Solzhenitsyn, Colson and Harvard

My head is spinning. Christianity Today, the evangelical magazine, has enlisted Chuck Colson, who went to prison as part of a corrupt U.S. administration, to write a reflection upon the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who went to prison for his critique of an oppressive Soviet regime. The result is intriguing -- Colson finds in Solzhenitsyn a soulmate of sorts, and, in particular, finds in Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard commencement address a warning of the sort of social ills that Colson, now a prominent evangelical, also abhors. An excerpt from the Christianity Today piece:

"Thirty years ago this summer, a 59-year-old bearded dissident, whose writings helped expose and eventually bring down Soviet tyranny, stood facing rows of robed faculty and graduates at Harvard's historic Yard for its 327th commencement. Expectations ran high. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was admired for his literary achievements and lionized by the faculty, if not for his outspoken views on Communism, at least for the fact that he was an oppressed intellectual. Solzhenitsyn delivered each line in his high-pitched voice in Russian. The translation blunted the impact somewhat—in fact, there were even sporadic bursts of applause. But soon enough, outraged professors realized that Solzhenitsyn was charging them with complicity in the West's surrender to liberal secularism, the abandonment of its Christian heritage, and with all the moral horrors that followed."

Colson is a Boston native and former aide to Sen. Leverett Saltonstall, R-Mass., who went on to serve as Nixon's chief counsel and was imprisoned in 1974 for Watergate-related crimes. After his release, he founded Prison Fellowship, and he has become a leading evangelical voice in the U.S.

Solzhenitsyn, who died Sunday, was a Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist who was imprisoned for his critique of Stalin and then exiled (a portion of which he spent in Vermont) upon the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago,'' which described Soviet prison and labor camps.

Colson's piece, which was written with Anne Morse, piqued my curiosity about how the Harvard speech was understood at the time, so I asked the Globe's library to pull up our coverage from 30 years ago. The speech was clearly a big deal -- an image of the front page is at left. And the speech was clearly understood much as Colson describes; the Globe's headline was "Solzhenitsyn, at Harvard, laments West's darker side,'' and the lead paragraph, written by reporter William Hamilton, says, "In his first major statement since taking up residence in the United States nearly two years ago, Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn yesterday described his new home in angry terms as a materialistic, cowardly society that has lost its spiritual direction."

Colson goes further, comparing Solzhenitsyn to the prophet Jeremiah, and suggesting that the acceptance of same-sex marriage in parts of the U.S. and the declining popular support for the Iraq War are manifestations of the moral decay Solzhenitsyn foresaw at Harvard thirty years ago. That conclusion, of course, is sure to be contested; I suppose that with Solzhenitsyn gone, the debate over his legacy begins.

UPDATE: An e-mail from Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today: "Nice post. A bit of oddness is that the piece was written about a month before Solzhenitsyn’s death and is in the issue that’s now at the printer.'' Impressive timing.

(Photo above, by UPI, shows Solzhenitsyn at Harvard on June 8, 1978.)