Solzhenitsyn

^{CHAPTER FOURTEEN} OUT IN THE COLD

For all Solzhenitsyn’s differences with the liberals at Novy Mir, he was conscious that they remained allies in the struggle against Soviet repression. This was more evident than ever in February 1970, when his old friend Alexander Tvardovsky was removed from his post as Novy Mir’s editor after sixteen years at the helm. Tvardovsky was devastated by his dismissal and never recovered from the blow. Within six months, his health had collapsed, and he died a year afterward, on December 18, 1971.

Solzhenitsyn’s presence at the funeral three days later caused a considerable stir. Although the high-ranking officials of the Writers’ Union who were officially responsible for organizing the ceremony had sought to keep him away, he had attended at the insistence of Tvardovsky’s widow, sitting beside her in the front row. Watched by the world’s media, Solzhenitsyn stepped forward at the end of the ceremony and made the sign of the cross over the open coffin. “There are many ways of killing a poet”, Solzhenitsyn wrote in his eulogy to his friend published a week later. “[T]he method chosen for Tvardovsky was to take away his offspring, his passion, his journal.” Having blamed Tvardovsky’s death on his dismissal from Novy Mir, Solzhenitsyn rounded on his friend’s persecutors, who had brazenly sought to hijack the funeral: “And now the whole gang from the Writers’ Union has flopped on to the scene. The guard of honour comprises that same flabby crowd that hunted him down with unholy shrieks and cries. Yes, it’s an old, old custom of ours, it was the same with Pushkin: it is precisely into the hands of his enemies that the dead poet falls. And they hastily dispose of the body, covering up with glib speeches.”¹

The Soviet authorities may have succeeded in silencing Tvardovsky, but they were still singularly failing in all efforts to silence Solzhenitsyn. In the months following his friend’s funeral, Solzhenitsyn’s voice reached more people throughout the world than ever before. During 1972, his work was translated into thirty-five languages.² This was also the year in which he went public with an open confession of Christianity by means of a Lenten Letter to Pimen, Patriarch of All Russia. Until the publication of this open letter, most people were unaware of Solzhenitsyn’s Christianity, principally because the need for discretion had dictated that he either avoid or tone down overt references to his religious faith in his books. The Christian aspects of his work had been expressed by way of sympathetic characterization or allegorical allusion, with little else to suggest that Solzhenitsyn was anything more than a dispassionate observer of religious issues. Certainly, few people realized that he considered himself an Orthodox believer.

The inspiration for writing the letter to Patriarch Pimen, who had been elected head of the Russian church the previous year, was the Patriarch’s pastoral letter, which was read out on a Western radio station during the broadcast of a religious service on Christmas Eve 1971, only three days after Tvardovsky’s funeral. “At once I was fired with a desire to write to him. I had no choice but to write! And this meant new troubles, new burdens, new complicating factors.”³

One complication was the hostility his open expression of Christianity caused among many of his erstwhile allies. His Lenten Letter urged the Patriarch to act with greater courage in the face of the atheism of the Soviet regime. Yet many of his liberal-minded friends considered Orthodoxy an archaic irrelevance and were surprised and antagonized by Solzhenitsyn’s stance. For the first time, Liusha Chukovskaya, one of his most devoted helpers, rebelled against him and adamantly refused to type the Letter. “After more than six years of working together,” Solzhenitsyn recalled, “it became apparent that we did not think alike.”⁴

There is no doubt that many others began to detect in the emergence of Solzhenitsyn’s traditional Christianity a spirit to which they were not akin, although Solzhenitsyn himself insists that the break with many of his former allies dated from the publication of August 1914 the previous year. This, he believed, was the origin of the schism among his readers, the steady loss of supporters, with more leaving than remained behind.

Even if the origins of the schism were slightly earlier, Solzhenitsyn was still surprised by the hostility his Lenten Letter aroused. He had intended the letter to be low-key, releasing it only to the limited circulation of the narrow ecclesiastical samizdat network, with the idea that it would gradually find its way to all those whom it really concerned. Inevitably, however, considering his controversial international reputation, it was published almost immediately in the West and provoked a flood of interest in the Western media. He learned that the letter and the coverage it had received in the West had left the KGB spluttering with rage—a rage more violent than that excited by most of his actions before or since. There was no mystery here, he added. “Atheism is the core of the whole Communist system.” Yet if the anger of the KGB was scarcely surprising, he was not prepared for the hostility of normally sympathetic circles, observing that the move had aroused disapproval and even disgust among the intelligentsia too: “How narrow, blind and limited I must be, thought some, to concern myself with such problems as that of the Church.” Yet regardless of the opposition and the consequent loss of powerful allies, Solzhenitsyn remained defiant: “Though many people condemned me, I have never regretted this step: if our spiritual fathers need not be the first to set us an example of spiritual freedom from the lie, where are we to look for it?”⁶

In the Lenten Letter, Solzhenitsyn had berated the Patriarch for addressing his pious words only to the world’s Russian émigrés, ignoring the needs of the beleaguered believers in Russia itself: “Yes, Christ bade us to go seek the hundredth lost sheep, but only after ninety-nine are safe. But when the ninety-nine who should be at hand are lost—should they not be our first concern?”⁷ There followed a plea for the church to speak out against the persecution of religious practice in the Soviet Union, before he concluded with a call to sacrifice. External fetters, he insisted, were not so strong as the spirit, which was capable of overcoming all persecution. “It was no easier at the time of the birth of Christianity, but nevertheless Christianity withstood everything and flourished. And it showed us the way: the way of sacrifice. He who is deprived of all material strength will finally always be triumphant through sacrifice. Within our memory our priests and fellow-believers have undergone just such a martyrdom worthy of the first centuries of Christianity.”⁸

For all the hostility it caused in irreligious circles, Solzhenitsyn’s public acknowledgment of his Christianity was greeted with joy and admiration among Christians in both East and West. One admirer was Father Alexander Schmemann, dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York State, who had read the Lenten Letter as soon as it was published in the West. He was deeply impressed by its elevated style and biblical rhythms and detected in Solzhenitsyn’s words the mark of prophecy. Father Schmemann was a regular broadcaster of religious programs to the Soviet Union, and he made Solzhenitsyn’s letter the subject of his Easter sermon, broadcast by Radio Liberty:

Solzhenitsyn heard the broadcast and was much encouraged. Father Schmemann was someone whose judgment he respected, not least because the priest had been one of the first to discern the Christianity at the heart of his own work. As early as 1970, Father Schmemann had written that Solzhenitsyn’s books were explicable in terms of the “triune intuition of creation, fall, and redemption”. Although at the time Schmemann was unaware whether Solzhenitsyn accepted or rejected Christian dogma, ecclesiastical ritual, or the church itself, he nevertheless insisted that here was a Christian writer who had “a deep and all-embracing, although possibly unconscious perception of the world, man, and life, which, historically, was born and grew from Biblical and Christian revelation, and only from it”.¹⁰ Solzhenitsyn had read Father Schmemann’s article and wrote that it was “very valuable to me… it explained me to myself…. [I]t also formulated important traits of Christianity which I could not have formulated myself.”¹¹

It is clear, therefore, that Solzhenitsyn already held Father Schmemann in high regard and was particularly pleased that such a figure had spoken so seriously about his Lenten Letter. A few months later, he recalled how profoundly he had been moved to hear that his favorite preacher had given his approval and how he felt that “this in itself was my spiritual reward for the letter, and for me, conclusive confirmation that I was right”.¹²

Another by-product of Solzhenitsyn’s public profession of faith would be as vociferously negative as Father Schmemann’s broadcast had been positive. Solzhenitsyn’s religious “regression”, coupled with what was perceived as his reactionary revisionism in August 1914, ensured that the communist press in the West now fell in with the official Moscow line. Solzhenitsyn was no longer the persecuted writer unjustly expelled from the Writers’ Union; he was now a dangerous renegade seeking to rewrite and blacken the glorious history of the Revolution. Communist journals in the West queued up to condemn August 1914, and their negative reviews were reprinted gleefully in the Soviet media.

Solzhenitsyn’s treatment at the hands of Western communists during this period prompted a bitter response in his autobiography, where he complained that “under the laws of leftist topsyturvydom, red sinners are always forgiven, red sins are soon forgotten. As Orwell writes, those very same Western public figures who were outraged by individual executions anywhere else on earth applauded when Stalin shot hundreds of thousands; they grieved for starving India, but the devastating famine in the Ukraine went unnoticed.”¹³ By the early seventies, the red sins carried out by the Soviet government may not have been as brutal as those perpetrated under Stalin’s murderous regime, but the red sinners of the KGB were still as active as ever. On August 8, 1971, KGB agents sought to assassinate Solzhenitsyn as he queued in a department store in Novocherkassk. According to a later confession by Lieutenant Colonel Boris Ivanov, one of the KGB operatives involved in the plot, the “whole operation lasted two or three minutes” and involved the surreptitious administering of a deadly poison to the intended victim’s skin. As Solzhenitsyn left the shop, completely oblivious of the deadly toxin that had been administered, the KGB agents assumed that he had only a short time to live. “It’s all over”, the officer-in-charge of the operation informed Ivanov. “He won’t live much longer.”¹⁴

Recalling the incident many years later, Solzhenitsyn told Russian journalists that he had been feeling well and that he and a friend had “visited the cathedral and the shops”. He went on to describe the effects of the toxin: “I don’t remember any injection, I certainly didn’t feel it, but by mid-morning the skin on my left side suddenly started to hurt a great deal. Towards evening (we had stopped to see people we knew), I continued to deteriorate and had a very large burn. The following morning I was reduced to a terrible state: my left hip, left side, stomach and back were covered with blisters, the largest of which were fifteen centimeters in diameter.”¹⁵

Alya told a Western journalist that her husband had “a strange, inexplicable disease” and that it took him months to recover, often being barely able to get out of bed or write.¹⁶ The doctors who examined him could not fathom the cause of the affliction, though some surmised that he had suffered a severe allergic reaction. Years later, in 1992, after the assassination plot was reported in the Russian newspaper, Sovershenno Sekretno (Top Secret), it was disclosed, after consultation with a respected toxicologist, that the substance employed by the KGB was probably ricin.¹⁷

Oleg Kalugin, a high-profile KGB defector, confirmed the assassination attempt had been made and claimed that the KGB “had a laboratory that invented new ways of killing people”. These included “poisons that could be slipped into drinks to jellies that could be rubbed on a person to induce a heart attack”. According to Kalugin, “a KGB agent rubbed such a substance on Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a store in Russia in the early 1970s, making him violently ill but not killing him.”¹⁸ Although Kalugin did not specify that ricin was the toxin used in the jelly, the fact that ricin can cause heart attacks would seem to confirm the toxicologist’s conclusion. Kalugin’s claims also throw into question the exact means by which the toxin was administered. It has generally been reported that Solzhenitsyn had been “stabbed… with a poisoned needle”¹⁹ or that the assassination attempt had been made “by poking him with a sharp instrument tipped with poison”,²⁰ yet Solzhenitsyn did not feel anything, reinforcing Kalugin’s claim that it had been rubbed onto the skin as a jelly. Even so, one wonders how such jelly had been rubbed onto the skin, under the layers of clothing, without the victim’s knowledge. Such mysteries will probably remain unanswered, but the fact that the KGB had tried to take Solzhenitsyn’s life would appear to be confirmed by the evidence.

A few years later, the KGB seems to have perfected this particular method of assassination. In 1978, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London after being surreptitiously “shot” with a modified umbrella using compressed gas to fire a tiny pellet contaminated with ricin into his leg. He died a few days later, the ricin pellet being discovered during an autopsy. Since Georgi Markov had defected from Bulgaria in 1969 and had subsequently written books and made radio broadcasts that were highly critical of the Bulgarian communist regime, the prime suspects would appear to have been the Bulgarian secret police. It was widely believed, however, that Bulgaria would not have been able to produce the pellet, and that it must have been supplied by the KGB. Needless to say, the KGB denied any involvement, but Oleg Kalugin and another KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky, would later confirm its involvement.

On August 12, 1971, four days after the failed assassination attempt, Alexander Gorlov, a friend of Solzhenitsyn, was beaten brutally when he surprised a group of KGB officers in the process of searching Solzhenitsyn’s country cottage at Rozhdestvo. Finding the plain-clothed intruders in the house, Gorlov had demanded their identification, to which the intruders had responded by knocking him to the ground, tying him up, and dragging him face down into the woods where he was viciously assaulted. Gorlov, his face mutilated and his suit torn to ribbons, was then bundled into a car and driven off to the local police station. The KGB officers demanded that he sign an oath of secrecy, but Gorlov adamantly refused. “If Solzhenitsyn finds out what took place at the dacha,” he was told, “it’s all over with you. Your official career will go no further…. This will affect your family and children, and, if necessary, we will put you in prison.” In defiance of all these threats, Gorlov informed Solzhenitsyn of all that had happened as soon as he was released. The next day Solzhenitsyn wrote an open letter to Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB.

After detailing the brutal nature of Gorlov’s treatment and the threats made against him, Solzhenitsyn demanded that Andropov publicly identify the intruders, oversee their punishment as criminals, and offer an explanation of why the incident had occurred. “Otherwise,” Solzhenitsyn concluded, “I can only believe that you sent them.” Solzhenitsyn sent a copy of the letter to Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, stating that he considered Andropov “personally responsible for all the illegalities mentioned” and that if the government wished to distance itself from such actions it should conduct an investigation into the matter.²²

Far from distancing itself, the government awarded Andropov with a place on the Politburo two years later. This was the beginning of his rise to supreme power within the Soviet Union. On the death of Brezhnev in 1982, he became General Secretary of the Communist Party, consolidating his power in June of the following year with his election to the presidency. Thus the head of the hated KGB became the head of state.

On August 23, 1973, Solzhenitsyn gave an interview to the Associated Press news agency and Le Monde, in which he detailed death threats he had received. He was convinced that these were the work of the KGB. He had also heard from sources allegedly within the KGB that there had been a plan to kill him in a car accident. Even as he was speaking to these Western journalists, the KGB was being implicated in the death of Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, a frail sixty-seven-year-old woman who was one of Solzhenitsyn’s most devoted supporters. Over the years, she had typed up many of his works and was known to be one of his confidantes. She was arrested by the KGB and broke down under interrogation, divulging the whereabouts of a hidden copy of The Gulag Archipelago. Racked with guilt, she returned home on August 23 and apparently committed suicide by hanging herself, though there were rumors that the KGB had a direct hand in her death. Such rumors were fueled by the fact that her body was taken to the Leningrad morgue in strictest secrecy and was not shown even to the family before being sealed in a coffin for burial. There seems to be no doubt that the KGB was at least indirectly responsible for the death of this elderly woman.

Solzhenitsyn had done everything in his power to keep the existence of The Gulag Archipelago a secret from the authorities. Now that they had a copy in their possession he had no choice but to order publication in the West as soon as possible. He announced the existence of the book, and his decision to publish it, to Western correspondents in Moscow. If the cat was out of the bag, the whole world and not just the KGB ought to know about it.

A few weeks later, on September 24, there was an enigmatic meeting between Solzhenitsyn and Natalya on a station platform that seemed to bear all the hallmarks of KGB involvement. The unhappily married couple, who for several years had not lived as man and wife in anything but pretence, had finally divorced six months earlier, and Solzhenitsyn had married Alya soon afterward. Relations between Natalya and her former husband had been strained, and Solzhenitsyn was surprised when she phoned to arrange the meeting. He deduced from the tone of her voice that her motives were not merely personal, and he reluctantly agreed to meet up with her at the neutral location of the Kazan station. Natalya told him that she had been speaking to “certain people” and had come to discuss the publication of some of Solzhenitsyn’s suppressed works, particularly Cancer Ward. The prospect of finally having Cancer Ward published in the Soviet Union was certainly alluring, but there was something in the nature of his former wife’s offer that aroused his suspicions. She told him that he was wrong to keep attacking the security organs. It was the Central Committee that was persecuting him, not the KGB. She announced that she had recently made many new and influential friends in high places, and that they were far cleverer than Solzhenitsyn realized. If these people had been searching for his manuscripts, Solzhenitsyn had only himself to blame: “You tell the world that your most important works are still to come, that the flow will continue even if you die, and that way you force them to come looking.” It was then that Natalya had mentioned what these certain people evidently wanted her to convey, no doubt with the threatened publication of The Gulag Archipelago in mind. “Why don’t you make a declaration that all your works are in your exclusive possession and that you won’t publish anything for twenty years?”²³ So that was it. If he agreed to block publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the West, Natalya’s influential friends would agree to the publication of Cancer Ward in the Soviet Union. Insisting that her only aim was to help him, Natalya asked cautiously whether he would agree to talk to someone a little higher up. Solzhenitsyn replied that he would speak only to the Politburo and “only about the nation’s destiny, not my own”.²⁴

In fact, although he conveyed no details to Natalya, Solzhenitsyn had taken steps only weeks earlier to do just as he said. On September 5, he had written a letter of constructive criticism to the leaders of the Soviet Union, in the hope of evoking some sort of positive response from them about the nation’s destiny. As a sign of good faith, he had not treated it as an open letter and did not release it to his friends or to the press. On the contrary, he had endeavored to keep its very existence a secret, dispatching individual copies to leading figures in the Soviet government. It was a genuine attempt at dialogue.

Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to Soviet Leaders was in many respects a visionary document, detailing the way in which civilization in both the East and the West was in peril—the peril of “progress”.

The world had been “dragged along the whole of the Western bourgeois-industrial and Marxist path” only to discover

Solzhenitsyn’s visionary rhetoric was not aimed solely at condemning past crimes but was an urgent effort to convince the Soviet government of its responsibility as the guardian of the future: “We have squandered our resources foolishly without so much as a backward glance, sapped our soil… and contaminated belts of waste land around our industrial centres—but for the moment, at least, far more still remains untainted by us, which we haven’t had time to touch. So let us come to our senses in time, let us change our course!”²⁷ To secure the future and create a land of clean air and clean water for our children, he went on, it was necessary to overcome the dictatorship of short-term economic considerations and to renounce many forms of industrial production that result in toxic waste.²⁸

Amidst the political polemics, the text of the Letter to Soviet Leaders was enlivened by the aesthetic ruminations of a literary master. Thus a discourse on the need for disarmament concluded with a plea for peace—not the peace of the politician but the peace of the poet:

A similar observation offered an alternative to the utterly unnatural life people were forced to endure in modern cities. Against the huge industrial conurbations, Solzhenitsyn contraposed life in the “old towns—towns made for people, horses, dogs… towns which were humane, friendly, cosy places, where the air was always clean, which were snow-clad in winter and in spring redolent with garden aromas streaming through the fences into the streets…. An economy of non-giantism with small-scale though highly developed technology will not only allow for but will necessitate the building of new towns of the old type.”³⁰

At the conclusion of his heartfelt address, Solzhenitsyn pleaded for equally fair treatment for all ideological and moral currents, in particular between all religions. He stated that personally he considered Christianity the only living spiritual force capable of undertaking the spiritual healing of Russia but proposed no special privileges for it, simply that it should be treated fairly and not suppressed. Besides the freedom to worship, he called for “a free art and literature… allow us philosophical, ethical, economic and social studies, and you will see what a rich harvest it brings and how it bears fruit—for the good of Russia”.³¹

Although Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to Soviet Leaders was written specifically from a Russian perspective, there were remarkable parallels between its central message and that of the radical economist E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, which was being published almost simultaneously in the West. Schumacher’s book was destined to have a dramatic impact on Western thought; its publication served to bolster the environmentalist lobby and launch the “green” movement. Schumacher’s call for sustainable development, eco-friendly economics, and human-scale enterprises echoed Solzhenitsyn’s own thoughts. “I came to the same conclusions in parallel with him but independently”, Solzhenitsyn stated. “If you have read my Letter to Soviet Leaders you will see that I say much the same thing as he did at about the same sort of time.”³²

There were other parallels with Schumacher. Like Solzhenitsyn, Schumacher believed that economic activity subsisted within a higher moral, and ultimately religious, framework. Like Solzhenitsyn, he had made his first public profession of faith the previous year, in his case with his reception into the Roman Catholic Church. There was, however, one notable difference. Whereas Schumacher was lauded and applauded by Western leaders, including American President Jimmy Carter, Solzhenitsyn received nothing but a wall of silence in response to his Letter to Soviet Leaders. In 1974, Schumacher was awarded the CBE by the British government for his services to economics. In the same year, Solzhenitsyn was exiled by the Soviet government as a traitor.

In the last quarter of 1973, Solzhenitsyn remained preoccupied with the subject of Russia’s reconstruction along the lines he had outlined in his Letter to Soviet Leaders. Specifically, he was in the process of editing a collection of eleven essays, later to be published as From under the Rubble, which was intended to stir debate on matters of fundamental principle concerning the contemporary state of Russian life. Each essay sought to shed light both on the present evils and on possible future long-term solutions. Solzhenitsyn wrote three essays for the collection, the first of which, entitled “As Breathing and Consciousness Return”, included a reiteration of the thoughts on nationhood he had elucidated in his Nobel Lecture: “In spite of Marxism, the twentieth century has revealed to us the inexhaustible strength and vitality of national feelings and impels us to think more deeply about this riddle: why is the nation a no less sharply defined and irreducible human entity than the individual? Does not national variety enrich mankind as faceting increases the value of a jewel? Should it be destroyed? And can it be destroyed?”³³

Having stated his own belief in the enriching variety of nations, he compared it with the desire of Andrei Sakharov for an intellectual world leadership, for world government. Such a government, Solzhenitsyn maintained, would be impossible under democracy, “for given universal franchise, when and where would an intellectual elite be elected to govern?” Consequently, any world government would need to be imposed because it would never be elected. It would constitute authoritarian rule. “Whether such a government proved very bad or excellent, the means of creating it, the principles of its formation and operation, can have nothing in common with modern democracy.”³⁴

In October 1973, Solzhenitsyn wrote a postscript to his original essay in which he asked fundamental questions about the nature and meaning of “happiness” and “freedom”. The current conception that both were linked to material considerations, such as the absence of poverty or increasing disposable income, was inadequate. At their deepest and most meaningful level, happiness and freedom both found their fulfillment on a transcendent spiritual plane. To illustrate the point, he gave the example of the desire of the peasants for land in pre-revolutionary Russia: “The peasant masses longed for land and if this in a certain sense means freedom and wealth, in another (and more important) sense it means obligation, in yet another (and its highest) sense it means a mystical tie with the world and a feeling of personal worth.”³⁵

Solzhenitsyn used this practical example of natural peasant yearnings as a springboard into a deeper discussion of metaphysical reality:

On the other hand, a surfeit of comfort, which some mistake as freedom, leads to corruption. For this reason, the materially affluent Western democracies were in a state of spiritual confusion. The moral health of civilization had been preserved by past generations who had never known the modern conveniences of technological society: “A level of moral health incomparably higher than that expressed today in simian radio music, pop songs and insulting advertisements: could a listener from outer space imagine that our planet had already known and left behind it Bach, Rembrandt and Dante?”³⁷

If the essay displayed Solzhenitsyn’s contempt for the moral bankruptcy of Western materialism, he still saved his fiercest scorn for the immoral totalitarianism of the Soviet system:

In November, Solzhenitsyn wrote another essay for inclusion in From under the Rubble, entitled “Repentance and Self-Limitation”. A quarter of a century later he would still consider this one of his more important articles, expressing one of his key thoughts.³⁹ In one important respect, it was his own considered reply to the issue of “National Bolshevism” that had caused such acrimony with the liberal critics of Novy Mir. Although he had disagreed strongly with the nature of their critique of National Bolshevism, feeling that they were attacking it for the wrong reasons, Solzhenitsyn was opposed to the xenophobic chauvinism and jingoism of the National Bolsheviks. In “Repentance and Self-Limitation”, he sought to dissect the essence of National Bolshevism, which made communism and patriotism inseparable, praised the Revolution and the subsequent history of the Soviet Union as a triumph of the Russian spirit, and believed that blood alone determined whether one was Russian or non-Russian. As for things spiritual, Solzhenitsyn wrote, all trends are admissible to the National Bolshevik. “Orthodoxy is not the least bit more Russian than Marxism, atheism, the scientific outlook, or, shall we say, Hinduism. God need not be written with a capital letter, but Government must be.”⁴⁰

Against such triumphalist pseudo-fascism, dressed up in Marxist clothes, Solzhenitsyn placed his own view of love for one’s country:

Like a latter-day John the Baptist calling on his fellow countrymen to repent, Solzhenitsyn reminded them that

The concept of repentance and self-limitation was not applicable to nations only. It was equally applicable to individuals, in fact more so, because any national repentance could only start in the hearts and minds of individuals. “We are always anxiously on the lookout for ways of curbing the inordinate greed of the other man, but no one is heard renouncing his own inordinate greed.” It was this selfishness, this pride, at the very heart of man which lay at the root of society’s problems.

A quarter of a century later, Solzhenitsyn had succumbed to more than a trace of scepticism: “I believe that if people knew how to self-limit they would be morally much higher. Unfortunately, the idea of self-limitation is not successful if you try to propagandize it. It does not resonate. Mostly, I think, only highly religious people are willing to accept this idea. For instance, if you try to propagandize the idea of self-limitation to governments or states and say that they should learn not to grab what belongs to others, this does not have an effect.”⁴³

Solzhenitsyn’s third and final essay for From under the Rubble was entitled “The Smatterers”, combining a pessimistic appraisal of the recent past, a plaintive cry against present trends, and a defiant optimism about the future. He finished it in January 1974 and passed it to Liusha Chukovskaya, the trusted friend who had helped him for the previous eight years. He requested that she type it, along with the other two essays destined for From under the Rubble, but was surprised when she returned a few days later and launched into a raging tirade against him, against which her previous disquiet over the Lenten Letter paled into insignificance. She had been horrified by the content of the essays and thrust a sheaf of notes listing her disagreements into his hands. Her anger was heightened by the confirmation that for all those years she had helped a man with whom she now knew she disagreed on fundamentals.

Chukovskaya was not alone in her apprehensions about the direction that Solzhenitsyn seemed to be taking. Another helper, Mirra Petrova, disliked what she perceived as a reactionary drift in Solzhenitsyn’s work, particularly in August 1914 and October 1916, and despised every mention of religion. Solzhenitsyn also alienated his old friend Lev Kopelev, who was very critical of the contents of the Letter to Soviet Leaders. For his part, Solzhenitsyn thought that Kopelev had reverted to his earlier communist sympathies, feeling that his old ally had become a fierce and abiding foe.

Solzhenitsyn grieved at the cooling or loss of previous friendships, understanding the apprehensions of erstwhile allies but finally unable to accept their disagreements. It must have seemed as though he was losing the warmth of many of those closest to him, finding himself out in the cold in the grimmest heat of battle. Yet he still had the indomitable strength of Alya to lean on. She had just given him their third son in as many years, and he knew that, in her at least, he had an ally who agreed with all he was doing and saying. She was his rock, standing firm amid the storms that his own efforts were unleashing upon both of them. Nevertheless, the joys of fatherhood and family life could not dispel entirely the sorrows incurred through the sacrifice of old friendships. In a moment of melancholy in December 1973, he had asked himself, “[W]hen will the din of battle cease? If only I could go away from it all, go away for many years to the back of beyond with nothing but fields and open skies and woods and horses in sight, nothing to do but write my novel at my own pace.”⁴⁴

Little could he know that within two months his prayer would be answered, although scarcely in the way he had envisaged. He was about to find himself thrust out in the cold by his enemies as well as his friends. Out in the cold and a long way from home.