Commentary
In February 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the KGB, stripped of his citizenship, and expelled from the Soviet Union. On the eve of his arrest, he circulated a short essay among Moscow’s intellectuals titled “Live Not by Lies.”
The essay was neither a revolutionary manifesto nor an appeal to overthrow the state. Instead, it was a quiet moral summons. Solzhenitsyn urged ordinary citizens to withdraw their consent from falsehood—to refuse to repeat what they knew to be false, even when silence promised their safety. Tyranny, he argued, does not rest solely on brute force; it survives because people are compelled to participate in a lie, often out of fear, convenience, or moral fatigue….