Politics & Power Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn is doing a double reversal here, and that’s what gives the line its bite. He speaks with the earned authority of someone who lived inside a system where law wasn’t a check on power but an instrument of it: when the legal code has no anchor beyond the regime’s needs, legality becomes theater. In the Soviet context, “objective legal scale” isn’t a lawyerly nicety; it’s the difference between rule of law and rule by decree, between a predictable public life and one where guilt is retroactively manufactured.

Then he pivots, refusing the easy Cold War ending where the West simply pats itself on the back. A society that recognizes only the legal scale - that treats “it’s legal” as the final moral argument - is, for him, spiritually stunted. The subtext is a warning aimed at liberal modernity: rights talk and procedural fairness are vital, but they’re not a full account of human dignity. Law can draw boundaries; it can’t supply purpose. It can punish crimes; it can’t define the good.

The rhetorical power comes from the balanced phrasing: terrible one indeed vs not quite worthy of man either. He’s calibrating two different failures - tyranny on one side, moral minimalism on the other - and implying they’re linked by a shared emptiness. When law floats free of truth, you get oppression. When truth is reduced to law, you get a thinner, colder freedom that can’t explain why anything matters beyond compliance.