On June 8, 1978, Harvard University invited the Soviet dissident Alexander Sultzhenitsyn to deliver a major commencement address.

Sultzhenitsyn was, by this time, a world-famous figure.

He had won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970.

Some two and a half decades earlier, while serving in the Soviet army during World War II,

he was arrested and sent to the Gulag, a Soviet prison camp, for criticizing the Soviet premier,

Joseph Stalin, in a private letter. He was imprisoned there for nearly a decade, a decade during which he

underwent profound, spiritual, religious, philosophical reorientation, and awakening,

eventually reflecting on his experiences in a major study of the Soviet gulag system, the Gulag

archipelago. In time he was freed from the camp, but exiled from the Soviet Union, he settled in America,

and there was thought perhaps to be a valuable critic of the Soviet system. Of course,

critic he was. But the fact that he was a critic of Soviet repression and the sole deforming

debasement that Russians were forced to endure did not necessarily mean that he would endorse the

American system in which he had so recently found his freedom.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. When Harvard invited Sulzhenitsyn

to address their graduating classes that year, I'm not sure they were expecting so thoroughgoing

a critique, civic, philosophical, moral,

as the one he delivered. Now, America has always benefited from the observations of penetrating

thinkers, from other countries, people who see us as we are. Tocqueville remains the unsurpassed

friendly critic of the American way of life, and Solzhenitsyn's

Jeremiah at Harvard can be read in a similar spirit, warning us about deep-seated tendencies,

habits of mind and heart, leading America into the very sort of societal sickness from which he

had just escaped. This week, as students return to campus, we bring to mind Sultzhenitsyn's analysis of

...