Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the world-famous author of Gulag Archipelago, found much that he admired in the Russian Orthodox religion. Most importantly, he recognized the wisdom and value one of Christianity’s main teachings: to not do harm to one’s fellow man, even at the price of one’s own suffering.

In his most popular novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he quoted a pertinent verse from the bible:

Let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or an evil-doer, or as a meddler in other men's matters. Yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.1

In Soviet Russia, and especially in the labor camps, where—as the Russian folk-saying goes—“man is wolf to man,” and to obtain any level of comfort, prosperity, or wellbeing, meant doing so at the expense of another person’s agony, ruin, or even death, this truly was a profound fundamental lesson. It protected against moral corruption, against a steady degeneration of one’s inner life, for the sake of mere animal survival.

It was, furthermore, directly opposed to the corresponding teaching of Communism, which moralized viciously about an ideal society and government, but when it came to the meaning of one’s personal life, offered only a purely cynical hedonism—“that pitiful ideology,” as Solzhenitsyn wrote, “that ‘human beings are created for happiness.’”2 To live for one’s own happiness, in that Soviet context, meant the same thing as “survive at any price;” in other words, to live by the guidance of no moral principles or beliefs about what is right, but by the animal instinct to obtain pleasure and safety, and avoid suffering and death, by adapting oneself to the current environment. The right, therefore, is to do what achieves your immediate desires and survival; and that makes you a compliant puppet of any despotic regime you fall under, since whether you attain some level of wellbeing, or suffer and die instead, is fully controlled by it.

And if it says you must kill, torture, or rob your fellow men for the sake of that personal “happiness”—whether it be as a Communist Party member, a secret police agent, the chief of a labor camp, or even a zek “trusty”—you won’t have moral grounds to object on. And you’ll most likely go along, and thus choose the path of inner corruption.

Solzhenitsyn had this exact thing in mind, when he wrote:

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good.3

Though it may sound like he was exaggerating—he wasn’t! It will be worth clarifying, however, the translation of the above statement from its original Russian.

In Russian, the word for “good” literally means kind, and the word for “evil” literally means angry—or, in the case of an “evil” person, it means anger solidified into a permanent character trait, essentially a cruel person.^[a] Built right into the Russian language, then, is this specific, narrow conception of good and evil. And if we take that definition, Solzhenitsyn’s claim is entirely true.

Thus, he continues:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.4

What Solzhenitsyn meant by this, is that it’s part of our human nature to (at least occasionally) feel the desire to do harm to others (whether from anger, greed, lust, fear for our own safety, and so on). But whether we act upon this temptation depends on the forces that restrain (or encourage) it. These forces, Solzhenitsyn recognized well, could either be external or internal. Externally, these were the practical (legal, social, and other physical) consequences of doing harm to other human beings; internally, these were the contents of a person’s mind, the knowledge he uses to guide his life (in other words, his morality).5

The ancient, esoteric piece of wisdom he gleaned from his prison years was this: unrestrained power over people makes you cruel! Those placed in a position of power over another person (the informer over the informed upon, the interrogator over the interrogated, the high-ranking trusty over the general laborer), in which they have no cause to fear any negative consequences from doing him violence, unavoidably act on their evil desires—when it is to their advantage (or when the mood strikes them)—unless they restrain themselves morally. And “the cruelty they manifest,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “is proportionate to the defenselessness of the person in their power.”6 By means of repeated cruel actions over time, cruelty becomes second-nature to them, a stable and durable trait of their personalities.

“Watch your actions,” wrote the originator of Daoism, “they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” Thus does a person arrive at “corruption of soul,” as Solzhenitsyn called it (the “soul” meaning the nature of one’s inner life), and becomes fundamentally evil.7 This was, indeed, what Solzhenitsyn recognized in himself when he was a captain in the Red Army:

In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor.8

In this, we see the core truth in the famous quotation: “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”—or, as Solzhenitsyn put it, “unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”9

In free countries that protect individual rights, this problem is efficaciously settled by a just legal system that punishes those who inflict harm on others. The fear of this punishment mostly prevents even those without any internal restraints from doing evil (at least in the Russian sense); and the issue of someone having untrammeled power over people almost never comes up. “In ordinary human societies,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “the human being lives out his sixty years without ever getting caught in the pincers of [this] kind of [ethical] choice, and he himself is quite convinced of his decency, as are those who pronounce speeches over his grave. A human being departs from life without ever having learned into what kind of deep well of evil one can fall.”10

In the Soviet Union, however, there was no such luxury. And the problem of falling into corruption had to be solved by morality, or not at all. “So wouldn’t it be more correct to say,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “that no camp can corrupt those who have a stable nucleus, who do not accept that pitiful ideology which holds that ‘human beings are created for happiness,’ an ideology which is done in by the first blow of the work assigner’s cudgel? Those people became corrupted in camp who before camp had not been enriched by any morality at all or by any spiritual upbringing.” Yet this was exactly what happened, he observed, to whole generations growing up under Soviet rule.11

“Pardon me, you . . . love life?” he wrote, in mockery of the student activities at school and the communist youth league:

You, you! You who exclaim and sing over and over and dance it too: “I love you, life! Oh, I love you, life!” Do you? Well, go on, love it! Camp life—love that too! It, too, is life! . . .

You haven’t understood a thing. When you get there, you’ll collapse.12

It was, on the other hand, the “religious believers” in camp who profoundly impressed Solzhenitsyn; who—more than anyone else—categorically rejected the Soviet regime; who refused to accept trusty positions (those vital “links in the chain [of oppression] without which . . . the entire camp system” would’ve crumbled); and who often perished at general labor, but “didn’t become corrupted.”13

Christianity instilled in them the morality to defy their Communist tyrants, to never side with the Soviet state, and to resist its (and their own) evil temptations to destroy others for the sake of their personal gain or survival. The major critique leveled against Christian ideology, that it makes people closeminded to new ideas and different lifestyles, was in this case an enormous asset. It inoculated its believers against the cynical amorality of a Soviet upbringing; and against the many-times worse strain of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which rather than restraining one’s evil impulses, actually deemed it morally right to kill, torture, imprison, and dispossess other people, as long as it served the good of the state. To quote Solzhenitsyn:

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. 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. . . . [“The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.”] That is the precise line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.14

That is why Solzhenitsyn, as he titled a 1983 speech, considered “Godlessness the first step to the Gulag.”15

This article is adapted from my fifth book, On Rotting Prison Straw: The Self-Actualization of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. You can read the completed book here.

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[a] The Russian word for good is “добрый” and for evil is “злой.”