Jordan B. Peterson quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as saying that “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” After viewing most of Peterson’s Biblical Series, I remembered that I had a copy of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago , which includes Parts I and II, and decided it was high time to read at least that much.

Here is a rather chilling passage (from Part I, pp. 173-175) in which Solzhenitsyn probes the relationship between ideology and evil.  After describing NKVD director Genrikh Yagoda‘s use of ikons for target practice, Solzhenitsyn goes on:  

“Just how are we to understand that?  As the act of an evildoer?  What sort of behavior is it?  Do such people really exist?

“We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any.  It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple.  But when the great world literature of the past — Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens — inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception.  The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured.  They recognize themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black.  And they reason: ‘I cannot live unless I do evil. So I’ll set my father against my brother! I’ll drink the victim’s suffering until I am drunk with them!’  Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate.

“But no; that’s not the way it is!  To do evil a human must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.  Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble — and his conscience devoured him.  The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses.  Because they had no ideology.

“Ideology — that’s what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.  That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.  That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late) by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

“Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.  This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed.  How, then do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist?  And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

“There was a rumor going the rounds between 1918 and 1920 that the Petrograd Cheka, headed by Uritsky, and the Odessa Cheka, headed by Deich, did not shoot all those condemned to death but fed some of them alive to the animals in the city zoos.  I do not know whether this is truth or calumny, or, if there were any such cases, how many there were.  Following the practice of the bluecaps [the uniformed sections of the NKVD wore blue caps…], I would propose that they prove to us that this was impossible.  How else could they get food for the zoos in those famine years?  Take t away from the working class?  Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn’t their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the future?  Wasn’t it expedient?

“That is precisely the line the Shakespearean evildoer could not cross.  But the evildoer does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.

“Physics is aware of phenomena that occur only at threshold magnitudes, which do not exist until a certain threshold encoded by and known to nature has been crossed.  No matter how intense a yellow light you shine on a lithium sample, it will not emit electrons.  But as soon as a weak bluish light begins to glow, it does emit them.  (The threshold of the photoelectric effect has been crossed.)  You can cool oxygen to 100 degrees below zero Centigrade and exert as much pressure as you want; it does not yield, but remains a gas.  But as soon as 183 degrees is reached, it liquefies and begins to flow.

“Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude.  Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life.  He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again.  But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope.  But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.”

For more information: 

On the cities of Petrograd and Odessa, click here, and here; 

On the Cheka, click here; 

On Uritsky, click here; as to Deich, the only person I could find by that name who was involved in the Russian Revolution is Lev Deich (click here)– though he seems to have been a writer/journalist rather than Chekist, so maybe someone who knows the history better than I do can help here?