Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the most important Soviet dissident, but his message was accessible to all. On the day before he was sent into exile in 1974, he published a short essay entitled “Live Not By Lies.” It only takes him a few pages to lay out the most effective strategy for resisting totalitarianism.

As Solzhenitsyn well knew, ordinary people often feel that they are too weak to make any difference in a corrupt world. When all the powers of government are arrayed in the service of oppression, the lone citizen truly seems powerless. If they speak up, they might miss out on a job, an education, or social acceptance. So they remain silent—after all, what difference does a single voice make?

More than you might think, said Solzhenitsyn. For though the regime is powerful, its power does not rest on military might. Instead, it comes from lies.

Solzhenitsyn saw that though a revolution might rely on physical force, violence is not enough to maintain its power. As he put it:

Violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.

The Revolution can only be continued if everyone lies. In the Soviet Union, lies often came in the form of Marxist slogans: Workers of the World, Unite! Even though common people had no interest in uniting with the workers of Algeria, the United States, or Brazil, they shouted the slogans in order to stay safe. And when everyone moved in lockstep, the system seemed impenetrable. So much so that the Soviet authorities were able to force compliance with truly bizarre doctrines like Lysenkoism.

Lysenkoism was the political/scientific project of Trofim Lysenko, who probably killed more people than any scientist in human history. He did so by rejecting any scientific theories that conflicted with Marxist doctrine.

Lysenko was a biologist who denied the existence of genes. He did so because genes encode stable characteristics that are passed down from one generation of living things to the next. In his view, this contradicted the Marxist ideal of Revolution.

Marx believed that when capitalism died, socialism would produce a “new man,” ushering in a new age. Lysenko translated this idea into the field of biology, arguing that organisms are only shaped by their environment. For example, he thought that by manipulating the environmental conditions that seeds are exposed to, you could even grow orange trees in Siberia.

His ideas were so popular that Stalin empowered him to lead the “modernization” of agriculture in the Ukraine, where forced collectivization had already murdered millions of people. On Lysenko’s decree, farmers were ordered to plant seeds very close together. As he saw it, seeds from the same species wouldn’t compete against one another. Much like the proletariat, they were destined for cooperation. He also prohibited fertilizer and pesticides.

The results were predictable: mass starvation. Even after the Soviets grew farm acreage 163 times, food production hadn’t reached pre-collectivization levels.

Yet that wasn’t the end of Lysenko’s career. Because his ideas aligned with party orthodoxy, they weren’t criticized. In fact, hundreds of scientists were sent to prisons, asylums, and firing squads for defending genetics. The country’s genetics researchers were once among the world’s finest, but no matter: The Revolution required a full commitment.

By the 1950s, communist China adopted Lysenkoism as its official agricultural doctrine. Thirty million people starved to death as a result. But that wasn’t enough to stop Soviet satellites like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic from having to accept Lysenkoism as the “new biology.”

Soviet lies like Lysenkoism give Solzhenitsyn’s program of resistance its special edge. If the regime rules through falsehood, then there is no end to the damage it can do. Yet by the same token, totalitarian dictatorships cannot survive if people stop lying. As Solzhenitsyn said: “When people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.”

Of course, it’s impossible to read about the Soviets’ sacrificing biology to political ideology without thinking of the experts who claim to follow the science but can’t tell us what a woman is. People who undergo gender transition surgery are 12 times as likely to attempt suicide as those who do not, but this fact is inconvenient for the Revolution.

Much as in Solzhenitsyn’s day, powerful institutions—both nominally public and nominally private—are arrayed against the truth.  We face the challenge he posed in 1974:

Let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?

—

Image credit: public domain (Lysenko); public domain (Solzhenitsyn)