Solzhenitsyn

^{CHAPTER NINETEEN} A PROPHET AT HOME

Toward the end of 1993, Solzhenitsyn had an audience with Pope John Paul II in Rome. It was a meeting of considerable significance. The two men represented, each in his own way, the triumph of the human spirit over the evils of totalitarianism. Furthermore, both men had contributed to the downfall of communism to an extent that probably surpassed any of their contemporaries.

Solzhenitsyn had been a great admirer of John Paul II since the earliest days of his pontificate, describing the election of a Polish Pope as a gift from God. He had supported the Pope’s policies throughout the world, not merely in John Paul’s outspoken attacks on communism in Eastern Europe but also in his measures against Marxist-inspired liberation theology in South America. In a meretricious age, the Pope shone in Solzhenitsyn’s eyes as a towering, and all too rare, paragon of virtue. The danger was that the Russian might feel a sense of disappointment when he finally met the Pole in the flesh. It was a danger that never materialized; Solzhenitsyn retained vivid memories of his audience, describing their meeting and discussions as “very positive”. As a man, the Pope was “very bright, full of light”.¹

The audience lasted for an hour and a half and was characterized by what Solzhenitsyn described as very interesting conversations. In particular, the Pope appeared to be well acquainted with Solzhenitsyn’s socio-political writings. He mentioned the importance of Rerum novarum to the Church’s social teaching, perhaps sensing the affinity between the Church’s teaching and Solzhenitsyn’s views. As Solzhenitsyn remembered,

“We were in complete affinity except for that one point”, Solzhenitsyn insisted, stating that the bulk of their conversation centered on the place of religion in the modern world and its role. The audience took place on the fifteenth anniversary of the Pope’s ascension to the papacy, and Solzhenitsyn felt saddened that he appeared to have physically weakened by this point.³

By comparison, the seventy-four-year-old Russian was in excellent health. It was not he who was visibly ailing but his country, which was emerging from communism in poor and deteriorating circumstances. As if he needed any reminder of the grim reality, news reached him in February 1994 that his Russian publisher had been gunned down in Moscow by the mafia, his death the consequence of sordid commercial rivalries rather than politics. It was, therefore, with no illusions that he and Alya began preparations for their return to Russia, which, at last, had passed beyond the realm of interminable rumor to that of imminent reality.

On March 1, he made only his third appearance at a public event in Cavendish, Vermont, in the eighteen years he had lived there. The purpose was to bid farewell to the neighbors who hardly knew him but to whom, nonetheless, he felt a debt of gratitude. “Exile is always difficult,” he told the two hundred villagers who attended the meeting, “and yet I could not imagine a better place to live and wait and wait and wait for my return home than Cavendish, Vermont…. You forgave me my unusual way of life, and even took it upon yourselves to protect my privacy. Our whole family has felt at home among you.”⁴

The farewells completed, Solzhenitsyn braced himself for a future that appeared to offer nothing but uncertainty. In the December 1993 elections, there had been a dramatic swing to the ultra-nationalists under the leadership of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In the so-called business world, crime and corruption were reaching new heights, as the murder of Solzhenitsyn’s publisher had graphically demonstrated. Car-bombs, not conferences, had become the favored means of settling business disputes. Even before his arrival on Russian soil, Solzhenitsyn had fearlessly made enemies in the worlds of both politics and commerce, attacking Zhirinovsky as a “clown” and declaring war on the mafia. In an interview with the New Yorker, Solzhenitsyn distanced himself in disgust from the crypto-fascism of the ultra-nationalists and stated that “the mafia understand that if I was not going to make peace with the KGB I certainly would not with them”.⁵ It was clear that there were many in the new Russia who were not looking forward to the writer’s return.

In the same interview with the New Yorker, Solzhenitsyn admitted that he had overestimated the threat of a Soviet world takeover when he had first been exiled and that, in hindsight, his tone had seemed shrill. “When I fought the dragon of communist power,” he explained, “I fought it at the highest pitch of expression.”⁶

At the end of April, Solzhenitsyn gave his last interview on Western television before his departure for Russia, appearing on the CBS program Sixty Minutes. Perversely, considering his recent outspoken attack on the xenophobic nationalists in Russia, he was asked to respond to an American commentator who had branded him “a freak, a monarchist, an anti-semite, a crank, a has-been, not a hero”. His reply was both measured and direct: “The Western press works in the following way: they don’t read my books. No one has ever given a single quotation from any of my books as a basis for these accusations. But every new journalist reads these opinions from other journalists. They have been just as spiteful to me in the American press as the Soviet press was before.”⁷

Concerning his return home, he merely answered vaguely that “my hope is maybe I’ll be able to help somehow”,⁸ but one suspected that, whatever the future held in Russia, he would be pleased to leave the distortions of the Western media behind him. In the interim, however, they continued to dog his last days in the West. Anne McElvoy, writing in The Times, admitted that Solzhenitsyn had described Vladimir Zhirinovsky as “an evil caricature of a Russian patriot” but still insisted that Solzhenitsyn’s Rebuilding Russia was “dangerously nationalistic”.⁹

If Solzhenitsyn nurtured any hope that there might be more clarity of vision in the East than there had been in the West, from either politicians or the media, he would soon be disillusioned. On the morning of May 27, as he set foot in Russia for the first time in more than twenty years, every shade of opinion in the political spectrum scrambled to appropriate him as one of their own. Alexander Rutskoi, a Russian imperialist and leader of the right-wing Accord for Russia, Boris Yeltsin, still the leader of the liberal reformers, and even Anatoli Lukyanov, a hard-line communist, all claimed Solzhenitsyn as a supporter of their own particular position.¹⁰

Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn was more interested in meeting ordinary Russians. After a ten-hour flight from Alaska, he took his first steps on Russian soil at Magadan, which, appropriately enough, had once been the center of the Soviet labor camp system. It was a poignant moment for the former prisoner. “Today, in the heat of political change, those millions of victims are too lightly forgotten, both by those who were not touched by that annihilation and, even more so, by those responsible for it. I bow to the earth of Kolyma where many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of our executed fellow-countrymen are buried. Under ancient Christian tradition, the land where innocent victims are buried becomes holy.”¹¹

Arriving in the eastern city of Vladivostok flanked by his family, Solzhenitsyn received a hero’s welcome. The authorities greeted him with flowers, hugs, and the traditional welcome gifts of bread and salt. Mobbed by journalists and applauded by a crowd of two thousand, Solzhenitsyn spoke of his hopes and fears for the future:

He told the crowd that he planned to travel through the heart of Russia, beginning in the east and going through Siberia, which he had only ever seen previously through the grate of a prison train window. He wanted to meet ordinary people along the way, so that he could test and revise his own judgment, “understand truly” their worries and fears, and “search together for the surest path out of our seventy-five year quagmire”.¹²

Solzhenitsyn’s triumphant return was witnessed by the world’s media and was covered in depth by the BBC, which had bought the rights to film the homecoming. The BBC filmed the whole journey from the Solzhenitsyn home in Vermont to the joyful arrival at Vladivostok, interviewing the writer at his desk in Vermont minutes before he took his final leave of it. There was time for a moment’s melancholy. He told his interviewer that this, after all, was his home too and that in some respects his years in Vermont had been the happiest and most productive of his life. All departures were a kind of death, he said. He had finished his great work. There was no time to start anything else, anything of substance. That too was a death. He could not hope to live for long back in Russia. He was going home to die.

During his interview with the New Yorker three months earlier, he had been asked whether he feared death. His face had lit up with pleasure. “Absolutely not! It will just be a peaceful transition. As a Christian, I believe there is life after death, and so I understand that this is not the end of life. The soul has a continuation, the soul lives on. Death is only a stage, some would even say a liberation. In any case, I have no fear of death.”¹³

Although the BBC had purchased the exclusive rights to film the return, the best view of events as they unfolded was seen by the family itself. Recalling his father’s return to Russia, Ignat described the weeks leading up to it as unforgettable:

The story of the odyssey is taken up by Yermolai:

As father and son traversed the country throughout June and July, Solzhenitsyn made forthright speeches claiming that Russia was in the grip of a ruling clique and required grassroots democracy. He urged spiritual revival and called for a crusade against the country’s moral and cultural decline. He was a prophet coming home, but, as so often with prophets at home, his own people were the last to be receptive to his words. Two thousand people greeted him on his arrival in Moscow on July 21, but the city had changed almost beyond recognition, both physically and metaphysically. D. M. Thomas evoked the transformation in starkly symbolic terms: “Pushkin’s statue faced a McDonald’s. The West was moving in. Send us your trivia, your TV game shows, your dazzling trash, your pornography! Russia was begging.”¹⁶

The trivializing of culture was reflected in Russian tastes for literature. In 1994, the bestselling titles in Moscow bookshops included novelized versions of the Charles Bronson film Death Wish, an Italian television series Octopus, and a Mexican soap, Simply Maria. A British journalist looking for Solzhenitsyn’s books found none in the fiction department of House of Books, Moscow’s largest bookshop. He was told to try the secondhand department. Such stories reinforced claims that Solzhenitsyn was out of fashion and out of date in modern Russia, the ultimate heresies in a novelty-addicted culture.

Far from feeling horrified at the neglect of Russian literature in the face of this invasion of Western pulp fiction, many critics appeared to relish their nation’s cultural decline and gloated over Solzhenitsyn’s popular demise. “Everyone knows his name, but no one reads his books”, wrote Grigori Amelin, a young Moscow critic, in May 1994. “Our Voltaire from Vermont is a spiritual monument, a hat-rack in an entrance hall. Let him stay in mothballs forever…. [P]ut this eunuch of his own fame, this thoroughbred classic with a hernia-threatening Collected Works, a Hollywood beard and a conscience polished so unbelievably clean it glints in the sun, out to pasture.”¹⁷ In similar vein, the novelist Victor Yerofeyev felt qualified to dismiss Solzhenitsyn’s work without any apparent understanding of it. “The humanistic pathos of Solzhenitsyn, which informs all his writings, seems no less comic, no less obsolete, than Socialist Realism as a whole…. A Slavophile Government Inspector has come to call on us, dragging behind him all the traditional baggage of Slavophile ideology.” Yerofeyev then added a dose of petty snobbery by deriding Solzhenitsyn as “a provincial schoolteacher who has exceeded his authority and overreached himself”.¹⁸

An explanation for the hostility Solzhenitsyn provoked in Russia was offered by Doctor Michael Nicholson of University College, Oxford. Doctor Nicholson, who with Professor Alexis Klimoff was the translator of Solzhenitsyn’s Invisible Allies, had been studying Solzhenitsyn from samizdat documents since the 1960s, had written his thesis on “Solzhenitsyn and the Russian Literary Tradition”, and had taught the Russian’s works with evident enthusiasm to generations of Oxford undergraduates. He believed Solzhenitsyn was only considered irrelevant in modern Russia because of the “anarchic, amoral zeitgeist” that had replaced Marxist dogma. Relativism looked good after the years of communist prohibition and inhibitions and was easier to accept than Solzhenitsyn’s alternative set of values.¹⁹ It was this turnaround that was responsible for Solzhenitsyn’s hostile reception in the new Russia:

Nicholson suggested that Solzhenitsyn may have felt similarly to another returning émigré, Zinovy Zinik, whose sense was that Russia in the 1990s had become like a land of disorientated immigrants: “The people here [have] emigrated to a new country. The old country slipped off from under their feet, and they are now in the new one. And it is as alien to them as it is to me.”²¹

Solzhenitsyn was thrown into this alien environment in the autumn of 1994 when he was given his own fifteen-minute television talk show on Channel One. Meetings with Solzhenitsyn was given a prime-time slot and attracted a respectable 12 percent of Moscow viewers, though it could not compete with the 27 percent who tuned into Wild Rose, another Mexican soap, on one of the rival channels. By this time, Russian viewers were as addicted to soaps as were their counterparts in the West. D. M. Thomas reported that a terminally ill man had written to a newspaper, offering his life savings to anyone who could tell him the ending of yet another Mexican soap, The Rich Also Cry.²²

One of Solzhenitsyn’s rival talk-show hosts, Artyom Troitsky, a rock critic with a post-midnight program called Café Oblomov, spoke for many new Russians when he questioned the need for Solzhenitsyn’s show: “Why should anyone now care about The Gulag Archipelago? I’m afraid Solzhenitsyn is totally, totally passe.” In his own efforts not to become passe and to remain relevant, Troitsky had metamorphosed from serious “rock” dissident to editor of Russian Playboy. Another new Russian quick to pass judgment on Solzhenitsyn’s emergence as a television celebrity was Victor Yerofeyev, who took the opportunity to indulge once more in petty snobbery: “It’s better to have him speak than write. He writes such ugly Russian. He is once again what he always was at heart—a provincial schoolteacher.”²³

Perhaps it was inevitable that Solzhenitsyn would not survive for long in the world of television. On April 23, 1995, a report in the Sunday Times suggested he was facing a television ban for “criticizing the regime”, and five months later the program was finally axed. Solzhenitsyn remains convinced that the decision was politically motivated. “The program was terminated because the powers-that-be were afraid of the issues being discussed.”²⁴ Whether his removal was due to these outspoken attacks on the government or whether it was merely that he did not fit into the modern scheduling requirements is a matter of conjecture. The new upbeat program that replaced Solzhenitsyn boasted as its first guest La Cicciolina, an Italian parliamentarian and porn queen. Russia was getting what it wanted—and it wasn’t Solzhenitsyn.

The sense of despondency induced by Russia’s cultural decline was expressed in Solzhenitsyn’s speech at Saratov University on September 13, 1995. “We are still holding together as a single unified country,” he told his audience, “but our cultural space is in shreds.”²⁵ The despondency was also evident in his announcement in December that he would refrain from voting for either Yeltsin or his communist opponent in the presidential elections. “I was approached by television asking for my opinion”, Solzhenitsyn explained. “I asked them whether they would broadcast what I had to say. Yes, they said. I replied that both Yeltsin and the communists are not worthy of being elected, that they have not put forward programs, that no programs have been discussed. Neither of these sides has repented anything that they have done in the past, and I propose to vote against both. (There was an option to vote against both.) They did not broadcast this!” His eyes glinting with amusement, Solzhenitsyn pointed out with evident relish that 5 percent of the population did vote against both. “These people figured it out for themselves”, he laughed.²⁶

Increasingly disgruntled at the road Russia was taking, Solzhenitsyn retreated into the sort of reclusive life that had characterized his years in Vermont. The large house where he and Alya now resided in acres of isolated woodland in leafy countryside just outside Moscow was not dissimilar to their former home in the United States. Seeking seclusion, he returned to his writing, ever the source of solace throughout his troubled life, and began to observe Russia’s demise more passively, though still as passionately, from the sidelines. Yet his increased isolation did not stifle his ability to make carefully planned assaults on the Russian leadership when the opportunity arose. One such opportunity presented itself in November 1996, when he timed an attack on the government in the French newspaper Le Monde to coincide with a two-day visit to Paris by Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Russian Prime Minister.

Such was the force of his fulminations that the Reuters news agency described it as a “blistering attack… on Russia’s new political leaders, saying they were no better than the communist rulers he spent much of his life opposing”.²⁷ In his article, entitled “Russia Close to its Deathbed”, Solzhenitsyn wrote that Russia was not a democracy and would never develop a genuine market economy. Russia’s rulers “get away with… genuine crimes that have plunged the country into ruin and millions of people into poverty, or condemned thousands to death—yet they are never punished”. During the last decade, “the ruling circles have not displayed moral qualities that are any better than those during the communist era”. Indeed, in many cases, the same communist cliques remained in power: “Former members of the communist elite, along with Russia’s new rich, who amassed instant fortunes through banditry, have formed an exclusive… oligarchy of 150 to 200 people that run the country.”²⁸

Solzhenitsyn claimed that the Duma parliament was crushed by presidential power, that local assemblies were more like servants obedient to local governors, and that television channels were subservient to President Boris Yeltsin, who had been elected without any debate on his past rule or any articulated program for the future. “The government… enjoys the same impunity as the former communist power and cannot be called a democracy.”²⁹ Such a situation would have unleashed a social explosion in other countries, he wrote, but this would not happen in Russia because society, bled for seventy years under communist rule and weeded of political opponents, had no strength left. (In July 1998, Solzhenitsyn was to reiterate his belief that communism had weakened and exhausted the Russian spirit: “It is as if, just having survived the heaviest case of cholera, to immediately upon recuperation get the plague. It is very hard to withstand.”³⁰)

Meanwhile the government had no coherent economic strategy, and ill-conceived and ill-prepared privatization had proved disastrous, handing over national wealth for a fraction of its value to incompetent individuals. “Such easy gains are unprecedented in the history of the West”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding that corruption had reached a level the West could not imagine. “Market economy has not yet seen the light, and, as things are going, it never will.”³¹

Two years later, Solzhenitsyn’s views had not moderated. In 1998, he wrote Russia in Collapse, in which he elaborated on the scathing sentiments expressed in his article for Le Monde. Discussing these with the present author, Solzhenitsyn’s disgust with the status quo in Russia was all too evident:

“Imagine”, he continued, “the people have been thrust into poverty, such that a woman teacher does not have suitable clothes to wear when she goes to teach a class.” Teachers no longer have access to published material because it is too expensive; scientists “now receive less money than street sweepers;… doctors do not receive their salaries for halfa year, nine months or more; … workers need to strike in order to get their paychecks”. Furthermore, “people have lost the opportunity to travel around the country to visit relatives or to go to some cultural event because the cost of travel is prohibitive”. This material devastation has had damaging ramifications in the cultural sphere so that “the cultural space of the country has been torn…. There is almost a cultural atomization, a cultural rift certainly, in the country. What else could people in this position feel but that they have been abandoned, spiritually abandoned?” The link between material poverty and cultural impoverishment is inextricable: “If people cannot receive the necessary education, or at least access to that cultural level which that person has set for himself, if that cultural level remains somewhere up above, unreachable to him, he has therefore lost both materially and spiritually.”³³

In Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn had stated that Russia had entered a blind alley. In our interview, he reiterated this, stating that the central government possessed no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley. They were pursuing a course of simply trying to stay in power by any possible means.

When asked what he felt about the influx of Western multinationals into the economic life of Russia, Solzhenitsyn was unequivocal about his misgivings. Russia was losing its economic sovereignty and was “becoming in many ways, I won’t say fodder, but is becoming available to multinationals”. Whereas in the past “we were able to rely on our own economic strength”, today “we have resigned ourselves from the resolution of simply standing on our own two feet”.³⁵

Coupled with this economic influx from the West was the accompanying influx of other Western influences. Was this a form of cultural imperialism? “It could be termed cultural imperialism if the West’s current cultural level was high”, Solzhenitsyn replied. “Certainly our young people readily accept that which flows from the West”, but this is “exclusively materialist in character and is devoid of spiritual content, so I would call this not a Western imperialism but the imperialism of materialism”.³⁶

Solzhenitsyn believed that the process of globalization was inevitable, but that it could proceed in different ways. “One would be a full standardization of life on earth. The other would be a careful preservation of national differences and cultures, and not only of national peculiarities and characteristics but those of civilization.” It should always be remembered that in addition to many different nations, there also exist “several large civilizations, large cultures”. At present, it seems that the world is moving toward the former alternative, that of global standardization. This is unfortunate.

Nevertheless, the globalizing of the modern world has inextricably linked the paths of Russia and the West. Over the previous twelve years, Solzhenitsyn had stopped viewing Russia as something very distinct from the West.

There was, Solzhenitsyn believed, a stark and unavoidable choice facing mankind as it enters the third millennium. “There could be a model of what has been called sustainable development, Schumacher’s view of stable development, or there could be a model of unbridled, unlimited growth.”³⁹ The former path was one of sanity, the latter potentially disastrous. The world was locked into the latter course, putting the future of both humanity and the planet at risk.

It was clear that in 1998, his eightieth year, Solzhenitsyn was still as unwilling to compromise with a system he despised as he had been thirty years earlier. Doctor Michael Nicholson accredits this to “a massive degree of integrity…. You can call it inability to change or cantankerousness, but he has managed to annoy a whole range of people over the years…. He’s been accused of being an anti-semite, he’s been called a crypto-Jew, he has managed to provoke on a very large scale…. It’s not bad you know, ever since 1962, and he was certainly still causing a stir thirty years after Ivan Denisovich.”⁴⁰

Few could argue that Solzhenitsyn has managed to provoke hostility on a huge scale over the years. Yet his son Yermolai senses a sea change in the public’s perception of his father. Perhaps, at last, the tide is beginning to turn in his favor.

Since Yermolai now lives and works in Moscow, he is certainly well placed to monitor any changes in the media’s stance toward his father, yet one must suspect an element of bias in his words, a degree of wishful thinking. He is on safer ground when he states his belief that his father’s reception among those who read him “has always been and remains overwhelmingly positive”. This, in itself, is grounds for optimism: “At the risk of stating the obvious,” Yermolai continues, his father’s books are the means by which “he will (and does) influence Russian society the most”. Consequently, “the vagaries of the media’s stance are in many ways of much less lasting significance than might appear at first glance”.⁴²

A similarly positive appraisal of Solzhenitsyn’s reception and role in today’s Russia was given by Ignat:

Again, one could be tempted to dismiss such comments as indicative of excessive filial loyalty rather than being illustrative of the objective nature of Solzhenitsyn’s role in modern Russia. A less biased, though admittedly sympathetic, view was given by Michael Nicholson. Discussing Solzhenitsyn’s place in the literary life of modern Russia, Nicholson believed that “the coherence of the fictional world Solzhenitsyn creates, the heroic dimensions of his life, his moral reputation—all present an irresistibly broad target to those jostling for elbow room in the literary life of post-Communist Russia”. Nicholson pointed to the rise of “avant-gardism”, which Solzhenitsyn had dismissed as the product of “shallow-minded people” who had no feel “for the language, the soil, the history of one’s mother country”, as the principal cause of this literary hostility, adding that “the septuagenarian Solzhenitsyn seems unlikely to benefit in his lifetime from a reverse swing of the pendulum”. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn’s “readiness over the years to endure and even provoke unpopularity has lent his position an integrity which even adversaries have grudgingly acknowledged”. Ever since his literary debut in 1962, he had functioned in both the East and the West as “a touchstone, litmus or creative irritant”, and there was “virtue in his unfashionable rejection of relativism and his enduring capacity to provoke”.⁴⁴

One adversary who had “grudgingly acknowledged” the integrity of Solzhenitsyn’s position in modern Russia was the writer Alexander Genis, who paid the following magnanimous tribute to Solzhenitsyn’s role as a thankless prophet to a heedless generation: “In its own way, it is, I feel, a courageous and dignified role—to be one of the last remaining prophets of Apollo in the abandoned temple of absolute truth.”⁴⁵