Solzhenitsyn and Freedom of the Press

A curious feature of Solzhenitsyn’s Commencement Speech at Harvard (National Review, July 7, 1978) is its attack on freedom of the press. The untoward liberties that American journalists are known to take have been shocking to Solzhenitsyn, and he responds with something between petulance and indignation. He leaves his listeners uncertain whether he has really thought about, or understood, the interdependence of liberties and liberty as such. And in contrasting Soviet repression with American freedom, he exhibits what must strike his listeners as a weird nostalgia for one element in the Soviet system: By what law has [the American press] been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?

In the East the press is censored but at any rate knows its place; in the West it is responsible to no one, and has become an ungovernable power. “Legally,” Solzhenitsyn adds, “your researches are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however,”—in short, the violence we do to freedom is better concealed but equally pervasive, and Solzhenitsyn has come to tear away the veil. H’s iconoclasm, however, is less original than he supposes: a decade ago we heard exactly the same criticism o...