Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  Before the end of his first year in exile, he completed work on his autobiography The Oak and the Calf, published in 1975. Shortly afterward, he finished a supplement to this entitled Invisible Allies, which was not published for a further twenty years for fear of incriminating his friends and allies still resident in the Soviet Union. The first year of exile also saw the publication of Prussian Nights, Solzhenitsyn’s poetic account of his memories of front-line service in the Second World War. Meanwhile, he was working on Lenin in Zurich, his indictment of Lenin’s collaboration with Russia’s enemies during the previous war. Such a revisionist approach to Lenin’s shady business deals and to the role of the Germans and big business in the bankrolling of the Bolshevik Revolution would have been tantamount to blasphemy in the Soviet Union. Although Stalin had been dethroned and attacked for nurturing a personality cult, the cult surrounding Lenin was still sacrosanct. He was still the ultimate stainless communist icon, and Lenin in Zurich was seen by the Soviets as an act of unforgivable iconoclasm.

  Solzhenitsyn had been helped considerably in his research for Lenin in Zurich by several historical studies that had been published in the West but were not available in the Soviet Union. Unwittingly, by expelling Solzhenitsyn to the West, his enemies in Russia had opened up a whole new world of research to him, placing powerful new weapons at his disposal. In the author’s note at the end of Lenin in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn expressed gratitude to the writers of these historical studies “for their close attention to events which determined the course of the twentieth century, but which have been carefully concealed from history, and which because of the direction taken by the development of the West have received little attention”.7 Questioned about this cryptic conclusion to his study of Lenin, Solzhenitsyn reiterated that the four authors explicitly named and to whom he was particularly indebted in his research for the book were moving against the wind of the century: “Both the meaning and the facts which they relayed were cast in doubt and certainly most people asked the question ‘why do we need this?’ Specifically, one of the books which had concentrated on Lenin’s ties with Germany was simply rejected even though there were stacks of documents to verify its claims and people just continued to deny that these things had ever happened.”8

  In this defense of unfashionable Western historians, Solzhenitsyn was firing his first warning shots to the governments of the West. Within months of his arrival, he had begun to rock the boat, starting to side with Western dissidents as vociferously as he had sided with dissidents in the East. It was clear that, in spite of the claims of the Soviet press, Solzhenitsyn was no mere mouthpiece for the liberal humanists who ruled in the West. He had hinted as much in volume one of The Gulag Archipelago, stating that “I do not like these ‘left’ and ‘right’ classifications; they are conditional concepts, they are loosely bandied about, and they do not convey the essence.”9 Unfortunately, political thought during the Cold War years was pre-conditioned by such classifications, and anyone who failed to fit neatly on the left-right continuum was doomed to misinterpretation by the stagnant ideologues on both sides of the divide.

  Solzhenitsyn had already alienated many dissidents in Russia by his failure to genuflect before the altar of Western two-party democracy. Such a system was no panacea for the problems of totalitarianism, not least because it led to a choice little better than that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. His pessimism was sometimes seen as authoritarian in nature, a misunderstanding exacerbated by some muddled thinking, or at least some muddled wording, in one of his essays in From under the Rubble. Yet his views were far from anti-democratic, as his enthusiasm for the political system in Switzerland indicated. He told Doctor Fred Luchsinger, editor-in-chief of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a Zurich newspaper, that he admired Swiss democracy because it was organized in small local units, such as the village and the canton. Unlike the centralized democracies in other Western countries, the emphasis in Switzerland was on local self-determination and the active participation of the entire population. It reminded him, he informed Luchsinger, of the democratic system in medieval Novgorod. On another occasion, he told his Swiss publisher, Otto Walter, that he was very impressed by the treatment Alexander Herzen had received when he sought political asylum in Geneva during the nineteenth century. The authorities in Geneva had asked the federal government in Bern whether they had any objections to Herzen’s request for asylum, and the government had replied that it was a matter for Geneva to decide for itself. “This”, Solzhenitsyn exclaimed, “really is democracy from the base, when a city can decide questions of national policy for itself.”10

  Solzhenitsyn repeated his praise of the Swiss political system in an interview on American television in June 1974:

  Swiss democracy has some amazing qualities. First, it is completely silent and works inaudibly. Secondly, there is its stability. . . . Thirdly, it’s an upturned pyramid. That is, there’s more power at the local level . . . than in the cantons, and more power in the cantons than with the government. . . . Furthermore, democracy is everyone’s responsibility. Each individual would rather moderate his demands than damage the whole structure. The Swiss have such a high sense of responsibility that there are no attempts by groups to seize something for themselves and elbow out the rest. . . . Naturally one can only admire such a democracy.11

  In Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, the Swiss system represented his own passionate belief in self-limitation incarnated on a national level. It was proof that the principles he lived by could be employed on a practical basis by societies as well as by individuals. Once again, there are similarities between Solzhenitsyn’s views and those of E. F. Schumacher, who had given his Small is Beautiful the subtitle “A Study of Economics As If People Mattered”. In the Swiss democratic system, Solzhenitsyn believed that he was seeing politics as if people mattered.

  Solzhenitsyn’s interview on American television was timed to coincide with publication of the long-awaited English translation ofThe Gulag Archipelago. As expected, its publication had a huge impact throughout the English-speaking world. “To live now and not to know this work”, wrote L. W. Webb in the Guardian, “is to be a kind of historical fool missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.”12 His views were echoed around the globe as The Gulag Archipelago became an international bestseller. Two million copies of the American paperback edition were published, the book being described by George Kennan in the New York Review of Books as “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levelled in modern times”.13

  Solzhenitsyn had achieved his aim, fulfilling the promise he had made while still a prisoner in the camps he described so graphically in The Gulag Archipelago. As a completely unknown prisoner, languishing in the oblivion of the Gulag, he had vowed to let the world know about the Soviet Union’s sordid secret—an unspeakable secret that had hushed up the killing oftens of millions of people. Yet he could not have imagined the success which awaited him, the immensity of which was evoked by George Kennan: “The Soviet leaders cannot, just by ignoring it themselves or attempting to smother it with falsehood, consign it to oblivion or cause it to remain without consequences. It is too large for the craw of the Soviet propaganda machine. It will stick there, with increasing discomfort, until it has done its work.”14

  Of course, the Soviet propaganda machine could always, in time-honored fashion, simply dismiss such reviews in the American press as the anti-socialist rantings of bourgeois reactionary forces. More difficult was the devastating effect that the French edition was having on the views of the socialist intelligentsia in France. Following publication of The Gulag Archipelago, the longstanding love affair between French intellectuals and the Soviet Union was brought to an uncomfortable end. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Aragon, and the other illustrissimi of the pro-Soviet old guard sank into gloom-laden old age, their lifelong delusions laid bare before their eyes. “What shall we do?” asked Sartre in a plea to his lover. “Where shall we go?” “A whirlwind
is carrying me to the grave,” mourned de Beauvoir, “and I am trying not to think.”15

  In contrast to the desolate atheism of Sartre and de Beauvoir, Solzhenitsyn was beginning to feel more hopeful about the problems facing the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. On September 27, his open letter to the Third Council of the Russian Church Abroad was published in the daily newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo. It was written at the request of Metropolitan Filaret, who had asked him to present his views as to how the portion of the Russian Orthodox Church that existed in freedom could render assistance to the oppressed and captive portion in Russia. No doubt fueled by nostalgia for the native soil upon which he was no longer free to walk, Solzhenitsyn’s letter was full of heartfelt praise for the devoutness of his fellow countrymen. He spoke of churches filled to the brim, stating that, in the midst of the current castration of faith in the West, there were probably nowhere else on earth such crowded churches as those in the USSR.

  Faith does not suffer when there is scarcely enough space to bow to the ground or to make the sign of the cross. Standing together shoulder to shoulder we support one another against persecution. And the number of faithful far exceeds the number who are willing and able to attend services. In the Ryazan region, with which I am most familiar, more than seventy per cent of all infants are baptized, despite all the prohibitions and persecution. In the cemeteries crosses are replacing the Soviet markers with their star and photograph.16

  There were still many problems to be surmounted, such as state interference in church affairs, poorly organized or non-existent parishes, and the lack of Christian education for the nation’s youth, but Russian young people were finding the way to church on their own, and the church was growing stronger in the fervor of its believers and converts, if not in its formal organization. With evident relish, Solzhenitsyn compared the resurrection of religious faith among the young with the militant atheism of Soviet youth in the honeymoon period following the Revolution. In the years immediately before and after the Revolution, the church was shunned and subjected to ridicule by young people and the intelligentsia. Solzhenitsyn remembered how many fiery adherents were claimed by militant atheism in the 1920s. “Those who went on rampages, blew out candles, and smashed icons with axes have now crumbled into dust, like their Union of the Militant Godless.” Fifty years on, and the enemies of faith had adopted a different and more subtle, though no less pernicious, persona: “Since the shiny bauble of unlimited material progress has led all of humanity into a depressing spiritual cul-de-sac, represented with only slight nuances of difference in the East as in the West, I can discover only one healthy course for everyone now living, for nations, societies, human organizations, and above all else for churches. We must confess our sins and errors (our own, not those of others), repent, and use self-restraint in our future development.”17

  Even if he still remained contemptuous of the spiritual cul-de-sac into which the world had wandered, Solzhenitsyn’s words had seldom resonated with such optimism. It seemed that life in the admirable Swiss democracy was, for the liberty-starved writer, as fresh with freedom as the alpine air.

  In December 1974, Solzhenitsyn finally traveled to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize, four years after it had been awarded to him. In April 1975, he visited Paris, appearing on the popular television program Apostrophe. The program attracted five million viewers, twice the usual number, and most were captivated by his passionate sincerity and charm. According to L’Express, Solzhenitsyn was “a new prophet, the herald of a great religious movement”, and Paris Match considered him “a genius . . . the equal of Dostoyevsky”.

  On June 30, Solzhenitsyn delivered an address to two and a half thousand delegates of the AFL-CIO, America’s main trade union organization, at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. He expressed great admiration for America and the American people. The United States was “a country of the future; a young country; a country of still untapped possibilities; a country of tremendous geographical distances; a country of tremendous breadth of spirit; a country of generosity; a country of magnanimity”. Yet he also spoke about the situation in the Soviet Union where there was occurring a liberation of the human spirit. New generations were growing up which were “steadfast in their struggle with evil; which are not willing to accept unprincipled compromises; which prefer to lose everything—salary, conditions of existence and life itself—but are not willing to sacrifice conscience; not willing to make deals with evil”.18 As well as being an expression of praise for his fellow dissidents, Solzhenitsyn’s words were a measured attack on the American policy of detente, which he believed was a betrayal of his dissident friends in the Soviet Union and amounted to nothing less than a shameful compromise with evil.

  Surprisingly, considering his pro-American stance, Solzhenitsyn’s visit to Washington was most conspicuous for the absence of any invitation to the White House. Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, was known to be uneasy about Solzhenitsyn’s outspoken opposition to detente, and it was widely suspected that it was he who had blocked the invitation. Certainly, the official excuses emanating from the White House were sufficiently lame to raise suspicions about the true motive for the official snub to Solzhenitsyn. President Ford was said not to want a meeting “without substance”. It seems a little odd that the President of the United States could find nothing of substance to discuss with the author who was currently shaking the Soviet empire with the revelations in The Gulag Archipelago, not least because he had found time to pose with both a beauty queen and with Pelé, the Brazilian soccer star, only a week or so earlier.

  Simon Winchester, the Guardian’s Washington correspondent, praised President Ford for his reality and integrity in denying a hearing to the “shaggy author”, the “hairy polemicist” who had become the “darling of the redneck population” and who had talked to thousands of “sagging beer bellies” at the Hilton Hotel.19 Gratuitous insults and stereotypes aside, Winchester’s views were typical of those who now suspected Solzhenitsyn of political incorrectness. One State Department official managed to take the abuse against Solzhenitsyn one step further, foolishly rushing in where even Winchester had feared to tread. “Let’s face it”, he remarked, “he’s just about a Fascist”. This comment provoked the writer D. M. Thomas to justifiable words of contempt. How could anyone suggest that Solzhenitsyn, “a man who had fought the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, demanded freedom of speech and religion, the rule of morality, grass-roots democracy, ecology before profit, an end to military conscription, and an end to the Soviet empire was ideologically akin to Himmler.”?20

  Many Americans were outraged at the White House’s cold-shouldering of Solzhenitsyn, and President Ford found himself politically embarrassed by the snub. Politicians were as annoyed as their electorates, and on July 15, Solzhenitsyn addressed an audience of some eighty congressmen at a reception in his honor held in the Senate Caucus Room. In early October, the Senate unanimously adopted a resolution to confer honorary citizenship on him, but once again the State Department, in a further example of Kissinger’s vindictiveness, intervened to prevent its implementation.

  Having caused such controversy in the United States, Solzhenitsyn made his first visit to Britain in February 1976. He arrived as a celebrity, and The Times reported on February 23 that his portrait had been presented to the Victoria and Albert Museum by Felix Fabian. An entourage of journalists accompanied him as he visited Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon, before his arrival in London. At the BBC Television Centre, he criticized senior executives for the decline in the standard of its Russian service, calling for more information to be transmitted to a people bombarded with lies. He believed that the BBC should also broadcast to the minorities in the Soviet Union, for example, in Estonian, Latvian, and Ukrainian. Above all, the BBC Russian service should offer more religion to its listeners. Christianity, he explained, was the most vital form of dissent in Russia, and some communities were two or three hundred miles from a church. The BBC could and should bri
ng the church into their homes.

  The highlight of Solzhenitsyn’s visit was an interview on Panorama, the BBC’s flagship current affairs program. Five million people watched the original broadcast, while a staggering fifteen million saw the repeat, an audience normally only achieved by popular comedy shows or soap operas. The nation watched and listened, but Solzhenitsyn was already beginning to suspect that his words were falling on deaf ears:

  My warnings, the warnings of others—Sakharov’s very grave warning directly from the Soviet Union—these go unheeded, most of them fall, as it were, on the ears of the deaf—people who do not want to hear them. Once I used to hope that experience of life could be handed on from nation to nation, and from one person to another. . . . But now I am beginning to have doubts. Perhaps everyone is fated to live through every experience himself in order to understand.21

  More controversially, Solzhenitsyn was beginning to criticize the decadence of the West as vociferously as he criticized the despotism of the East. He warned of the dangers inherent in the retreat of the older generation who had yielded their intellectual leadership. It was, he said, “against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience of life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society”.22

  During the interview, Solzhenitsyn took the opportunity to defend himself from the various labels that had been pinned on him by hostile critics on both sides of the Iron Curtain:

  Take the word “nationalist”—it has become almost meaningless. It is used constantly. Everyone flings it around, but what is a “nationalist”? If someone suggests that his country should have a large army, conquer the countries which surround it, should go on expanding its empire, that sort of person is a nationalist. But if, on the contrary, I suggest that my country should free all the peoples it has conquered, should disband the army, should stop all aggressive actions—who am I? A nationalist! If you love England, what are you? A nationalist! And when are you not a nationalist? When you hate England, then you are not a nationalist.23