Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  In a similar cynical denial of his own principles of openness, Gorbachev brazenly denied the existence of political prisoners until Andrei Sakharov’s unexpected release from exile in the “closed” city of Gorky. Sakharov returned to Moscow to a hero’s welcome and vowed to fight for the freedom of all.

  In spite of such double standards, the Soviet stranglehold was being greatly loosened under Gorbachev’s leadership. Corrupt officials who had abused their positions in the Brezhnev era were investigated publicly, as were allegations of black marketeering within the Party apparatus. The changing atmosphere within Soviet society inspired rumors that Solzhenitsyn’s books would at last be published in the USSR. In March 1987, a Danish newspaper reported that Soviet authorities were shortly to lift the ban on Cancer Ward.18 A year later, in April 1988, The Gulag Archipelago finally breached the Iron Curtain with its publication in Yugoslavia.19 On August 3, a Soviet weekly newspaper, Moscow News, hailed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as one of the great classics of Russian literature and an outstanding event in literary, moral, and spiritual life. Ten days later, the Soviet State Publishing Committee announced that it was liberalizing its official attitude to Solzhenitsyn’s works. Referring to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the committee agreed that it was up to individual publishing houses to decide whether or not to reprint those works that had been previously published in the Soviet Union. Publication of those of Solzhenitsyn’s books that had thus far only been published abroad, in other words the vast bulk of his work, was not to be authorized at present.20 Significantly, Novy Mir announced on the same day that it planned to publish George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  Encouraged by the liberalizing tendencies within the state apparatus, Soviet dissidents stepped up their campaign for Solzhenitsyn’s return. In summer 1988, a short article appealing for his citizenship to be restored was published in the weekly journal Book Review.21 At the end of August, an unofficial committee lobbying for the erection of a monument to Stalin’s victims in Moscow invited Solzhenitsyn to join its board. He politely declined the invitation. In October, the first meeting of a Soviet human rights group called Memorial, set up to commemorate the victims of Stalinism, demanded public recognition for, and the restoration of Soviet citizenship to, Solzhenitsyn.

  In a panic-stricken response to the growing reform movement, the Soviet old guard began to fight a furious rearguard action. At first, it seemed that they might be successful. Boris Yeltsin, the highly popular reformist mayor of Moscow, was sacked, and in the summer of 1988, Gorbachev abandoned his delicate balancing act between old guard and avant garde and realigned himself with the hard-liners. It looked like the same old story: all the promises of reform were to be broken in a renewed totalitarian backlash. With the neo-Stalinists again in the ascendency, Gorbachev set about installing hard-liners in prominent positions of power. On September 30, Vadim Medvedev was appointed as the Politburo member responsible for ideology. Two months later, he dramatically vetoed publication of Solzhenitsyn’s books in the Soviet Union on the basis that they were “undermining the foundations of the Soviet state”.22

  On this occasion, however, the hard-liners had underestimated the forces aligned against them. Even as Gorbachev was siding with the old guard, liberals within the Communist Party formed the Democratic Union, the first organized opposition movement to emerge since 1921. Gorbachev banned its meetings and created a new Special Purpose Militia unit to deal with any disturbances. Meanwhile, in the Baltic republics, nationalist Popular Fronts were attracting mass membership. In November 1988, the small nation of Estonia audaciously broke away from the Soviet Union. In February of the following year, the Estonians raised the national flag above their parliament building in place of the hammer and sickle. At around the same time, two newspapers in the neighboring Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania published Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not by a Lie”, which had appeared in samizdat just before his exile.

  In the face of such defiance, Gorbachev’s hard-line government caved in beneath the weight and momentum of the opposition. In March 1989, during elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies, Soviet voters were for the first time in years allowed to choose from more than one candidate, some of whom were not even Party members. Despite the heavily rigged election process, prominent reformers such as Yeltsin and Sakharov were elected. When Sakharov, as combative as ever, called for an end to one-party rule, his microphone was switched off—a gesture that only highlighted the desperate nature of the communist hierarchy’s efforts to cling to power, especially as Sakharov’s speech was being broadcast live on Russian television.

  In the same month as the elections, Twentieth Century and Peace, a magazine published by the officially sanctioned Soviet Peace Committee, defied the Kremlin’s ban on Solzhenitsyn’s works by following the example of the Baltic journals and publishing “Live Not by a Lie”. A commentary accompanying the essay credited Solzhenitsyn with helping to prepare the way for the present reforms.23 Meanwhile, in remote Kuban, another small journal also flouted the official ban by publishing a three-part guide to Solzhenitsyn’s work.24

  Following the success of the reformers in the March election, Solzhenitsyn found that he had many friends in influential places. In April, several delegates in the Soviet parliament called for the restoration of his citizenship. The struggle, so long confined to the back-streets of the dissident fringe, was now being waged in the corridors of power.

  On June 2, while thousands of Chinese students were occupying Tiananmen Square in the abortive hope that totalitarianism could be overthrown in the other communist superpower, Sakharov was shouted down in parliament as he accused the Soviet army of atrocities in Afghanistan. On the same day, another delegate, the writer Yuri Karyakin, caused a similar furor by proposing that the government should restore Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship and that it should inscribe the names of the millions killed under Stalin on the walls of KGB headquarters.25

  Solzhenitsyn must have sensed final victory at the beginning of July when the Soviet Writers’ Union not only voted for his reinstatement as a member, but also urged the authorities to sanction publication of The Gulag Archipelago.

  In spite of last-ditch efforts by hard-liners on the Central Committee to block its publication, the seemingly impossible happened in October when Novy Mir published the first long extract from The Gulag Archipelago. The journal published one-third of the work in three issues, adding a million to its readership in the process. Three million copies were sold. Interest in Solzhenitsyn was enormous, and the state-run publishing house Sovietski Pisatel announced plans to publish a collection of his works.

  In the same month that the first extracts of The Gulag Archipelago were published, there were unprecedented counter-demonstrations in Red Square during the October Revolution celebrations. One of the banners read: “Workers of the World—we’re sorry”.

  For the communist old guard, the previous year had been one of unmitigated disaster. Not only had problems within the Soviet Union escalated out of control, but the Soviet grip on its empire in Eastern Europe was being prised loose. During 1989, reformist movements had triumphed throughout the Eastern bloc, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

  In December 1989, the Soviet authorities indicated begrudgingly that Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship would be returned to him if he applied for it. His rejection of the offer was conveyed by Alya to the New York Times: “It’s shameful, after all that they have done to him, that the Parliament doesn’t have the simple courage to admit that they were wrong. They try to turn a moral and political question into a matter of bureaucracy and paperwork. . . . They kick him out and after that they want him to come and bow and ask permission to enter. . . . We’ve waited a long time. We will wait until they become wise.”26

  Wisdom was not particularly evident in Gorbachev’s decision on January 19, 1990, to send Soviet tanks into Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, to crush the indep
endence movement there. More than a hundred people were killed that night, fomenting further hatred of the Soviet regime and intensifying the struggle for independence. In February, scores of thousands converged on Red Square in the largest demonstration in Russia since the Revolution. The following month, voters registered their disgust with the communist regime in the local elections. In the Soviet republics, nationalists swept the board, paving the way for the declarations of independence that followed. In Russia, the anti-communist Democratic Platform gained majorities in the powerful city councils of Leningrad and Moscow. During the May Day celebrations, Gorbachev suffered the humiliation of being jeered by sections of the crowd in Red Square, and by the end of the month his arch-rival Boris Yeltsin had secured his election as chairman of the Russian parliament. Two weeks later, on June 12, Yeltsin played his master card, declaring Russian independence from the Soviet Union in imitation of the Baltic states.

  After nearly three-quarters of a century of communist rule, Russia was reborn as a nation state. One by one, the outlying republics had declared their independence from the communist yoke, and now Russia itself had opted out. It was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, which had ceased to exist in anything but name, claiming to rule a vanished empire. In July 1990, the Soviet Communist Party held its last Congress. Yeltsin tore up his party card in full view of the cameras, and two million others followed his example before the end of the year.

  Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Vermont, Solzhenitsyn observed the unfolding of events with a rising sense of joy. Surely it was now only a matter of time before he and his family could return home. Yet even amid the triumph there was no time for triumphalism. Such was his irrepressible personality that he was already writing a bold, polemical manifesto for the new Russia. He sensed that the end of the Soviet Union might be an exciting new beginning for his native land. Russia had been reborn, but now she needed to be rebuilt.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  REBUILDING ON GREEN FOUNDATIONS

  In January 1990, Solzhenitsyn took his war of words with Russia’s modernists to the literal as well as the literary level. He announced through his Paris publisher Nikita Struve that he would be writing a specialized glossary of ancient Russian words and rare dialect as a means of defending the purity and beauty of the language from the encroachments of foreign neologisms and Soviet bureaucratic jargon.

  The glossary, to be published in monthly installments in the Soviet review Russian Speech, was welcomed by traditionalist writers who had voiced their abhorrence of both the inelegant, politically correct vocabulary of the Soviet era and the emerging arriviste vocabulary of the new capitalism. The westernizing flavor of Gorbachev’s perestroika had added new words to the menu of the contemporary Russian language, including the capitalist buzzwords biznesmen and menedzher.

  The whole debate was far more politically charged than its roots in dry philology may have suggested. Many traditionalist writers viewed the arrival of certain aspects of Western popular culture, such as rok and narkotiki, to be as great a danger to the Russian way of life as the emergence of the words themselves was a threat to the language. Western cultural and linguistic imperialism was following hard on the heels of the deadening effects of Soviet sloganizing. In the late 1960s, the writer Konstantin Paustovsky had claimed in an article in Literaturnaya Gazeta that the language was degenerating into bureaucratic slang, and as recently as July 1989, an article in Literaturnaya Rossiya had urged the Supreme Soviet to pass laws of linguistic defense. Solzhenitsyn was, therefore, stepping into a highly topical minefield when he chose to side with the traditionalists against the modernists. “The Russian language is his element, his substance in life”, Nikita Struve explained. “It is natural for an exiled writer.”1

  Solzhenitsyn’s desire to nurture and preserve the purity of the language did not spring from motives of a retrogressive or reactionary nature but was derived from a passionate belief that the richness of the Russian language itself gave rise to opportunities for innovation. It was his intention to emphasize these opportunities and to stress that, as a living tongue, Russian could evolve vividly and vibrantly without recourse to alien appendages. “Russian, with its suffixes and prefixes, is still a living language, where it is possible to create new words”, Struve said. “Solzhenitsyn’s works are testimony to its regenerating power.”2

  Although Solzhenitsyn had been working on the dictionary for many years, ever since his days in the labor camps,3 his work on it had been reinvigorated after he had seen Stephan, his youngest son, typing. “It was a way to bring his Russian son closer to the language”, Struve explained.4 In fact, Struve, in making this statement, unwittingly summarized the vocational trinity at the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s inspiration during the years of exile. First and foremost, he was a writer, and the literary aspects of his life invariably took precedence over everything else. Yet, as his son Ignat had testified, he was a naturally gifted teacher and a considerate father. It was not surprising, therefore, that as patriarch and tutor he should gain inspiration for his literary endeavors from the desire to educate his children. Fatherhood was itself a creative force.

  Fatherhood was, however, an obligation as well as an inspiration, and he and Alya made every effort to fulfill their parental duties in the difficult and unusual cultural circumstances in which they found themselves. Yermolai, Ignat, and Stephan were encouraged to assimilate with the indigenous culture in which they were living without losing their Russian culture and heritage. It was a difficult balancing act, which, to judge by results, was achieved with distinction.

  Yermolai, the eldest of Solzhenitsyn’s sons, was a particularly gifted schoolboy who was graded three years ahead of his age. Yet even this superlative achievement may not have done the child prodigy the justice he warranted; the Russian scholar Alexis Klimoff, visiting Vermont to discuss translations, found the three teenagers studying subjects at a level ten years ahead of their peers. Without doubt, this was due largely to the quality of the home schooling they had received from their parents, along with the religious instruction from Father Tregubov, a priest from the Orthodox Church at Claremont. According to D. M. Thomas, it was “all part of the rich and rigorous demands placed upon them”.5 As a twelve-year-old, Yermolai had helped his mother by setting one of his father’s works on their computer. Desiring to maximize his son’s evident potential, Solzhenitsyn sent Yermolai to Eton for his final two years in school. “I would say that my father sending me to school at Eton was a reflection of his respect for the quality of education available there,” Yermolai wrote, “and I am grateful for his decision to do so.”6

  My two years at Eton did not I think leave me with any specifically English traits (to the extent that I do not feel I could usefully disaggregate them), although I certainly grew to love and appreciate the wealth and possibilities of the English language—something that I had not encountered in Vermont to nearly the same degree. That is perhaps the greatest gift I took away from that A-Level experience. When I was at Eton my fellow students would often say that the true measure of our opinion of the school was whether or not we would send our own children there. I would hesitate to answer such a question today, not the least for having little idea of what kind of place Eton would be a decade and more down the road. I think Eton could benefit through losing some of its “stiffness”. As for the quality of the learning—it was tremendous. A great faculty and a real stimulus for probing deeper into the subjects of study are characteristic of the College.7

  On a more general level, Yermolai’s memories of England itself were necessarily colored by those of the school—seeing as it was of the boarding variety—and were thus somewhat limited. Nevertheless, his view, limited or otherwise, was extremely positive: “I very much like England, and am always happy to visit there when I get the chance. Its contributions to world civilization are monumental, and British humour will (most of the time) find in me a great fan.”8

  After his time at Eton, Yermolai ret
urned to the United States where he read Chinese at Harvard.

  Ignat was no less gifted than his older brother. He made his solo debut as a pianist with the Windham Community Orchestra, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 2, when he was still only eleven years old. Like Yermolai, he continued his studies in England. Not unreasonably, D. M. Thomas concluded that Solzhenitsyn “must have valued English education”,9 yet Ignat insisted that “there was no master-plan to send us there” and that “it was essentially a coincidence”.10

  My moving to England was for one specific reason, which was to study with the extraordinary piano pedagogue Maria Curcio, who taught (and continues) privately in London. Concurrently, I enrolled to complete my A-Levels at the Purcell School, then located in Harrow, since I had not completed high school in the US before moving to London. I spent a total of three years in London. It was not easy at first. I think England is not the easiest country for a fourteen-year-old to move to on his own. But gradually I made some wonderful friends, and of course soaked up the great concert life and museums of London. I now look back fondly on those years as formative in my personal and musical life. I have come back often to visit, and will continue to do so.11

  After completing his studies in England, Ignat returned to the United States and enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, one of the finest music schools in the world, to pursue a double degree in piano and in conducting. While there, his performing activities continued to expand, and eventually he signed with Columbia Artists, a major music management in New York.

  Stephan, the youngest of the brothers, received his B.A. from Harvard and a Master’s in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so completing the successful educational careers of the Solzhenitsyns’ prodigious offspring. The three boys had harvested the fruits of their parents’ labors on their behalf, as well as laboring diligently on their own account. D. M. Thomas depicted the home life which the boys had enjoyed since infancy and which was the secret of their ultimate success, as an “ordered harmony . . . a productive hive, a rich simplicity”. Solzhenitsyn and “his loving disciples”, wrote Thomas, had “farmed the grain of the spirit”.12