Tear It Down

(Installment #9 in a series of reflections from “The Gulag Archipelago”)

When Solzhenitsyn was arrested and later interrogated, a large part of his questioning revolved around his suitcase full of notebooks and his war diary. He intended to be a writer and, not believing in the capacities of memory alone, he committed his experiences on the war front to writing. He wrote down his thoughts as well as the stories and tales he heard from others.

These things were all being used against him and to save himself he “repented” as thoroughly as he could. In the fourth month of his ongoing interrogation, that period concluding, all of his notebooks and his diary “were cast into the hellish maw of the Lubyanka furnace, where they burst into flame…and flew out the highest chimney in black butterflies of soot.”

He continues:

Oh, that soot! It kept falling on and on in that first postwar May…My doomed diary was only one momentary plume of that soot. I recalled a frosty sunny morning in March when I was sitting in the interrogator’s office. He was asking his customary crude questions and writing down my answers, distorting my words as he did so. The sun played in the melting latticework of the frost on the wide window, through which at times I felt very much like jumping, so as to flash through Moscow at least in death and smash onto the sidewalk five floors below…in the gaps where the frost had melted, the rooftops of Moscow could be seen, rooftop after rooftop, and above them merry little puffs of smoke. But I was staring not in that direction but at a mound of piled-up manuscripts – someone else’s- covering the entire center of the floor in this half-empty room, thirty-six square yards in area, manuscripts which had been dumped there a little while before and had not yet been examined. In notebooks, in file folders, in homemade binders, in tied and untied bundles, and simply in loose pages. The manuscripts lay there like the burial mound of some interred human spirit, it’s conical top rearing higher than the interrogator’s desk, almost blocking me from his view. And brotherly pity ached in me for the labor of that unknown person who had been arrested the previous night, these spoils from the search of his premises having been dumped that very morning on the parquet floor of the torture chamber, at the feet of that thirteen-foot Stalin. I sat there and wondered: Whose extraordinary life had they brought in for torment, for dismemberment, and then for burning?

Oh, how many ideas and works had perished in that building – a whole lost culture? Oh, soot, from the Lubyanka chimneys! And the most hurtful thing of all was that our descendants would consider our generation more stupid, less gifted, less vocal than in actual fact it was.

Today the west is bent on self-destructing. But it is not the west entirely. Vast swaths of western people still think, create, write, and do good. It is the State in the west that is the destroying power. It serves only itself and sees the people as its servants. It seeks to tear down our history and hide it from future generations. It seeks to proclaim itself in its modern form as the only good. All that came before, all that built the very foundation on which it now stands, it calls evil.

A friend of mine once told me about his nephew who was quite the intellect. He was so smart he was given a full-ride scholarship to study engineering at a prestigious university. During one school break he returned home to visit his family, and trying to be helpful, he asked his dad if there was anything he could do to help out while he was home. His father told him the old shed out back was beyond repair and, if he didn’t mind, he could tear it down. The young man was happy to help, so the next day he grabbed a sledgehammer, went inside the shed, and began beating on the walls. Sure enough, having already deteriorated a great deal, the shed soon collapsed…right on top of the boy’s head!

The western powers are like that young man. Full of smarts, they have stepped into power and taken to beating down the walls of western life and culture. And soon it will collapse on their heads. And ours too.