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His prime historic target is revolutionary ideology, because of its power to subvert private conscience, encouraging men to see their fellow men as "insects" (Lenin's word) to be virtuously crushed for the good of the cause. It was in the name of Marxism-Leninism that the horrors of Gulag were visited upon the Russian people. The book is one of the most overwhelming attacks on the practical applications of that ideology ever written. What Solzhenitsyn urges in another remarkable document, Letter to the Soviet Leaders, is that the Soviet government abandon its ideology entirely.
It not only has been a scourge and a failure in the past, he says, but now threatens to lead the U.S.S.R. into a war with China. Shrimps may learn to whistle —as Nikita Khrushchev said in another connection—before such a thing is done by the Soviet government. "Human nature," Solzhenitsyn once wrote, "changes not much faster than the geological face of the earth." The author's suggestion—in Gulag—that the masters of the Kremlin put on trial the men most evidently guilty of the past imprisonment, torture and murder of so many millions of their countrymen will probably be ignored, too.
In the old cold war days, Americans might have joined Solzhenitsyn in his urgings. But detente, the benefits of trade, the establishment of a Chase bank in Moscow, and the hope for arms limitations have made the U.S. more tolerant of the Kremlin. The convergent development of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., though, will not much liberalize Russian society. Like environmentalists here and the economists of the Club of Rome, Solzhenitsyn has also urged his country to turn away from its dream of Western technological progress. Instead, he suggests, it should create in the Northeast territory a vast community in which science might be used to create a way of life closer to the earth, to the customs of ancient Russia.
Even if little comes of his advice, history may yet judge Solzhenitsyn a success—and not merely in the realm of art. For he is surely one of those towering witnesses thrown up by history (or God) in moments of crisis to remind the world that the pursuit of material progress is no way to the peace that passes understanding. For the first tune, though, that message may concern survival as well as salvation.