Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

^{CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR} CONSUMMATUM EST

At the beginning of August 2007, barely a week after Der Spiegel published Solzhenitsyn’s reference to the Christian martyrs killed at the hands of the communists at the Butovo cemetery outside Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church sponsored a commemoration of these very martyrs at the cemetery itself. President Putin and his government were conspicuous by their absence at the event, a fact for which they were roundly condemned in the Russian press. Three months later, in an apparent act of penance for his earlier sin of omission (if one can use such language about the motives and actions of politicians), President Putin visited Butovo and issued a statement about the evils of ideology and about the millions who had perished at the hands of the communist regime. On the same day, the Orthodox Church canonized hundreds of victims of communism.

On December 9, two days before his eighty-ninth birthday, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on the “Vesti Nedeli” (News of the Week) program on Rossiya Television to mark the publication of a new edition of The Gulag Archipelago. Although Russia had “reasserted its influence in international relations, and regained its role in the world”, he cautioned that internally, “morally, we are far from what we wish and what we need to be”. Russia needed “spiritual development” that transcended politics.¹

On March 31, 2008, A. N. Wilson once again emerged as Solzhenitsyn’s British champion, much as Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge had been his champions in the 1970s. Having waxed lyrical about Cancer Ward the previous year, Wilson now praised The First Circle: “I have been reading The First Circle, and for a week, nothing else has had much reality for me. It is not only the most devastating indictment of Stalinism; it is also a superb novel, all set within the space of three days.”² Having discussed the literary merits and moral quality of the novel, Wilson turned his attention to Solzhenitsyn himself:

On April 2, Solzhenitsyn was again causing controversy, this time by accusing the Ukrainian government of “historical revisionism”. In an interview with the Russian daily newspaper Izvestia, Solzhenitsyn condemned efforts in the Ukraine to have the great famine of 1932-1933 recognized internationally as Russian genocide against the Ukrainian people. Against such “revisionism”, Solzhenitsyn countered that the famine was caused by the corrupt ideals of the communist regime, under which all suffered equally, Russians and Ukrainians alike. The suggestion that it was genocide was a bizarre “fable” that had “surpassed the wild suggestions of the Bolshevik propaganda machine”: “Still, defamation is easy to insinuate into Westerners’ minds. They have never understood our history: You can sell them any old fairy story, even one as mindless as this.” Three days later, and to its great credit, the Boston Globe published a good translation of the full text of Solzhenitsyn’s words in Izvestia, under the headline “Ukrainian Famine Not a Genocide”. Rarely had Solzhenitsyn’s words been treated so objectively and fairly in the Western media.

It was perhaps fitting that Solzhenitsyn’s final public statement should incorporate three of the prevailing passions of his life: the condemnation of communism, the defense of historical truth, and the love of Russia. He died of heart failure on August 3, 2008, at his home outside Moscow, after a life of dauntless and unswerving service to the cause of justice and truth. Few indeed could claim as justly, in the words and with the spirit of St. Paul, that he had fought the good fight, that he had finished the race, and that he had kept the faith (see 2 Tim 4:7). It might even be decorous to compare Solzhenitsyn not merely with St. Paul, but with Christ Himself. Few had lived their lives nailed to the cross of suffering and crowned with the thorns of scorn as had Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and few could utter with their final breath the final words of Christ, consummatum est, so worthily.

The funeral service and committal was held in the cathedral of the Donskoi Monastery on August 6. Solzhenitsyn scholar and translator Michael Nicholson, who attended the service, described it as “extremely intense and moving” and described how the graveside was mobbed for long after the service as people tried to leave flowers and kiss the temporary wooden cross.⁴ Less than two weeks later, Solzhenitsyn received a further victory over his communist foes, this time posthumously, when it was announced that Moscow’s Great Communist Street (ulitsa Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya) was to be re-named “Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street”.⁵ In order to bestow this honor, which had been sanctioned by a decree from President Putin, the city officials had to amend an existing rule stipulating that only people dead for at least ten years could be honored with a street name. “Life has shown that there are cases when you don’t need to wait ten years to evaluate a person’s contribution to the history of Russia and Moscow”, said Moscow City Assembly Chairman Vladimir Platonov.⁶ The irony implicit in the secular canonization of a man who had spent most of his life condemning secularism and the secularization of political life was all part of the grim humor surrounding the Divine “comedy” of his life.

And the comedy continued. On September 11, on the eve of the fortieth day after Solzhenitsyn’s death, when Russian Orthodox custom calls for commemoration of the dead, Vladimir Lakeyev, a Communist Party leader in Moscow, read a statement saying that Great Communist Street was named after the Bolsheviks who fell in battle there in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Renaming the street, one of the most prestigious thoroughfares in Moscow, after Solzhenitsyn was “inadmissible”, said Lakeyev, because the current name “reflects the feat of communists who gave their lives for freedom, the happiness of the people and the strengthening of the state”. By contrast, Solzhenitsyn was “a public figure who devoted his life to fighting the Soviet people’s state and spoke out with anti-communist and anti-state positions”.⁷ Shortly afterward, the website of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party declared that “citizens across the country continue to express their displeasure with the campaign of canonization of the false prophet”.⁸

On September 23, in spite of the communist protests, the Moscow government gave preliminary approval to amendments to the law that would fully legalize the name change, thereby ratifying the presidential decree, dated August 12, stating that a plaque in honor of Solzhenitsyn should be erected on the street and that the new street signs and the plaque should be in place by January 1, 2009. Intriguingly, the presidential decree specified the text of the plaque, identifying Solzhenitsyn as a Nobel Prize winner and a winner of the State Prize of Russia but making no mention of the Gulag. Meanwhile, in a further darkly comedic coup de theatre, a small group of communists and residents of Great Communist Street demonstrated with placards blazoned with the slogan “Don’t Live a Lie”. It was all so bizarrely surreal that it would not have been out of place in Orwell’s dystopia.

As if to call the bemused observer back to some sense of sanity, the priests at St. Martin the Confessor, a beautiful Orthodox church on Great Communist Street, erected a sign outside the church with its pre-1917 address, 15 Bolshaya Alekseyevskaya, which honors the church of St. Aleksy, a medieval Orthodox saint. Explaining their decision to erect the sign, the Reverend Valery Stepanov, who serves at the church and hosts a television show about Moscow, said that “we shouldn’t be like the communists, who went around renaming everything. But”, he added, “Solzhenitsyn Street is better than Great Communist Street.”⁹

Meanwhile, far from the confusions and contradictions aroused on the streets of Moscow by Solzhenitsyn’s death and emerging legacy, writers in the West were queuing up to pay their tributes to one of the giants of the twentieth century. In death, if not in life, Solzhenitsyn could be forgiven and even praised, albeit grudgingly, by those who had long since ostracized him for his devastating critique of the West’s liberal ascendency.

One year after Solzhenitsyn’s death, on August 3, 2009, Vladimir Putin sent a telegram to Solzhenitsyn’s widow in which he described Solzhenitsyn as “a global individual, whose creative and ideological heritage will always hold a special place in the history of Russian literature and in the chronicles of our country”.¹⁰ On the same day, Dmitry Medvedev, who had succeeded Putin as Russian President, also sent a telegram to Alya Solzhenitsyn. Its contents seemed to suggest that perhaps, at last, her husband’s deepest aspirations were being heeded even by his country’s politicians. The telegram is, in any event, a fitting tribute by the President of Russia to his nation’s greatest modern hero:

The final sentence of the President’s tribute would prove to be prophetic. In October 2010, it was announced that The Gulag Archipelago would become required reading for all Russian high school students. In a meeting with Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Putin described The Gulag Archipelago as “essential reading”. “Without the knowledge of that book, we would lack a full understanding of our country and it would be difficult for us to think about the future.”¹² Ultimately, however, the facts of Solzhenitsyn’s life speak louder than any words, and one can almost hear his ghost echoing the closing words of his interview with Der Spiegel: “No, no. Don’t. It’s enough.” His life speaks for itself. It was finished; accomplished; consummated.

Today, after the Soviet Union’s demise, and after the statues of Stalin have been ignominiously toppled, it is easy to forget the sheer enormity of Solzhenitsyn’s achievement. Quite simply, what he did was considered to be impossible. It was beyond belief that one man could defy the communist state and survive. It was even more unbelievable that he should not only survive, but that he should play a significant role in the state’s downfall and that he should outlive the state itself. Solzhenitsyn’s life and example flew in the face of the “reality” of the “realists”.

The destiny of the small man who dared defy the might of the state was epitomized in the eyes of most pessimistic “realists” by the example of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1948, when Solzhenitsyn was serving his sentence as a political prisoner of the Soviet regime. As such, the figure of Winston Smith can be seen not merely as a figure of Everyman in his alienation from the totalitarian state (Big Brother), but as an unwitting figure and prophecy of Solzhenitsyn himself. According to the “realistic” view, Winston Smith would not only be crushed by the Almighty State, but he would also betray every ideal, and everything he loved, in abject surrender to its uncompromising demands. The triumph of Big Brother was inevitable; it was predestined. It was Fate, and to deny or defy fate was fatal and futile.

The fact is that Orwell had failed to shake off the Hegelian determinism of his Marxist past. He had long since become disillusioned with Marxism but still believed that the forces of history were immutable and the triumph of the state inevitable. Orwell still believed, like his former comrades, that the state was omnipotent; he only differed from them to the extent that he hated this omnipotent god, whereas they admired it.

Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, did not believe that the communist state was a god but merely a demon, or a dragon, a manifestation of evil. He did not believe in fate but in freedom: the freedom of the will and its responsibility to serve the truth. Fate was a figment of the imagination, but the dragon was real. Furthermore, it was the duty of the good man to fight the dragon, even unto death if necessary. Solzhenitsyn fought the dragon, even though it was thousands of times bigger than he was, and even though it breathed fire and had killed millions of people. He fought it because, in conscience, he could do nothing else. In doing so, he proved that faith, not fate, is the final victor. Faith can move mountains; it can move Machines that were thought to be gods; it can move and remove Big Brother.

Solzhenitsyn has re-written George Orwell’s novel, using the facts of his life as his pen. He represents the victory of Winston Smith. Truth, it seems, is not only stranger than fiction; it has a happier ending.