Book Review: Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West

A prophetic voice continues to speak

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book, Warning to the West mentions some of the horrific events that happened in Russia--events that he warns could happen in the West and in the United States. We need to heed Solzhenitsyn's warning, and we need to find the courage to defend the truths and goodness which lie at the core of our faith and our country.

P>KNOXVILLE, TN (Catholic Online) - When we watch current events unfolding in Europe and in the United States, we are reminded of a book that Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote in 1976, Warning to the West. This is a short, easy book to read, but it is disturbing. It is disturbing because it mentions some of the horrific events that happened in Russia--events that he warns could happen in the West and in the United States.

Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer and Nobel laureate. The communists sent him to a prison camp for eight years because he was critical of Stalin, and then they exiled him to Siberia. They eventually expelled him from Russia, and he settled in the United States. Years later he returned to Russia, where he died in 2008 at the age of 89. Two of his best known books are The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

But it is his book Warning to the West that we recall now. Everyone who values truth and liberty must read this book. The book is based on a compilation of talks that Solzhenitsyn gave in the United States and in Great Britain. In a certain sense, his comments seem more relevant for us today than they did when he first uttered them. The following is a brief review of some of his comments from this powerful little book.

According to Solzhenitsyn, only four months after the 1918 revolution in Russia, which was to liberate the workers, the communist leaders betrayed the workers. From that time on, the working class was not able to stand up for its rights. They could not defend their simplest, everyday interests. The communists crushed the workers and all opposition by putting them in concentration camps, starving them and murdering them. Solzhenitsyn describes the communists filling barges with people and sinking the barges. No one was safe. The communists would even torture and kill your loved ones. Some estimates place the final death toll over 60,000,000.

Solzhenitsyn does not believe that what happened in Russia is isolated to his country. He says that we are approaching a major turning point in world history. It is something new, the emergence of a world wide crisis. He describes the crisis as an apocalyptic storm and "a great historical cataclysm, a flood that swallows up civilizations and changes whole epochs." It is a political crisis and a spiritual crisis, both happening at the same time. He says it is a concentration of evil, a tremendous force of hatred spreading throughout the world. 

To a large extent, this impending crisis is the end result of a pragmatic, materialistic philosophy which rejects God and absolute morality. It also embraces moral relativism and scoffs at the concepts of good and evil, which are considered old fashioned and laughable. It is a fundamental change in the way that we view the world and ourselves. This philosophy also forms the foundation for Marxism, communism and socialism, which are all violent and opposed to democracy and liberty.

For instance, Solzhenitsyn says Karl Marx wrote that democracy should be more feared than monarchy and that political liberty is worse than abject slavery. Marx and Engels frequently said that once they got in power, terror would be necessary. Solzhenitsyn quotes them as saying, "After achieving power, we'll be considered monsters, but we couldn't care less."

Whereas this crisis was manifested in Russia under the guise of communism, it is now manifesting itself in the West under the guise of socialism. Solzhenitsyn believes socialism is a myth. He calls it a misty phantom that provides the illusion of quenching people's thirst for justice. It is believed to be some sort of ultramodern structure that can serve as an alternative to capitalism, but it does not have a single or precise definition. He says socialism is like an emotional impulse that defies logic. Its devotees do not study it or subject it to critical analysis, yet they defend it with a passionate lack of reason.

Many do not believe that what happened in Russia can happen in the United States, but we are not impervious to calamity. Solzhenitsyn lists some of the warning signs in Russia just before the crisis hit. Thirty-five years ago when he wrote this book, he saw these same signs in Europe. Although America is years behind Europe, we can see almost all of these signs in the United States today.

The complete list of signs Solzhenitsyn mentions in his book is as follows: "Adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; people with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval."

Solzhenitsyn says that these signs mean the crisis is near. In the final pages of his book, he pleads for Europeans to heed his warning, but he could just as easily be speaking to Americans today. He writes, "We the oppressed people of Russia, the oppressed people of Eastern Europe, watch with anguish the tragic enfeeblement of Europe. We offer you the experience of our suffering; we would like you to accept it without having to pay the monstrous price of death and slavery that we had to pay."

But we are not listening. Since Solzhenitsyn gave the talks compiled in this book, Europe has continued to plunge headlong into its love affair with socialism, and the United States has blindly followed their lead. We need to listen to Solzhenitsyn's warning, and we need to find the courage to defend the truths and goodness which lie at the core of our faith and our country.

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Michael Terheyden was born into a Catholic family, but that is not why he is a Catholic. He is a Catholic because he believes that truth is real, that it is beautiful and good, and that the fullness of truth is in the Catholic Church. However, he knows that God's grace operating throughout his life is the main reason he is a Catholic. He is greatly blessed to share his faith and his life with his beautiful wife, Dorothy. They have four grown children and three grandchildren.

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