The Great Triumvirate Brings Down the Berlin Wall, 1989
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, John Paul II, and Ronald Reagan
The Great Triumvirate and the Fall of the Evil Empire
[Dear Substack Reader, as I approach the end of the semester, teaching American Heritage, I’m once again reminded of the beauty of romantic conservatism and its three great exemplars at the end of the Cold War: the prophet and Eastern Orthodox, Alexander Solzhenitsyn; the priest and Roman Catholic John Paul II; and the king and the Protestant Ronald Reagan. I find it no accident that these men brought down an empire using only words and examples, demanding, always, a proclamation of the dignity of the human person in all of his or her mysterious ways.
Much of this is a straightforward essay, but parts of it are explanatory notes that I threw in for convenience].
Three men at the end of the twentieth-century and beginning of the twenty-first century, two of them blatant Christian Humanists, deserve special recognition: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn; Pope John Paul II; and President Ronald Reagan. A Russian Orthodox, a Roman Catholic; and a Protestant respectively, each fought not with weapons and aggressive violence, but rather with the convictions that history, a transcendent morality, and True Love will eventually conquer all evils.
A former Communist, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn witnessed first hand the brutality of the Gulag state. Though faced with severe reprisals from the state, the betrayal of his wife to the Soviet government, eventual exile from his beloved though tortured homeland, he recorded the tyranny perpetuated by the Soviet ideologues in a number of deeply meaningful works, including the one frequently cited above, The Gulag Archipelago. More than any other work, the Gulag forced western journalists and academics to confront the monstrous realities of the Soviet Union—not just under Stalin’s Cult of Personality dictatorship, but the wretched evil that pervades the entire system. The system ran on the blood of those who deviated. From the very beginning of the Soviet takeover of Russia, the revolutionaries established the ideologically-driven police, militia, army, courts, and jails. Even the labor camps—the Gulag—began in embryo form only a month into the revolution.[1] The parasitic Soviets craved blood from 1917 to 1991; such bloodletting was an inherent part of the system. Solzhenitsyn claims that the Gulag state murdered 66 million just between 1917 and 1956.[2]
No mere anti-communist, Solzhenitsyn has attacked not just the ideological regimes of Russia and its former communist allies in Eastern Europe, but he has attacked all of modernity—in the East and the West. Western consumerism, he warns, will destroy the West by mechanizing its citizens in a more efficient and attractive manner than communism could. “Dragged along the whole of the Western bourgeois-industrial and Marxist path,” Solzhenitsyn warned,
A dozen maggots can’t go on and on gnawing the same apple forever; that if the earth is a finiteobject, then its expanses and resources are finite also, and the endless, infinite progress dinned into our heads by the dreamers of the Enlightenment cannot be accomplished on it . . . All that ‘endless progress’ turned out to be an insane, ill-considered, furious dash into a blind alley. A civilization greedy for ‘perpetual progress’ has now choked and is on its last legs.[3]
Only by embracing a transcendent order and the Creator, Solzhenitsyn has argued, can mankind save itself from the follies and murders of the ideologues.[4] In his 1983 Templeton address, he took his arguments against modernity even further.
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest of worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transition stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble or fall, nor must be linger fruitless on one rung of the ladder . . . The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when the assistance leaves us, we die. In the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.[5]
In his commentary on Solzhenitsyn’s address, Kirk argued that the above passage “expressed with high feeling [ ] the conservative impulse.”[6] Certainly, Kirk and Solzhenitsyn were kindred spirits. One should never underestimate the import of Solzhenitsyn’s moral imagination. As the leading Solzhenitsyn scholar, Edward E. Ericson, Jr., has argued: “I would say that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich put the first crack into the Berlin Wall and The Gulag Archipelago was an irresistible blow to the very foundations of the Soviet edifice.”[7]
Equally devout in his religion and equally educated, Karol Wotija was also raised under ideological systems, first National Socialism and then communism. Instrumental in the underground movements against each, Wotija was an accomplished poet, moral philosopher, priest, and theologian. He devoted his life as a bishop in Poland and as the Patriarch of the West to defeating the various ideologies of the last 100 years. His first Christmas letter to the people of Poland upheld the example of St. Stanislaw. The Pope labeled him the “patron of moral order in our country” who “did not hesitate to confront the ruler when defense of the moral order called for it.”[8] For his peaceful efforts, St. Stanislaw had been murdered, becoming a martyr. To anyone listening—and everyone in the eastern bloc was—the message was clear. In 1979, returning to his home in Poland, he spoke earth-shattering words, words that reshaped the Iron Block and became the beginning of the end of Soviet tyranny. Quoting Christ, John Paul II urged the Poles: “Be not afraid.” Act as Christ would, and know that Truth is constant. Stand for truth, and you stand for the winning side. John Paul’s words marked “the first hour of the revolution,” as Barbara Eliot has argued in her stunningly powerful history of the Velvet Revolution, Candles Behind the Wall, as they gave rise to Solidarity, the trade union that fought on Christian principles.[9]
John Paul used his trip to Poland as the beginning of a full-fledged campaign against ideological terror. Not only had he praised St. Stanislaw’s martyrdom as an act against unjust state, and quoted Christ, demanding that the forthcoming fight be one based on Christian principles of truth and love, but he also praised the twentieth-century martyr who best exemplified these Christian virtues. While visiting Auschwitz, John Paul prayed in the cell where this martyr had been injected with carbolic acid on August 14, 1941, only two weeks after being placed there. When innocent prisoner #5659 was about to be placed in Cell Block #13, the worst of all tortures prior to the invention of the gas chambers, prisoner #16670 volunteered to take his place. Stunned at the unprecedented request, the commandant acquiesced. The man who volunteered was a Roman Catholic priest, Maximilian Kolbe. Kolbe and ten others went to cell block #13. The Nazis denied the prisoners water and food, and they forced them to stand, hunched over, naked, in the dark. Their captors hoped to induce the prisoners madness. Instead, Kolbe talked of hope to the men, and, rather than madness, joy ensued. Infuriated, the commandant ordered the men injected with carbolic acid on August 14, 1941. When the first doctor approached Kolbe to inject him, Kolbe simply lifted his arm and continued to pray. Severely rattled by Kolbe’s faith and composure, the translator fled. When he returned after the injection to remove Kolbe’s body, he was stunned at what he found: “When I opened the iron door, Father Kolbe was no longer alive. His face had an unusual radiance about it. The eyes were wide open and focused on some definite point. His entire person seemed to have been in a state of ecstasy. I will never forget that scene as long as I live.”[10] John Paul II called Auschwitz the “Golgotha of the modern world. . . . built for the negation of faith—faith in God and faith in man. . . . [meant] to trample radically not only on love but on all signs of human dignity, of humanity . . . . built on hatred and contempt for man in the name of a crazed ideology.” Further, the Pope instructed the crowd gathered around him, Kolbe’s actions pointed the way, “victory through faith and love.”[11]
John Paul II served as more than an inspiring vocal counterpart to ideological terror regimes. He appointed anti-communist bishops in the eastern bloc, condemned liberation theology movements in Latin America, and condoned the non-violent actions of Catholics to thwart the schemes of the various communist regimes. Kirk called the ascendancy of John Paul II one of the ten most important world events since the French Revolution. With such a man as pope, Dr. Kirk argued, the Christians of all stripes have temporarily staved off “the Antichrist,” for he, “with few to help him, has faced down the vanguard of the world.”[12] The vanguard, the communists, especially feared John Paul II, even issuing one statement to Polish school teachers that read: “The Pope is our enemy . . . . Due to the uncommon skills and great sense of humor he is dangerous, because he charms everyone, especially journalists. Besides, he goes for cheap gestures in his relations with the crowd, for instance, puts on a highlander’s hat, shakes all hands, kisses children, etc. . . . It is modeled on American presidential campaigns.”[13] This was mild compared to many of the published propaganda from the frightened communists. Another pamphlet claimed the pope hoped to unite all Catholics around the world in a neo-fascist front to destroy the paradise of communism.[14] Though maliciously mislabeling the pope a neo-fascist, their fears were not unwarranted. In the spring of 1981, John Paul II miraculously survived the bullet of a KGB-hired assassin. The attempt on the pope’s life came only weeks after the first Vatican meeting with then-CIA director Bill Casey. Clearly, the Soviets were getting worried.
The words, message, and charisma of the pope greatly affected the third person, Ronald Reagan. After watching the televised return and speech of the pope to Poland in 1979, Reagan “said then and there that the pope was the key figure in determining the fate of Poland,” his advisor Richard Allen recalls. “He was overcome by the outpouring of emotion that emanated from the millions who came to see him. There were tears in his [Reagan’s] eyes.”[15] Three years later, in June 1982, the president met with the Pope and confided in him that though each had almost been assassinated in the spring of 1981, “each had been spared by God, for a purpose.” Together, they were to free Poland.[16]
[A quick look back at Ronald Reagan’s anti-communism--
Early 1960s: started outlining ways to defeat the Soviets without war
1968: Speech, What Price Peace?
1977: “My theory of the Cold War is, we win and they lose. What do you think about that?” Reagan to Dick Allen, 1977. [“Interview with Richard V. Allen,” May 28, 2002, Charlottesville, VA, Ronald Reagan Oral History Project, University of Virginia, 26]
“Reagan went right to the heart of the matter. Utilizing American values, strength, and creativity, he believed we could outdistance the Soviets and cause them to withdraw from the Cold War, or perhaps even to collapse. Herein lay the great difference, back in early 1977, between Reagan and every other politician: He literally believed we could win, and was prepared to carry this message to the nation as the intellectual foundation of a presidency.” [Allen, “Ronald Reagan,” in The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 52]
“These themes never varied in the essentials, primarily because he was the principal author of everything he said, and he would never say anything with which he disagreed.” [Allen, “Ronald Reagan,” in The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 53]
1978 Trip to Berlin:
“One aspect of that travel was his first visit to Germany, in December 1978 . . . . Another of the Reagan administrations most dramatic policy initiatives--the Reagan Doctrine to roll back communism--was also born on that 1978 trip. It was in Berlin. The Reagans, Peter Hannaford, our wives, and I and a nervous fellow from our con-[7] sulate passed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin to the Alexanderplatz, a prominent spot. We got out of the car and began to walk around. At that moment, an incident occurred that set Ronald Reagan’s blood to boiling. Two East German volkspolizei had stopped a shopper. They made him place his bags on the ground and produce his identification; then they searched his bags. Reagan was livid, and muttered that this was an outrage. It was clear from his reaction that he was determined to one day go about removing such a system. On our return toward West Berlin, we traveled by several points of the Wall, including a spot where an incident had occurred several years before. It involved a young boy who succeeded in passing through the first set of barriers surrounding the Wall, but became entangled in barbed wire. His comrades had escaped ahead of him into West Berlin, but this boy, Peter Fechter, being the last over, was detected by searchlights and shot by an East German guard. He stayed on that fence for some hours before he died and his body was removed. Ronald Reagan listened to [t]his episode with fascination and, again, anger whirled within him. It was clear he placed a high priority on seeing that Wall come down one day.” [Richard V. Allen in Hannaford, ed., Recollections of Reagan, 7-8]
Summer 1979: After watching the televised return and speech of the pope to Poland in 1979, Reagan “said then and there that the pope was the key figure in determining the fate of Poland,” his advisor Richard Allen recalls. “He was overcome by the outpouring of emotion that emanated from the millions who came to see him. There were tears in his [Reagan’s] eyes.”[17]
1980 Interview with National Journal:
“I think that the Soviet intentions are exactly what they’ve always said they are. The ultimate goal is a one-world state in which the entire world adopts Marxism, Communism. And they’ve said it repeatedly, every Russian leader has said that and has never retreated from that position: to support socialist revolutions wherever they take place in the world. But the trouble is they’re going out there make them take place.” [“Reagan: ‘It Isn’t Only Washington That Has a Compassionate Heart,’” National Journal (March 8, 1980): 391.]
“Well, we’ve got a couple of things, and certainly a defensive weapon. Before I am too pessimistic, let me again reiterate that I believe the Soviet Union is not going to move unless they have far more strength than they now have. I could be wrong; I don’t think so. But let me give you a strategic plan for the Soviet Union. They have picked off Central Europe--Easter Europe is gone already--and they have moved down into Africa. They have shown the intention of moving forward and have made some steps toward Latin America. The idea is to isolate and leave us, as I say, the last domino, the last bastion of capitalism in the world. But they don’t want to blow us up. They want what we have. They can say, ‘Look, fellows, we’re not going to send the bombers over and everything. We just want some agreements from you, and here’s what they are.’ Now, I don’t think the Soviet Union has the margin they want to deliver that kind of ultimatum--surrender or die. And as long as they feel that way, I think we still have some time if we start now and move as fast as we can move. The Soviet Union, I believe, is up to its maximum ability in developing arms. Their people are denied many consumer products because it is all going into the military. They know that if we turned our full industrial might into an arms race, they cannot keep pace with us. Why haven’t we played that card? Why haven’t we said to them when we’re sitting a the SALT table, ‘Gentlemen, the only alternative to you being willing to meet us halfway on these things is an arms race’? And maybe we wouldn’t have to have the arms race because that the last thing they want us to do.” [“Reagan: ‘It Isn’t Only Washington That Has a Compassionate Heart,’” National Journal (March 8, 1980): 392.]
As President
Anti-communist since the 1940s, dealing with Communists in Hollywood.
Caspar Weinberger, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense: “Our military buildup during the Reagan administration would be the most important part of our foreign policy, which had essentially four major goals. The most basic, of course, was to protect our national security—our physical borders, our citizens, and our interests abroad. Protecting our allies was essentially an extension of this policy, as peace-loving nations contribute to regional and global stability. We would always need to convince our friends and allies that our interests were mutual and that we were reliable partners. Taking this strategy one step further, our third goal was to encourage countries trying to get out from under the yoke of Soviet Communism. Our fourth major policy goal, about which President Reagan felt passionate, was to bring the Soviets to the bargaining table and achieve real nuclear arms reductions. Our major military buildup was instrumental in making that happen. This seemed paradoxical to some, but if we did not have real strength, the Soviets would never even talk to us. For peace can come only to those who are strong and determined enough to fight for it. The president and I rejected detente, which argued that we should accept the Soviet Union as merely having a different political outlook. I thought President Reagan's definition of detent was more accurate: ‘a French word the Russians had interpreted as a freedom to pursue whatever policies of subversion, aggression, and expansionism they wanted anywhere in the world.’ The president and I wanted to roll back Communism so that the people of Eastern Europe and elsewhere could breathe free. Poland’s Solidarity movement provided the first opportunity to do this in the new administration.” [Weinberger, In the Arena, 278]]
Reagan attacked the Soviet empire on a number of fronts: politically, economically, and militarily (through the arms buildup). His most effective attack, however, was rhetorical. Ronald Reagan argued for a transcendent morality, backing it up with force, understanding the ideological thugs well. In 1981, his first public appearance after the failed assassination attempt, he told the graduating class at the University of Notre Dame: “The West won’t contain communism. It will transcend communism. It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”
Here's the end of the speech:
At Notre Dame, May 17, 1981:
‘We need you. We need your youth. We need your strength. We need your idealism to help us make right that which is wrong. Now, I know that this period of your life, you have been and are critically looking at the mores and customs of the past and questioning their value. Every generation does that. May I suggest, don't discard the time-tested values upon which civilization was built simply because they're old. More important, don't let today's doomcriers and cynics persuade you that the best is past, that from here on it's all downhill. Each generation sees farther than the generation that preceded it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. . . . .
The years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization. The West won't contain communism, it will transcend communism. It won't bother to dismiss or denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.
William Faulkner, at a Nobel Prize ceremony some time back, said man ``would not only [merely] endure: he will prevail'' against the modern world because he will return to ``the old verities and truths of the heart.'' And then Faulkner said of man, ``He is immortal because he alone among creatures . . . has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.''
One can't say those words -- compassion, sacrifice, and endurance -- without thinking of the irony that one who so exemplifies them, Pope John Paul II, a man of peace and goodness, an inspiration to the world, would be struck by a bullet from a man towards whom he could only feel compassion and love. It was Pope John Paul II who warned in last year's encyclical on mercy and justice against certain economic theories that use the rhetoric of class struggle to justify injustice. He said, ``In the name of an alleged justice the neighbor is sometimes destroyed, killed, deprived of liberty or stripped of fundamental human rights.''
For the West, for America, the time has come to dare to show to the world that our civilized ideas, our traditions, our values, are not -- like the ideology and war machine of totalitarian societies -- just a facade of strength. It is time for the world to know our intellectual and spiritual values are rooted in the source of all strength, a belief in a Supreme Being, and a law higher than our own.
When it's written, history of our time won't dwell long on the hardships of the recent past. But history will ask -- and our answer determine the fate of freedom for a thousand years -- Did a nation borne of hope lose hope? Did a people forged by courage find courage wanting? Did a generation steeled by hard war and a harsh peace forsake honor at the moment of great climactic struggle for the human spirit?”’
American journalists mocked or ignored Reagan’s Notre Dame speech, but the Soviets were more astute.
TASS response: TASS: “Pravda today dismissed President Reagan’s statement that communism is a dying political philosophy and compared his administration to medieval crusaders. The Communist Party newspaper was commenting on Reagan's May 17 speech at Notre Dame University in which he said, ‘The West will not contain communism, it will transcend communism.’ The president called communism ‘a sad bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.’ The response from Pravda said, ‘This is not the first time that prophets foretelling the imminent death of communism emerge in the West. The anti-communist crusade which began in 1917 has always featured fanaticism characteristic of medieval crusaders rather than rational thinking. The Reagan administration also bears the mark of such fanaticism.’” [“Pravda Likens Reagan to Medieval Crusaders,” UPI (June 3, 1981)]
“In response to questions, Reagan contended: The situation in Poland ‘is to be quite tense for some time now,’ because ‘the Soviet Union is faced with a problem of this crack in their once Iron Curtain and what happens if they let it go.’ . . . The first question at the news conference, the third Reagan has held since taking office, dealt with a statement he made at his Notre Dame Commencement speech last month when he said that ‘Western civilization will transcend communism,’ which he referred to as ‘a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.’ Reagan was asked whether he related this to Poland. He replied: ‘. . . I think the things we're seeing, not only in Poland, but the reports that are beginning to come out of Russia itself about the younger generation and its resistance to long-time government controls, is an indication that communism is an aberration, it's not a normal way of living for human beings, and I think we are seeing the first cracks, the beginning of the end," Reagan said. Reagan also was asked why he had not made a major foreign policy speech, as has been suggested to him by some of his aides. The aides proposed that he make the address at the commencement exercises at both Notre Dame and the U.S. Military Academy. Reagan rejected the idea. Reagan in response detailed a number of foreign policy meetings between members of his administration and various foreign leaders. ‘I don’t necessarily believe that you must, to have a foreign policy, stand up and make a wide declaration that this is your foreign policy,’ he said.” [Lou Cannon, “President Expresses Sympathy for Israel on Raid against Iraq,” Washington Post (June 17, 1981), pg. A1]
In 1983, Reagan upped the ante before a group of American evangelicals: The cold war is “a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil. . . . pray for the salvation of all those who live in totalitarian darkness [that] they will discover the joy of knowing God.” He labeled the Soviet regime an “evil empire,” and the press had a field day, claiming Reagan to be a moron. But Reagan’s greatest challenge came in 1987, standing before the Brandenburg Gate: “General Secretary Gorbachev. . . . Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”[18] Reagan, the eternal optimist, almost alone among westerners believed the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse. Even his own advisors strongly disagreed with his views, and especially his rhetoric—which they considered a bizarre combination of strength and naivety. But Reagan was sure, as truth was truth, and lies ultimately destroy themselves.
Inspired the by truths and convictions professed by Solzhenitsyn, John Paul II, and Reagan, Eastern Europeans launched one of the most successful and quiet revolutions in world history, exactly two hundred years after the French Revolution began. With John Paul II’s 1979 trip to Poland, the anti-communist underground grew in numbers and purpose. Its members would fight communism, but, like Maximilian Kolbe, peacefully, armed only with the truth. As John Paul the II wrote after the collapse: “The fall of this kind of ‘bloc’ or empire was accomplished almost everywhere by means of peaceful protest, using only the weapons of truth and justice” and sought “to reawaken” in the ideologue “a sense of shared human dignity.”[19] Truth is truth—it can be obscured, hidden, or misplaced, but it cannot be destroyed. It only awaits to be called upon and recovered.
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1989: An Annus Mirabilis in World History
Soviets had planned world-wide celebrations to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution
April: Poland announced free elections
May 2: Hungary opened its borders to West Germany and Austria
June: Hungarians reburied Imre Nagy and martyrs of the 1956 revolt
September 12: Poland’s first non-communist party elected
October: Hungarian Communist Party disbanded
October 16-20: Hungarian government reformed as representative democracy
November 4: Demonstrations began in East Germany
November 9: After the protestors circled the extant medieval walls of Leipzig seven times, Hoenecker resigned and sought refuge with the Lutheran minister he had tortured
December 3: President Bush and Premier Gorbachev declare Cold War over at Malta Conference
December: Romanian leader Ceausescu arrested Lazlo Tokes, a prominent Calvinist minister
December 15: Timisoara (Romania) massacre
December 22: Baptist minister Peter Dugulescu led counter demonstration: “God exists!”
December 24: Ceausescu arrested and executed
December 25: Romania celebrated death of the “Anti-Christ”
[1] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag, vol. 2, 9-10.
[2] Solzhenitsyn,The Gulag, vols. 2, 10.
[3] Quoted in Joseph Pearce’s excellent biography, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker House, 2001), 204-5.
[4] For Solzhenitsyn’s vital role in the fall of communism, see Pearce, Solzhenitsyn; and Edward E. Ericson, Jr., “The Gulag Archipelago a Generation Later,” Modern Age 44 (Spring 2002): 147-61.
[5] Quoted in Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, 40-41.
[6] Quoted in Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, 40.
[7] Edward E. Ericson, Jr., “Solzhenitsyn, The Moral Imagination, and the Collapse of Communism,” unpublished paper in possession of the author, delivered September 20, 2003, at the Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, Mecosta, Michigan. My deep appreciation to Dr. Ericson for sharing his wisdom with me.
[8] Quoted in George Weigel, Witness to Hope, 297.
[9] Barbara [Von der Heydt] Eliot, Candles Behind the Wall: Heroes of the Peaceful Revolution That Shattered Communism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdman’s, 1993), 120.
[10]Quoted in Robert Royal, Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 192-215.
[11] Quoted in Weigel, Witness to Hope, 315.
[12] Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, 41.
[13] Quoted in Weigel, Witness to Hope, 304.
[14] Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994), 36-7.
[15] Quoted in Schweizer, Victory, 35-6.
[16] Schweizer, Victory, 107.
[17] Quoted in Schweizer, Victory, 35-6.
[18] The three previous quotes are from Dinesh D’Souza, Ronald Reagan.
[19] John Paul II, On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum (Paulist Press), 35.
I remember that year, and I couldn't believe it was actually happening. I was born the year the Berlin Wall went up, and I never thought I would see it come down.