For the Good of the Cause

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

English, Russian (translation)

Genres: Fiction, Russia, Russian Literature, Classics, Historical Fiction, Literature, Politics

142 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

also known as
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)

Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.

This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.

Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...

Reviews

[Kasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Solzhenitsyn, and a pleasant surprise. I was prepared for a heavy incomprehensive literary thesis, something convoluted and philosophical concerning communist ideas or luck of thereof, but what I got was short, accessible, to the point and kept me engaged, in suspense even till the very end. It's a story about enthusiastic youth in Russian Siberia deciding to contribute, in the spirit of solidarity, to the good of the cause. Unfortunately rampant corruption and abusive bureaucracy gets in the way. The conflict between the ideals and the reality makes for an engaging read, even now years after the Soviet Union broke up, as I think the dissonance between hopes and dreams of a fair, protective government and the politicians' egos and their personal benefit will remain, no matter what the system, to a bigger or lesser degree.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short novel was the second of Solzhenitsyn's works to be published in the Soviet Union. When Khrushchev succeeded Stalin, he made an attempt to lighten the worst aspects of his predecessor's rule without undermining the Soviet system.

For the Good of the Cause shows how the hope of better times given to ordinary people was crushed by the vast network of Communist officials wanting to maintain the system that gave them power and authority.

The story is set in a provincial town where the students and staff of a technical school have completed construction of a new building. Their pride and sense of accomplishment are dashed when some higher ups decided to put a new research institute in the building, leaving the technical school in their cramped and inadequate quarters.

When the Head of the school tries to fight this decision he is told the bureaucracy's decision is "for the good of the cause." The Head's investigation uncovers dirty dealing behind the scenes but he is powerless to expose it. Who in Moscow would listen? No one. The book is a chilling portrayal of the outright cruelty of Stalin becoming the more hidden control of "the system."

After the author won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, this was one of his novels cited by the Soviet government as evidence that Solzhenitsyn was a dangerous man of ideas. An introduction in the Praeger Publications edition I read tells the full story of the eventual censorship of the author's writing by the Soviet Union.

I read the novel first and then the introduction. It is as if Solzhenitsyn told his own future!

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even—or perhaps especially—those in power who purport to be for the people, screw the people over.

[Agnes Tyley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, sharp and cutting. Discussion before and letters debating it after showed powerfully the debates in Soviet Russia over intellectual ideas, bureaucracy and art. nice to know at some points there was intellectual freedom (yay for Kruschchev thaw) even if Solzhenitsyn was treated very badly overall. would like to read about gulags now ✅

[Marc Lamot · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this in Dutch when I was 18. Was not impressed. Most probably I was too young.

[Tommy · Rating 5 out of 5]

j'ai l'impression que l'occident revit la même chose, particulièrement au Québec

[Johnny B · Rating 4 out of 5]

A smol book that I picked to fit in my bag while travelling. Unfortunately too small, and I finished it within a few days.
I liked the book. It reads as though beginning the great exposition of a political drama. The core theme of personal greed is perhaps juxtaposed more by the communist ideal context but the story could take place anywhere on the world. I was left wanting the story to continue.

[Misael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Le pongo en realidad una calificación un poco más alta: 3.8
Hay piezas notables como Ivan Denisovich o las miniaturas en prosa, pero algunas otras no me cautivaron tanto como esas dos. Recomendable sí, definitivamente por Ivan Denisovich.

[Philip Baumbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book. I feel the criticism of the USSR is mild because Solzhenitsyn wanted to have his novel published.

[Babs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a neat little book and I generally like Russian authors. So I enjoyed this. (However, for those of you who assiduously check in with beating heart and drooling mouth every morning on the off-chance of the appearance of one of my fascinating reviews, before you rush out to buy this book in order to agree with everything I'm about to say I should point out that I think the translation I had (.....) was pretty shit.)

Anyway, basically this novella looks at the case of a struggling technical school in deepest darkest Russia and how they have to fight against bureaucracy, lack of money, officialdom etc. in order to get their new building, so that they have room for their equipment, dormitories, don't have to hold meetings in stairwells etc. So what happens is that these rosy-cheeked All Markedly Very Individual young Russian students do the building themselves: the dig foundations, spend their summer holidays bricking the walls, their weekends and evenings plastering and painting. But then of course, bad Mr. Faceless Russian Official steps in, looks lasciviously at the amazing (and free) new building and says, Ah this would be perfect for the new Research Institute I've decided we need, to give this town some status and me some more lovely Power!" And the upshot is that the headmaster and his friend in the local economic council - the emotional but wise and thoughtful model of what Good Communsim should be, as opposed the Bad Communism of the above - are left impotent and the students crest-fallen and cruelly deceived by the grown-ups.

Now really this wasn't an amazing novella. It was Solzhenitsyn slagging off Communism (again, but of course very importantly and wholly justifiably). But what was really interesting for me was the huge change in viewpoints and reactions between 1964 and, for example, 2009. Briefly, my response to the tale as the hardened 21st Century capitalist that I am was, "How bloody unfair that these optimistic and open-hearted teenagers should build their own educational institute and then have it simply taken away from under their noses without so much as an apology or explantation." Solzhenitsyn's viewpoint was (I think), "Even if this action was for the good of the cause [of Communism:], does this mean that smashing the good faith and generous nature of the younger generation is a price worth paying?" And what was most interesting about this book was that a selection of reviews, letters and slightly barbed interchanges between two Russian literary magazines follow.... and the main viewpoint of the 'comrades' who wrote the letters - very erudite and intelligent letters sent in from, for example, Vassily, a welder, Kiev - were "We simply need to establish whether appropriating this building for another use *was* for the good of the cause: if so, then there is no doubt that it should be so". What all of the letters utterly agreed on was that the support and furtherance of Communism was The Aim - a given, and the one and only thing to consider. All else was peripheral and in a way weak and shameful to even consider.

It was this absolute absorption in and focus on Communism permeating all of the exchanges at the back of the book which interested me. Like when I see devout Catholics, I couldn't help but momentarily question whether my life is more flimsy and 2-dimensional without this adherance to something huge but fundamentally flawed. These people were incapable of considering the novel whilst at the same time being objective about the political system and creed in place at the time. (I mean, what a mark of success, Josef). Even though I think Communism is great in theory but that what it demands is not inherent with man's nature and so in practice en masse ends in disaster, I feel that reading this I was looking at the human situation from an objective and ethical viewpoint. I suppose that is no more valid though than looking at it through the mindset of the people at the time who were living under all-pervasive Communism. Or maybe it is.

Well I could write so much more on this. As a political / historical document it is brilliant. Interestingly in 1964 several of the people writing these letters were talking about the new enlightened times, the breaking away from the personality cult of Stalin, the open-minded people in power, "of course we're nothing like the people in the book these days..." and yet of course we are now aware that people were still getting tortured and imprisoned for freedom of thought. But I guess these guys were probably speaking relatively. The fact that a published discussion - however generally pro-Communism - was allowed was a step forward. And who am I to say these peoples' thoughts were wrong, I'm sure they held them even more fervently than I do my reasonable ones.

[Joey Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Cause it was good

[Zach Hollifield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second reading: Even better than the first time. One of my favorites of Solzhenitsyn’s. And that’s saying something.

Concise, convicting, compelling.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is Solzhenitsyn at his most deceptively subdued—an apparently modest novella that, upon closer inspection, reveals itself as a scalpel slid quietly under the skin of Soviet bureaucracy.

It is not Gulag theatre, not historical epic, not political thunder; instead, it is the slow burn of everyday authoritarianism, the kind that doesn’t need to shout because it has already colonized the logic of ordinary life.

Solzhenitsyn understands that totalitarianism does not thrive on spectacular violence but on the gentle, relentless rearrangement of what seems normal.

The premise is disarmingly ordinary: a group of students build a new school building, investing sweat, hope, and youthful idealism into it—only to watch the structure be taken from them by authorities who decide it is needed “for the good of the cause.” In a lesser writer’s hands, this would be a moral fable.

But Solzhenitsyn gives it the density of documentary and the psychological acuity of a character novel. His critique is not directed at one villain but at a system engineered to convert idealism into raw material for its machinery.

What stands out is the way the narrative shifts between voices, perspectives, and tonalities. There is a rhythmic alternation between the intimate and the institutional.

One moment we are inside the minds of students who feel the pride of building something tangible; the next, we’re plunged into the jargon-soaked corridors of administrators whose language seems designed to dissolve responsibility. This alternating structure becomes the book’s quiet engine: a demonstration of how human experience gets flattened when it enters the bureaucratic bloodstream.

Solzhenitsyn is working here with smaller canvases than in his major works, but the moral geometry is just as sharp.

He portrays the subtle violence of “collective decisions,” where no one is personally cruel but everyone participates in a cruelty that becomes unavoidable, almost rational.

The administrators are not monsters—they are, in some ways, more frightening: intelligent, polite, convinced of their own necessity. The tragedy emerges from the friction between lived reality and ideological abstraction, between people who build and people who repurpose.

This is also one of Solzhenitsyn’s most restrained pieces stylistically.

The sentences are clean, almost transparent; the emotional charge accumulates quietly, like snow on a roof before it suddenly collapses.

Yet beneath the restraint lies the unmistakable moral thunder of his worldview. He is not merely telling a story about a building; he is diagnosing the larger Soviet habit of confiscating meaning, of redefining personal effort as state property.

What lingers after the final page is a sense of violated sincerity. The students are not crushed by prisons or exiles; they are crushed by the polite smile of authority, the soft-spoken decree, the phrase “for the good of the cause,” which lands like a velvet-wrapped hammer.

And that is Solzhenitsyn’s most unsettling insight: oppression rarely arrives with boots and chains.

More often, it arrives with a signature on a document.

‘For the Good of the Cause’ is a quiet masterpiece—an anatomy of petty tyranny, a study of disillusionment, and an unforgettable reminder that the smallest injustices often reveal the deepest structural rot.

Most recommended.

[Will Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the Solzhenitsyn part of this OK, it´s kind of classic Solzhenitsyn in how it tells the story very clearly using a great deal of interactive dialogue at first to bring the characters straight into your view but then later switches to wonderfully direct explanatory prose which builds a scene perfectly. He is a master in the art of producing this kind of direct outline of his scenes and his characters and drawing in the reader, it is immediately noticeable when you switch to another author that is requires more concentration to focus on the work. Whereas when you read Solzhenitsyn you don´t even really need to try to read it, it just comes off the page into your consciousness. If that isn´t the mark of a fantastic writer I do not know what is. The story is upsetting yet hopeful Like most of his books.

However the best bit of this work is actually the critical reviews which are placed in the appendices, as these capture perfectly the influence that Solzhenitsyn had on the literary field, and even on culture and politics generally in the former Soviet Union at the time. But also, quite brilliantly, how the critics of the time had to position their arguments within a very careful frame of reference which was considered the most effective means of implicitly criticising the regime within which they lived without explicitly criticising the regime. Amazing to think how an entire culture was conducted within this framework and how the language of the socialist ideal permeated virtually every aspect of the lives of people living their. Both as a consequence of their beliefs and of the fear they had of being exposed as someone who stood against the regime and was thus allied with the other.

[Paul R · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solzhenitsyn’s novella about Post Stalinist Russia and the “Little Stalins” and careerists entrenched in the bureaucratic apparatus of Soviet society who enabled the Soviet system to go on functioning well after Stalin had gone.

The appendix includes a number of favourable reviews and criticisms which appeared in the Soviet press by the defenders of the party bureaucracy. While the majority of articles disapprove of Solzhenitsyn’s work, they indicate a shift in dissent that was tolerated in Soviet Society under Khrushchev. The mood towards cultural tolerance, however, changed again after Krushchev's removal in 1964 with the arrest of writers who were given long term prison sentences. According to Wikipedia, publishing of Solzhenitsyn's work quickly stopped and by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union after he denounced state censorship. Solzhenitsyn was eventually expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and was declared a non-person.

A review by Dimitri Granin published in 1963 in the Literaturnaya Gazeta defines what is meant by 'for the good of the cause' and demonstrates the cultural and artistic liberalisation that took place under Krushchev: “Seriously and courageously he poses a moral and social problem: What does: ‘for the good of the cause” mean? He exposes this problem to the level of the high moral demands of a Communists society. He fights passionately for faith in the people who are furthering that cause and who alone have the right to judge what is useful to the cause and what is not. He exposes those who while using the interests of the state as a cover, look after their own little affairs at the expense of the state. He demands justice, and how can one call his approach “scholastic” when he is trying to defend justice and further it? Only a story filled with the joy and the pain that come from real knowledge of life can excite and move us in this way”. (p 124)

Sadly, this type of self-serving behaviour is common in even so-called 'free societies' and liberal democracies and reminds me of the observation on freedom by Noam Chomsky: “It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions – you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.” Which begs the question: how free are we all really?

[Colin Burdett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading Cancer Ward before I read this but I ended up finishing this first cause it’s so short. Can’t quite grasp the context of him writing this but the effect of his writing is still altogether here. It’s very obviously a commentary on Soviet politics. The clash between Stalinism, (true) Leninism, and of course pseudocommunist capitalism/basically an oligarchy I suppose. Of course it’s made clear that these different philosophies and people can’t mix. They taint each other. And they are inherent in any communist country. You back yourself behind the principal and the students. You get angry. I was so mad at the end, I’m literally on an airplane man. Nonetheless it’s great. I also loved how some of the students (acting out the true leninist ideals) were debating how long books should be. Of course this book is direct and to the point, especially when compared to how long Cancer Ward is. Really who is to say who the right person is. To me none of them were totally correct. An issue every single society and political ideology has. An excellent read for sure.

[Pádraic · Rating 5 out of 5]

The level-headed rage I've come to expect from Solzhenitsyn is still present here. His targets are clear and his points are concisely expressed. But what brings this up into a more exemplary category is its deftness as a piece of narrative. The voices of the characters are so distinct, so colourful, and the seemingly inescapable web of bureaucracy and policy and ideology that they're trapped in is rendered with great sympathy and a sense of the actual emotional reality of being in the situation, rather than a clinical diagnosis taken from a greater distance—not that anyone could ever accuse Solzhenitsyn of taking such a tone. And all of it more impressive for being done in so few words; this edition, once the introduction and appendices are discounted, leaves a story of a scant seventy pages.

[Philip Horspool · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reread this after having first read it around 40 years ago. For me it remains a relevant short story and the debate around bureaucracy, social justice, 'individualism' and democracy are still relevant. Solzhenitsyn's style is direct and his character portrayal open and clear. There are good people, bad people, confused people, brave people and for me he spells this out clearly and cleverly. 'For the Good of the Cause' was not and is not a unique Soviet/Socialist issue, we hear the kind of justification given by Knorozov in aspects of our lives every day it seems to me. Look no further than the self interest of politicians of all shades. A book worth an hour or so of anyone's time I think.

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

A taut novella of bristling indignation which depicts faceless, soulless and outright cruel bureaucracy at its absolute pettiest. The Sphere edition I read includes a rigorous introduction by its translator David Floyd and an appendix collecting together a heated correspondence conducted through the pages of Literaturnata Gazeta and Novy Mir in the immediate aftermath of the story’s original publication.

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Totally down beat and depressing! The mind of Soviet Russia during height of Communism in the 1960s. A new school which the students themselves helped in building gets transferred into the hands of Soviet higher ups just before the students were to start classes. The communist political group wants to spend millions of dollars to turn the building into an "institute", a status symbol of Communist Progress. The school teacher and administrators are disrespected and stepped over.

[Daire Hogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short story displaying the corruption in the USSR after the cult of personality of Stalin. It illustrates the fight between the old hat powers and the hopeful liberals after the denunciation of the Stalin cult. Try to get a copy with the back and forth from the Soviet newspaper critics as they are illuminating.

[Alex Rappoccio · Rating 3 out of 5]

En bra och nätt liten novell som fångade mycket som är värt att tänka på, inte bara om sovjet men också samhällen i stort. I slutet av boken får man dessutom ta del av den dåvarande kulturdebatten, vilket jag berömmer den här utgåvan för. Slutligen tycker jag att tre stjärnor är för lågt men fyra kanske för högt, kan dock tänka mig att den kanske kan nå hela fyran efter en omläsning ✌️

[Zhespy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was shocked when I came to the end of this story so quickly (and that is a good thing not a bad thing). I would have liked a slower/longer exploration of this story going more into the exploitation of the students (workers) to the whims of the rich and powerful and its effects on the students. However, the short story still manages to paint the picture the author wanted us to see quite well.

[Laurie Wilcockson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though not a poet, Solzhenitsyn is a victim of the Poet's Curse. That is to say, interesting, complicated guy - vacuous, unremarkable books. It is the context of his books, not their content, which makes them classics, and as that context becomes increasingly less relevant, so too does it become harder to appreciate his works.

[Mohab Essam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short novel opens a window on the state of the Soviet Union with its day-to-day bureaucracy, slogans, propaganda,etc. Short, expressive, and elequently written. Words definitely serve their intended function.

[Kinosfronimos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed both the moralistic story, as well as the inclusion of Soviet era debate (in the form of letters to the editor) about the piece when it was first published.

[James Walsh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A vignette of a book which lacks the depth of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Although it is nonetheless an interesting portrayal of life in Russia under the communist regime.

[Naira · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A quien dispute de le puede convencer. Nada temía más en la juventud que la indiferencia."

[john lennon · Rating 3 out of 5]

good and interesting insight into communist ussr

[Yvonne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Supposedly fiction hmm…
Kinda tragic but well written no less.