Solzhenitsyn and the Reverse Canary

Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1965 (Hulton Archives, from The New York Sun).

I cannot possibly add anything to the many tributes to Alexander Solzhenitsyn that have appeared since his death, including the eloquent ones by The New York Sun, Richard Brookhiser, John McCain, David Warren, and Victor Davis Hanson. 

But it may be of some interest to note Natan Sharansky’s reference to him in “The Case for Democracy,” in this excerpt from pages 108-119 of that book:

[After the Six Day War], [by] the early 1970s, the number of Soviet Jews asking for invitations [to leave] was in the tens of thousands.  The Soviet leadership, suddenly faced with a serious challenge to their authority, took steps to stop the Jewish exodus. . . . 

Few people understood the extent of the challenge that freedom of emigration would pose to a totalitarian state like the USSR.  Kissinger fought the Jackson amendment because he was concerned it would torpedo détente. . . .

The perceived “narrowness” of the Jackson amendment also drew the ire of many dissidents, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  As fervent an opponent of détente as Jackson, Solzhenitsyn nevertheless was bitter that people were wasting so much time and resources on a tangential issue like freedom of emigration.  He lamented a West that for decades ignored the horrors of the Soviet regime, and whose leaders were partners in “signing treaties, giving loans, shaking ‘honest’ hands” and even “boasting about these achievements to their parliamentarians,” could now mobilize for what was in his mind largely a sideshow.

As Solzhenitsyn saw it, the real battle was toppling the Soviet totalitarian system and restoring freedom of thought, speech, and religion.  He feared that with so much attention focused on the Jackson amendment, pressure on the USSR would dissipate once the problem of Soviet Jewry was resolved. . . .

There were other dissidents, however, who saw the question of freedom of emigration as a far broader issue.  Andrei Sakharov was one of them.  When I asked him why he so fervently supported the Jackson amendment, which would primarily help Jews, Sakharov answered that in a closed society, freedom of emigration lowers the degree of control a regime can exercise over its subjects.  When people have a right to leave a country, Sakharov explained, they are less afraid and more independent.  And if they are less afraid and more independent, they are more willing to stand up for the rights that everyone is being denied.

Sakharov was absolutely right.  Those who saw freedom of emigration as a narrow issue simply did not realize how dangerous it was for the USSR. . . . The Soviets would have loved to engage in esoteric and abstract debates with the West about the nature of human rights.  Freedom of emigration, however, brought everything down to earth. . . .

[E]ven the strongest supporters of the Jackson amendment could not anticipate the impact [of it] on the course of the Cold War.

Just as the adverse treatment of Jews is a reliable early warning sign of a sick society whose illness can eventually engulf the world, the demand for fair treatment of Jews may be the early sign of a movement that ultimately results in the fair treatment of every people, and every person, no matter how powerless or unpopular, within a society — and change history in a positive direction.

And Solzhenitsyn is of course himself one of the most staggering stories (which include those of Sakharov and Sharansky) of the power of an individual, armed only with words and courage, to repair the world.