Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE} TROUBLOUS TIMES

As the dust settled on the ruins of the Soviet Empire, and as Russia struggled to emerge—battered, bruised, but perhaps not entirely broken—from the ruins, the enormity of Solzhenitsyn’s legacy was finally coming of age. Within the first ten years of its publication, The Gulag Archipelago had sales of more than thirty million and had been translated into at least thirty-five languages. It, and its author, could not be ignored. Loved or loathed, the man and his work straddled the final years of the Soviet Union like a colossus of outraged conscience. Thirty years later, as the Soviet corpse sank beneath the soil of Russia, Solzhenitsyn had earned his place of honor in the pantheon of those who fought the monster when it was still very much alive, and not only alive but deadly.

In exposing the bloody nails with which Lenin and Stalin had nailed Russia and its people to the communist cross, Solzhenitsyn had become a nail in the communist coffin. “[Y]ou have still not realized that with the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago, that hour in history has struck which will be fatal to you”, wrote the Russian dissident L. L. Regelson, in an open letter to the Soviet leaders shortly after the Gulag was published.¹ In similar vein, the Frankfurter Allegemeine, a leading German newspaper, attested to the ominous nature of the Gulag’s publication: “The time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet system from the appearance of Gulag.”²

These appraisals of Solzhenitsyn’s legacy are remarkable for the fact that they were written by those who do not share his religion or his politics. The praise, when given, is often given grudgingly. Others are not so charitable, belittling Solzhenitsyn’s importance in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.³ It is a sad reflection of the present age and its meretricious Zeitgeist that Solzhenitsyn is often held in scorn in spite of his irrepressible courage in single-handedly defying tyranny. In a cowardly age, courage is evidently undervalued.

Perhaps the antagonistic attitude of many toward Solzhenitsyn is rooted in a deeply ingrained hostility toward his Christian faith, a fact to which Solzhenitsyn biographer D. M. Thomas alluded: “To find that a writer believed passionately in Chairman Mao, or Stalin, or Ho Chi Minh, was acceptable to the liberal mind, but if he believed passionately in God it caused a frisson of discomfort and doubt.”⁴

Solzhenitsyn’s faith was expressed with eloquence in Russia in Collapse, most particularly in the chapter entitled “The Orthodox Church in these Troublous Times”. Commencing with a reminder, lest his readers forget, of the persecution of the church under communism, and the martyrdom of many Christians at the hands of the secular state, he expressed his hopes for the future of Orthodox Christianity in post-communist Russia:

He called upon the church to distance itself publicly from the “ostentatious television-based process of the government’s conversion to the Church (a practice so undignified and confused)” and to accept and embrace its “role in society and the everyday life of the people”: “While it legitimately separates itself from political power, the Church should not allow itself to become separated from society and its grievous needs. This century-long Orthodox tradition of remaining outside social issues is particularly distressing considering today’s disastrous condition of the Russian nation and people”.⁶

Significantly—considering the accusations often leveled against him that he is a chauvinistic Slavophile or extreme nationalist—he criticized “those who exalt patriotism to the detriment of Orthodoxy and place this patriotism above the latter”:

He attacked the secular and anticlerical forces in the media for their outspoken attacks on reemergent Orthodoxy, implying ironically that these very voices had been conspicuously silent during the “voiceless times” when it took courage to speak out: “And those who were spared by the Red Hoof in the voiceless times, now, in the Russia of glasnost, sneer at the Orthodox faith and at every imperfect exercise thereof, and show no respect for the tens of thousands of martyrs who had been trampled by the very same Hoof. How sad is this rupture of the Millennium of Christianity in Russia.”⁸

In the conclusion to the chapter, Solzhenitsyn reaffirmed, “in these troublous times”, his Orthodox faith and exhibited the deep well of hope that sprang from it:

Solzhenitsyn’s Orthodoxy led him to sympathize with the Serbians during the crisis in the Balkans in 1999, and he proved, even as an octogenarian, that he had not lost the ability to cause controversy, nor the ability to provoke outrage in the West. On April 8, 1999, he attacked the policy of NATO in Kosovo, stating that it had flagrantly ignored the United Nations and that it had “trampled” the UN’s Charter “under foot”: “NATO has proclaimed before the world for the coming century an old law, that of the jungle: the strongest is always right. If your high technology permits it, surpass a hundred times in violence the adversary you condemn.”¹⁰ Two months later, he again attacked the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, stating that he saw “no difference in the behavior of NATO and Hitler”, adding that, although he did not know how the Yugoslav problem could be resolved, he lamented that “for the third month before the eyes of the whole world a European country is being destroyed”.¹¹ As the conflict in Yugoslavia brought the blood-soaked curtain down on the horrors of the twentieth century, and as the world looked timidly toward a doubt-filled future at the dawn of the new millennium, there were signs that Solzhenitsyn was being brought in from the cold, signs that at last the exiled prophet was being welcomed home. On September 20, 2000, hemet the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, who was at pains to illustrate that he had Solzhenitsyn’s approval of his government’s policies. In August 2001, Putin stated that, prior to his education reforms, documents had been sent to “very different people, known and respected by the country, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn”.¹² It was all a far cry from the days of the Politburo. Four years earlier, in May 1997, Solzhenitsyn had been elected as a full member of the Russian Academy of Science, a far cry from the days of his expulsion from the Writers’ Union in 1969.

In spite of his being courted by those who inhabited the corridors of power, Solzhenitsyn retained his right to criticize the government vociferously. Like the character of Aslan in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Solzhenitsyn was not a “tame lion”. Indeed, he was prone to bite the hand that paid him compliments. On December 14, 2000, he made a rare public appearance to accept a humanities award at the French Embassy in Moscow, using the occasion to attack the policies of post-communist Russia. In his acceptance speech, and during the news conference that followed it, he delivered what the Moscow Times described as a “devastating criticism of Boris Yeltsin’s decade”. Nor did Putin escape his wrath: he criticized the President for making several “political mistakes”, not least of which was Putin’s recent decision to reinstate the melody of the Soviet hymn as the national anthem.¹³ Solzhenitsyn returned to the political fray on February 21, 2001, speaking out against the trading of farmland on the eve of the opening session of the Russian State Council’s discussion of land reform. “Land should be owned, being the property of the farmer only and nobody else—not a plunderer or a landlord”, he told journalists. Instead of offering farmland for auction, with the inevitable result that it would pass into the hands of absentee speculators, arrangements should be made to facilitate low-interest loans to farmers so that they could purchase their own land. He also believed that farmland should be given free of charge to the descendants of those who were stripped of their land and exiled during Soviet times.¹⁴ His views were in conformity with those he had expressed over the years, from his Letter to Soviet Leaders in 1973 to his Rebuilding Russia in 1990, and show him to be part of an agrarian political tradition that, in the West, includes the land policies promoted by Chesterton and Belloc in the 1920s, and by E. F. Schumacher in the 1970s.

Two months later, on April 25, he spoke out against the takeover of the NTV nationwide television network by the state-controlled media giant, Gazprom. Condemning the dangers inherent in state-controlled media, he also attacked Russian television for being “largely callous and sometimes even derisive to the real plight of the people”. Furthermore, independent media was only useful insofar as it possessed “internal and domestic governance, without sourcing dollars from abroad”.¹⁵ Four days later, he called upon the Russian government to end its moratorium on capital punishment as a means of fighting terrorism. “Sometimes, capital punishment is needed for the sake of saving the nation and the state”, he said. “In Russia matters stand this way at the moment.” The troubles in Chechnya remained “an unfinished chapter in Russian history, and a grim political problem. Therefore, the wave of terrorism is rising in this country…. Those in Europe who are telling us to abolish capital punishment do not know the trials Russia has gone through.”¹⁶

As ever, Solzhenitsyn’s candor made him as many enemies as friends. Amongst the friends was the American political philosopher Daniel J. Mahoney, whose book Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology was published in 2001. Mahoney argued that Solzhenitsyn’s greatest contribution to modern political culture was to be found in his call for modern man, and the modern mind, to throw off the shackles of utopian presumption in order to ascend from ideology to the transcendent truths of a Christian concept of reality. Ironically, Solzhenitsyn’s crucial contribution was also the reason for much of the hostility toward him. “Contemporary intellectuals and journalists will not tolerate any serious challenge to the enlightenment or progressivist assumptions underlying modern liberty”, stressed Mahoney.¹⁷

Amongst the enemies was Vladimir Voinovich, a novelist and former Soviet-era dissident who published a book in July 2002, Portrait Against the Backdrop of a Myth, which criticized the “cult of personality” surrounding Solzhenitsyn. If Mahoney’s work emphasized the ascent from ideology, Voinovich’s volume seemed to be a descent to the personal. “I am not against Solzhenitsyn but against an untouchable figure, against the cult of personality”, Voinovich told reporters in Moscow at the press-launch of his book. “As a writer he wasn’t bad, even excellent at times, but notions about his greatness, his genius, his prophetical abilities and moral purity are part of a myth.”¹⁸ It is certainly noteworthy that Voinovich should publish such a plaintive volume in the light of the continuing insistence by many of Solzhenitsyn’s detractors that he was “irrelevant” and “forgotten” in modern Russia. In the book itself, Voinovich recounts his first meetings with Solzhenitsyn in the 1960s. “We were all in ecstasy about how he wrote, how he carried himself and how he spoke. He said, for example, a writer needs to live modestly, dress simply, and ride in a common train.”¹⁹

If much of Voinovich’s book, particularly those parts detailing his growing disenchantment with the burgeoning celebrity status of Solzhenitsyn, appeared to be the product of old-fashioned envy, his criticisms of Solzhenitsyn’s political ideas were at least valid expressions of real political differences. “In his project for reviving Russia,” Voinovich wrote, Solzhenitsyn “puts the rights of the individual lower than the interests of national security.” He complained of Solzhenitsyn’s meeting with President Putin, reminding his readers that the Russian President was a former KGB agent, and he objected to Solzhenitsyn’s strong nationalist position, especially his defense of Russia’s war against the rebels in Chechnya.²⁰

Solzhenitsyn made new enemies with the publication in 2001 and 2003 of Dvesti let vmeste, orTwo Hundred Years Together, a two-volume history of the Jews in Russia. Cathy Young, a columnist for the Boston Globe, reacted furiously, accusing him of anti-Semitism.²¹ Others, in both Russia and the West, echoed her concerns. Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress, was unhappy with the book but was conciliatory in his response: “This is a mistake, but even geniuses make mistakes. Richard Wagner did not like the Jews, but was a great composer. Dostoyevsky was a great Russian writer, but had a very skeptical attitude towards the Jews.”²² Solzhenitsyn was not without his defenders, however. Daniel J. Mahoney responded to Cathy Young’s “unbelievably shoddy account” of Solzhenitsyn’s writings:

Richard Pipes, in his review of Two Hundred Years Together for the New Republic, stressed that Solzhenitsyn “makes a conscious effort to show empathy for both sides, calling on Jews and Russians to display ‘patient mutual understanding and an acknowledgment of their share of sin’—the ultimate sin being the 1917 revolution that brought Russia untold miseries”.²⁴ Pipes also noted that he felt that the book was an attempt by Solzhenitsyn to rid himself “of the reputation for anti-Semitism” and concluded his review by stating that he had succeeded in doing so.

Such was the controversy surrounding the publication of the book in Russia that Solzhenitsyn gave a rare press interview in December 2002 to clarify his motives in writing it. He stressed that he was motivated by a desire that the Russians come to terms with the Stalinist and revolutionary pogroms against the Jews, and also that the Jews come to terms with the fact that they should be as offended by their own role in the Soviet purges as they are, rightfully, by the persecution they suffered under the Soviets. “My book was directed to empathise with the thoughts, feelings and psychology of the Jews—their spiritual component”, he told reporters in Moscow. “I have never made general conclusions about a people. I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back.”²⁵

Even as the controversy surrounding his latest book continued to simmer, memories of a previous controversy were being resurrected. In May 2003, Harvard University staged a conference to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address. In 1978, Solzhenitsyn had attacked the materialism, consumerism, and hedonism of the West, insisting that it offered no alternative to communism. Twenty-five years later, Jay Nordlinger, managing editor of National Review, described his words as “more relevant than ever”. Nordlinger, one of the speakers at the twenty-fifth anniversary conference, alongside Solzhenitsyn’s sons Ignat and Stephan, called the Harvard address “one of the most controversial and notorious speeches in modern history”: “I confess that, as I went back over this speech, I was astonished at how true it was…. I kept writing in the margins, ‘True’. ‘So true’. ‘Blindingly true’.”²⁶

At the end of 2003, Solzhenitsyn and his family were interviewed for a film documentary about his life and work.²⁷ Approaching his eighty-fifth birthday, the aging writer responded to questions with an air of sagacious serenity, the fruits of self-imposed solitude. “The city makes me feel fatigue”, he remarked. “I hate its humdrum, those unending visits and phone calls. I long for a secluded place…. I managed to live this wise for some time before my exile, then in Vermont and now here.” He spoke of his faith and his belief that Russia’s destiny is interwoven with Christian Orthodoxy. “Orthodox people believe firmly that God keeps in mind some special purpose for Russia. But we mustn’t think, if there is some divine plan, that God will fulfill this plan. We have our own free will, and we can misunderstand this plan, stray from it. Over the centuries we have made many mistakes.”

Asked why he had brought his own children up within the Russian Orthodox faith, he waxed lyrical over the importance of Christianity in his life, and the life of his family: “A child is born: God sends into your palms a soul which you should rear. How can you conceal this soul from Him, steal it?”

He waxed wistful over the fate of young people in modern Russia, lamenting that they “live amidst many a temptation”: “The creed of social Darwinism has been proclaimed: survive those who can, strive for success, accrue your wealth, move forward! This temptation is the worst of all, gripping young people and spoiling them.” The antidote to this self-spoliation was self-limitation; one should “work at oneself, try to put oneself within moral limits and to improve oneself”.

Turning to the subject of art, he insisted on the centrality of Christianity to any understanding of the nature, or supernature, of artistic creativity:

Inevitably, the interview took a retrospective look over Solzhenitsyn’s eventful life. Alya Solzhenitsyn recalled her feelings when she first heard the news that her husband had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Solzhenitsyn was asked about his relationship with Andrei Sakharov. “There were two big figures—you and Sakharov—who challenged the state. What were the contradictions between you?” Solzhenitsyn’s response, as candid and eloquent as ever, was nonetheless conciliatory in tone. He “did not agree” with aspects of Sakharov’s Thoughts about Progress and Peaceful Coexistence, published in 1978, explaining that it “was too delicate about the communist regime”.

In the light of the more recent controversy surrounding Two Hundred Years Together, which had led many people to add the tag of “anti-Semitism” to that of “nationalist”, Solzhenitsyn was at pains to defend his decision to write the book. Reminding his interviewer that “almost every writer wrote about the Jews and Russians”, he listed the illustrissimi of Russian writers to illustrate his point: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Schedrin, and Gorky. He was merely following in a noble literary tradition. The book itself was the fruit of the “huge amount of historical materials” he had accumulated in his research for his historical epic, The Red Wheel. He had not used the material on the Jews in Russian society in his series of novels so decided to write a separate volume on the subject. Originally intended as one volume, the book burgeoned into two. “It was a bestseller; everyone goes on reading it.” It had received “very different reactions”. Many had read it with “great interest” and had thanked him for writing it; “others, the so-called Russian nationalists… reproached me for not criticizing the Jewish religion”. As for the reaction from the Jews who had read the book, he had been greatly encouraged by the generally positive response: “And I had marvelous letters from Jews too; from prominent rabbis, from highly intellectual Jews. They were quite understanding. They appreciated the balance of my book, the tone of it. They accepted it.” There were, however, “many minor individual Jews” who rejected the book. “They were so malicious” and wrote “some spiteful reviews”.

Moving onto the subject of contemporary politics in post-communist Russia, Solzhenitsyn lamented the lack of repentance on the part of former communists. “Repentance is a national Russian trait which developed under Orthodoxy.” It was necessary for an individual to “regret things and feel repentance”.

Yermolai, the eldest of Solzhenitsyn’s sons, commented toward the end of the documentary that his father was “clearly aware of the end of his life”: “It doesn’t mean he feels he is about to die; it’s simply an objective awareness. He is turning eighty-five soon. I have the impression that during the last several years his mental outlook, the scope of his thinking, has increased and that he has approached very, very deep insight.”