Dostoyevsky chose John 12:24 as the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” Suffering enables one to reach the deepest truths. An episode from Dostoyevsky’s own life, familiar to his contemporary readers, illustrates this point: As punishment for illegal political activities, he was condemned to be shot – but then was pardoned at the last possible moment and imprisoned for four years in a czarist prison camp. In those extreme conditions Dostoyevsky found faith, and his story became exemplary for other Russian sufferers.

The gulag to which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sentenced in 1945 was incalculably worse than any czarist prison camp. His famous history of the gulag prison camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, shocked Western readers who had had only a vague idea of how horrible that system was. It made the czarist prison camps, described by Dostoyevsky in his The House of the Dead, look like a vacation resort by comparison. And yet those extreme conditions led Solzhenitsyn and some others to look inward and find faith. For the epigraph to Part IV of The Gulag Archipelago (“The Soul and Barbed Wire”), he selected 1 Corinthians 15:51: “Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” Prison changed Solzhenitsyn. As he tells the story, it led him from self-congratulatory materialism to repentance and faith.

The Gulag Archipelago, written in the 1950s and ’60s and published in 1973, is, among other things, the story of Solzhenitsyn’s journey from atheism to God. Describing the many ways people were first arrested (your date arrests you at the end of a lovely evening; you are taken unconscious from the operating table), then interrogated under torture (lowered naked into boiling oil; having your testicles slowly compressed), transported to Siberia (in railroad carriages so densely packed that some prisoners are suspended above the ground between others), punished (by hard labor at fifty degrees below zero), and subjected to unrelenting hunger for years on end – at each example of what an arrested person undergoes, Solzhenitsyn pauses to recount his own experience. Yet for all the depredations, his story turned out to be a happy one – he insisted on this – because it led him to understand life’s meaning and purpose. He ends the book’s central chapter, “The Ascent”: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”

Training to be an officer in World War II, Solzhenitsyn came to regard himself as superior to ordinary people. Anticipating an officer’s stars, students “developed a tigerlike stride and a metallic voice of command,” which became habitual. Years later Solzhenitsyn recalled how, only a month after “the officer’s stars were fastened” on him, he had abused a careless soldier. “And do you know, I had forgotten all about it until now.… Only now, seated in front of this sheet of paper, have I remembered.… Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.”

With horror, Solzhenitsyn remembered how he had tossed out commands he would allow no one to question, “convinced that no orders could be wiser. Even at the front, where, one might have thought, death made equals of us all, my power soon convinced me that I was a superior human being.” Addressing old men with condescending familiarity, he “sent them out to repair wires under shellfire so that my superiors should not reproach me.” One of them even died that way. Like a pre-revolutionary aristocrat, Solzhenitsyn was served by an orderly. “That’s what shoulder boards do to a human being. And where have all the exhortations of [my] grandmother, standing before an ikon, gone!”

“Had I at least kept my student’s love of freedom,” it would not have been so bad, “but, you see, we never had any such thing. Instead, we loved forming up.… I remember very well that right after officer candidate school I experienced the happiness of simplification, of … not having to think things through … the happiness of forgetting some of the spiritual subtleties inculcated since childhood.” Echoing Dostoyevsky, he notes that people love to escape from responsibility by acting as the agent of some theory or institution. It gives them what Mikhail Bakhtin called a spurious “alibi for being.” The official term for this in Soviet education was “partyness,” the virtue of not thinking for oneself but following without question those who, according to Marxist-Leninist ideology, had the indubitable truth.

Even when Solzhenitsyn was arrested in early 1945 for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend, his attitude did not change. “There was more than enough time to consider my former life and to comprehend my present one. But I couldn’t.” Even as he was led away, he made someone else carry his bag because he, after all, was an officer. Had someone accused him of haughtiness, “I would not have understood him!”

Although Solzhenitsyn came to regard Stalin as a gangster, he, like many others, at first remained a devoted Marxist-Leninist. He told another prisoner “that our Revolution was magnificent and just.… I said there had been a long period in which the people in charge of everything important in our country had been people of unimpeachably lofty intentions.” So devoted was he to Lenin that when someone called another prisoner, the pre-revolutionary radical Fastenko, by Lenin’s patronymic, asking “‘Ilyich, is it your turn to take out the latrine bucket?’ – I was utterly outraged and offended because it seemed sacrilege to me not only to use Lenin’s patronymic in the same sentence as ‘latrine bucket,’ but even to call anyone on earth ‘Ilyich’ except that one man, Lenin.” Fastenko instructed: “‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image!’ But I failed to understand him! … One thing is absolutely definite: not everything that enters our ears penetrates our consciousness. Anything too far out of tune with our attitude is lost.”

To grow wiser, Solzhenitsyn had to learn, in defiance of all his education, to think for himself. In this respect, he resembled Innokenty Volodin, a character in his novel The First Circle (1968). Volodin, a Soviet ministry official, has always read only books “warranted sound,” so that all he had to do was absorb what they said. When he discovers his mother’s pre-revolutionary diaries and books, Volodin must learn something new: how to read while questioning. Solzhenitsyn, too, had to give up the comfort of “simplification” and appreciate complexity and doubt. Colonel Vorotyntsev, the hero of Solzhenitsyn’s series of novels The Red Wheel, set during World War I, comes to understand that such questioning demands a kind of courage very different from that required to face enemy bullets without flinching. Thinking for oneself demands the courage to be alone with one’s beliefs and to maintain them even against the pressure to conform.

“At the time I was committed to that world outlook which is incapable of admitting any new fact or evaluating any new opinion before a label has been found for it from the already available stock.”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The key moment came when the imprisoned Solzhenitsyn met three young people who had defied shared opinion. When he remarked matter-of-factly that a recently published prayer from President Franklin D. Roosevelt had of course been hypocritical, one of them, Boris Gammerov, turned on him in fury: “Why? Why do you not admit the possibility that a political leader might sincerely believe in God?”

And that is all that was said! … I could have replied to him very firmly, but prison had already undermined my certainty, and the principal thing was that some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions, and right then it dawned upon me that I had not spoken out of conviction but because the idea had been implanted in me from outside.

“Implanted from outside”: Solzhenitsyn realized that he did not believe what he thought he believed. His political convictions were not the product of his own thought, and therefore, however sincerely he might express them, they were something alien. This realization testified to something within him that was deeper than he had suspected. Evidently, “some kind of clean, pure feeling does live within us, existing apart from all our convictions.” Of course, Solzhenitsyn could have suppressed this insight, and he had probably done so before. But what he saw in prison gave him pause.

Gammerov and his friends continued to challenge Solzhenitsyn. “At the time I was committed to that world outlook which is incapable of admitting any new fact or evaluating any new opinion before a label has been found for it from the already available stock: be it the ‘hesitant duplicity of the petty bourgeoisie,’ or the ‘militant nihilism of the déclassé intelligentsia.’” Now Solzhenitsyn was pressed to change not just his particular beliefs but also his understanding of what it means to hold beliefs at all. He had to learn to entertain the possibility that evidence or logic might lead him to change his mind. Marxism-Leninism claimed to be not just true but the very standard of truth, so that anything that contradicted it was by definition wrong. Solzhenitsyn had to reject this view before he could reject any of Marxism-Leninism’s specific theses.

When Solzhenitsyn at last appreciated the value of diverse opinions, he entered a period of radical skepticism. Nerzhin, the autobiographical hero of The First Circle, resembles, in the words of one of his Marxist friends, a “young Montaigne” and an “infant Pyrrhonist” – which is to say, he personifies doubt, and, like Solzhenitsyn himself, he comes to regard prison as a blessing: “It’s made me think.”

Spiritual rebirth happens only if, faced with the gulag’s fundamental choice, the prisoner chooses rightly: one must decide whether to survive at any price, even if to do so, one causes another’s death.

Nerzhin grasps the limitations of human reason. As someone tells him, “Writers try to explain people completely, but in real life we never get to know anyone completely. That’s why I love Dostoyevsky.… The closer you get [to his characters], the less you understand them.” Solzhenitsyn strove to make his own characters just as elusive.

When another prisoner confides his plan to overthrow the regime and set up a better one, Nerzhin answers that, even if this scheme were feasible, it might make things even worse, just as the overthrow of repressive czarism had done. “I simply don’t believe that anything good and durable can be constructed on this earth of ours,” he explains. “How can I set about advising you when I can’t disentangle myself from my own doubts?”

Nerzhin realizes, however, that radical doubt is not enough – that its destructive power is useful but that it lacks the power to build – and he grows skeptical of skepticism itself. Just as there are no atheists in the trenches, there are no relativists in the frozen gulag. “However clever and ungainsayable such philosophical systems as skepticism … may be,” he observes, “you must remember that they are in their very nature condemned to impotence.” For life to be meaningful, it is necessary to “affirm something.”

Nerzhin is deeply moved by the religious prisoner Kondrashov, who insists that ethics are not entirely relative to the class structure of society (“being determines consciousness”), and that people are not infinitely malleable, as the Party maintains. “Every man is born with a sort of inner essence,” Kondrashov asserts. “It is, so to speak, the innermost core of the man, his essential self. No ‘being’ … can determine him. Moreover, every man contains within himself an image of perfection, which … sometimes stands out with remarkable clarity! And reminds him of his chivalrous duty!”

Don’t laugh at the medieval idea of chivalry, Kondrashov continues. “In the days of chivalry, there were no concentration camps! No gas chambers!” It turns out that Kondrashov, a painter who has produced bad official art, has secretly painted his own ideal of perfection: the moment when Parsifal first catches sight of the Holy Grail. In it, a gray horse emerges from a forest and stands before an abyss:

The rider himself had no eyes for the abyss.… He was staring in rapt amazement, into the depths of the picture, where an orange-gold radiance suffused the whole expanse of the sky above, emanating perhaps from the sun, perhaps from a still purer source.… Stepped and turreted, growing out of the stepped mountain and visible also from below through the cleft between the cliffs, between the trees and the ferns, rising to a needle point in mid-heaven at the top of the picture, hazy and indistinct, as if spun from shifting cloud, yet discernible in all the details of its unearthly perfection, ringed in a blue-gray aureole by the invisible supersun, stood the Castle of the Holy Grail.

What led Solzhenitsyn to his own chivalrous struggle and subverted his skepticism was the Soviet theory of ethics, which he recognized as fundamentally wrong. Objective morality, according to the official view, is a myth perpetrated by the ruling classes to keep others in subjection. Morality is always class-based and so entirely relative. Reading his mother’s diaries, Volodin, the ministry bureaucrat, is amazed that she and her friends “in all seriousness … began certain words with capital letters – Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Good and Evil, the Ethical Imperative. In the language used by Volodin and those around him, words were more concrete and easier to understand – progressiveness, humanity, dedication, purposefulness.”

Volodin’s mother believed in compassion and pity, as if they were objective virtues somehow inscribed in the skies, rather than relative to particular classes. Soviet doctrine, by contrast, taught that compassion for class enemies is a vice, and cruelty practiced by the Party a virtue. The word “conscience” fell out of use, replaced by “consciousness” (as in “class consciousness”).

For Lenin, materialism ruled out any idea of objective goodness. Such an idea could derive only from God or from philosophical idealism, which was simply disguised religion. The only goodness, from a Leninist perspective, is expediency – that is, whatever serves the interests of the Party. As Solzhenitsyn describes it in Gulag, Soviet children were taught the fundamental lesson that, for a materialist, the material result is all that counts.

It is important to forge a fighting Party! And to seize power! And to hold on to power! And to remove all enemies! And to conquer in pig iron and steel! And to launch rockets! And though for this industry and for these rockets it was necessary to sacrifice the way of life, and the integrity of the family, and the spiritual health of the people, and the very soul of our fields and forests – to hell with them! The result is what counts!!!

If it is necessary to arrest people not for what they did but for what they might do (“we protect ourselves … against the future”), and if it is expedient to starve millions of peasants to death in order to collectivize agriculture, and if it is useful to deport whole nationalities to Siberian wastes where most will die: well, it is the result that counts!

Citing the common belief that between 1918 and 1920, the secret police “did not shoot all those condemned to death but fed some of them alive to the animals in the city zoos,” Solzhenitsyn argues that although he does not know if the rumor is true, one can be sure that, according to official ideology, there is no reason to regard such an action as immoral. After all, “How else could they get food for the zoos in these famine years? Take it away from the working class? Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn’t their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the future? Wasn’t it expedient?”

Recognizing that atheism and materialism, taken to their logical extremes, lead to this morality, which his deepest self rejected, Solzhenitsyn realized that somewhere inside he really did have faith. He recalled how he and some other students had once been invited to join the secret police. Everything he believed (or thought he believed) told him this move would be not only personally advantageous but also morally upright, and yet for some reason he could not explain, he could not do it.

It was not our minds that resisted but something inside our breasts. People can shout at you from all sides: “You must!” And your own head can be saying also: “You must!” But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it.

And so the faith of his ancestors survived within him: “Without even knowing it ourselves, we were ransomed by the small change in copper that was left from the golden coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart.”

All the same, Solzhenitsyn also recalled, he could have been persuaded to join the secret police, and so it was only chance that he did not become a torturer. There but for the grace of God go I! He therefore had no claim to moral superiority, all the more so because, as an officer, he had given needless orders that led to the deaths of others. “So let the reader who expects this book to be [only] a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.” The book is more than that. It is also a personal confession, the story of how, bit by bit, he recognized his own sinfulness and recovered the faith he did not know he had.

It has long been known, Solzhenitsyn observes, that prison can cause “the profound rebirth of a human being,” although more often it doesn’t. Spiritual rebirth happens only if, faced with the gulag’s fundamental choice, the prisoner chooses rightly: one must decide whether to survive at any price, even if to do so, one causes another’s death. “This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other will descend. If you go to the right – you lose your life, and if you go to the left – you lose your conscience.”

When prominent Bolsheviks found themselves arrested, they invariably made the wrong choice. After all, they were just applying the maxim “the result is what counts” to their own cases. The people who behaved best were the religious believers, an observation we can trust because we find it even in the memoirs of those who, like Evgeniya Ginzburg, remained Marxists and atheists. “In the course of this book,” Solzhenitsyn comments,

we have already mentioned [the believers’] self-confident procession through the Archipelago – a sort of silent religious procession with invisible candles. How some among them were mowed down by machine guns and those next in line continued their march. A steadfastness unheard of in the twentieth century! And it was not in the least for show, and there weren’t any declamations.

Atheist officials treated these “nuns,” as believing women were called, with special vindictiveness. They were “kept only with prostitutes and thieves at penalty camps. And yet who was there among the religious believers whose soul was corrupted? They died – most certainly, but … they were not corrupted.” Reflecting on such displays of courage, Solzhenitsyn concluded: “It is not the result that counts! It is not the result – but the spirit!”

Achieving faith required one more step: one must squarely face one’s own sinfulness. So long as one treats oneself as a victim of others’ injustice, one remains “sharply intolerant” and judgmental. Tolstoy’s novels and stories make the same point: to become enlightened, one must recognize the evil in one’s own heart, face the sins one has committed but arranged to forget, and consider how easily one might have been led to even worse ones. Solzhenitsyn advises: “Reconsider all your previous life. Remember everything you did that was bad and shameful and take thought.… Yes, you have been imprisoned for nothing. You have nothing to repent of before the state and its laws. But … before your own conscience?”

Solzhenitsyn recalled how, as he lay alone in the surgical ward of a camp hospital, a Dr. Boris Kornfeld spoke with him and described his own conversion to Christianity. “On the whole,” Kornfeld confided, “I have become convinced that there is no punishment that comes to us in this life on earth which is undeserved. Superficially it can have nothing to do with what we are guilty of in actual fact, but if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.”

“Yes, you have been imprisoned for nothing. You have nothing to repent of before the state and its laws. But … before your own conscience?”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That night, Kornfeld was murdered in his bed, and so, Solzhenitsyn realized, these words were his last. “And, directed to me, they lay upon me as an inheritance. You cannot brush off that kind of inheritance by shrugging your shoulders.” They struck Solzhenitsyn because he had already entertained similar thoughts. He decided that Kornfeld’s ideas were not quite right because they seemed to indicate that the innocent people who suffered at the hands of the Nazis and Bolsheviks must have been “some sort of super evildoers” to deserve such punishment. All the same, “there was something in Kornfeld’s last words that touched a sensitive chord, and that I accept quite completely for myself. And many will accept the same for themselves.”

As he lay there for many nights in the surgical ward, Solzhenitsyn “pondered with astonishment my own life and the turns it had taken.” To remember his thoughts, he set them down in verse. When he was younger, he recalls:

Bookish subtleties sparkled brightly, Piercing my arrogant brain, The secrets of the world were … in my grasp.…

But passing here between being and nothingness, Stumbling and clutching at the edge, I look behind me with a grateful tremor Upon the life that I have lived.

Not with good judgment nor with desire Are its twists and turns illumined. But with the even glow of the Higher Meaning Which became apparent to me only later on.

And now with measuring cup returned to me, Scooping up the living water, God of the Universe! I believe again! Though I renounced You, You were with me!

Reviewing his life, Solzhenitsyn grasped that what he had regarded as beneficial “turned out in actuality to be fatal, and I had been striving to go in the opposite direction to that which was truly necessary to me.” His suffering taught him “this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good.” When he thought he was doing good, that was precisely when he was doing the most evil. In The Gulag Archipelago’s most famous lines, he confides:

And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

“The falsehood of all the revolutions in history” has relied on making the opposite assumption: that the line separating good and evil lies between groups, and so it is only necessary to separate and eliminate the evil people. Those who do so “take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.”

But “all the religions of the world” struggle instead with “the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person,” beginning within oneself. To do so, we must engage in (as Solzhenitsyn put it elsewhere) “repentance and self-limitation.” Solzhenitsyn found faith when he appreciated the evil in his own heart. We must all do the same.

Solzhenitsyn extended his idea of repentance and self-limitation to Russia as a whole. Because Solzhenitsyn regarded himself as a Russian patriot, he has often been assumed to be an imperialist, but the very opposite is true. He regarded Russia’s domination of other peoples as a curse. For centuries, the idea that what matters most is imperial power had led Russia into national sin, he affirmed. “All this came to us from Peter I, from the glory of our banners and the so-called ‘honor of our Fatherland.’ We were crushing our neighbors; we were expanding. And in our Fatherland it became established that: The result is what counts.” Bolshevism developed the sinfulness already in us.

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor political parties – but right through every human heart.”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Instead of taking pride in the enormous size of the Russian empire, Russians should repent for imprisoning their neighbors, wrote Solzhenitsyn in his essay “Repentance and Self-Limitation.” They must acknowledge what they did to the native Siberian peoples. “With regard to all the peoples in and beyond our borders forcibly drawn into our orbit, we can fully purge our guilt by giving them genuine freedom to decide their future for themselves.”

It is easy to forget that repentance, to be real, entails “self-limitation.” “We are always very ready to limit others,” Solzhenitsyn cautions, just as we are always ready to excuse ourselves. For a nation as for an individual, “repentance is always difficult. And not only because we must cross the threshold of self-love, but also because our own sins are not so easily visible to us.” To see them, we must stop saying: Look what they did to us! and say instead: Look what we did to ourselves! “We are all guilty, all besmirched.… We, all of us … were the necessary accomplices.” Above all, we must stop thinking that evil is committed only by others. We must not imagine that we can eliminate it by destroying the bad people who disagree with us.

Humanity needs to redirect its efforts to the development of the soul. “The turn toward inward development, the triumph of inwardness over outwardness, if it ever happens, will be a great turning point in the history of humankind.”