Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (109 page)

The new project was a massive exercise, as it had to be.
¹⁰¹
The gulag
was
overwhelming, a massive intervention in so many millions of lives that only an equally vast project could do justice to what was indeed ‘the greatest horror story of human history.’ Besides the eight years he spent in the camps, it took Solzhenitsyn nine years – April 1958 to February 1967 – to compile the book.
¹⁰²
Parts of the story had escaped before, but Solzhenitsyn’s aim was to present such a mass of material that no one would ever again doubt the gross and grotesque abuses of freedom in Soviet Russia. Eighteen hundred pages long, it is all but overwhelming – but, as a literary work as well as a record, that was Solzhenitsyn’s aim.

The book first appeared in the West in Paris, on 28 December 1973. At the end of January 1974 the BBC World Service and its German counterpart began broadcasting excerpts from
The Gulag
in Russian. In the same week the German version of the book was published, and smuggled copies of the Russian version began to appear in Moscow: they were passed from hand to hand, ‘each reader being allowed a maximum of 24 hours to read the entire volume.
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On 12 February Solzhenitsyn was arrested. At 8:30
A.M.
on Wednesday the fourteenth, the Bonn government was informed that Russia wanted to expel Solzhenitsyn and asked if the Germans would accept him. Willy Brandt, the German chancellor, was at that moment chairing a session of the cabinet. Interrupted, he immediately agreed to Russia’s request.
The Gulag
was published in the U.K. and the United States later that spring. Worldwide, by 1976, according to
Publisher’s Weekly,
the first volume sold 8 to 10 million copies (2.5 million in the United States, a million-plus in Germany, and just under that in the U.K., France, and Japan). All together, Solzhenitsyn’s books have sold 30 million copies.
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Gulag –
GUlag in Russian – stands for
Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei
(Chief Administration of the Labour Camps). Throughout his long book, Solzhenitsyn is unsparing in the detail. From the techniques of arrest to the horrors of interrogation, from the ‘ships’ of the archipelago (the red-painted cattle trains that transported the prisoners) to the maps of the 202 detention camps, from the treatment of corpses to the salaries of the guards, nothing is omitted.
¹⁰⁵
He tells us how the ‘red cows,’ the cattle trucks, were prepared, with holes carved out of the floor for drainage but steel sheets nailed down all around, so no one could escape.
¹⁰⁶
We learn the name of the individual – Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel, a Turkish Jew, born near Constantinople – who first thought up the gulag.
¹⁰⁷
We learn the death rates of the various camps and are given an unsparing list of thirty-one techniques of punishment during interrogation. These include a machine for squeezing fingernails, or ‘bridling,’ in which a towel is inserted between the prisoner’s jaws like a bridle and then pulled back over his shoulders and tied to his heels, with his spine bent. The prisoner was then left for several days without food or water, sometimes having first been given a salt-water douche in the throat.
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But as Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn’s biographer, says, the book is not
just a series of lists or statistics. Solzhenitsyn re-creates a whole world, an entire culture. His tone is ironic, not self-pitying, as he gives us the jokes and the jargon of life in the camps – camps that, he tells us, varied widely, from prospecting camps to railroad-building camps, transit camps to collective labour camps, island camps to juvenile camps. He shows that people were sent to the camps for absurd reasons. Irina Tuchinskaya, for example, was charged with having ‘prayed in church for the death of Stalin,’ others for showing friendliness to the United States, or a negative attitude toward state loans. Then there is the jargon. A
dokhodyaga
is a man on his last legs, a ‘goner’;
katorga
was hard labour; everything that was constructed in camps was, they said, built with ‘fart power’;
nasedha
was ‘stool pigeon,’ and reality was deliberately reversed so that the worst camps were referred to as the most privileged.
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However, as horror is piled on horror, as page after page passes – as the weeks and months pass for those in the gulag (and this is Solzhenitsyn’s intention) – the reader gradually comes to realise that although countless millions have been murdered, the human spirit has not been killed, that hope and a black sense of humour can keep those who survive alive, not thriving exactly, but
thinking.
In one of the last chapters, describing a revolt in the Kengir camp that lasted for forty days, the reader feels like cheering, that reason and sanity and goodness can prevail, even though in the end the revolt is brutally put down, as we know it will be.
¹¹⁰
So the book, though nearly choking with bleak horrors, is not in the end an entirely bleak document, as Solzhenitsyn intended. It is a warning to all of us of what it means to lose freedom, but it is a warning to tyrants as well, that they can never hope to win in the end. The reader comes away chastened – very chastened – but not despairing. As W. L. Webb said, reviewing the book in the
Guardian,
‘To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.’
¹¹¹

The un-freedoms in the Communist world, described by Solzhenitsyn and the Medvedevs, or those which took place in the Cultural Revolution in China, were far worse than anything that occurred in the West. Their extent, the vast number of their victims, underlined the fragility of freedom, equality, and justice everywhere. And, just as the 1960s had opened with Hayek’s and Friedman’s examinations of freedom, so the decade closed with other philosophers addressing the same issues, after years of turbulence in the name of civil rights.

In his 1969 book
Four Essays on Liberty,
Isaiah Berlin
built on Hayek’s notion that, in order to be free, man needs an area of private life where he is accountable to no one, where he can he left alone, free of constraint. Born in 1909 in Riga, part of the Russian empire, Berlin had moved to Russia when he was six. In 1921 his family had moved to Britain, where he was educated at Oxford, becoming a fellow of All Souls and subsequently professor of social and political theory and founding president of Wolfson College. In his essays, Berlin made three points, the first that liberty is just that: freedom.
¹¹²
In a famous sentence, he wrote, ‘Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.’
¹¹³
Berlin was at
pains to point out that one man’s freedom may conflict with another’s; they may indeed be irreconcilable. His second and third points were that there is an important distinction between what he called ‘negative’ freedom and ‘positive’ freedom. Negative freedom is, on this analysis, ‘a certain minimum area of personal freedom which on no account must be violated; for if it is overstepped, the individual will find himself in an area too narrow for even that minimum development of his natural faculties which alone makes it possible to pursue, and even to conceive, the various ends which men hold good or right or sacred. It follows that a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of public authority…. Without adequate conditions for the use of freedom, what is the value of freedom?’
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Berlin argued that this doctrine of negative freedom is relatively modern – it does not occur in antiquity – but that the desire not to be impinged upon, to be left to oneself, ‘has been a mark of high civilisation.’ Negative freedom is important for Berlin not merely because of what it stands for but also because it is a simple notion, and therefore something men of goodwill can agree upon.

Positive freedom, on the other hand, is much more complex.
¹¹⁵
This, he says, concerns all those issues that centre around the desire of the individual ‘to be his own master.’ This concept therefore involves issues of government, of reason, of social identity (race, tribe, church), of genuine autonomy. If the only true method of attaining freedom in this sense is the use of critical reason, then all those matters that affect critical reason – history, psychology, science, for example – must come into play. And, as Berlin says, ‘all conflict, and consequently all tragedy, is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational or the insufficiently rational’; insofar as man is a social being, what he is, is, to some degree, what others think and feel him to be. It is this, he says – this failure on the part of many to be recognised for what they wish to feel themselves to be – that was ‘the heart of the great cry’ at that time on the part of certain nations, classes, professions, and races.
¹¹⁶
This is akin to freedom, he says, and it may be no less passionately needed, but it is not freedom itself. Berlin’s aim in saying all this is to underline that there can be no ‘final solution’ (his words), no final harmony ‘in which all riddles are solved, all contradictions reconciled,’ no single formula ‘whereby all the diverse ends of man can be harmoniously realised.’ Human goals are many, he says, not all commensurable, some in perpetual rivalry. This is the human condition, the background against which we must understand freedom, which can only be achieved by participation in the political system. Freedom will always be difficult to attain, so we must be crystal-clear about what it is.
¹¹⁷

Both Raymond Aron, in
Progress and Disillusion
(1968), and Herbert Marcuse, in
An Essay on Liberation
(1969), believed the 1960s to have been a crucial decade, since they had revealed science and technology as real threats to freedom, not just in the form of weapons and weapons research, which had linked so many universities to the military, but also because the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the sexual revolution in general had been underpinned by a psychological transformation.
¹¹⁸
For them the whole idea of freedom had been extended; in the third world in particular
the traditional Marxist classes still needed to be freed; the influx of Western consumer goods – aided by widespread television – was exploiting a new raft of people. At the same time, in the developed Western democracies, people – especially the young – were experiencing a new form of freedom, a personal liberation, insight into their own character as afforded by the new psychologies. Marcuse in particular looked forward to a new ‘aesthetic’ in politics, where art and the creative act would allow people greater fulfilment, producing in the process what he called ‘prettier’ societies, more beautiful countries. It was at last appropriate, he said, to speak of utopias.

An entirely different idea of freedom – what it is and what its fate is likely to be – came from Marshall McLuhan. Born in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada in 1911, he took a Ph.D. in Cambridge in 1943, working with E R. Leavis and I. A. Richards, founder of the New Criticism, which gave him an intellectual confidence from which stemmed his great originality. McLuhan’s chief interest was the effect of the new ‘electric’ media on man’s self-consciousness and behaviour, but he also thought this had important consequences for freedom. McLuhan’s notion of the individual, and his relation to society as a whole, was quite unlike anyone else’s.

For him there have been three all-important watersheds in history: the invention of the alphabet, the invention of the book, and the invention of the telegraph, the first of the electric media, though he also thought the arrival of television was another epochal event. McLuhan’s writing style was allusive, aphoristic, showing great learning but also obscure at times, meaning he was not always easy to understand. Essentially, he thought the alphabet had destroyed the world of tribal man. Tribal man was characterised by an oral culture in which all of the senses were in balance, though this world was predominantly auditory; ‘no man knew appreciably more than another.’
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‘Tribal cultures even today simply cannot comprehend the concept of the individual or of the separate and independent citizen,’ he wrote. Into this world, he said, the phonetic alphabet ‘fell like a bombshell.’ The components of the alphabet, unlike pictographs and hieroglyphics, were essentially meaningless and abstract; they ‘diminished the role of the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell’ while promoting the visual. As a result whole man became fragmented man. ‘Only alphabetic cultures have succeeded in mastering connected linear sequences as a means of social and psychic organisation.’
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He thought that tribal man was much less homogeneous than ‘civilised’ man and that the arrival of the book accelerated this process, leading to nationalism, the Reformation, ‘the assembly line and its offspring the Industrial Revolution, the whole concept of causality, Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of the universe, perspective in art, narrative chronology in literature and a psychological mode of introspection that greatly intensified the tendencies towards indivi dualism.
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But with the arrival of the electric media, McLuhan thought that this process was now going into reverse, and that we would see a revival of tribal man.

The ideas for which McLuhan became famous (or notorious, depending on your viewpoint) were ‘The medium is the message’ and his division of media
into
‘hot’
and
‘cool.’
By the former phrase he meant two things. One, as described above, that the media determine much else in life; and two, that we all share assumptions about media, that the way ‘stories,’ or ‘news,’ are reported is as important as the actual content of these events. In other words, content is only part of the story: attitudes and emotions too are carried by electric media, and it was in this sense of a collective experience that he meant a return to tribalisation.
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