Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, b[u]t it is possible to constrict it within each person.

And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more….

And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison!”

— Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

From The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation,vol. 2 (New York: Harperperennial, 1973), 615-616.

Here Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observes that evil is often carried out under the conviction of righteousness. Those in power—and even ordinary people obeying unjust orders—can believe they are serving a greater good, when in reality ideology has corrupted their sense of morality. The real danger does not lie simply in launching revolutions to correct the injustices of corrupt states, classes, or parties. Rather, revolutions tend to root out the evils most visible to them, but in their haste they also destroy what is good, while allowing evil itself to survive in new and often more destructive forms. The deeper problem is not external structures but the evil within every human heart. Though good also dwells in us, it is never untainted. It was through his years in the filth and degradation of the Soviet gulags that Solzhenitsyn came to see this truth clearly: the dividing line between good and evil runs through every human being, not through states, parties, or institutions.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Russian novelist, historian, and the 1970 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, despite having served as a decorated captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, experienced arrest then imprisonment in 1945 for having written private letters criticizing Joseph Stalin. Solzhenitsyn then spent eight years in the Soviet labor camps followed by three years of exile in Kazakhstan. He described the disasters that befell Russia after the Revolution with the reiteration of a saying he remembered from childhood: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”