Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER SEVENTEEN} RUSSIA REBORN

On October 13 1979, Solzhenitsyn found himself once more the victim of government censorship. This time, however, it was not the Soviet government that sought to block his work but an ostensibly friendly regime. The Finnish authorities blacked out transmission of a Swedish television adaptation of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the Swedish-speaking population of the Aland Islands. The transmission was banned in Finnish territory because the Supreme Court had ruled that it might harm Finland’s relations with the Soviet Union.¹ Yet if the icy politics of the Cold War still continued to raise its frosty head, Solzhenitsyn could shrug it off with the knowledge that the iciness was the chill of the morgue. He already believed that the Soviet regime was dead on its feet, and he sensed that his return to Russia was a distinct possibility.

When these words were spoken, few would have taken them very seriously. The Soviet Union stood secure, or so it seemed, an indestructible monolith, squatting its vast immovable bulk over the whole of Eastern Europe and extending its influence to every corner of the globe. In fact, the Brezhnev era was in many respects a period of relative stability. Consumer goods were heavily subsidized, and shoppers could be comfortable in the knowledge that basic foodstuffs such as meat and bread cost the same as they had done under Stalin thirty years earlier. The stability masked deeper problems, such as food shortages, a burgeoning black market, and unprecedented levels of corruption, but none of these appeared to represent a serious threat to the fabric of Soviet society. To suggest in 1980 that the whole Soviet edifice was about to collapse was as unthinkable as to suggest that the United States was on the verge of falling apart. It was assumed, tacitly at least, that both superpowers would be a fixture in world politics for decades to come. In this light, Solzhenitsyn’s words must have seemed absurdly, blindly optimistic.

Brezhnev was succeeded in November 1982 by the hard-line, former head of the KGB Yuri Andropov, reinforcing the impression that the Soviet monolith was as immovable as ever. In the same month, a play in Moscow about Lenin, Thus Shall We Win, was brought to a halt by a lone man shouting “down with Soviet fascism” and demanding Solzhenitsyn’s return.³ His solitary act of defiance may have displayed the indomitable nature of Solzhenitsyn’s supporters, but the gesture was at once both heroic and hollow, a Jacobite plea for the impossible.

In May 1983, Solzhenitsyn arrived in Britain for a high-profile visit during which he was more favorably received than he had been during his previous visit seven years earlier. The political complexion had changed considerably in the intervening years. Callaghan’s Labour government had been toppled in 1979 by the Conservatives’ triumph at the polls, and Britain was enjoying the afterglow of its victory in the Falklands war. On May 11, Solzhenitsyn was received by Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street in a private, hour-long courtesy call during which they discussed the cause of freedom.

On May 9, The Times had carried a photograph on its front page of Solzhenitsyn bearing an icon during an Orthodox service at the Russian Church in Exile in Kensington. The following day, he gave the Templeton Address at London’s Guildhall, the text of which was published by The Times. Entitled “Godlessness, the First Step to the Gulag”, this speech was perhaps more overtly religious than any of his previous appeals for a rediscovery of sanity amidst the madness of modern life. He began with a memory of his childhood, which served as a moral template for the rest of his speech, as indeed for the rest of his life and that of the century in which he had lived. “Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”

Since then, he explained, he had spent nearly half a century researching the history of the Russian Revolution, which had “swallowed up some sixty million of our people”, but if he was asked to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of all that had happened he could not put it more accurately than to repeat the same words. “And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: ‘Men have forgotten God.’”

Quoting Dostoyevsky’s observations about the seething hatred for the church that had characterized the French Revolution—“revolution must necessarily begin with atheism”—Solzhenitsyn asserted that “hatred of God is the principal driving force” behind Marxism. As a result, the USSR had witnessed an uninterrupted procession of martyrs among the Orthodox clergy. Although the West had not suffered the communist experience, it too was “experiencing a drying up of the religious consciousness…. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short-lived value. It has become embarrassing to appeal to eternal concepts, embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system.”

He concluded his address with an appeal to eternal verities:

Solzhenitsyn’s voice was as uncompromising as ever, his words as strident, but for once they seemed to be received by sympathetic ears. On May 12, the lead article in The Times had nothing but praise for the Russian writer’s timely reminder of “what happens to a society when men have forgotten God…. Fashionable opinion might be tempted to dismiss Solzhenitsyn as an embittered exile whose religious enthusiasm, born under Soviet oppression, is inappropriate for the liberal societies in the West. Fashionable opinion, as so often, would be wrong.”⁵

Once again Solzhenitsyn was succeeding in fanning the flames of controversy as few others could. On May 14, The Times published an angry rebuttal of both Solzhenitsyn’s Templeton Address and its own leader article in a joint letter from representatives of the British Humanist Society, the National Secular Society, and the Rationalist Press Association. In the same issue, several other letters were published that supported the tenets of Solzhenitsyn’s argument. For the next fortnight, debate simmered and boiled on The Times’ letters page as Solzhenitsyn’s supporters and detractors laid claim and counter-claim to the role of religion in modern society.

On May 23, in the midst of this debate, The Times published an interview with Solzhenitsyn by Bernard Levin, in which he reiterated his conviction that “the goal of Man’s existence is not happiness but spiritual growth”. He admitted that in the modern world such a conviction “is regarded as something strange, something almost insane”. Levin asked him whether there was anything intrinsically wrong with the right of the mass of the people to enjoy the material possessions that previously were enjoyed by only a few, to which Solzhenitsyn replied that one must distinguish between material sufficiency and consumer greed. The whole of history, he maintained, consisted of a series of temptations to which mankind had normally succumbed, showing itself to be unworthy of its higher purpose. “Now we stand before the temptation of the material, more than a sufficiency of the material, of luxury, of everything, and again we show ourselves unworthy. Our historical process is really—consists of—man standing before the things which are temptations to him and of showing himself able to overcome them.”⁶

Again Solzhenitsyn expressed his admiration for Pope John Paul II, “his personality, the spirit which he has brought into the Roman Catholic Church and his constant and lively interest in all the various problems all around the world”.⁷

Asked by Levin whether suffering was necessary for people to turn to things of the spirit, Solzhenitsyn confirmed that “suffering is essential for our spiritual growth and perfection”. Furthermore, “suffering is sent to the whole of humanity…. It is sent in sufficient measure so that if man knows how to do so he can use it for his growth.” Suffering must be freely accepted for it to have any positive power. “Now, if a person doesn’t draw what has to be drawn from suffering but instead is embittered against it he is really making a very negative choice at that moment.”⁸ Asked whether he believed that communism would finally collapse in the Soviet Union, he refused to be drawn on a specific timescale but repeated his premonition that “I am personally convinced that in my lifetime I will return to my country.”⁹

Solzhenitsyn had granted this exclusive interview to Bernard Levin because Levin had been one of the few writers in Britain to speak up in his defense. For the same reason, several weeks later he granted an interview to Malcolm Muggeridge. For some time, Muggeridge had been eager to interview Solzhenitsyn, and the Russian finally agreed to his requests during the British visit. The interview was broadcast on BBC2 on July 4, 1983, and covered much of the familiar terrain explored in the earlier interview with Levin, including the brutalities of the Soviet regime, the resurgence of Christianity in the face of these brutalities, the betrayals of Western liberalism, and the need for spiritual renewal in the non-communist countries. There was also the same prophetic premonition: “In a strange way,” Solzhenitsyn told Muggeridge, “I not only hope, I’m inwardly convinced that I shall go back.” In fact, Muggeridge was one of the few people who took Solzhenitsyn’s hopes of a return to Russia seriously. He had been predicting the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union since the mid-1970s. In the event, both men would live to see their prophecies fulfilled.

Commenting on the televised interview, Peter Ackroyd wrote that Solzhenitsyn’s “convictions animate him and in this short interview he seemed entirely self-assured, with a directness of glance and an economy of gesture which are the marks of someone who has ‘come through’”. Ackroyd was also amused by the mutual respect that the two protagonists displayed throughout the proceedings: “The spectacle of Solzhenitsyn and Muggeridge agreeing with, and complementing, each other had its comic moments…. ‘Hallelujah!’, said Muggeridge to one remark by Solzhenitsyn; ‘what you have said has a profound significance’, said Solzhenitsyn after one of Muggeridge’s own contributions.”¹⁰ For his part, Solzhenitsyn has nothing but positive memories of his meeting with Muggeridge, describing him as “enchanting”.¹¹

In October, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed at home in Vermont by Bernard Pivot, who recorded their dialogue for his French television program. The interview was broadcast on December 10, on the eve of Solzhenitsyn’s sixty-fifth birthday. It revealed that Solzhenitsyn “chops wood in true Russian style for exercise” and that he had taken up tennis late in life. “When I was a boy in Ryazan,” he explained, “I dreamed of playing tennis, but I never had enough money for a racket. At the age of fifty-seven, I managed to allow myself my own court.” There was also the same familiar, seemingly mandatory, refrain that his dearest wish was “to return to Russia alive, not just in my books”.¹²

On December 9, the day before the interview with Pivot was broadcast, Solzhenitsyn’s French publishers brought out a revised and expanded version of August 1914, which was described as the first volume of a cycle of books entitled The Red Wheel. Solzhenitsyn announced that he had completed two further volumes, covering October 1916 and March 1917, but these still awaited publication. He was working on a fourth volume, and several more were planned. “Probably my life will come to an end before I complete it”, he told Pivot. In fact, he survived to see the full cycle through to completion, considering The Red Wheel the most important work of his life.¹³

Given Solzhenitsyn’s own estimation ofThe Red Wheel as the culmination of his literary achievement, it was scarcely surprising that he became animated when discussing it, enthusing about it both as a work of literature and as a much-needed work of history:

Solzhenitsyn ascribed a great deal of perennial wisdom to folk sayings, which, in the context of their use in The Red Wheel, “lays bare, presents clearly, the meaning of that which the previous chapter had described”. In fact, folk wisdom can do more than merely summarize what has been said: “It is in some ways an unexpected judgment of the people regarding that which we are doing.” To illustrate the point, Solzhenitsyn discussed the proverbial lines “Don’t search the village, search your heart”, with which he had ended a chapter in August 1914: “In Russian, there is also a rhyme which is lost in the English translation. It means that when you try to explain strange occurrences, things that are going on, don’t look around and say, ‘Oh, it’s because people are this or that way’, but recognize that you also may be that way and that perhaps the key to what has transpired may also be found inside yourself.”¹⁵

It is clear from the irrepressible enthusiasm with which Solzhenitsyn discussed The Red Wheel that his work on this mammoth enterprise was the most important part of his life throughout the 1980s, taking precedence over everything else.

While Solzhenitsyn labored away at The Red Wheel in the secluded isolation of Vermont, the Red Wheel of Soviet politics was laboring onward into the swamps of stagnation. Yuri Andropov died in February 1984, barely a year after taking power, and was succeeded by the seventy-three-year-old Konstantin Chernenko. He also died only a year later, and in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev—at fifty-three the youngest member of the Politburo—took over the leadership. Within months of his accession, the famous buzzwords of the Gorbachev era, glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), could be heard on the lips of excited Russians. Perhaps at last the end of communist oppression was in sight. Older Russians, remembering the false dawn under Khrushchev, remained cautious.

Ironically, the emergence of glasnost in the Soviet Union coincided with rumors that Solzhenitsyn was about to become an American citizen. On June 24, 1985, the press waited expectantly for his arrival at an American court where a special ceremony had been arranged to confer citizenship on Solzhenitsyn and his family. In the event, Alya arrived with their eldest son, Yermolai, and was duly granted citizenship (each of the three sons would subsequently opt for US citizenship when they reached the age of eighteen), but it was Solzhenitsyn’s failure to appear that excited the interest of the media. Unconvinced by the official explanation given by the clerk of the court that he was ill, the press quoted a family friend who suggested that he may have wished to avoid the crowd of reporters.¹⁶ Years later, the mystery surrounding his non-appearance was explained by Alya. Throughout the years of exile, her husband “never wanted to, and did not, become a US citizen, since he could not imagine himself to be a citizen of any country except Russia (not the USSR!)”. During the early eighties, at the height of the Afghan war and at a time of failing hopes for short-term change in the USSR, Solzhenitsyn did in fact experience a moment of some doubt, but ultimately he decided to “remain stateless—right up until Russia’s liberation from communism, an event for which he had always hoped”.¹⁷ In short, he appears to have changed his mind at the very last minute, possibly prompted by recent changes in his homeland.

The cracks in the Soviet monolith were symbolized dramatically in April 1986 by the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the sort of ecological tragedy that Solzhenitsyn had forecast in his Letter to Soviet Leaders more than a decade earlier. The Soviet authorities desperately tried to smother all news of the catastrophe, concealing the matter for a full three days in cynical contradiction of the much-heralded glasnost. Muscovites suspected that something was amiss when trainloads of evacuated children began arriving at Kiev station, but it was only when meteorological observers in Sweden detected the radioactive cloud that the Soviet Union was forced to confess the worst.

In a similar cynical denial of his own principles of openness, Gorbachev brazenly denied the existence of political prisoners until Andrei Sakharov’s unexpected release from exile in the “closed” city of Gorky. Sakharov returned to Moscow to a hero’s welcome and vowed to fight for the freedom of all.

In spite of such double standards, the Soviet stranglehold was being greatly loosened under Gorbachev’s leadership. Corrupt officials who had abused their positions in the Brezhnev era were investigated publicly, as were allegations of black marketeering within the Party apparatus. The changing atmosphere within Soviet society inspired rumors that Solzhenitsyn’s books would at last be published in the USSR. In March 1987, a Danish newspaper reported that Soviet authorities were shortly to lift the ban on Cancer Ward.¹⁸ A year later, in April 1988, The Gulag Archipelago finally breached the Iron Curtain with its publication in Yugoslavia.¹⁹ On August 3, a Soviet weekly newspaper, Moscow News, hailed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as one of the great classics of Russian literature and an outstanding event in literary, moral, and spiritual life. Ten days later, the Soviet State Publishing Committee announced that it was liberalizing its official attitude to Solzhenitsyn’s works. Referring to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the committee agreed that it was up to individual publishing houses to decide whether or not to reprint those works that had been previously published in the Soviet Union. Publication of those of Solzhenitsyn’s books that had thus far only been published abroad, in other words the vast bulk of his work, was not to be authorized at present.²⁰ Significantly, Novy Mir announced on the same day that it planned to publish George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Encouraged by the liberalizing tendencies within the state apparatus, Soviet dissidents stepped up their campaign for Solzhenitsyn’s return. In summer 1988, a short article appealing for his citizenship to be restored was published in the weekly journal Book Review.²¹ At the end of August, an unofficial committee lobbying for the erection of a monument to Stalin’s victims in Moscow invited Solzhenitsyn to join its board. He politely declined the invitation. In October, the first meeting of a Soviet human rights group called Memorial, set up to commemorate the victims of Stalinism, demanded public recognition for, and the restoration of Soviet citizenship to, Solzhenitsyn.

In a panic-stricken response to the growing reform movement, the Soviet old guard began to fight a furious rearguard action. At first, it seemed that they might be successful. Boris Yeltsin, the highly popular reformist mayor of Moscow, was sacked, and in the summer of 1988, Gorbachev abandoned his delicate balancing act between old guard and avant garde and realigned himself with the hard-liners. It looked like the same old story: all the promises of reform were to be broken in a renewed totalitarian backlash. With the neo-Stalinists again in the ascendency, Gorbachev set about installing hard-liners in prominent positions of power. On September 30, Vadim Medvedev was appointed as the Politburo member responsible for ideology. Two months later, he dramatically vetoed publication of Solzhenitsyn’s books in the Soviet Union on the basis that they were “undermining the foundations of the Soviet state”.²²

On this occasion, however, the hard-liners had underestimated the forces aligned against them. Even as Gorbachev was siding with the old guard, liberals within the Communist Party formed the Democratic Union, the first organized opposition movement to emerge since 1921. Gorbachev banned its meetings and created a new Special Purpose Militia unit to deal with any disturbances. Meanwhile, in the Baltic republics, nationalist Popular Fronts were attracting mass membership. In November 1988, the small nation of Estonia audaciously broke away from the Soviet Union. In February of the following year, the Estonians raised the national flag above their parliament building in place of the hammer and sickle. At around the same time, two newspapers in the neighboring Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania published Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not by a Lie”, which had appeared in samizdat just before his exile.

In the face of such defiance, Gorbachev’s hard-line government caved in beneath the weight and momentum of the opposition. In March 1989, during elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies, Soviet voters were for the first time in years allowed to choose from more than one candidate, some of whom were not even Party members. Despite the heavily rigged election process, prominent reformers such as Yeltsin and Sakharov were elected. When Sakharov, as combative as ever, called for an end to one-party rule, his microphone was switched off—a gesture that only highlighted the desperate nature of the communist hierarchy’s efforts to cling to power, especially as Sakharov’s speech was being broadcast live on Russian television.

In the same month as the elections, Twentieth Century and Peace, a magazine published by the officially sanctioned Soviet Peace Committee, defied the Kremlin’s ban on Solzhenitsyn’s works by following the example of the Baltic journals and publishing “Live Not by a Lie”. A commentary accompanying the essay credited Solzhenitsyn with helping to prepare the way for the present reforms.²³ Meanwhile, in remote Kuban, another small journal also flouted the official ban by publishing a three-part guide to Solzhenitsyn’s work.²⁴

Following the success of the reformers in the March election, Solzhenitsyn found that he had many friends in influential places. In April, several delegates in the Soviet parliament called for the restoration of his citizenship. The struggle, so long confined to the back-streets of the dissident fringe, was now being waged in the corridors of power.

On June 2, while thousands of Chinese students were occupying Tiananmen Square in the abortive hope that totalitarianism could be overthrown in the other communist superpower, Sakharov was shouted down in parliament as he accused the Soviet army of atrocities in Afghanistan. On the same day, another delegate, the writer Yuri Karyakin, caused a similar furor by proposing that the government should restore Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship and that it should inscribe the names of the millions killed under Stalin on the walls of KGB headquarters.²⁵

Solzhenitsyn must have sensed final victory at the beginning of July when the Soviet Writers’ Union not only voted for his reinstatement as a member, but also urged the authorities to sanction publication of The Gulag Archipelago.

In spite of last-ditch efforts by hard-liners on the Central Committee to block its publication, the seemingly impossible happened in October when Novy Mir published the first long extract from The Gulag Archipelago. The journal published one-third of the work in three issues, adding a million to its readership in the process. Three million copies were sold. Interest in Solzhenitsyn was enormous, and the state-run publishing house Sovietski Pisatel announced plans to publish a collection of his works.

In the same month that the first extracts of The Gulag Archipelago were published, there were unprecedented counter-demonstrations in Red Square during the October Revolution celebrations. One of the banners read: “Workers of the World—we’re sorry”.

For the communist old guard, the previous year had been one of unmitigated disaster. Not only had problems within the Soviet Union escalated out of control, but the Soviet grip on its empire in Eastern Europe was being prised loose. During 1989, reformist movements had triumphed throughout the Eastern bloc, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

In December 1989, the Soviet authorities indicated begrudgingly that Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship would be returned to him if he applied for it. His rejection of the offer was conveyed by Alya to the New York Times: “It’s shameful, after all that they have done to him, that the Parliament doesn’t have the simple courage to admit that they were wrong. They try to turn a moral and political question into a matter of bureaucracy and paperwork…. They kick him out and after that they want him to come and bow and ask permission to enter…. We’ve waited a long time. We will wait until they become wise.”²⁶

Wisdom was not particularly evident in Gorbachev’s decision on January 19, 1990, to send Soviet tanks into Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, to crush the independence movement there. More than a hundred people were killed that night, fomenting further hatred of the Soviet regime and intensifying the struggle for independence. In February, scores of thousands converged on Red Square in the largest demonstration in Russia since the Revolution. The following month, voters registered their disgust with the communist regime in the local elections. In the Soviet republics, nationalists swept the board, paving the way for the declarations of independence that followed. In Russia, the anti-communist Democratic Platform gained majorities in the powerful city councils of Leningrad and Moscow. During the May Day celebrations, Gorbachev suffered the humiliation of being jeered by sections of the crowd in Red Square, and by the end of the month his arch-rival Boris Yeltsin had secured his election as chairman of the Russian parliament. Two weeks later, on June 12, Yeltsin played his master card, declaring Russian independence from the Soviet Union in imitation of the Baltic states.

After nearly three-quarters of a century of communist rule, Russia was reborn as a nation state. One by one, the outlying republics had declared their independence from the communist yoke, and now Russia itself had opted out. It was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, which had ceased to exist in anything but name, claiming to rule a vanished empire. In July 1990, the Soviet Communist Party held its last Congress. Yeltsin tore up his party card in full view of the cameras, and two million others followed his example before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Vermont, Solzhenitsyn observed the unfolding of events with a rising sense of joy. Surely it was now only a matter of time before he and his family could return home. Yet even amid the triumph there was no time for triumphalism. Such was his irrepressible personality that he was already writing a bold, polemical manifesto for the new Russia. He sensed that the end of the Soviet Union might be an exciting new beginning for his native land. Russia had been reborn, but now she needed to be rebuilt.