Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on war and the blessing of defeat

There is a simple truth which one can learn only through suffering: in war not victories are blessed but defeats.  Governments need victories and the people need defeats.  Victory gives rise to the desire for more victories.  But after a defeat it is freedom that men desire - and usually attain.  A people needs defeat just as an individual needs suffering and misfortune: they compel the deepening of the inner life and generate a spiritual upsurge.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, p. 272

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on evil and ideology

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.  Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him.  Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too.  The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses.  Because they had no ideology.

Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and deterimination.  That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.  That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, pp. 173-174

1973

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on resisting tyranny

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?   Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?…  The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!  If…if… We didn’t love freedom enough.  And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation….  We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

~ Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on human differences, equality and freedom

Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn