No one believes he is living by lies. We think a particular disagreement is inconsequential or that it isn’t our issue. We think we aren’t the ones to speak out, because reasons.

A voice from 1974 calls to us and everyone in our century:

There was a time when we dared not rustle a whisper. But now we write and read samizdat [banned literature distributed in secret] and, congregating in the smoking rooms of research institutes, heartily complain to each other of all they are muddling up, of all they are dragging us into! There’s that unnecessary bravado around our ventures into space, against the backdrop of ruin and poverty at home; and the buttressing of distant savage regimes; and the kindling of civil wars; and the ill-thought-out cultivation of Mao Zedong (at our expense to boot)—in the end we’ll be the ones sent out against him, and we’ll have to go, what other option will there be? And they put whomever they want on trial, and brand the healthy as mentally ill—and it is always “they,” while we are—helpless.

This is how Solzhenitsyn begins “Live Not by Lies,” which he released the day he was arrested, a day before his exile. “We are approaching the brink,” he says, “already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble:

‘But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.’”

He says maybe civil disobedience is beyond us. Maybe how the Czechs stood up to their government is too much. What we can do, at the very least, is to reject lies.

“Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”