Solzhenitssyn' politicapl hilosophy by PaulAvrich « The remedy invented by Lenin and Trotsky, the general suppression of democracy, is worse than the evil it is intended to cure. » ROSA LUXEMBURG, 1918 A T THE CLIMAX of The First Circle, his great novel of the purges, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the arrest in 1948 of a young Soviet diplomat named Innokenty Volodin anct hi~ imprisonment in the Liubianka, the central headquarters of the secret police in Moscow. Marched downstairs by a guard, « Inno.kenty noticed how worn the steps were. He had seen nothing like it in his life. They were now in oval hollows half a step deep, from the sides to the center. He shuddered. In thirty years how many feet must have shuffled here to wear down the stone that way. » Thirty years. In other words, since 1918. That was when it. all began - at the very outset of the Bolshevik dictatorship. Thus, with the publication of The First Circle in 1966,we already had a hint of the theme that Solzhenitzyn would develop in The Gulag Archipelago : that the system of repression began in the earliest days of the Soviet state ; that the reign of terror was not caused by the paranoia of a single tyrant but was inherent in Bolshevism itself; that Lenin (aided by Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky) was guilty of the same crimes, though on a smaller scale, as Stalin - indeed, that he laid the foundations for what was to follow ; that already in Lenin's time there were thousands of « !van Denisoviches » inhahiting the Archipelago of prisons and camps that stretched across the length and breadth of Russia. It was Lenin, says Solzhenitsyn, v;ho inaugurated the authoritarian regime tl)at Stalin was later to perfect. And his victims, beyond the landowners, officers, and bureaucrats who .103
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