Solzhenitsyn

^{CHAPTER EIGHTEEN} REBUILDING ON GREEN FOUNDATIONS

In January 1990, Solzhenitsyn took his war of words with Russia’s modernists to the literal as well as the literary level. He announced through his Paris publisher Nikita Struve that he would be writing a specialized glossary of ancient Russian words and rare dialect as a means of defending the purity and beauty of the language from the encroachments of foreign neologisms and Soviet bureaucratic jargon.

The glossary, to be published in monthly installments in the Soviet review Russian Speech, was welcomed by traditionalist writers who had voiced their abhorrence of both the inelegant, politically correct vocabulary of the Soviet era and the emerging arriviste vocabulary of the new capitalism. The westernizing flavor of Gorbachev’s perestroika had added new words to the menu of the contemporary Russian language, including the capitalist buzzwords biznesmen and menedzher.

The whole debate was far more politically charged than its roots in dry philology may have suggested. Many traditionalist writers viewed the arrival of certain aspects of Western popular culture, such as rok and narkotiki, to be as great a danger to the Russian way of life as the emergence of the words themselves was a threat to the language. Western cultural and linguistic imperialism was following hard on the heels of the deadening effects of Soviet sloganizing. In the late 1960s, the writer Konstantin Paustovsky had claimed in an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta that the language was degenerating into bureaucratic slang, and as recently as July 1989, an article in Literaturnaya Rossiya had urged the Supreme Soviet to pass laws of linguistic defense. Solzhenitsyn was, therefore, stepping into a highly topical minefield when he chose to side with the traditionalists against the modernists. “The Russian language is his element, his substance in life”, Nikita Struve explained. “It is natural for an exiled writer.”¹

Solzhenitsyn’s desire to nurture and preserve the purity of the language did not spring from motives of a retrogressive or reactionary nature but was derived from a passionate belief that the richness of the Russian language itself gave rise to opportunities for innovation. It was his intention to emphasize these opportunities and to stress that, as a living tongue, Russian could evolve vividly and vibrantly without recourse to alien appendages. “Russian, with its suffixes and prefixes, is still a living language, where it is possible to create new words”, Struve said. “Solzhenitsyn’s works are testimony to its regenerating power.”²

Although Solzhenitsyn had been working on the dictionary for many years, ever since his days in the labor camps,³ his work on it had been reinvigorated after he had seen Stephan, his youngest son, typing. “It was a way to bring his Russian son closer to the language”, Struve explained.⁴ In fact, Struve, in making this statement, unwittingly summarized the vocational trinity at the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s inspiration during the years of exile. First and foremost, he was a writer, and the literary aspects of his life invariably took precedence over everything else. Yet, as his son Ignat had testified, he was a naturally gifted teacher and a considerate father. It was not surprising, therefore, that as patriarch and tutor he should gain inspiration for his literary endeavors from the desire to educate his children. Fatherhood was itself a creative force.

Fatherhood was, however, an obligation as well as an inspiration, and he and Alya made every effort to fulfill their parental duties in the difficult and unusual cultural circumstances in which they found themselves. Yermolai, Ignat, and Stephan were encouraged to assimilate with the indigenous culture in which they were living without losing their Russian culture and heritage. It was a difficult balancing act, which, to judge by results, was achieved with distinction.

Yermolai, the eldest of Solzhenitsyn’s sons, was a particularly gifted schoolboy who was graded three years ahead of his age. Yet even this superlative achievement may not have done the child prodigy the justice he warranted; the Russian scholar Alexis Klimoff, visiting Vermont to discuss translations, found the three teenagers studying subjects at a level ten years ahead of their peers. Without doubt, this was due largely to the quality of the home schooling they had received from their parents, along with the religious instruction from Father Tregubov, a priest from the Orthodox Church at Claremont. According to D. M. Thomas, it was “all part of the rich and rigorous demands placed upon them”.⁵ As a twelve-year-old, Yermolai had helped his mother by setting one of his father’s works on their computer. Desiring to maximize his son’s evident potential, Solzhenitsyn sent Yermolai to Eton for his final two years in school. “I would say that my father sending me to school at Eton was a reflection of his respect for the quality of education available there,” Yermolai wrote, “and I am grateful for his decision to do so.”⁶

On a more general level, Yermolai’s memories of England itself were necessarily colored by those of the school—seeing as it was of the boarding variety—and were thus somewhat limited. Nevertheless, his view, limited or otherwise, was extremely positive: “I very much like England, and am always happy to visit there when I get the chance. Its contributions to world civilization are monumental, and British humour will (most of the time) find in me a great fan.”⁸

After his time at Eton, Yermolai returned to the United States where he read Chinese at Harvard.

Ignat was no less gifted than his older brother. He made his solo debut as a pianist with the Windham Community Orchestra, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 2, when he was still only eleven years old. Like Yermolai, he continued his studies in England. Not unreasonably, D. M. Thomas concluded that Solzhenitsyn “must have valued English education”,⁹ yet Ignat insisted that “there was no master-plan to send us there” and that “it was essentially a coincidence”.¹⁰

After completing his studies in England, Ignat returned to the United States and enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, one of the finest music schools in the world, to pursue a double degree in piano and in conducting. While there, his performing activities continued to expand, and eventually he signed with Columbia Artists, a major music management in New York.

Stephan, the youngest of the brothers, received his B.A. from Harvard and a Master’s in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so completing the successful educational careers of the Solzhenitsyns’ prodigious offspring. The three boys had harvested the fruits of their parents’ labors on their behalf, as well as laboring diligently on their own account. D. M. Thomas depicted the home life which the boys had enjoyed since infancy and which was the secret of their ultimate success, as an “ordered harmony… a productive hive, a rich simplicity”. Solzhenitsyn and “his loving disciples”, wrote Thomas, had “farmed the grain of the spirit”.¹²

Thomas also singled out the importance to the boys of the “stimulation of meeting interesting people who came as guests”,¹³ perhaps the most notable of whom was Mstislav Rostropovich, Yermolai’s godfather, who was a frequent visitor. The internationally renowned cellist was one of Solzhenitsyn’s oldest friends and one of his greatest allies. In July 1974, only a few months after Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from the Soviet Union, Rostropovich had defected under duress, mainly due to his own persecution at the hands of the Soviet state for his public support for Solzhenitsyn. In January 1990, Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnyevskaya, had been given back their Soviet citizenship. The following month, he made his first return to Moscow since his defection to conduct the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. At a crowded press conference, he relayed a message from Solzhenitsyn: “Tell our people I will come back, but only when every person has a chance to read my books.” Rostropovich stated optimistically that “when we left, the Soviet Union was a huge island of lies, now it is cleansing itself”, but he added that he and his wife would not be totally content until Solzhenitsyn was returned to his people. Stung into an official response, Nikolai Gubenko, the Soviet Minister of Culture, said that he would work to restore citizenship to anyone who left under duress.¹⁴

Solzhenitsyn’s demand that everyone should have the chance to read his books at last seemed likely to be met. Plans were already under way in Russia to publish all his works over the next two years. Throughout the following months, many of his works were published in his own country for the first time, becoming instant bestsellers. Seven million copies of his books were sold in the first year alone, so that 1990 became known as “The Year of Solzhenitsyn”.¹⁵ The huge success added to the pressure on the authorities to restore his citizenship. In April 1990, the staff of Literaturnaya Gazeta sent an open letter to Gorbachev calling for Solzhenitsyn’s rehabilitation. Ominously, the news was accompanied by reports that the conservatives and liberals in the Soviet Communist Party were on the verge of a major split.¹⁶ Yet even while it looked as though the people of Russia were about to suffer another bout of the Soviet Union’s insufferable politics, Solzhenitsyn sent a timely reminder that there were more important issues than the deadening dichotomy of left and right. At the end of April, he announced that he would be donating his share of the royalties on the Soviet sales of The Gulag Archipelago to help with the restoration of a sixteenth-century monastery.¹⁷

With pressure mounting, it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. On August 16, Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship was finally restored, nearly seventeen years after it had been taken from him. Twenty-two other victims of Soviet oppression had their citizenship restored on the same day, including Viktor Korchnoi, the chess grandmaster, and Oskar Rabin, the artist whose open-air exhibition had been bulldozed on the orders of Brezhnev. A Soviet spokesman said it was “a way of apologizing, belatedly, but apologizing”.¹⁸ Within days, Ivan Silayev, the Russian Prime Minister, sought to make political capital from the decision by inviting Solzhenitsyn to the Soviet Union as his personal guest. Solzhenitsyn refused.¹⁹ He was not prepared to be used as a pawn in the highly volatile game of power politics unfolding in Russia. Instead, he was preparing a major move of his own.

On September 18, an important new essay entitled “Rebuilding Russia” was published simultaneously in two Soviet newspapers: Komsomolskaya Pravda, the communist youth daily, and Literaturnaya Gazeta. The fact that his essay was being published as a sixteen-page supplement in two journals that previously would only have mentioned him in scathing pejoratives was further evidence of his sudden and dramatic rehabilitation. Solzhenitsyn specified that his author’s fee should be donated to the fund for the victims of Chernobyl, a gesture indicative of the environmental concerns at the heart of his vision.

The essay commenced with a catalog of the disasters that had befallen Russia as a result of the “laboured pursuit of a purblind and malignant Marxist-Leninist utopia”. This included the destruction of the peasant class together with its settlements, which in turn had “deprived the raising of crops of its whole purpose and the soil of its ability to yield a harvest”. Large swathes of the countryside had been flooded “with man-made seas and swamps”, and the cities had been “befouled by the effluents of our primitive industry”. Furthermore, “we have poisoned our rivers, lakes, and fish, and today we are obliterating our last resources of clean water, air, and soil, speeding the process by the addition of nuclear death, further supplemented by the storage of Western radioactive wastes for money…. We have cut down our luxuriant forests and plundered our earth of its incomparable riches—the irreplaceable inheritance of our great-grandchildren”.²⁰

The danger for the new Russia, Solzhenitsyn warned, was of a mindless leap from the wanton waste of Marxism to the uncontrolled greed of unbridled materialism. “For centuries both manufacturers and owners took pride in the durability of their merchandise, but today (in the West) we see a numbing sequence of new, ever new and flashy models, while the notion of repair is disappearing: items that are just barely damaged must be discarded and replaced by new ones, an act inimical to the human sense of self-limitation, and a wasteful extravagance.”²¹ This was inherent to a decadent system hell-bent on permanent and ultimately unsustainable economic growth at whatever cost to the future of the planet. The West had succumbed to a “psychological plague”, which was “not progress, but an all-consuming economic fire”,²² a plague more than merely economic in nature. It had contaminated the very moral fabric of Western life and was threatening to do the same in Russia:

Against the rising tide of licentiousness there was Solzhenitsyn’s perennial call for self-limitation and the plaintive appeal of the poet for peace from the unendurable stream of information, much of it excessive and trivial, which was diminishing the soul. Modern man was being crushed by the omnipresence of technology. There was ever more clamor of a propagandist, commercial, and diversionary nature. “How can we protect the right of our ears to silence, and the right of our eyes to inner vision?”²⁴

Above all, however, and as the title suggested, Rebuilding Russia was more than the product of a plaintive voice crying in the wilderness, or a prophetic warning of what awaited a heedless generation. It was a positive vision of a new Russia, restructured according to sound and sensible principles and based upon sustainable and traditional values. It welcomed the resurgence of nationalism in the various constituent parts of the Soviet Union and looked forward to the final dissolution of the Soviet empire and the reemergence of independent nations in its place. “Every people, even the very smallest, represents a unique facet of God’s design.” To reinforce the point, Solzhenitsyn quoted the religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyev, who had written, paraphrasing the Christian commandment: “You must love all other people as you love your own.”²⁵

Solzhenitsyn also believed that the spirit of decentralization should go beyond the rights of small nations to be free from the yoke of internationalism or imperialism. It should extend to the rights of small communities, and even families, to be free from the yoke of central state planning. “The key to the viability of the country and the vitality of its culture lies in liberating the provinces from the pressure of the capitals”, he wrote. Provinces should “acquire complete freedom in economic and cultural terms, together with strong… local self-government”.²⁶ The need patiently and persistently to expand the rights of local communities would be an essential part of the gradual reshaping of the entire state organism. Only through a strong and revitalized local government could genuine democracy exist:

The enduring influence of Solzhenitsyn’s years in Zurich and his admiration for the Swiss political system is clearly discernible, although he was certainly aware of, and enamored by, similar systems that had existed in Russia’s medieval past. Whatever the principal motivation behind his advocacy of decentralization and subsidiarity in political life, he had nailed the lie that he was in any way undemocratic in his beliefs—not that this would stop the accusations being made, particularly by those who could not see beyond the futile oscillations of the Western two-party democracies.

Similar radical thinking energized Solzhenitsyn’s calls for the restructuring of the Russian economy. What was needed was the reestablishment of independent citizens: “But there can be no independent citizen without private property.” Seventy years of propaganda had instilled in Russians the notion that private property was to be feared, but this was merely the victory of a false ideology over “our human essence”. The truth was that ownership of modest amounts of property, which did not oppress others, must be seen as an integral component of personality, and as a factor contributing to its stability.²⁸ Solzhenitsyn professed to having no special expertise in economics and had no wish to venture definitive proposals, but the overall picture was clear enough:

There is a remarkable affinity between these proposals and those advocated by Schumacher in Small is Beautiful and by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in their calls for distributism. Schumacher, Chesterton, and Belloc had all gained a large degree of their initial inspiration from the social teaching of the Catholic Church, particularly as espoused by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum novarum. By 1990, Solzhenitsyn was certainly conversant with the ideas of these kindred spirits and indeed with the Pope’s crucial encyclical. He had come across the works of Schumacher and Chesterton soon after his arrival in the West but stressed that he had already arrived at similar conclusions himself entirely independently.³⁰ Since the central tenets of Rebuilding Russia were largely a development and a maturing of the ideas he had originally expressed years earlier in his Letter to Soviet Leaders, it is clear that the affinity was a question of great minds thinking alike rather than one mind borrowing from another. “There was no direct influence because I was always submerged and immersed in things Russian. I touched upon world issues to the extent that these touched upon Russian questions and Russian concerns, but that which I was drawing from and writing toward was Russian, so it would be a coincidental affinity not a direct one.”³¹

In many respects, Rebuilding Russia was one of Solzhenitsyn’s most remarkable endeavors—and perhaps will prove to posterity one of his most important. Although it was written with Russia specifically in mind, there is much of general interest. It deserves to stand beside Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity, and Belloc’s Essay on the Restoration of Property as a permanent monument to the concepts of smallness, subsidiarity, and economic sanity during a century characterized primarily by its headlong rush toward unsustainable growth and politico-economic giantism.

Solzhenitsyn concluded Rebuilding Russia on a note of genuine humility, blended with words of sober realism. It was “impossibly difficult to design a balanced plan for future action”, he wrote, and there was “every likelihood that it will contain more errors than virtues and that it will be unable to keep pace with the actual unfolding of events. But it would also be wrong not to make the effort.”³² In making the effort, he had fulfilled his duty, but perhaps he already sensed that, not for the first or the last time, his words would fall on deaf ears.

By 1990, most Russians were simply sick and tired of politics. All they wanted was an easy way out of the post-communist mess in which the Soviet Union had found itself. An easy life. To a disillusioned people intent on the path of least resistance, Solzhenitsyn’s solution seemed too much like hard work. Much better to listen to the prophets of boom, who were promising a land of limitless consumer goods. A people intent on self-gratification was not likely to feel attracted to Solzhenitsyn’s plea for self-limitation. In fact, in Rebuilding Russia, Solzhenitsyn had seen the danger and had foretold its consequences: “If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structures or by any industrial development: a tree with a rotten core cannot stand.”³³

When Rebuilding Russia was published, a spokesman for President Gorbachev promised that the Soviet leader would study the document.³⁴ Whether he did so is unknown. What is certain is that Solzhenitsyn’s practical proposals for a revitalized Russia had not, to borrow a phrase of Chesterton, been tried and found wanting but had been wanted and not tried. Worse, they had been both unwanted and untried.

In fairness, it was very unlikely that Gorbachev had much time to study Solzhenitsyn’s proposals, even had he any desire to do so, and even less likely that he would have been able to do anything about them. By the autumn of 1990, he was being outmaneuvered on all fronts by his opponents. Yeltsin and his liberal allies in the Russian parliament had outflanked Gorbachev with the declaration of Russian independence, while the hard-liners within the Soviet hierarchy were gaining the ascendancy within the Communist Party and were putting the increasingly isolated Soviet leader under ever-greater pressure.

In the midst of this feuding, Solzhenitsyn was being used as a convenient political pawn. In December, the liberals in the Russian parliament awarded him the Russian state literature prize for The Gulag Archipelago, an honor that was tied up with the desire of the Yeltsin camp to score points against their Soviet communist opponents. In the meantime, the hand of the communists had been strengthened by a series of leadership reshuffles that had placed control of both the Interior Ministry and the media in the hands of old-guard reactionaries. On December 20, in protest at these developments, the liberal Soviet Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnadze resigned, warning ominously that “dictatorship is coming”.

The effects of Gorbachev’s hard-line reshuffle became apparent on January 13, 1991, when thirteen Lithuanians defending the national television center were killed by Soviet troops. Yeltsin flew immediately to the Baltics and signed a joint declaration condemning the Soviet violence. A week later, a quarter of a million people protested on the streets of Moscow against the killings, the largest demonstration ever seen on the streets of the Russian capital. Only hours later, with a callous disregard for public opinion, Gorbachev’s forces stormed the Interior Ministry in Riga, the capital of Latvia, killing a further five people. The Russian press, overwhelmingly on the side of Yeltsin and the liberals, backed the Baltic states against Gorbachev’s repression. In response, Gorbachev threatened to tighten control of the media and, as if to back his threats with action, he added more hard-liners to the Politburo and gave wider powers to the security forces.

A popular backlash against Gorbachev’s efforts to turn back the communist clock was evident in June when the citizens of Leningrad voted in a referendum to rename the city St. Petersburg. In the same month, Boris Yeltsin emerged triumphant in the Russian presidential election, winning an overwhelming majority in spite of Soviet attempts to block his campaign.

The stage was set for the final conflict between the Soviet old guard and Yeltsin’s liberals. It came on August 19 when the country awoke to the soothing sounds of Chopin on the radio and Swan Lake on the television. There was no cause for alarm, the listeners and viewers were informed, but a state of emergency had been declared “in the public interest”. In an uncanny echo of Khrushchev’s removal from office almost thirty years earlier, it was announced that Gorbachev had resigned for health reasons. The country was now ruled by the self-appointed “State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR”, a grandiose title for the group of hard-liners appointed to their posts by Gorbachev during the recent reshuffles. With little or no public support, the hard-liners soon realized that Russians would no longer kowtow to the tactics of terror. In defiance of a curfew order, a hundred thousand people took to the streets and defied the tanks. On the morning of August 21, only two days after the state of emergency had been declared, it was announced that several tank units had defected to Yeltsin’s side, and by the afternoon, the takeover had collapsed completely. Its leaders fled. One group flew to the Crimea, where they were arrested on arrival, and several others committed suicide. Meanwhile Gennady Yenayev, the group’s nominal leader, took neither of these drastic courses of action, choosing instead merely to drink himself into an oblivious stupor. Thus began and ended what Russians call the putsch, what history would record as the final farcical collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, the humiliating end of seventy-four years of communist rule.

One practical result of the dramatic events in Russia, from Solzhenitsyn’s point of view, was the announcement in September that the treason charges against him had been officially revoked. This had been the last official obstacle barring his return to Russia. Its removal coincided with the completion, at long last, of the final book in The Red Wheel cycle. His work on this had been the other obstacle to his return: he had been determined to finish it before the inevitable disruption that the move from Vermont to Russia would entail.

In April 1992, Solzhenitsyn was visited in Vermont by Vladimir Lukin, the new Russian ambassador to the United States. It was the first official recognition on the part of Russia’s new anti-communist leaders that Solzhenitsyn, to quote an article in The Times of May 14, “has become a legend in his homeland and revered by many as a saint”.³⁵ Shortly afterward, he was visited by Stanislav Govorukhin, the film director who had achieved fame and notoriety in 1990 for his anti-Soviet film You Can’t Live Like This. Govorukhin spent the Orthodox Easter with Solzhenitsyn and his family, filming a documentary to be shown on Russian television. It was the first time that Solzhenitsyn had granted an interview to anyone from the former Soviet Union since his expulsion in 1974. During the course of the interview, he revealed that his wife would be traveling to Moscow in May to find a suitable home for the family’s return to Russia.

On June 12, President Yeltsin announced his intention to telephone and possibly meet Solzhenitsyn during his forthcoming state visit to the United States. Four days later, within hours of his arrival in Washington, Yeltsin made an emotional thirty-minute call to Solzhenitsyn, during which he expressed repentance over the way former regimes had treated him and urged his return home, promising that “Russia’s doors are wide open.” Yeltsin promised to do everything he could to ensure that “one of the great sons of our nation” could work for the Russian people from within Russia and not from a foreign land. The two men discussed the urgent and painful problems facing their country, and Solzhenitsyn urged particularly that Russia’s peasants should be given land of their own as soon as possible. For his part, Yeltsin assured Solzhenitsyn that he was trying to restore Russia’s spiritual values and that Solzhenitsyn had “blazed a trail of truth” that he was seeking to follow. Unlike the leaders of the previous regime, he would tell the Russian people “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.³⁶

Yeltsin’s words were certainly warm, even if more cynical commentators suspected a colder motive for his courting of Solzhenitsyn’s support. As a writer in The Times observed, “Mr Solzhenitsyn still enjoys huge moral authority in Russia, and his support would be of considerable value to Mr Yeltsin.”³⁷ Yet if actions spoke louder than words, it was clearly true that much had changed in Russia since Yeltsin’s dramatic rise to power. In fact, on the very day that Yeltsin phoned Solzhenitsyn, Russia made a significant break with its Soviet past by granting political asylum to a research student from communist North Korea who had applied to stay in Russia to become a Christian priest.³⁸

With the pace of change accelerating daily in Russia, it was no longer a question of if, but when, the Solzhenitsyns would return. Yet the months passed, and little altered as far as their domestic arrangements were concerned. On June 11, 1993, almost a year to the day after his conversation with Yeltsin, Solzhenitsyn, still firmly rooted in Vermont, attended his son’s graduation ceremony at Harvard. Ten days earlier, Alya, on another visit to Russia, had assured reporters that we are coming back and very soon, “it is a matter of months”.³⁹

News of Solzhenitsyn’s imminent return prompted an article in The Times by Bernard Levin, one of his most loyal allies throughout the years of exile. Entitled “A Giant Goes Home”, it was a eulogy to the Russian’s courage and achievement, overlaid with Levin’s scarcely concealed delight at the providential turn of events: “We have it on Shakespeare’s authority, no less, that the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. But can there ever have been any revenge so sweet, or any revolution of the clocks so meaningful, as the news that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is shortly to return to his homeland, Russia, after almost exactly twenty years of forced exile?”⁴⁰

The weeks and then the months slipped away, and still there was no sign of the exile’s long-awaited return. In September 1993, Ignat made his first journey back to Russia since he had left it as a bemused infant. On tour with the National Symphony Orchestra and Mstislav Rostropovich, he described it as “an unforgettable experience, twelve days that are a separate chapter in my life”.⁴¹ For the first time, he could see Russian words all around him, on shop fronts and road signs, everywhere: “seeing Russian with my own two eyes… hearing Russian spoken all around me—a din of hundreds of people walking along Tverskaia, and all speaking Russian”. With childlike excitement, he explored various corners of Moscow, the hometown of a dimly discerned childhood, and met people who had been until then only legendary shadows from his father’s past: “meeting friends of my parents, their comrades-in-arms, sitting and drinking tea with people who had risked their lives or livelihoods together with my father, and who were always present with us in spirit during the long years of exile”. The flow, the flood, of first impressions surged through his consciousness: the Kremlin, the blinding beauty of St. Petersburg, “and of course the concerts themselves with passionate Russian audiences”.⁴² One can picture Solzhenitsyn’s response as his son recounted his first excited impressions of Russia, and can only guess at the sense of longing it must have induced in his own exiled bones. Yet still he did not return.

Instead, on September 14, even as Ignat was giving concerts to ecstatic Russian audiences in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Solzhenitsyn was in the Liechtenstein village of Schaan, receiving an honorary doctorate from the International Academy of Philosophy. His speech to the Academy was destined to be his valedictory address to the West, an appropriate finale to his years of exile.

Commencing with the divorce of politics from ethics that, he said, had begun with the Enlightenment and had been given added theoretical justification by John Locke, Solzhenitsyn presented a masterful analysis of the world’s malaise. Whereas in Rebuilding Russia he had sought to solve society’s problems on a socio-political level by laying green foundations, now he was seeking deeper solutions to the fundamental problems of life by laying philosophical foundations. Moral impulses among statesmen had always been weaker than political ones, Solzhenitsyn admitted, but he stressed that the consequences of their decisions for society as a whole necessitated that “any moral demands we impose on individuals, such as understanding the difference between honesty, baseness and deception, between magnanimity, goodness, avarice and evil, must to a large degree be applied to the politics of countries, governments, parliaments and parties”.⁴³ Within a Christian context, he quoted Vladimir Solovyev, who had stated that “political activity must a priori be moral service, whereas politics motivated by the mere pursuit of interests lacks any Christian content whatsoever”.⁴⁴

Solzhenitsyn proceeded to discuss the nature and meaning of “progress”. The whole of humanity had embraced the term, but few seemed to give any thought to what it actually meant: “[P]rogress yes, but in what? And of what? And might we not lose something in the course of this Progress?”⁴⁵ “It was”, he reminded his audience, “from this intense optimism of Progress that Marx, for one, concluded that history will lead us to justice without the help of God.”⁴⁶ In the twentieth century, Progress had indeed marched on, and was “even stunningly surpassing expectations”, but it was doing so only in the field of technology. Was this sufficient in itself, and had it been purchased at a price—perhaps at too high a price? Unlimited Progress was threatening the limited resources of the planet, “successfully eating up the environment allotted to us”. It was also threatening the life of the human soul. In the face of technocentric Progress with its “oceans of superficial information and cheap spectacles”, the human soul was growing more shallow and the spiritual life reduced.

As Solzhenitsyn concluded his address, he was bidding farewell to the West with a final plea for sanity. Yet as he prepared for a return to Russia, he knew that the same problems of “progress” awaited him in his homeland. The new Russians were accepting the new religion of consumerism with open, grasping arms, worshipping the latest gadgets as enthusiastically as their Western brothers. East and West were now marching together in a new unity, blinded not by the Light, but by the lights of a flashing, glittering technolatry. Unity without purpose.