Solzhenitsyn and the American (Alt-)Right

On a prompt from a friend, I’ve been reading a little about pseudo-intellectual Jordan Peterson. In a New York Review of Books piece reviewing Peterson’s new book, 12 Rules for Life, I ran across this passage (bolds mine):

Peterson himself credits his intellectual awakening to the Cold War, when he began to ponder deeply such “evils associated with belief” as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and became a close reader of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago [published in English in 1974]. This is a common intellectual trajectory among Western right-wingers who swear by Solzhenitsyn and tend to imply that belief in egalitarianism leads straight to the guillotine or the Gulag. A recent example is the English polemicist Douglas Murray who deplores the attraction of the young to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and wishes that the idea of equality was “tainted by an ideological ordure equivalent to that heaped on the concept of borders.” … Solzhenitsyn, Peterson’s revered mentor, was a zealous Russian expansionist, who denounced Ukraine’s independence and hailed Vladimir Putin as the right man to lead Russia’s overdue regeneration.

I was caught off-guard by the Solzhenitsyn reference. That said, my acquaintance with his work is thin, mostly to due to a few friends who were fans. One old friend was a huge Solzhenitsyn admirer. In politics, she was a right-leaning centrist, mostly a consequence of her evangelical Christianity. But she also held a number of left-leaning views, particularly in relation to the LGBTQ community. As an aside, she was also a Henry James super-fan. I never knew exactly what to make of the two allegiances, considered together. But I never forgot her curious attachment to Solzhenitsyn.

But, on Peterson and his ilk, what is the American right, and alt-right, getting out of Solzhenitsyn? Why bother? How far back does this go? When did it all begin?

A 2008 Guardian article, written a few days after Solzhenitsyn’s death, provides a few clues. First, it appears right-wingers may appreciate his trenchant critiques of Bolshevism, Marx, and Engels. Solzhenitsyn criticized how an atheist Marxism and Bolshevism suppressed the Russian Orthodox Church, which Solzhenitsyn defended and admired. That Church, he believed, was the fount of Russia’s traditions and culture.

This is, I think, key. We know that some American white nationalists and alt-right figures, such as Matthew Heimbach (of the Traditionalist Workers Party, right), admire the revived Russian nationalism and traditionalism that centers on Russia’s seeming racial homogeneity. The view of Russia as a “Motherland” friendly to white supremacy and anti-Semitism appeals to segments of the alt-right. With his admiration of the cultural effects of the Russian Orthodox Church, Solzhenitsyn also called for a larger Slavic state (pan-Slavism) that would include Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—a call that Putin no doubt has found advantageous. In this coordinated political and religious ideology, Putin is seen as a “lion of Christianity.” To cement the connection he has fostered a close relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church. Heimbach, to live out this connection in America, was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin, Heimbach believes, fights for “faith, family, and folk.” This view has also been imported to America through the World Congress of Families, which promotes right-wing Christianity. The WCF has advocated for the U.S. to adopt something like Russia’s 2013 anti-LGBT law. To the American right, then, Solzhenitsyn’s call for Russia to return to its Orthodox roots coincides with the right’s view that America return to to traditional Christianity and cultural mores.

Solzhenitsyn also evolved into a critic of Western individualism, materialism, and liberalism. He did so after having witnessed the disruptive effects that accompanied the reintroduction of capitalism into Russia. This aspect of his thought was cemented, for Americans, in a June 1978 commencement address at Harvard (video and transcript at this link). Here are some excerpts (bolds mine—pardon the length):

If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world’s rifts, I would have concentrated on the East’s calamities. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West, in our days, such as I see them.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, circa 1974, courtesy of Wikipedia

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. …

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It’s time, in the West — It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. ..

The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media.) But what sort of use does it make of this freedom?

Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to his readers, or to his history — or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? It hardly ever happens because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist usually always gets away with it. One may — One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance. … Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. …

The American Intelligentsia lost its nerve and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation’s courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?

As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say that “communism is naturalized humanism.” … One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorships; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach.

Even a mere cursory review of the highlighted passages above reveals what might resonate with the American right: criticism of weak politicians, disdain for hyper-individualism, concern for morality, contempt for the media, critique of a general loss of nerve in international affairs, concern for the decline from humanism to materialism, anti-Marxism, etc.

The Harvard address may indeed be the point after which Solzhenitsyn found friends on the American right. This 2014 article by Lee Congdon in The American Conservative—which is a review of Daniel Mahoney’s The Other Solzhenitsyn— points to 1978 as the turning point. Mahoney’s work argues that Solzhenitsyn was a misunderstood patriot who loved his country—not an anti-Semite, a nationalist, an imperialist, or an authoritarian. Even so, Congdon, in contradistinction to Mahoney, does not dare to argue for Solzhenitsyn as a democrat. This is a point to be noted, perhaps, in relation to the alt-right’s admiration for Solzhenitsyn. They can use Mahoney’s defense of Solzhenitsyn as a democrat to insulate themselves from criticisms about the authoritarianism inherent in their actions and tactics.

To Solzhenitsyn, Putin’s emergence offered a remedy to these diseases. Putin was an alternative—as were the communal aspects of Russian Orthodoxy. Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn’s unassailable anti-Communist and anti-Stalinist credentials insulate him from criticism that his work somehow denigrates liberty. Even if pan-Slavism and pro-Putinism imply the restriction of freedom, the invocation of Solzhenitsyn can cloak one’s authoritarianism in a widely respected author and his great works. Solzhenitsyn’s courage in the face of Soviet repression can never be denied.

If 1978 didn’t convince American conservatives that they’d found a friend in Solzhenitsyn, they had a confirmation of applicability in 1980 from one of the their great intellectuals. In that year Russell Kirk positively reviewed a new book by Edward Ericson, titled Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision (Eerdmans). Ericson recounted that review and his memories of it in a 2012 piece at The Imaginative Conservative. Here’s a sample (bolds mine):

In that aforementioned review, Kirk writes, “The purpose or end of humane letters is ethical: a point forgotten by most writers and reviewers nowadays.” And he specifies that “Solzhenitsyn’s great concern is the moral state, rather than the political state.” Then he aligns Solzhenitsyn with T. S. Eliot: “Like Eliot, Solzhenitsyn sets his face against both the dread tyranny of Communism and the ‘Western’ infatuation with sensual satisfactions, and trifling material possessions.” This leads to Kirk’s next observation: that “Solzhenitsyn’s moral vision is what Eliot called the ‘high dream’—the vision of Dante, the Christian extrasensory perception of true reality. Even more than Dante, Solzhenitsyn passed through the Inferno, and was purged of dross.”

And here’s this on conservatism and ideology—delivered without irony (bolds mine):

The subject about which knowing my Kirk best prepared me to appreciate Solzhenitsyn was the subject of ideology. I recall an argument that raged among conservatives at one long-ago time about whether conservatism was an ideology or not. Kirk said not. As I followed the argument among my betters, with each side populated by writers whose ideas had helped me, I concluded that Kirk was right. Although time has dimmed my memory of the details of the argument because I came to a settled conviction on the matter, I agree with him that conservatism, far from being an ideology, is a negation of ideology. Then I came to Solzhenitsyn, and one confirmation of our consanguinity was his rejection of ideology—not just Marxist ideology but ideology per se. Both Kirk and Solzhenitsyn saw ideology as rooted in utopian thinking and avoided that loose usage common today that employs the term ideology to refer to any well-developed perspective, or world view.

On this Ericson and Kirk obviously differ with the alt-right, Heimbach, Putin, and Peterson. The latter use Solzhenitsyn’s pan-Slavism and Russian Orthodoxy to buttress their political ideology of state-sponsored traditionalism, nationalism, and white supremacy. Solzhenitsyn is used, then, as some Marxists, or rather Stalinists, used Marx.

The Ericson piece draws further parallels between Kirk and Solzhenitsyn, most of which given by Kirk in his 1993 book, The Politics of Prudence. The idea of the “moral imagination” is an important theme in the rest of Ericson’s reflection. But how do we square that with what we know about the alt-right’s white supremacy and Putin’s authoritarianism?

Returning to Jordan Peterson, what do we make of things, in 2018, when an alt-right, neo-fascist finds inspiration in one of great books of anti-communist liberalism? Indeed, on the latter, David Remnick said the following, in 2003, about The Gulag Archipelago: “It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth-century.” He also called it a “masterwork.”

Given the praise from Remnick and Ericson, it would seem that today’s alt-right pseudo-intellectuals (or “intellectual entrepreneurs,” to Pankaj Mishra) are engaging in a little cafeteria Solzhenitsynism? Alt-right ideologues have to pick-and-choose, at least a bit, to find a political hero in Solzhenitsyn. Or maybe they read a “late Solzhenitsyn” and ignore his more nuanced early and middle career?

In any case, the answer to the question of when Solzhenitsyn became important to the American right, generally, was 1978. The story above explains why. But since Solzhenitsyn himself cannot object to the associations being made in his name, we’ll never know whether he approves, or disapproves, of the alt-right appropriation. It’ll be interesting to see how much longer this continues. – TL