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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Both the technological and the organic in Solzhenitsyn’s organising imagery seem to propose structures and processes independent of human agency or control; and for Solzhenitsyn’s idea of history, control is a crucial question. The role of the individual within history, the extent to which he can be held responsible or can change his situation, is left unexplained. The imagery of the Great Machine perhaps presupposes a Great Mechanic who originally constructed the device, and indeed when Solzhenitsyn’s technocratic ideology issues into prescriptive injunctions its very substance is a belief in an individual or collective elite who should run society and its institutions; but the technological and structural images are not used in this way. Although one of the intentions of The Gulag Archipelago is to demonstrate a continuity between Lenin and Stalin, to prove the former an architect of later repression, the emphasis in the technological images of history is upon mechanical operations which take place over against the activity of individuals, including that of those people who apparently administer them. Yet the individual is for Solzhenitsyn the absolute subject of history:
The Universe has as many different centres as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a centre of the Universe . . . (G.A., p. 3).
The individual is consequently expected to have moral responsibility and, in Solzhenitsyn’s phrase, ‘civil valour’ (G.A., p. 462), a concept upon which he puts much emphasis although it is ill-defined. He assigns to each of the Russian people some share in blame for allowing the Stalinist crimes to take place.
1 Medvedev points out (On Gulag Archipelago, trans. Tamara Deutscher, New Left Review 85, 1974) that while Solzhenitsyn speaks of ‘Stalinists’ he has no concept called ‘Stalinism’. Most of his references to Stalin are dropped out of the main text into footnotes; this obliqueness points the ambiguity.
2 It could be argued that Stalin is both author and functionary of history, but the oppositions in Solzhenitsyn's ideology are mechanistically rigid and not dialectically mutual.
3 Victor Semyonovich Abakumov, Minister of State Security, 1946‐1952; executed under Kruschev, 1954.
4 Cf. Ticktin (Political Economy of the Soviet Intellectual, Critique No. 2). This reinforces the point Mandel makes about Solzhenitsyn's technocratic positions: while his ideology is anti‐Stalinist it remains within the Stalinist problematic.
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