The following post is intended to disparage only those political ideologies explicitly identified and any extrapolations to the current political landscape, except those of the most general kind concerning the nature of the governance of humans, are the responsibility of the reader solely.
For the past 4 years, I've been engrossed, to the greatest practical extent, in the writings of a man who, humanly speaking, is my hero. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's
magnus opus is
The GULAG Archipelago in which he examines every facet of the behemoth prison system of the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1954. His sources are 270-plus first-hand accounts from his fellow prisoners; his style blurs the distinction between the horrible and the ridiculous.
Yet, despite the terror of the content, Solzhenitsyn is able to maintain an air of divine hopefulness and even humor.
In the chapter entitled
The Dogs' Service, in the fourth of seven books, Solzhenitsyn paints the portrait of the relationship between the prisoners and the camp guards. The convoy guards, responsible for the prisoners marching to, from and while at the work-site outside of the camp grounds exercised a special level of tyranny:
"Convoy service...was like front-line service. The convoy had nothing to fear from any investigation, and did not have to give any explanations. Every convoy guard who fired his rifle was right. Every prisoner killed was guilty.... At the gatehouse, a zek [abbreviation of the Russian term for prisoner] ran up to a guard with a release document (he was going to be released the next day) and asked: "Let me through, I am going to the laundry. I'll only be a minute!" "You can't." "But tomorrow I'm going to be free, fool!" The guard shot him dead. Killed. And there wasn't even a trial. And how easy it was for a prisoner not to notice in the heat of his work those blazes on the trees which constituted an imaginary dotted line, a forest cordon instead of barbed wire. For example, Solovyov cut down a fir tree and, moving backward, was cleaning the branches off it. He saw only his felled tree. And the convoy guard squinted and waited. He wouldn't call out to the zek, "Watch out!" He just waited, and Solovyov, not noticing, crossed the line of the work zone, continuing to back his way down the tree trunk. A shot! An explosive bullet and a lung was blown apart. Solovyov was killed and the Tonshayevo [camp guard] was given a hundred ruble prize."Solzhenitsyn's primary goal here is not to evoke feelings of pity or even sympathy for the innumerable innocent Russians sent to labor camps for being "politically hostile." No, the 1975 Nobel Literature Prize winner is concerned for the guard and what kind of person his "service" has made him. He writes,
"The absoluteness in the relations between the convoy and the prisoners, this continual right of the guards to use a bullet instead of a word, could not fail to influence the character of the VOKhR officers and enlisted men as well. The lives of the prisoners were given into their power, though not for the whole day, yet totally and profoundly." How can a man who spent 10 years in the GULAG prison system and 20 more in exile from his home be concerned for the spiritual well-being of those brutal "wolves," as he calls the camp guards?
His point is that the 60 million zeks who lost their lives in the camps were not the only victims of the totalitarian Communist Stalinist regime. Even the lowly guards who were "doing the work of the State" came to loose all sense of humanity, whether it be that of a zek or even their own. The loss of human life in Soviet Russia is staggering, but the loss of human souls is perhaps an even greater tragedy.
Is the state responsible for its citizens' souls? Yes--insofar as government is constituted by men. Why should those in positions of political power be any less concerned with their constituents' well-being--be it economic, physical or spiritual--than one's next-door neighbor? Obviously, the role of the Church ought not to be usurped by civil authority, but can anyone doubt that Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Stalin's birth name) will answer for the soul of those young convoy guards?
Pray for our leaders.
