161 CHRONICLESnist he is not.nEven his obvious Russian patriotism has an extremenlibertarian coloration. In The Gulag Archipelago he makesnan unprecedented statement that it is governments whonneed military victories, while people need military defeats.nSolzhenitsyn argues that prosperity and freedom are preferablento military victories and territorial expansion, andnmoreover, that defeats and territorial losses are beneficial fornnational prosperity and development toward freedom. Hensays that the Russian victory over Sweden in the early 18thncentury was a catastrophe for Russia and an unmitigatednboon for Sweden. For Russia, that victory led to twoncenturies of expansion, new wars, inefficient allocation ofnresources, poverty, and restrictions on freedom. Solzhenitsynnrejects Russian national pride in the victory overnNapoleonic France: as a result of that victory the abolition ofnserfdom was delayed for another half-century. He makes anchallenging remark that he would have rather settled withnthe French occupation. He reminds the reader that Russianndefeat in the Crimean War in 1855 at the hands of thenBritish and the French led to the abolition of serfdom and tonliberal legal reforms. Russian defeat in the war with Japan inn1904 led to liberation of peasants from the coUectivist powernof the commune and of the state to the spread of privatenland property and to the establishment of the Russiannparliament. From this perspective, for Solzhenitsyn, thenSoviet victory in World War II was a devastating defeat fornRussian freedom.nEvidently, Solzhenitsyn makes a distinction between thencountry and the state. His patriotism, based on the criterionnof freedom, is antistatist and populist. His patriotism isnmeasured by what is good for the country and for thenpeople, and what is best for the country, in his view, is notnthe expansion of the country, but the reduction of the state.nAs far as I know, we do not have a good economic theory ofnpatriotism either, and it seems to me that Solzhenitsyn givesnus quite valuable insights for its conception.nSo far we have dealt with the issues on whichnSolzhenitsyn’s theoretical contribution was to some extentnmarginal. There is, however, a special niche for Solzhenitsynnin modern social theory. It deals with the costs ofnideas and the primacy of ideologies in the truncating ofnfreedom and dehumanization of man.nEconomists long recognized the crucial role that ideasnand intellectuals, as producers and transmitters of ideas, playnin establishing restrictions on freedom. The Austrian Schoolneconomists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayeknwrote extensively on the subject. Thomas Sowell said innKnowledge and Decisions:nThe despotisms . . . were seen as vehicles for thenimposition of intellectuals’ designs on society atnlarge. . . . Freedom is not simply the right ofnintellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is,nabove all, the right of ordinary people to find elbownroom for themselves and a refuge from thenrampaging presumptions of their “betters.”nJohn Maynard Keynes wrote in his celebrated dictum:nThe ideas of economists and political philosophers,nboth when they are right and when they are wrong.nnnare more powerful than is commonly understood.nIndeed, the world is ruled by very little else.nPractical men who believe themselves to be quitenexempt from any intellectual influences, are usuallynthe slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen innauthority, who hear voices in the air, are distillingntheir frenzy from academic scribblers of a few yearsnback.nFrom this perspective, most economists of different schoolsnwill be on the side of Solzhenitsyn in his dispute with thenmajority of Soviet experts on the origins of communist terrornand Gulag.nSolzhenitsyn went on at length to elaborate and documentnhis basic proposition: the main source of terror andnforced labor on the mass scale is the imposition of ideas onnpeople by ideological states. Solzhenitsyn’s books, and ThenGulag Archipelago in particular, are all about the price ofnideologies to people. Unlike various precapitalistic economicnsystems and despotic states in the past, the modern socialistneconomy is built on the base of ideology. Older systems of ansocialist cast, dubbed by the Marxists as the Asiatic mode ofnproduction and better known in Western literature asnOriental despotism, regulated already existing economiesnand life-styles; they did not invent new ones. But on thensecond day of revolution, Lenin summoned an amateurneconomist, Yuri Larin, an expert on the German economicnmodel of War Socialism, and ordered him to establish andnexpand that model in Russia. Within three years, 1917-n1920, the system of collective transactions known as WarnCommunism was built. Gross national product declined tonthe range of 4 percent to 20 percent of the prewar leveln(estimates vary). Famine began in 1918 and continuednthrough 1921-22, although the system had to be suspendednin early 1921. The official Soviet data reported the faminerelatedndeath toll in 1921-22 in the range of 4.9 to 5.1nmillion. My calculations of the human losses during the WarnCommunism period between the censuses of 1917 andn1920 amount to 15.6 million.nThe process of socioeconomic implementation of thenideological model requires not only oppression of individualnpolitical opponents but, first and foremost, the mass destructionnof whole social classes and ethnic groups who do not fitnthe new system. The older despotisms imposed additionalnconstraints on human activities, but they did not try tonimpose a new model that would require fundamentalnchanges in behavior itself. Behavior is determined bynindividual preferences rooted in human nature. Lenin’snerror, corrected later by an unappreciated economic whiz ofnthe century, Joseph Stalin, lay in the fact that one cannotnchange basic modes of human behavior without making anso-called Cultural Revolution that would change humannminds and human nature. Until this is done, ideologicalnexperiments on human guinea pigs are limited to negativenselection, to the mass slaughter of the unfit groups of humannraw material. From Lenin’s and Pol Pot’s experience wenknow that the more ideologues hurry, the more they kill.nThe era of detente, when the USSR, Romania, Poland, andnEast Germany began to exchange their undesirable subjectsnfor Western subsidies (instead of murdering them), resultednin an implicit consensus that the slave-trade is a progressiven