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IT IS SAID of the Russian character that the ego is ever willing to vault across society, seeing itself as the universe. “I” becomes “We.” The gibe misses a lot, but helps us to understand the moral vision of Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the core of Edward Ericson’s meticulous new study. Solzhenitsyn’s “We” are the people, not the wilted clichés of socialist cant, but the millions smeared by modern history and the spiritual sterility of modern life. That smearing has extended from Russia to the West, where Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis of modernity’s fatal flaw—its “consciousness lacking all divine dimension”—has been dismissed as the ranting of an alien and a crank. Ericson’s task is to rescue Solzhenitsyn from his critics; his defense is constructed on the most painstaking examination of Solzhenitsyn’s moral, philosophical, and political tracts yet published. Democrat or demagogue? The debate about Solzhenitsyn’s political instincts is ended by Ericson’s scholarship. Faith is the source of Solzhenitsyn’s democratic politics. Without it, “you have only a petty liberty that is only a caricature . . . Nobody is prepared to die for that.” Authentic “human freedom is inner freedom, given to us by God: freedom to decide upon our own acts, as well as moral responsibility for them.” —Kenneth Murphy

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

IT IS SAID of the Russian character that the ego is ever willing to vault across society, seeing itself as the universe. “I” becomes “We.” The gibe misses a lot, but helps us to understand the moral vision of Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the core of Edward Ericson’s meticulous new study. Solzhenitsyn’s “We” are the people, not the wilted clichés of socialist cant, but the millions smeared by modern history and the spiritual sterility of modern life. That smearing has extended from Russia to the West, where Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis of modernity’s fatal flaw—its “consciousness lacking all divine dimension”—has been dismissed as the ranting of an alien and a crank. Ericson’s task is to rescue Solzhenitsyn from his critics; his defense is constructed on the most painstaking examination of Solzhenitsyn’s moral, philosophical, and political tracts yet published. Democrat or demagogue? The debate about Solzhenitsyn’s political instincts is ended by Ericson’s scholarship. Faith is the source of Solzhenitsyn’s democratic politics. Without it, “you have only a petty liberty that is only a caricature . . . Nobody is prepared to die for that.” Authentic “human freedom is inner freedom, given to us by God: freedom to decide upon our own acts, as well as moral responsibility for them.” —Kenneth Murphy

JOURNALISM LETTERS