__________________________________________________________________ Cecil E . Bohanon The Economics of Alexander Solzhenitsyn Introduction As a novelist , writer and philosopher Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a legendary and living champion of human freedom . He is not , however , an economist . Solzhenitsyn ’ s documentation of the horrors of the Soviet Gulag in both his fictional and non-fictional works gives profound insights into the human spirit in the presence of seemingly unbearable oppression . Solzhenitsyn ’ s perspectives on human freedom are of great interest to all who love liberty . However , they are not primarily insights about economic freedom . The purpose of this essay is to address the questions : What are the economics of Alexander Solzhenitsyn ? Is Solzhenitsyn a free-market capitalist ? Is he a Christian socialist ? How can one characterize Solzhenitsyn ’ s economic position ? This is a challenging and perhaps quixotic quest because Solzhenitsyn is relatively uninterested in economic matters . Yet discerning a great thinker ’ s insights ( and perhaps misperceptions ) about economics is an interesting exercise for those interested in free-enterprise education . To fore- Cecil E . Bohanon is Profesor of Economics , Ball State University ( Muncie , Indiana ). A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Private Enterprise Education ( APEE ) in Orlando , Florida , April 4 , 2005 . The autor wishes to thank T . Norman Van Cott for helpful comments . All errors are the author ’ s . shadow the conclusions of the essay , Solzhenitsyn is a reluctant advocate of free markets , who is much more willing to constrain a free market than most libertarian economists . Yet Solzhenitsyn is in great sympathy with basic institutions of a free-market on both theoretical and practical grounds . This tension in his thinking makes many of his positions on policy issues seem naïve and utopian . The essay is organized as follows . The first section examines the life of the author . The second section outlines some important philosophical themes from his work . The third section considers some economic positions Solzhenitsyn embraces . The fourth section offers a critique of Solzhenitsyn ’ s economic perspectives on public choice grounds . Life of Solzhenitsyn 1 Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11 , 1918 in Kislovodsk , Russia . His father had died in a hunting accident six months earlier . After his birth he and his mother moved in with her family in Rostov-on-the-Don in Southern Russia . The family was devoutly religious in the Orthodox Christian tradition . The family lost their land holdings in the Bolshevik 1 The biography is drawn from Joseph Pearce ’ s 1999 book : Solzhenitsyn : A Soul in Exile . Specific page references are given for points of importance . __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 35

__________________________________________________________________ revolution and was considered to be of “ less desirable social origin ” by the Soviet authorities . Nevertheless , young Alexander did gain admittance to one of the better schools in Rostov , where he excelled as a pupil . Solzhenitsyn ’ s adolescence and young adulthood were characterized by a drifting away from the Orthodox Christian faith of his family , to an enthusiastic acceptance of Marxism and atheism . By the time he entered the university he was a committed young communist . Although he had a great interest in literature he studied physics at the University of Rostov where , again , he excelled as a student . He married Natalya Reshtovskaya in a civil ceremony in April 1940 . Upon the outbreak of World War II Solzhenitsyn was initially classified , to his own disappointment , as medically unfit for military service . He and his wife were assigned to a teaching post in the small village of Morozovsk , 180 miles northeast of Rostov . As the war continued and Russia ’ s need for soldiers expanded he was allowed to join the Red Army where he served in battle . He was twice decorated and eventually attained the rank of captain . In February 1945 , just before the war ended , Solzhenitsyn was arrested under Article 58 , paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code for anti-Soviet propaganda . In correspondence with an old friend , intercepted and read by the military censors , he had made a number of derogatory comments about Stalin . For this perfidy he remained in the Soviet prison system until 1956 . Solzhenitsyn was shuffled among a number of prisons in the Moscow area during his first year in the system . In September 1946 , because of his physics degree , he was assigned to the Marfino prison near Moscow that was simultaneously a research center . Such prisons were called sharashkas . The conditions in the sharashkas were generally better than in other prisons in the Soviet gulag . His experience in Marfino became the basis for his novel First Circle . It is interesting to note that during this time frame , Solzhenitsyn continued to be a loyal communist and a convinced atheist [ Pearce ( 1999 ), p . 94 ]. In May 1950 he was transferred to a prison camp in Kazakhstan . The physical conditions there were worse than those encountered back in Moscow . This experience provided the basis for his novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich , and his non-fictional Gulag Archipelago . In January 1952 he was diagnosed with cancer and was sent to a treatment center , where he recovered from the disease . It was during this treatment regime that Solzhenitsyn converted ( or reconverted ) to the Orthodox Christian faith of his youth . In February 1953 , after serving his full eight-year term , he was freed from prison but “ permanently ” exiled to the Kok-Terek region of Kazakhstan . Unaccompanied by his wife , who continued her university career in European Russia , he was employed as a village school teacher . The cancer recurred in early 1954 , and he went to a cancer treatment center in Tashkent . Despite being given a 1 in 3 chance of recovery , he ended up being fully cured from the disease . This experience provided the basis for his novel Cancer Ward . Stalin had died in March 1953 and after a period of internal political turmoil in the Soviet Union many of the cases against political prisoners were reexamined . Solzhenitsyn ’ s case was re-opened __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 36

__________________________________________________________________ and in February 1956 he was rehabilitated . The examining prosecutors concluded that his war time correspondences did “ ... not constitute a crime ” [ Pearce ( 1999 ), p . 134 ]. In June 1956 he moved back to European Russia and was eventually reunited with his wife . He continued to teach high school and pursued his writing , sketching out and working on a number of fictional and non-fictional manuscripts . In 1961 literary censorship in the Soviet Union appeared to be easing . Solzhenitsyn submitted his short novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the leading Russian literary journal Novy Mir . Its editor Alexander Tvardovsky was enthralled by the novel and vowed to do everything in his power to promote it and the then unknown novelist . However , actually publishing a novel about the Stalinist labor camps was no easy feat even in a post-Stalinist Soviet Union . It was almost a year before the work was publicly available . In the mean time news of the controversial unpublished novel became the talk of Soviet literary circles . Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev became personally interested in it . He read the novel , liked it and ordered 23 copies for distribution to the members of the Party Presidium . Novy Mir published it in late 1962 with Khrushchev hailing it as a literary masterpiece from the podium at the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union . Solzhenitsyn and his novel became overnight sensations both within and outside the Soviet Union . seized by the KGB . ( Fortunately , he had hidden copies of much of his works in a number of different locations ). In late 1966 he began public readings of his forbidden works in Moscow where he openly criticized the KGB . Condemned by the authorities in the Soviet Union , his novels Cancer Ward and First Circle were published in the West in 1968 . He was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union in 1969 , but won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 . The publication of Gulag Archipelago in Paris in December 1973 led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union in February 1974 . Having divorced his first wife and remarried , his family joined him in Switzerland in March of that year . He lived and traveled in Europe for two years , until the summer of 1976 when the Solzhenitsyns were granted permanent asylum in the United States . He continued his career , writing and living in relative isolation with his family ( now including three young sons ) in Vermont . In June 1978 he was the commencement speaker at Harvard University . His Harvard speech was met with mixed reception in the West . The speech , given in Russian and simultaneously translated , condemned the West for what Solzhenitsyn perceived to be its loss of courage , material decadence and moral decay . Solzhenitsyn continued to live with his family in Cavendish , Vermont , and continued to write . He also gave occasional interviews and speeches . He returned to Russia in May of 1994 , where he continues to live , write and lecture . The cultural thaw of the early 1960 ’ s was , however , short-lived . By 1964 Solzhenitsyn had no official outlets for his work and began to publish his work via underground samizdat networks . During this time his archives were raided and Solzhenitsyn ’ s Thought To understand Solzhenitsyn , one must first have an appreciation of the philosophical underpinnings of his thought . First and foremost , Solzhenitsyn , like many __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 37

__________________________________________________________________ other Russian writers such as Tolstoy , Dostoevsky , Berdayev and Pasternak , is an Orthodox Christian . His understanding of human existence , good and evil , the modern world , and the nature and purpose of freedom is grounded in and shaped by this tradition . Each theme is examined in turn . A . The Meaning of Human Existence . Solzhenitsyn sees the purpose of human existence as one of spiritual development , not the attainment of human comfort , material well being or even happiness . As stated in his Harvard commencement speech : If , as is claimed by humanism , man were born only to be happy , he would not be born to die . Since his body is doomed to death , his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual : not a total engrossment of everyday life , not a search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption . It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent earnest duty so that one ’ s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth : to leave life a better human being than one started it [ Berman ( 1980 ), p . 19 ]. This quest for spiritual development in the confines of a material world is a theme in his work . It is epitomized by Solzhenitsyn ’ s insistence that one must develop a personal “ point of view ” to attain full moral personhood . This “ point of view ” means not only a developed attitude and perspective , but also an integrity and truth that will stand the tests of adversity and time . In the novel First Circle , the prisoner Nerzhin spent some time and effort searching for wisdom among the common people . He is disappointed to find that they have ... no homespun superiority to him .... What was lacking in most of them was a personal point of view which becomes more precious than life itself . There was only one thing for Nerzhin to do — be himself ... Everyone forges his inner-self year after year . One must try to temper , to cut , to polish one ’ s own soul so as to become a human being ( all emphasis in the original ) [ First Circle , pp . 388-89 ]. This insight also appears in his nonfictional Gulag Archipelago . “ Point of view ” arises as the culmination of spiritual development and is the primary bulwark against the indignity and abuse of a totalitarian state . Commenting on the horror of arrest and interrogation by the police apparatus of the Soviet state , he advises : From the moment you go to prison you must put your past firmly behind you . At the very threshold you must say to yourself : “ My life is over , a little early to be sure , but then there is nothing to be done about it . I shall never return to freedom . I am condemned to die — now or a little later ... Only my spirit and conscience remain precious and important to me ... A human being has a point of view ! ( Solzhenitsyn ’ s emphasis ) … [ Gulag Archipelago , p . 130 ]. He goes on to relate a powerful example of the triumph of a person with a “ point of view ”: N . Stolyarova recalls an old woman who was her neighbor on the Butyrki ( prison ) bunks in 1937 . They kept on interrogating her every night . Two years earlier , a former metropolitan of the orthodox Church , who had escaped from exile , had spent the night at her home in his way through Moscow . “ But he wasn ’ t the former Metropolitan , he was the Metropolitan ! Truly , I was worthy of receiving __________________________________________________________________ Laissez-Faire 38