Live Not by Lies

communist regimes were guilty of metaphysical ketman. In fact, says Miłosz, it represents the ultimate victory of the Big Lie over the individual’s soul.
Under the emerging tyranny of wokeness, conservatives, including conservative Christians, learn to practice one or more forms of ketman. The ones who are most deeply deceived are those who convince themselves that they can live honestly within woke systems by outwardly conforming and learning how to adapt their convictions to the new order. Miłosz had their number: “They swindle the devil who thinks he is swindling them. But the devil knows what they think and is satisfied.”8
Living in Truth
On the day of his Moscow arrest—February 12, 1974—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published what would be his final message to the Russian people before the government exiled him to the West. In the title of the exhortation, he urged the Russian people to “live not by lies!”9
What did it mean to live by lies? It meant, Solzhenitsyn writes, accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm—or at least not to oppose—to get along peaceably under totalitarianism. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform, says Solzhenitsyn, and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all the other lies their malign force. The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.
“We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready,” he writes. “But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!”
For example, says Solzhenitsyn, a man who refuses to live by lies:
Will not say, write, affirm, or distribute anything that distorts the truth
Will not go to a demonstration or participate in a collective action unless he truly believes in the cause
Will not take part in a meeting in which the discussion is forced and no one can speak the truth
Will not vote for a candidate or proposal he considers to be “dubious or unworthy”
Will walk out of an event “as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda”
Will not support journalism that “distorts or hides the underlying facts”
“This is by no means an exhaustive list of the possible and necessary ways of evading lies,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “But he who begins to cleanse himself will, with a cleansed eye, easily discern yet other opportunities.”10
The task of the Christian dissident today is to personally commit herself to live not by lies. How can she do that alone? She needs to draw close to authentic spiritual leadership—clerical, lay, or both—and form small cells of fellow believers with whom she can pray, sing, study Scripture, and read other books important to their mission. With her cell, the dissident discusses the issues and challenges facing them as Christians, especially challenges to their liberties. They employ the Kolaković method of See, Judge, Act. That is, identify the challenge, discern together its meaning, then act on your conclusions.
In the long term, today’s Christian dissidents must come to think of themselves as heirs to Father Kolaković’s Family, spreading the movement throughout the country and helping sympathetic believers prepare for days of suffering and resistance ahead. Soft totalitarianism is coming. As we will see in the next chapter, the groundwork has already been laid.

CHAPTER TWO Our Pre-Totalitarian Culture
All the young are candidates for the solutions of communism or fascism when there are no alternatives to despair or dissipation.
NADINE GORDIMER1
At dinner in a Russian Orthodox family’s apartment in the Moscow suburbs, I was shaken by our table talk of Soviet oppression through which the father and mother of the household had lived. “I don’t understand how anybody could have believed what the Bolsheviks promised,” I said glibly.
“You don’t understand it?” said the father at the head of the table. “Let me explain it to you.” He then launched into a three-hundred-year historical review that ended with the 1917 Revolution. It was a pitiless tale of rich and powerful elites, including church bureaucrats, treating peasants little better than animals.
“The Bolsheviks were evil,” the father said. “But you can see where they came from.”
The Russian man was right. I was chastened. The cruelty, the injustice, the implacability, and at times the sheer stupidity of the imperial Russian government and social order in no way justifies all that followed—but it does explain why the revolutionary Russian generation was so eager to place its hope in communism. It promised a road out of the muck and misery that had been the lot of the victimized Russian peasant since time out of mind.
The history of Russia on the verge of left-wing revolution is more relevant to contemporary America than most of us realize.
The Russia in which communism appeared had become a world power under the reign of the Romanov dynasty, but as the empire limped toward the twentieth century, it was falling apart. Though its rivals were fast industrializing, Russia’s agricultural economy and its peasantry remained mired in backwardness. A severe famine in 1891 shook the nation to the core and revealed the weakness of the tsarist system, which failed miserably to respond to the crisis. A young monarch, Nicholas II, came to power in 1894, but he proved incapable of meeting the agonizing challenges facing his government.
Past attempts to radicalize the peasantry went nowhere in the face of its profound conservatism. But by century’s end, industrialization had created a large urban underclass of laborers who were cut off from their villages and thus from the traditions and religious beliefs that bound them. The laborers dwelled in misery in the cities, exploited by factory owners and unrelieved by the tsar. Calls for reform of the imperial structure—including the ossified Russian Orthodox Church—went ignored.
Few in Russian