PAUL AVRICH « What's that ? » asks Kostoglotov. « Ethics first and economics afterwards ? » « Exactly, » replies Shulubin. Shulubin sees fit to mention Lenin only once, quoting his defense of equal incomes in the April Theses, which Lenin proceeded to violate the moment he carne to power : « Are you familiar with the April Theses ? There's one point I remember. It runs - No official should receive a salary higher than the average pay of a good worker. - That's what they began the Revolution with. » If these sentiments reflect Solzhenitsyn's own thinking, as they indeed appear to do, then he is an exponent of ethical socialism as opposed the amoral revolutionism of the Bolsheviks. He ranges himself with Herzen and Kropotkin against Lenin, and their like, who, as Kropotkin observed, failed to inspire a trúe social revolution because they lacked a genuine socialist morality. He sees the Bolsheviks, in effect, as heirs to the tradition of Nechaev, for whom expediency overrode all ethical considerations and for whom decency, honor, and integrity must be cast aside in the name of revolutionary necessity. Solzhenitsyn has no use for Maoist Red Guards or such groups as Black September, which have employed indiscriminate terror and have subordinated means to ends in the name of their particular cause. For Solzhenitsyn, as for Kropotkin, means must be consistent with ends. In his Nobel Lecture of 1970 he denounces the methods of terrorism, blackmail, and torture, of kidnapping and the taking of hostages, as Kropotkin had done fifty years before. « Violence, » he declares, « brazenly and victoriously strides through the world, unconcerned that its futility has been demonstrated and exposed by history many times. It is not simply naked force that triumphs but its trumpeted justification: the whole world overflows with the brazen conviction that force can do everything and justice nothing. Dostoevsky's Demons, a provincial nightmare of the last century, one would have thought, are, before our very eyes, crawling over the whole world into countries where they were unimaginable, and by the hijacking of planes, by seizing HOSTAGES, by the bomb explosions, and by the fires of recent years, signal their determination to shake civilization apart and to annihilate it ! To such « violence and lying » Solzhenitsyn opposes « the steadfastness of good » and « the indivisibility of truth. » It is the duty of writers and artists to tell the truth, he declares, for « one word of truth outweighs the world. ~ One must not try to reconcile « the white rose of truth with the black toad of villainy. » « And they may very well succeed. Young people, being at an age when they have no experience 1.10
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