The victims of communism foundation and recipient of the truman regan medal of freedom. Hes an adjunct professor of politics and former distinguished lecturer at the Catholic University of america. Its published many books, quite a distinguished history has. Hes a legend at the philippines. The politics of john f kennedy. School of government. Harvard university. And the founding director of the institute of political journalism at georgetown. With no further ado, im going to welcome you to a gentleman that we all have esteemed respect for, and we be standing here today. If it wasnt for dr. Lee edwards, sir. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, bob. And welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the victims of Communism Museum, him and what we have here today is part of our continuing series of programs about the victims and crimes of communism. Lookat a Remarkable Book by a remarkable author. This book has been the most powerful in diamond of a political in modern times. Its an expose of a vast underway of forced labor camps that stretched across the soviet union, from moscow to magadan. And it played a consequential role in the implosion of the soviet union and the collapse of the soviet empire. All this and more, much more can be said about impact of just one. One book, the gulag archipelago, 1918 1956. An experiment in literary investing ation by that Nobel Laureate alexander solzhenitsyn for solzhenitsyn the gulag archipelago was a moral and inescapable duty. He was after all, a man with a memory in a country. The lied about the past and his present in the name of utopia. The work remains an internationaller th more than 30 million copies sold around the world. 3 million here in the United States as a sign of his commit. And this tells you so much about alexander solzhenitsyn itself as a sign of his commitment to telling the truth about the gulag. He did not accept any royalties for the sales of those 30 million copies. He directing they be given to what became the alexander soldier and its in Russian Social Fund which was used by the gulag. And thousands thousand of former soviet gulag prisoners have received assistance from the fund. In a final chapter, solzhenitsyn calls for an accounting of the soviet crimes like the nazi trials in nuremberg. Why is germany allowed to punish its evildoer . Yes. And russia is not yet, despite the horror that he saw and the torture that he personally experienced during his eight years in the gulag. Solzhenitsyn does not despair as he ends his investigation describes himself as an unshakable optimist and day before he was forced into exile. Solzhenitsyn said that the gulag archipelago was destined to affect the course of history. I was sure of that, he said. And then, he added, you bolster fix our finished. There are no. Two ways about it. Indeed, not long after. The publication of the gulag archipelago, the berlin wall came tumbling down and the most evil empire of the 20th century was soon no more proving yet again that do have the power to change history. So at those opening remarks would like now to turn it over to mr. Mahoney. Oh, no, bob, you want to introduce bob . All right, please. This this is a somebody who knows as much or more about solzhenitsyn and everybody else in america. And were so pleased and honored to have him with us today. Thank you. Thank so very sir. Thank you very. And i definitely second that motion on and knowing a little bit about solzhenitsyn, then were glad to have back. Dans the latest member of our academic council. Uh, dan with us last summer for a we a book signing here for it was memoirs of Cardinal Joseph ben olinsky which he wrote introduction so same same spot. I think you can read oliver. Dan comes with us. Hes a Professor Emeritus at assumption, a senior fellow at the real Claremont Institute and a visiting professor and this is a mouthful institute i used to be at the real clear foundation. So hes a visiting professor and this is a mouthful. So make i get this one right at the school of, civic and economic thought and at Arizona State university. So good to go that. Just one quick plug. Hes the the persistence of the ideological lie i that comes out will be published in spring of 2025. Several on solzhenitsyn to include ascent alexander solzhenitsyn dissent from ideology and the other solzhenitsyn telling truth about a misunderstood writer and thinker. So then the floor yours and educate us on alexander solzhenitsyn and i will add to that list the sultanate sun reader, new and essential writings 1947 to 2005, which i coedited. I think its fair to say its an indispensable for grasping solzhenitsyn, a writer thinker, moral witness. Well, thank you very much to both lee edwards and to bob williams and delighted to be back at the among friends to see all the new faces. Lee edwards is absolutely about solzhenitsyn revealing and embodying, might say the power of the word. Some of you may remember that his nobel lecture, a very powerful piece in its own right ends by evoking a russian proverb. One word of truth outweighs the world. And he says, i know that is a violation of the law of physics, but it happens to be true. And associates himself four times in his works refer to the publication of the gulag archipelago. So it first appeared in russian in paris on december 28th, 1973, hence this 50th anniversary commemoration. But solzhenitsyn said, with the publication of the gulag archipelago, burnham wood, is moving birnam wood, as you remember, macbeth, the significance of birnam wood moving . In fact, solzhenitsyn went to receive the templeton prize, england in 1983. He asked to go to burn wood, and he did. So. And let me mention just a word about the composition of the gulag. Solzhenitsyn writing it in 58. The first champ to be written, the powerful and evocative chapter called the 40 days of king geir. About a camp revolt in the spring of. 1954. And its an exhilarating chapter. They ultimately fail, but they win. They went spiritually and i think if you read nothing else from the gulag archipelago read the chapter called the ascent about solzhenitsyns own spiritual and coming to philosophical selfknowledge in the camp and couple that with the 40 days the king year another version of spiritual ascent resistance to evil. Hows that coming down 1500 words too to beautiful and wonderful chapters. Solzhenitsyn most of the gulag archipelago in. Winters of 1965 and 66. To make a long story short, he had a friend who had been his jail at the lubyanka. The former estonian minister of education, arnold susi. Solzhenitsyn says about susi in the chapter called the ascent that he entered the camp a thoroughly decent man, and left the camps a thoroughly man. In other words, he was a personal embodiment and illustrate nation of the fact that one could choose not, to survive at any price. Arnold, susie and his wife kate. Somehow he eluded kgb. He went to the forests, estonia, and over 130 days in each winter, sometimes with he passionately and no, no books in front of him, he just this all up here. This is a man who had memorized 7000 lines of verse in the camps with. He had the lithuanians build them a cross with a hundred beads and it came up one monarch device. I dont know solzhenitsyn prayed to he he he shares some of his one great prayer in the gulag. But the the the the the rosary was for the sake of memory. All right. And the book was complete with the final edits. April 68. And then solzhenitsyn weighed it, debated when to publish it, when one of his typists, elena, foreign an, was arrested a copy of the gulag that she was supposed to destroy was that solzhenitsyn set everything motion. The book was published december 2873, and the rest is history. The gulag archipelago was published in english three volumes between 1974 and 78, and then, of course, a authorized abridgment was in 1985 and is still in print. It is, in my view, one of the indispensable books of. The last century, not least because does it undermine the and political legitimacy of the entire communist enterprise . But thats not its i think its you know, solzhenitsyn says at one point in the chapter called the blue caps. If you think this book is just a political expose, slam its cover shot. Okay. So how can those things both be true . The greatest critique of an lot of of a regime in Human History and slam the cover shot. If you think is just a political works theyre both true and theyre both part of solzhenitsyns this unique experiment in literary investigation an association called calls it brilliantly wove together personal experience, arrest and everything that followed and the testimony of what eventually counted. 257 four murder prisoners with Historical Research and, spiritual reflections. It readers on both sides of the iron curtain to encounter totalitarian oppression as for the first time and direct quote from the great russian writer lydia duke of skye, who was on a akhmatovas best friend hurt. Her father was a great russian novelist, very antitotalitarianism. She suffered the gulag. We hear and see what it was all like. Search, arrest. Interrogation. Prison. Deportee. Haitian transit. Camp. Prison camp. Hunger. Beatings. Corpses the gulag archipelago. Moreover, solzhenitsyns multifaith seated often sardonic arthurian voice served as powerful for indicting communist some and all its works. Solzhenitsyn usually cause with a mocking spirit in tone. He calls communism the progressive doctrine with a capital b and a capital d. This solzhenitsyn was not a fan of. Progress in ideological sense of that term. And as a root of solzhenitsyns critique was mankinds and his own nemesis. Ideology. Unlike the convened analysis of academic historians and political scientist, we really dont learn all that much from them in the end about totalitarianism. Sadly, turn to the writers mir, walsh and grossman and solzhenitsyn and pasternak. Solzhenitsyns understanding never treated the soviet union as merely tyranny, among others. So much of the book is a comparison of everyday life and political life and levels of political repression and experience of the camps in russia and the soviet regime. Solzhenitsyn saw the soviet regime as an as an ideological regime, par excellence built two pillars violence and lies, not lies are manifest manifold in the human world. And there is even the machiavellian lie, you know. But when solzhenitsyn speaks about the lie, he really means the imposition of an alternative reality take on the real world. The world, the life of Human Experience. Erik vogel it has, i think, a wonderful phrase second reality. You know what orwell talks about doublespeak and all. Thats how you navigate the gap between second reality and the world available to comment. Since an elementary experience and social nature famously argues in chapter called the boot camps that it was thanks to ideology that the soviet as 20th century experience and i quote evil doing a scale calculated in the millions shakespeares evil doers stopped at a half a dozen cadavers because they had ideology and know it. Lady macbeth and macbeth had an. You know they could justify a lot more than the killing of duncan and a few few scottish souls. Ideology allowed and intellectuals to justify the unjustifiable and to violence to nearly levels. One of the Great Stories of the 20th century is the moral and intellectual abdication of so many intellectuals. The red dean of canterbury who made political pilgrimages to lenins and soviet savvy soviet union to cuba, to china. They lived long enough. You certainly would have gone to managua, you know, looking for one ideological paradise after another. Jeanpaul sartre wrote in liberation, 1951 that freedom was so total in the soviet union. They had need for elections and bourgeois freedoms, and who saw china as the model, what he called factory . Only theyd after we overcome isolate and in solitude through terror, which provides new basis for fraternal ity or as somebody during the french revolution, a competition said be my brother or i will kill you. Okay, we dont want that kind of fraternity. Do we. Read Paul Hollander on the political pilgrims of the 20th century . They were numerous and shameful w. H. The great poet, when he initially publishes collected works, left out his poem spain 1937. Why because it lauded necessary every murder. And auden, who became a christian and entered zealotry and was ashamed of that poem, god bless. The central focus of solzhenitsyns work made it much more difficult to blame the soviet tragedy simply on stalins cult of personality as khrushchev folded in the famous 1956 speech on local conditions that were somehow peculiar an authoritarian russia, the kind of Richard Pipes movie, which is very much back because of recent developments in russia. But its the russians, the progressive doctrine, can move forward because will free it of its russian accretion. But as a layman, mallya, the author of the soviet tragedy, which is a splendid book in its own right, argued in an analysis profoundly indebted to solzhenitsyn. Every communist has manifested in nearly identical genetic code, despite important cultural differences between russian, asian and communism. Every communist experiment been marked by a single party regime based on a mendacious sitting ideology that demonizes real or imagined enemies. Socialism. Solzhenitsyn insight was to highlight the insanity nature of ideology and the ideological lie, and to make its absurdities visible to the western imagination. Gulag takes aim. The manichean as americanism is an old heresy. You got to know your heresies, and manichean ism is a big one. Marching ism is another big one. The new testament without the Old Testament that causes a of trouble too. But manichean ism and this belief if that evil is localized over them you know a if only we eliminate the sources of either class race. That kind of ideological manichean ism is very much alive in the new racial and wokeism, etc. , as if weve learned nothing from the totalitarian episode, the ideologist denies the permanence of the imperfection inherent to the condition as solzhenitsyn says in the ascent, we cannot abolish evil from the world but we can restrict it in our own. You know, and if we try to abolish evil, we increase the sum total of evil, the human world, using the full force of his artistry. I mean the gulag is as a power does, because first and foremost, a work of literary art. Solzhenitsyn defends the timeless distinction between good evil against its permission, a replacement by the ideological decay of me, between progress and, reaction. By the way, that pernicious ideological distinction is very alive and well in our intellectual, political and academic life. The bitter experience of souls in the camps led solzhenitsyn to the age old insight. Theres two formulations of the school, the gulag archipelago, one in the blue capsule, one of the ascent most famous and most quoted lines. The book the line between good evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties, either. Right through every human heart, more broadly, souls as a nation return to the wisdom, philosophical christianity. My friend david walsh has written very well. Hell be joining us on what christianity is through reflection on his personal experi inside of human nature in extremis, the gulag archipelago archipelago established beyond any doubt, that 20th century totalitarianism originated originated with lenin, the founding father, and icon of the bolshevik party. Faithful his marxist inspiration, lenin initiated a nihilistic project for in his own words. Solzhenitsyn and analyzes this essay. Essay from which this comes in the history of our show. Weed disposal system. Lenin. In january 1918, wrote that the project of the revolution was to purge russia of all sorts of harmful insects. The rhetorical dehumanization of human beings, ideological enemies was sent all to the leninist project and of course, is sent, remember, in the rwandan, the hutu regime with its genocide in 1994. Hutu radio would to the tutsis and the moderate hutus as cockroaches that had to be stamped out. Hitler to say the were poisonous bacillus. You get you get the point. You have dehumanize human beings before. You tyrannies and murder them on a mass scale. And in this solzhenitsyn argues lenin was more less faithfully followed by stalin. I think solzhenitsyn agrees with a remark that they should kosky made, and the main currents of marxism. Stalinism isnt the only possible outcome marxism, but its a perfectly and predictable outcome of marxism. I think that gets things just about right in gulag, solzhenitsyn shifts the attention away from high profile, communal as his, he says. They wrote the books, you know, the victims of the purges in 3637 the peasants ukrainian, russian, kazakh. They didnt write the books. But he particularly feel sorry for the victim. The party victims of communism, not because what was done to them was morally legitimate, but because they had been complicit in. All previous acts of ideological mass murder and collectivized russian was just fine. Just dont the revolution devour its children . To use an image from the french revolution, solzhenitsyn shows that he has much more sympathy for those ordinary russians, ukrainians who perished by the millions as result of the insane effort to create a new man and a new society. And russians, because millions of russians died, too. Not just ukrainians. A third of the people of kazakhstan were killed in the midthirties and in the famines of the toes as opposed to the primary early but not exclusively ukrainian. In the early thirties. 5 Million People died in the famine caused by wartime ism and that was almost exclusively in the heart of historic russia. So communist regimes, especially in killing peasants, that the principal victims of communist regimes globally, we all know the great leap forward for of the north korean famine of the nineties. In the gulag solzhenitsyn a riveting account of. He uses this image of metastases the metastases of cancer of soviet terror, its beginnings in red and lenins red terror. And the first concentration camps on the Arctic Sullivan islands. He rightly deems collectivization in the war against the independent peasantry. And thats not only the famine, thats collectivization itself. The the hundreds of thousands of families were exiled to the tundra and taiga siberia to the camps of to be the most terrible crime of the soviet regime. Quote, the targeting of the kulaks was the first experiment in mass totalitarian demos side quote one that was repeated by hitler with and again by stalin with the nationalities that were disloyal, him or suspected him. Now, the third, second and th