Having stated his own belief in the enriching variety of nations, he compared it with the desire of Andrei Sakharov for an intellectual world leadership, for world government. Such a government, Solzhenitsyn maintained, would be impossible under democracy, “for given universal franchise, when and where would an intellectual elite be elected to govern?” Consequently, any world government would need to be imposed because it would never be elected. It would constitute authoritarian rule. “Whether such a government proved very bad or excellent, the means of creating it, the principles of its formation and operation, can have nothing in common with modern democracy.”34
In October 1973, Solzhenitsyn wrote a postscript to his original essay in which he asked fundamental questions about the nature and meaning of “happiness” and “freedom”. The current conception that both were linked to material considerations, such as the absence of poverty or increasing disposable income, was inadequate. At their deepest and most meaningful level, happiness and freedom both found their fulfillment on a transcendent spiritual plane. To illustrate the point, he gave the example of the desire of the peasants for land in pre-revolutionary Russia: “The peasant masses longed for land and if this in a certain sense means freedom and wealth, in another (and more important) sense it means obligation, in yet another (and its highest) sense it means a mystical tie with the world and a feeling of personal worth.”35
Solzhenitsyn used this practical example of natural peasant yearnings as a springboard into a deeper discussion of metaphysical reality:
Can external freedom for its own sake be the goal of conscious living beings? Or is it only a framework within which other and higher aims can be realized? We are creatures born with inner freedom of will, freedom of choice—the most important freedom of all is a gift to us at birth. External, or social, freedom is very desirable for the sake of undistorted growth, but is no more than a condition, a medium, and to regard it as the object of our existence is nonsense. We can firmly assert our inner freedom even in external conditions of unfreedom. . . . In an unfree environment we do not lose the possibility of progress toward moral goals (that for instance of leaving this earth better men than our hereditary endowment has made us). The need to struggle against our surroundings rewards our efforts with greater inner success.36
On the other hand, a surfeit of comfort, which some mistake as freedom, leads to corruption. For this reason, the materially affluent Western democracies were in a state of spiritual confusion. The moral health of civilization had been preserved by past generations who had never known the modern conveniences of technological society: “A level of moral health incomparably higher than that expressed today in simian radio music, pop songs and insulting advertisements: could a listener from outer space imagine that our planet had already known and left behind it Bach, Rembrandt and Dante?”37
If the essay displayed Solzhenitsyn’s contempt for the moral bankruptcy of Western materialism, he still saved his fiercest scorn for the immoral totalitarianism of the Soviet system:
Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar’s, demands still more insistently that we render unto him what is God’s—that is a sacrifice we dare not make!38
In November, Solzhenitsyn wrote another essay for inclusion in From under the Rubble, entitled “Repentance and Self-Limitation”. A quarter of a century later he would still consider this one of his more important articles, expressing one of his key thoughts.39 In one important respect, it was his own considered reply to the issue of “National Bolshevism” that had caused such acrimony with the liberal critics of Novy Mir. Although he had disagreed strongly with the nature of their critique of National Bolshevism, feeling that they were attacking it for the wrong reasons, Solzhenitsyn was opposed to the xenophobic chauvinism and jingoism of the National Bolsheviks. In “Repentance and Self-Limitation”, he sought to dissect the essence of National Bolshevism, which made communism and patriotism inseparable, praised the Revolution and the subsequent history of the Soviet Union as a triumph of the Russian spirit, and believed that blood alone determined whether one was Russian or non-Russian. As for things spiritual, Solzhenitsyn wrote, all trends are admissible to the National Bolshevik. “Orthodoxy is not the least bit more Russian than Marxism, atheism, the scientific outlook, or, shall we say, Hinduism. God need not be written with a capital letter, but Government must be.”40
Against such triumphalist pseudo-fascism, dressed up in Marxist clothes, Solzhenitsyn placed his own view of love for one’s country:
As we understand it patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them. We ought to get used to the idea that no people is eternally great or eternally noble . . . that the greatness of a people is to be sought not in the blare of trumpets—physical might is purchased at a spiritual price beyond our means—but in the level of its inner development, in its breadth of soul.
Like a latter-day John the Baptist calling on his fellow countrymen to repent, Solzhenitsyn reminded them that
we Russians are not traversing the heavens in a blaze of glory but sitting forlornly on a heap of spiritual cinders. . . . And unless we recover the gift of repentance, our country will perish and will drag down the whole world with it. Only through the repentance of a multitude of people can the air and the soil of Russia be cleansed so that a new, healthy national life can grow up. We cannot raise a clean crop on a false, unsound, obdurate soil.41
The concept of repentance and self-limitation was not applicable to nations only. It was equally applicable to individuals, in fact more so, because any national repentance could only start in the hearts and minds of individuals. “We are always anxiously on the lookout for ways of curbing the inordinate greed of the other man, but no one is heard renouncing his own inordinate greed.” It was this selfishness, this pride, at the very heart of man which lay at the root of society’s problems.
After the Western ideal of unlimited freedom, after the Marxist concept of freedom as acceptance of the yoke of necessity—here is the true Christian definition of freedom. Freedom is self-restriction! Restriction of the self for the sake of others!
. . . This principle diverts us—as individuals, in all forms of human association, societies and nations—from outward to inward development, thereby giving us greater spiritual depth.
The turn toward inward development, the triumph of inwardness over outwardness, if it ever happens, will be a great turning point in the history of mankind, comparable to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. . . . If in some places this is destined to be a revolutionary process, these revolutions will not be like earlier ones—physical, bloody and never beneficial—but will be moral revolutions, requiring both courage and sacrifice, though not cruelty—a new phenomenon in human history.42
A quarter of a century later, Solzhenitsyn had succumbed to more than a trace of scepticism: “I believe that if people knew how to self-limit they would be morally much higher. Unfortunately, the idea of self-limitation is not successful if you try to propagandize it. It does not resonate. Mostly, I think, only highly religious people are willing to accept this idea. For instance, if you try to propagandize the idea of self-limitation to governments or states and say that they should learn not to grab what belongs to others, this does not have an effect.”43
Solzhenitsyn’s third and final essay for From under the Rubble was entitled “The Smatterers”, combining a pessimistic appraisal of the recent past, a plaintive cry against present trends, and a defiant optimism about the future. He finished it in January 1974 and passed it to Liusha Chukovskaya, t
he trusted friend who had helped him for the previous eight years. He requested that she type it, along with the other two essays destined for From under the Rubble, but was surprised when she returned a few days later and launched into a raging tirade against him, against which her previous disquiet over the Lenten Letter paled into insignificance. She had been horrified by the content of the essays and thrust a sheaf of notes listing her disagreements into his hands. Her anger was heightened by the confirmation that for all those years she had helped a man with whom she now knew she disagreed on fundamentals.
Chukovskaya was not alone in her apprehensions about the direction that Solzhenitsyn seemed to be taking. Another helper, Mirra Petrova, disliked what she perceived as a reactionary drift in Solzhenitsyn’s work, particularly in August 1914 and October 1916, and despised every mention of religion. Solzhenitsyn also alienated his old friend Lev Kopelev, who was very critical of the contents of the Letter to Soviet Leaders. For his part, Solzhenitsyn thought that Kopelev had reverted to his earlier communist sympathies, feeling that his old ally had become a fierce and abiding foe.
Solzhenitsyn grieved at the cooling or loss of previous friendships, understanding the apprehensions of erstwhile allies but finally unable to accept their disagreements. It must have seemed as though he was losing the warmth of many of those closest to him, finding himself out in the cold in the grimmest heat of battle. Yet he still had the indomitable strength of Alya to lean on. She had just given him their third son in as many years, and he knew that, in her at least, he had an ally who agreed with all he was doing and saying. She was his rock, standing firm amid the storms that his own efforts were unleashing upon both of them. Nevertheless, the joys of fatherhood and family life could not dispel entirely the sorrows incurred through the sacrifice of old friendships. In a moment of melancholy in December 1973, he had asked himself, “[W]hen will the din of battle cease? If only I could go away from it all, go away for many years to the back of beyond with nothing but fields and open skies and woods and horses in sight, nothing to do but write my novel at my own pace.”44
Little could he know that within two months his prayer would be answered, although scarcely in the way he had envisaged. He was about to find himself thrust out in the cold by his enemies as well as his friends. Out in the cold and a long way from home.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
COLD-SHOULDERED
The publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago in Paris in December 1973 provoked the full fury of the Soviet authorities. Typical of their splenetic response was an article in Pravda on January 14, 1974, entitled “The Path of Treason”, in which The Gulag Archipelago was described as “another slanderous book by A. Solzhenitsyn”. It was clearly designed to fool and cheat gullible people with all kinds of fabrications about the Soviet Union, and Solzhenitsyn was literally choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, for the Soviet people. The Gulag Archipelago contained nothing but “the outpourings of a deranged imagination” and was “stuffed with cynical falsifications concocted to serve the forces of imperial reaction”. Its author was seeing the Soviet system through the eyes of those who were shooting and hanging communists, revolutionary workers, and peasants, while they were defending the black cause of counterrevolution. Solzhenitsyn was guilty of moral degradation, spiritual poverty, and, perhaps worst of all, was “playing the role of a Christian fool”. The history of the labor camps documented in the book was nothing but a vicious fabrication, and, anyway, was unnecessary because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had already subjected abuses of the Soviet legal system in the days of the personality cult to unqualified criticism. The article concluded with an ominous threat: “Solzhenitsyn deserves the merit for which he has so zealously strived—the fate of a traitor from whom all Soviet working people, and every honest man on earth, cannot but turn away in anger and disgust.”1
Four days after the appearance of the Pravda article, Solzhenitsyn issued a statement in his own defense, complaining that the furious press campaign had concealed the book’s purpose from the Soviet reader: “Pravda lies when it says that the author ‘sees with the eyes of those who hanged revolutionary workers and peasants’. No! with the eyes of those who were shot and tortured by the NKVD. Pravda asserts that in our country there is ‘unqualified criticism’ of the pre-1956 period. So let them just give us a sample of their unqualified criticism. I have provided them with the richest factual material for it.”2 Several leading dissidents sprang to Solzhenitsyn’s defense, putting themselves at considerable risk as the campaign against him became ever more vociferous and hysterical. Andrei Sakharov and four other dissidents put their name to a letter in which they expressed their deep concern about the “new threats to Alexander Solzhenitsyn” contained in a recent statement by TASS, the Soviet news agency.
TASS declares that Solzhenitsyn is a traitor to the fatherland and that he is slandering its past. But how can one believe that “past errors” have been condemned and corrected and at the same time consider slanderous an honest effort to collect and publish people’s historical testimonies about a part of those crimes which are on our collective conscience? It is impossible to deny that there were mass arrests, inhuman conditions, forced labor, deliberate annihilation of millions of people in the camps. There was the abolition of the kulaks, the persecution and destruction of hundreds of thousands of religious believers, deportations of whole peoples, anti-worker and anti-peasant laws, persecution of former prisoners of war. There were other crimes, appalling in their ruthlessness, cowardice and cynicism.3
Responding to this letter by Sakharov and others, the American writer Saul Bellow added his voice to those seeking to protect Solzhenitsyn from further persecution. Writing in the New York Times, Bellow declared that the word “hero”, long in disrepute, had been redeemed by Solzhenitsyn. In a counter-threat to the Soviet authorities, Bellow warned that further persecution of Solzhenitsyn—deportation, confinement in a madhouse, or exile—would be taken as final evidence of the complete moral degeneracy of the Soviet regime.4
In the event, the Soviet regime displayed its moral degeneracy just three weeks later. Solzhenitsyn was arrested at his Moscow home on February 12, 1974, and taken to Lefortovo prison where he was charged with treason. On the following day, having been stripped of his Soviet citizenship, he was expelled from his homeland as a traitor. There is little doubt that under Stalin he would have been executed, an indication that the Soviet system had modified its methods if not its intolerant credo. The subtle shift of approach had not been lost on the dissident L. L. Regelson, who wrote an open letter to the Soviet government on February 17, protesting at Solzhenitsyn’s banishment:
You have, it seems, gradually begun to understand that in a spiritual battle an opponent slain is more dangerous than an opponent still living. . . . But . . . you have still not realized that with the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago, that hour in history has struck which will be fatal to you. . . that tens of murdered millions have risen up against you. . . . They have long been knocking for entrance into our lives, but there was none to open the door. . . . The Gulag Archipelago is the indictment with which your trial at the hands of the human race begins. . . . May the paralysis with which God punished your first leader serve as a prophetic prefiguring of the spiritual paralysis which is now inexorably advancing upon you.
. . . Perhaps some of you may begin to ask yourself: And is there One over us all who will demand a full reckoning?
Never doubt it—there is.
He will demand a reckoning. And you will answer. . . . Take Russia out of the hands of Cain, and give her back to God.5
Six weeks after Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion, his family was allowed to leave for Switzerland to join him in his new life in exile. On March 27, two days before their final departure, Alya had organized a farewell gathering of friends. Many well-known dissidents were in attendance, including Lev Kopelev, Yuli Daniel, and Alexander
Ginsburg, as well as a number of Western correspondents. In the true spirit of her husband, and in keeping with her own resilient character, Alya made a fiery and defiant statement to those assembled. “It is painful to part from Russia,” she said, “painful that our children are condemned to a life without a homeland, painful and difficult to leave friends who are not protected.” Concerning her husband’s expulsion, she stressed that “they can separate a Russian writer from his native land, but no one has the power and strength to sever his spiritual link with it, to tear Solzhenitsyn away from it. And even if his books are now set ablaze on bonfires, their existence in his homeland is indestructible, just as Solzhenitsyn’s love for Russia is indestructible.” In conclusion, she echoed the words of the wives of the Decembrists—the rebel aristocrats who had defied the Tsar in December 1825—who had followed their husbands into exile a century and a half earlier. “My place is beside him, but leaving Russia is excruciatingly painful.”6
His wife and family now safely with him, Solzhenitsyn began to come to terms with his new life. Throughout all the years of struggle against Soviet censorship, he had never sought to defect to the West. On the contrary, his love for Russia was such that he had earnestly desired to remain on Soviet soil whatever the cost. Nevertheless, there was no denying the sense of liberation that accompanied his arrival in Zurich. At long last, he was able to enjoy the freedom to write and say exactly what he wanted without the threat of imprisonment.
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