Warning to the West

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  I know you say this from the moral standpoint of a devout Christian, and truth for you is more important than consequences. But you are asking people to say that in the nuclear age; the sword that hangs over everybody’s heads is the electronic one of nuclear weapons, and I think this is one of the problems that you face when you are criticized as being an enemy of détente. What alternatives are there to dealing with the devil, as you would say, if the purpose of that is to avoid nuclear catastrophe?

  You know, there was a time at the beginning of the fifties when this nuclear threat hung over the world, but the attitude of the West was like granite and the West did not yield. Today this nuclear threat still hangs over both sides, but the West has chosen the wrong path of making concessions. Nuclear war is not even necessary to the Soviet Union. You can be taken simply with bare hands. Why on earth then should one have nuclear war? If you have raised your hands and are giving in, why have nuclear war? They can take you simply like that, without nuclear war. The most important aspect of détente today is that there is no ideological détente. You Westerners simply cannot grasp the power of Soviet propaganda. Today you remain British imperialists who wish to strangle the whole earth. All this is hidden beneath the thin crust of détente; to remove this crust will take only one morning: one single morning. You can’t be turned away from détente so simply. To turn you away from your present position one would need a year or two. But in the Soviet Union one morning, one command is enough! Newspapers come out with the news that the British imperialists have become so brazen that the situation has become intolerable. And nothing that is being said against you every day will contradict this. And détente—there is no détente, it’s just gone. One can’t raise the question of détente without ideological détente. If you are hated and hounded in the press, in every single lecture—what sort of détente is that? You are shown up as villains who can be tolerated for perhaps one more day. That is not détente. As for the spirit of Helsinki—may I ask a question in my turn? How do you explain that over the last few months there has been hardly any news coming out of the Soviet Union of the continuing persecution of dissidents. If you will forgive me, I will answer this myself. The journalists have bowed to the spirit of Helsinki. I know for a fact that Western journalists in Moscow, who have been given the right of freer movement, in return for this and because of the spirit of Helsinki, no longer accept information about new persecutions of dissidents in the Soviet Union. What does the spirit of Helsinki and the spirit of détente mean for us within the Soviet Union? The strengthening of totalitarianism. What seems to you to be a milder atmosphere, a milder climate, is for us the strengthening of totalitarianism. Here I would like to give you a few examples, a few fresh examples which you will not have heard about over the radio or read in the papers. May I? Someone went to visit Sakharov; he was killed on his way home on the train. No, it wasn’t you, he was killed, a Soviet citizen. Someone knocks at the door of Nikolai Kryukov, they have come to fix the gas; he opens the door. They beat him almost to death in his own house because he has defended dissidents and signed protests. All this happens in a flat. But on a street at five o’clock in the afternoon on Lenin Prospect (Lenin!) Malva Landa is seized and dragged into a car. She screamed, “Citizens, I’m being kidnapped,” and hundreds of people heard, passed by. They were afraid, because anybody can be seized like that, under the very eyes of passers-by. They shoved her into a car and took her to prison. That’s the situation, that’s the spirit of Helsinki and détente for us. And so it goes on. In Odessa, Vyacheslav Grunov has been arrested for possessing illicit literature and put into a lunatic asylum. They’ve released Plyushch, but continue to lock up others. There you have détente and the spirit of Helsinki.

  Alexander Isaevich, that was a very powerful feeling in the West, throughout the fifties and sixties, and perhaps now. In fact, a great British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, gave his support to the view “Better Red than dead.” But are you saying that this policy of détente was formulated by the Soviet government expressly for the purpose of preventing internal liberalization in the Soviet Union? In other words, the Soviet Union was falling behind economically. In order to catch up it had to import American and West German technology. Otherwise it would have to scrap the whole system. And so it can only catch up by importing its technology from abroad and clamping down internally.

  Here, forgive me, there are several questions. Yes, it is the import of technology which is saving the Soviet Union. That’s true. But I return to that terrible statement of Bertrand Russell’s: “Better Red than dead.” Why did he not say it would be better to be brown than dead? There is no difference. All my life and the life of my generation, the life of those who share my views, we all have had one viewpoint: Better to be dead than a scoundrel. In this horrible expression of Bertrand Russell’s there is an absence of all moral criteria. Looked at from a short distance, these words allow one to maneuver and to continue to enjoy life. But from a long-term point of view it will undoubtedly destroy those people who think like that. It is a terrible thought. I thank you for quoting this as a striking example.

  But you are asking as an alternative for a return to something like the Cold War tensions. And most people of course welcome détente as a respite from that, a break, something different. Would you agree that the alternative that you propose is likely to be a return to something like the tensions of the Stalin-Khrushchev period?

  I would like to emphasize … you think that this is a respite, but this is an imaginary respite, it’s a respite before destruction. As for us, we have no respite at all. We are being strangled even more, with greater determination. You recall the tension of the fifties, but despite that tension you conceded nothing. But today you don’t have to be a strategist to understand why Angola is being taken. What for? This is one of the most recent positions from which to wage a world war more successfully—a wonderful position in the Atlantic. The Soviet armed forces have already overtaken the West in many respects and in other respects are on the point of overtaking it. The navy: Britain used to have a navy, now it is the Soviet Union that has the navy, control of the seas, bases; you may call this détente if you like, but after Angola I just can’t understand how one’s tongue can utter this word! Your Defense Minister has said that after Helsinki the Soviet Union is passing the test. I don’t know how many countries have still to be taken, maybe the Soviet tanks have to come to London for your Defense Minister to say at last that the Soviet Union has finally passed the test! Or will it still be taking the exam? I think there is no such thing as détente. Détente is necessary, but détente with open hands. Show that there is no stone in your hands! But your partners with whom you are conducting détente have a stone in their hands and it is so heavy that it could kill you with one single blow. Détente becomes self-deception, that’s what it is all about.

  Can I ask you finally, as a great Russian patriot, what view you take of your own future?

  My own future is closely linked with the fate of my country. I work and have always worked only for it. Our history has been concealed from us, entirely distorted. I am trying to reconstruct this history primarily for my own country. Maybe it will also be useful for the West. My future depends on what will happen to my country. But quite apart from this, the Moscow leaders have particular feelings toward me: so that my own destiny may be decided before that of my country. It is possible of course they may try to get rid of me completely before the fate of my country changes for the better. I sometimes get news of that sort. When I came here I counted on returning very soon, because the Soviet Union then was much weaker and the West was much stronger. But over these two years mutual relationships have changed greatly in favor of the Soviet Union.

  Mr. Solzhenitsyn, thank you.

  This is the text of an interview with Mr. Solzhenitsyn conducted by Michael Charlton for the BBC program Panorama. The interview was subsequently aired in the United States on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line.

  [MARCH
24, 1976]

  THE BBC HAS been kind enough to invite me to give my opinion, as a foreigner and an exile, on the West as it is today and, in particular, on England. Perhaps an outside view might be able to contribute something fresh. My only hope is that you will not find what I have to say too tedious. I admit I am not all that well acquainted with the internal affairs of your country, but like so many Russians I have always followed Britain’s foreign affairs with the keenest interest. I intend to speak frankly and I shall not try to please you or to flatter you in any way. I would ask you to believe me when I say nothing could give me more pleasure than to express only admiration. A quarter of a century ago, in the labor camps of Kazakhstan, as we braced ourselves for our hopeless task of stemming the Communist tanks, the West represented the light of freedom. For us the West was not only the stronghold of the spirit but also the depository of wisdom.

  In that very year one of your ministers, Herbert Morrison, somehow managed to persuade Pravda to devote an entire page to a statement of his, without any censorship. My God, how eagerly we rushed to where the paper was displayed—a crowd of convicts with shaven heads, filthy jackets, clumsy prison-camp boots.

  This was it! At last our subterranean kingdom was going to be pierced with the diamond-bright, diamond-hard ray of truth and hope! At last, Soviet censorship, held for forty years in the grip of a bulldog’s jaws, was to be relaxed. Now he’d make them see the truth! Now he’d stand up for us! But as we read and reread that feeble, insipid article, our hopes subsided slowly. These were the superficial words of someone who had not the slightest idea of the savage structure, the pitiless aims of the Communist world—and of course this was precisely why Pravda so generously agreed to print them. We had endured forty years of hell, and this British minister could find no word of hope for us.

  The years went by. The decades went by. In spite of the Iron Curtain, views on what was happening in the West, what people were thinking about, kept coming through to us, mainly thanks to the BBC’s Russian broadcasts, although they were vigorously jammed. And the more we learned, the more the state of your world perplexed us.

  Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art—and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations. One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find the strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery. Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self-deception.

  This is precisely what we have found to be the correlation between the spiritual development of the East and that of the West. And, alas, the process of your development is five, if not ten times swifter than ours. This is what almost robs mankind of any hope of avoiding a global catastrophe. For years we refused to believe this, thinking that the information which reached us was inadequate. A few years ago I spoke of this with considerable alarm in my Nobel lecture.

  And yet, until I came to the West myself and spent two years looking around, I could never have imagined the extreme degree to which the West actually desired to blind itself to the world situation, the extreme degree to which the West had already become a world without a will, a world gradually petrifying in the face of the danger confronting it, a world oppressed above all by the need to defend its freedom.

  There is a German proverb which runs Mut verloren—alles verloren: “When courage is lost, all is lost.” There is another Latin one, according to which loss of reason is the true harbinger of destruction. But what happens to a society in which both these losses—the loss of courage and the loss of reason—intersect? This is the picture which I found the West presents today.

  Of course there is a perfectly simple explanation for this process. It is not the superficial one, so fashionable in our day, that man himself is irreproachable and everything is to be blamed on a badly organized society, but a purely human one. Once, it was proclaimed and accepted that above man there was no supreme being, but instead that man was the crowning glory of the universe and the measure of all things, and that man’s needs, desires, and indeed his weaknesses were taken to be the supreme imperatives of the universe. Consequently, the only good in the world—the only thing that needed to be done—was that which satisfied our feelings. It was several centuries ago in Europe that this philosophy was born; at the time, its materialistic excesses were explained away by the previous excesses of Catholicism. But in the course of several centuries this philosophy inexorably flooded the entire Western world, and gave it confidence for its colonial conquests, for the seizure of African and Asian slaves. And all this side by side with the outward manifestations of Christianity and the flowering of personal freedom. By the beginning of the twentieth century this philosophy seemed to have reached the height of civilization and reason. And your country, Britain, which had always been the core, the very pearl, of the Western world, gave expression with particular brilliance to this philosophy in both its good and its bad aspects.

  In 1914, at the beginning of our ill-fated twentieth century, a storm broke over this civilization, a storm the size and range of which no one at that time could grasp. For four years Europe destroyed herself as never before, and in 1917 a crevasse opened up on the very edge of Europe, a yawning gap enticing the world into an abyss.

  The causes for this crevasse are not hard to find: it was the logical result of doctrines that had been bandied about in Europe for ages and had enjoyed considerable success. But this crevasse has something cosmic about it, too, in its unplumbed, unsuspected depths, in its unimaginable capacity for growing wider and wider and swallowing up more and more people.

  Forty years earlier Dostoevsky had predicted that socialism would cost Russia 100 million victims. At the time it seemed an improbable figure. Let me ask the British press to acquaint its readers with the impartial three-page report of the Russian statistician Professor Ivan Kurganov. It was published in the West twelve years ago, but, as is so often the case with matters of social significance, we only notice things that are not contradictory to our own feelings. From Professor Kurganov’s analysis, we learn that if Dostoevsky erred, he erred on the side of understatement. From 1917 to 1959 socialism cost the Soviet Union 110 million lives!

  When there is a geological upheaval, continents do not topple into the sea immediately. The first thing that happens is that the fatal initial crevasse must appear someplace. For a variety of reasons it so happened that this crevasse first opened up in Russia, but it might just as well have been anywhere else. And Russia, which people considered a backward country, had to leap forward a whole century to overtake all the other countries in the world. We endured inhuman experiences which the Western world—and this includes Britain—has no real conception of and is frightened even to think about.

  It is with a strange feeling that those of us who come from the Soviet Union look upon the West of today. It is as though we were neither neighbors on the same planet nor contemporaries. And yet we contemplate the West from what will be your future, or we look back seventy years to see our past suddenly repeating itself today. And what we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable; journalists refusing to take responsibility for the words they squander so easily; universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; peo
ple with serious objections unable or unwilling to voice them; the majority passively obsessed by a feeling of doom; feeble governments; societies whose defensive reactions have become paralyzed; spiritual confusion leading to political upheaval. What will happen as a result of all this lies ahead of us. But the time is near, and from bitter memory we can easily predict what these events will be.

  In the years which followed the worldwide upheaval of 1917, that pragmatic philosophy on which present-day Europe was nourished, with its refusal to take moral decisions, reached its logical conclusion: since there are no higher spiritual forces above us and since I—Man with a capital M—am the crowning glory of the universe, then if anyone must perish today, let it be someone else, anybody, but not I, not my precious self, or those who are close to me.

  The apocalyptic storm was already raging over the land that used to be Russia when Western Europe speedily extricated itself from that terrible war in its haste to forget and to bring back prosperity, fashions, and the latest dances. Lloyd George actually said: “Forget about Russia. It is our job to ensure the welfare of our own society.”