. After nine years of clandestine writing, Solzhenitsyn closes his trilogy on the grim notice that a century has passed since the invention of barbed wire. And he, who has seen, lived, recounted the utmost of resistance, of hope against Hell, implies that it is this invention that will continue to determine the history of modern man. There is in the blackness of this great fresco no touch more desperate.

Steiner: September 4, 1978

[G. Steiner @ The New Yorker]