Perhaps Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn commands a tip of the cap. While Solzhenitsyn did not coin the term, his experiences and book The Gulag Archipelago are something of a study in cancel culture at its most extreme. At the heart of the cancel culture movement, poisoning the American ideal of free speech, is censorship. Through the institution of the Gulag, the Soviet NKVD literally cancelled individuals, cleansing every trace of their very existence from official records and creating a false reality without the dissenting individual. George Orwell used a fictionalized version of the Soviet narrative in 1984 but Solzhenitsyn lends a historical accuracy to his work that fiction, despite Orwell’s prosaic brilliance, cannot reach. Solzhenitsyn’s work creates a clear parallel to the current American societal norm because of its honest portrayal of the dangers of censorship left to its own devices.
In “A Muzzled Freedom”, Solzhenitsyn ponders a world beyond its current half-baked existence, asking “But even when all the main things about the Gulag Archipelago are written, read and understood, will there be anyone even then who grasps what our freedom was like?” (Solzhenitsyn, 320) The question of freedom in its current state is an interesting thought to ponder and one could call Solzhenitsyn prophetic despite the reality that the concept of freedom has been debated in various arenas for millennia. But the Gulag system stripped individuals of their innocence, turning a casual night of entertainment into immediate cause for concern or a scrap of bread into a life or death scenario, with individuals willing to go to any length necessary to survive. In a metaphorical sense, cancel culture creates a similar response, with the threat of expulsion from a platform ever-present for anyone unwilling to toe the accepted line.
In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, the official rhetoric from the One State describes freedom as an “unorganized, savage condition.” (Zamyatin, 13) While dystopian fiction, Zamyatin’s words ring somewhat-true for the suffocation present in the Soviet regime and other totalitarian states. A citizen left to their own devices will surely self-destruct, unable to manage the inherent responsibilities of their own freedom, or so the thought goes. As such, they must be placed under constant surveillance, their own expression and thought cancelled. Solzhenitsyn relays this idea through the story of Dr. Boris Kornfeld, willing to share his conversion from Judaism to Christianity at great risk of personal peril. In a society that not only discouraged religion as well as free thought, Kornfeld needed to be effectively cancelled. As such, Solzhenitsyn later writes, “These were the last words of Boris Kornfeld.” (Solzhenitsyn, 310) A strange sense of peace appears to exist within Solzhenitsyn in relaying Kornfeld’s last act on Earth, adding that his body was carried away to the morgue but his words lived on.