Solzhenitsyn would go on to author a massive three-volume tome on his time in the Soviet gulag system which he entitled The Gulag Archipelago. Published in 1973 (outside the Soviet Union), it led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974. No work did as much to undermine the supposed moral foundations, and indeed supposed superiority of the Soviet system. It forever demolished the fantasy that had been clung to by many Left-wing intellectuals since the 1930’s that the Soviet Union represented the next stage in human evolution—the advent of a new system of scientific “planning” appropriate to modern industrial life.
Solzhenitsyn forever demolished this fantasy by conclusively showing how the Soviet system—which indeed represented itself to the world, and was represented to the world by Leftist intellectuals, as the banner-carrier of Socialism—was completely reliant on oppression, violence, and tyranny.
What did Solzhenitsyn claim was at the heart of Soviet evil? Essentially, the idea that moral guilt or innocence depended on the collective identity to which someone belonged—which I’ll also refer to as “group-identity.” For example, one of the worst accusations that could be made was that you were a “class enemy.” This meant that you came from the wrong socio-economic “class.” Therefore, regardless of anything else about you, you were deemed forever and unalterably an enemy of the Soviet government. Of course, the definition of what constituted a “class enemy” was rather mercurial, and often simply used as a pretext to go after the perceived enemies of the Communists.
If you belonged to the wrong group, you became an “enemy of the people,” “enemy of the laborers,” “enemy of the proletariat,” or as previously mentioned, a “class enemy.” Those included within this wide umbrella included former Mensheviks (those who had fought against the Bolsheviks in the Revolution), clerics, entrepreneurs, capitalists, bourgeoise (essentially a member of the middle class, usually city-dwellers), kulaks (affluent peasants, and later identified in the USSR with those who refused to send their grain to Moscow), etc.
Similarly, if you belonged to the right group, you were deemed automatically righteous. You were part of “the proletariat,” a “laborer” for “the people,” a “comrade.” In short, your individual moral qualities no longer mattered—your group identity alone made you “good.”
This imposition of group-identity was, for Solzhenitsyn, at the heart of Soviet evil. It was based on Marxist philosophy, which held to the “materialist conception of history”—an explicitly atheist concept which saw history as the result of material conditions, rather than ideas. As Marx himself observed in the opening of The Manifesto of the Communist Party (or simply “The Communist Manifesto”) in 1848, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Thus, all human beings could be identified not primarily by their individual identity, but their group-identity, and thus divided into one of two categories: oppressor, or oppressed. (Read more.)
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