Nation: Is Solzhenitsyn Right?

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Am I, a child of European fascism, a survivor of Hitler's Holocaust, a student in Stalin's spiritual gulags, ready to reject the freedom I have enjoyed in this nation for 20 years because Solzhenitsyn tells us that here "the defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals"? Am I, who have passed half of my life at the mercy of totalitarian authority, really to feel that my personal freedom in this country is now endangered because, as Solzhenitsyn regrets, "a statesman who wants to achieve something important or highly constructive has to move cautiously and even timidly"? Am I, who came of age in Eastern Europe in the period of inflicted morality, really to fear danger "to the human soul" from what Solzhenitsyn calls "today's mass living habits"? Am I not here the master of my soul?

Sharing with Solzhenitsyn a despair over the millions who perished in totalitarian hands (including all but three members of my once numerous family), I nevertheless believe that he has failed to comprehend that often democracy is at best a shifting state between the tyranny it overthrew and the tyranny it might become. Even though freedom, tolerance and other qualities might be termed democracy's adjusted faults, these are by far to be preferred to the rigid correctitude of totalitarianism. Like a writer's work, freedom exists only when it is constantly interpreted — even misinterpreted.

Barbara Tuchman: America's Savonarola

Historian and author, Tuchman won Pulitzers for The Guns of August and Stilwell and the American Experience in China 1911-45.

Solzhenitsyn is a type of Isaiah, the angry prophet who arises when mankind is seriously misbehaving to denounce the age and its sins. People like to be scolded, especially when their conscience is bad — as it is in this last quarter of the terrible 20th century. This explains the Solzhenitsyn cult. He is fashionable; he is our Savonarola. I do not believe everything he says about Western society, although it is useful to hear his strictures; they make us think. Relatively speaking, however, I think America has good qualities, perhaps less operative now than they might be, but inherent, nonetheless. I would rather live in America than anywhere else I could think of— and so, evidently, would Solzhenitsyn.