American Thinker | Paul Kengor | Aug. 10, 2008
In a tribute I wrote earlier, posted at National Review, I noted that it is impossible to capture in one column what Solzhenitsyn meant, experienced, and how he went about translating it to the West. Professors like me know such frustration well, as we struggle to fully convey the impact of such a man to a classroom of students born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In my earlier piece, I talked about The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s shocking firsthand account of the Soviet forced-labor-camp system, where he himself had been held captive, and where tens of millions of innocents perished. In a disturbing way, that book may have made Solzhenitsyn the most significant of all Russian writers, quite a prize when one considers the caliber of the company.
That book had an incalculable impact, hitting with a force in the 1970s that no Soviet SS-20 missile could have delivered, and making Solzhenitsyn a pariah in the Evil Empire. One of the most important effects of the book was that it allowed Solzhenitsyn the moral credibility to become one of the leading spokesmen against the political-moral shipwreck that was détente. In turn, this offered crucial support to the likes of Ronald Reagan, who, before he was president, spent the latter 1970s attacking détente and arguing that the United States should, instead, go on the offensive, seeking not to accommodate the Soviets and their expansionary interests but to undermine the USSR and its entire communist empire, from Prague to Budapest to Moscow.
As Ronald Reagan made that argument in the period of 1974-76 in particular, when he was challenging Gerald Ford and the elite Rockefeller-Republican establishment that had pursued détente under Ford, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger, he needed credibility, some weight to back his assertions. The leadership of his own party disagreed with him, the press and academics disagreed, and, of course, the liberals disagreed. Just then, along came Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago.
Free from the chains of the Soviet concentration camps (Lenin’s and Trotsky’s phrase for the gulag), Solzhenitsyn sounded the alarm. He informed Americans of the political leprosy that was Soviet communism — the very system that their leaders were telling them should be tolerated, accepted, and welcomed into their homes.
He was saying precisely what Reagan was saying: a détente deal with Moscow would permanently enslave all of Eastern Europe, forcing those good people to continue to live under the jackboot of communist totalitarianism. To cut a deal with the slave masters of Eastern Europeans would be to sell down the river Poles, Hungarians, East Germans, Romanians, Czechs, Bulgarians, and Albanians. That was a bad deal for a good nation founded on human freedom. America should never submit to such an arrangement. Détente had to be rejected.
. . . more
