21 September 2013
Good Afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen!
Please allow me to before all else say thank you to the House of Terror and its Director Mária Schmidt for making this exhibition possible. I would next like to thank the esteemed author [Solzhenitsyn biographer Ludmila Saraskina, Ed.] for having honoured us by travelling here from Moscow and holding an extremely interesting lecture. We have found out many things about Solzhenitsyn, of course, but what is even more important perhaps is what we have discovered about the intellectual environment in which Russian people live today. And so we are grateful to Ms. Saraskina for, even if for just a moment, having opened for us a window onto the arena of the intellectual debates of modern Russia.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
I have thought much about whether there is any point in my speaking at an opening ceremony among experts, biographers and an acknowledged historian. After all, what can a poor Prime Minister add to what is spoken here? But then I thought that perhaps even more important than my speech is the fact that the Prime Minister of Hungary is present at this exhibition, because it provides us with the opportunity, and I would ask Ms. Saraskina to, if possible, pass on these thoughts to Solzhenitsyn's widow, for me to express in the name of the Hungarian people our gratitude and deep respect for everything that Solzhenitsyn also did for us, the Hungarians. This perhaps justifies my speaking here today. I have prepared a few thoughts, since I have been invited and duly accepted the invitation, and if you will allow me I would like to open this exhibition with these few thoughts.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
The image of the samizdat publications of Solzhenitsyn's works wrapped in newspaper being passed from person to person in secret in the eighties and nineties is familiar to many of us. When we read them, we felt as if we had awoken from a terribly long dream, and the truth that became clear before us was more horrible than we hade dared to imagine. Solzhenitsyn didn't simply expose the brutality of the communist terror, he became the chronicler of those people, including hundreds of thousands of Hungarians, who no longer had the opportunity to return from the house of the dead and tell their own stories. His books were the cure for the malignant, cancerous growth that the socialist system of ideals had become, and which by the end of the seventies was causing metastases in almost one sixth of the world, killing almost one-hundred million people. Solzhenitsyn's pen was driven by a sense of duty towards the dead and a sense of responsibility towards the living. This same force brought about the House of Terror Museum in Hungary in 2002, which now gives home to this unique exhibition.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
As we have perhaps read on the banner outside: One word of truth outweighs the whole world. If there is a people that understands the truth in this statement then it is the Hungarian people of the 1956 revolution. The task of this House, as a space for remembrance, is to reveal to us the truth about the past and confront us with what it is like when an ideal, a regime, tries to build on the bad within people while promising the greatest good.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Solzhenitsyn was a relentless critic of communism, but in fact he opposed all world views that attempted through any means to strip people of their very essence: humanity. The fire of the Old Testament prophets burned within him, who spoke the truth even if no one in their own land listened to them and if the punishment was prison, exile or death. To Solzhenitsyn, Christianity meant not only the acceptance of suffering, but also raising the injustice behind the suffering and putting it to question. Let's face it, many people today think that Christian behaviour is all about the image of turning the other cheek when we are struck. This is only part of the truth, because the Christian approach also includes the words with which we ask those who strike us for no reason, and I quote: "If I have spoken evil, bear witness to the evil; but if I spoke the truth, why do you strike me?" Solzhenitsyn did not accept the punishment that he received because he, a decorated hero of the Second World War, called Stalin what he really was, if I am reading the translation correctly then a gang master, what we would today call a gang leader. He knew that only those who are capable of putting the question "If I spoke the truth, why do you strike me?" in any situation can be regarded as being free.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
It would seem that for Solzhenitsyn this feeling of freedom was also the result of his feelings of responsibility towards his homeland. He knew that no one can be a prophet in their own land, as Ms. Saraskina proved to us earlier with her quotes, but he also knew that all prophets have a responsibility before God for the fate of their own people. Solzhenitsyn, and this is most impressive, did not want to leave his post voluntarily. As we know, he was unable to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature for many years because he was worried that he would not be allowed to return home, back to the Soviet Union. He did not want to give the communist dictatorship the opportunity to brand him a traitor who had forsaken his homeland. It is remarkable that when the system did eventually eject him, he did not occupy the comfortable position of speaking against his own people from abroad like some trumpet of truth. Outside his homeland, he could only live as a hermit, and that is precisely how he lived.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Solzhenitsyn was born almost precisely at the same time as the Soviet Union, and while he became the relentless critic of the communist system, perhaps not even he could have imagined that he would outlive the dictatorship that sought to silence him and emerge from the battle the winner. And this is when the complicated and uncomfortable issues began, Ladies and Gentlemen, but he was the one who knew precisely that the collapse of the communist systems not only meant victory in the war, but also brought with it the first steps on the difficult road towards renewal. By the end of the eighties, the atheist-robed high priests of Marxism may have lost the battle, but it was we who had to struggle with the inheritance they had bequeathed us.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Communism caused immeasurable damage and destruction. Through the establishment of the informant system and the condemnation of individual initiative, it created a society whose members were no longer capable of trusting either each other or the institutions of the state. Trust is a relationship that requires years of hard work, and which can be lost in the blink of an eye. Atheist communism slowly bus surely unbounded society from the values that had determined human relationships for centuries, and on which most countries' democratic system of institutions is usually based. Solzhenitsyn watched in alarm as capitalism devoured those societies that had been destroyed by communism for decades and which, perhaps precisely because of this destruction, lacked those self defence capabilities, today we would perhaps call them checks and balances, which could have prevented the exploitation of the country. Yes, Solzhenitsyn became a cumbersome individual; he wasn’t in tune with the mantra that repeated: East bad, Capitalism good. He had a somewhat more nuanced view of the world. And the reality was that people stumbled about distrustfully in that brave new world in which the survivors of the Gulag watched from the tram window how Molotov could step carelessly out of his black limousine and tie his shoelaces. Yes, the people loitered about the props of the post-communist world in which everything remained unspoken and everything was already unspeakable, in which it was precisely the former cadres of socialism who were trying to justify themselves before society and the world by claiming that it was they who would be the greatest supporters of the capitalist system and the new billionaires.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
In reply to the question of how it is possible to move beyond the post-communist world and rebuild the culture of mutual trust, Solzhenitsyn would perhaps tell us: give people back their faith and they will trust again. Solzhenitsyn does not encourage us to perform comrade-like self criticism, or to simply distance ourselves from the past, which forms an indelible part not only of our own history, but also of the personal memories of many hundreds of millions of people. No, what he encourages every post-communist country to do is to become converted and be renewed. As Hungary's new Fundamental Law also states, and I quote: "We proclaim that, following the moral decay brought about during the twentieth century, we have an undying need for spiritual and intellectual renewal."
Ladies and Gentlemen!
To us, the Hungarians, this means that we must look back to our Christian roots, because only this can re-establish people's trust in each other and build a renewed country that is committed to its people and is based on a democratic system of institutions. Most respected Solzhenitsyn, thank you for the lesson!
Thank you for your kind attention.
(miniszterelnok.hu)
