Subsidiarity and Solzhenitsyn 'A Prophet Restored'

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Drawing on these and earlier works, Mahoney makes a convincing case that the image of Solzhenitsyn constructed over the past four decades is a grossly distorted one. Mahoney shows, for example, that Solzhenitsyn was anything but anti-democratic. Rather, he was an advocate of “democracy in small spaces,” who urged Russians to establish democratic self-governance from the bottom up. As worthy examples of this model, Solzhenitsyn pointed to the local governing practices of Switzerland and New England, both of which he had witnessed firsthand. In addition to these models, he urged Russians to look to their own zemstvos—the small governing councils of local Russian provinces in the nineteenth century. “I have always insisted on local self-governance in Russia,” Solzhenitsyn asserted in an interview in Der Spiegel a year before his death.

Given this view of democracy, it is not surprising that the Russian Orthodox believer was an admirer of Catholic social teaching and of Pope John Paul II, whom he met in 1993 and whose election in 1978 he had described as “a gift from God.” Solzhenitsyn’s view of democracy (and his criticisms of both industrial capitalism and socialism) was actually very much in keeping with the subsidiarity principle of Catholic social teaching and the distributist ideals advocated by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. While Mahoney touches on these “small is beautiful” themes, the affinities between Solzhenitsyn’s views, Catholic social teachings (beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum), and the writings of the English distributists are developed more fully in Joseph Pearce’s biography, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile.

http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2015_Summer_Nolan.php