Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  Thomas also singled out the importance to the boys of the “stimulation of meeting interesting people who came as guests”,13 perhaps the most notable of whom was Mstislav Rostropovich, Yermolai’s godfather, who was a frequent visitor. The internationally renowned cellist was one of Solzhenitsyn’s oldest friends and one of his greatest allies. In July 1974, only a few months after Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from the Soviet Union, Rostropovich had defected under duress, mainly due to his own persecution at the hands of the Soviet state for his public support for Solzhenitsyn. In January 1990, Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnyevskaya, had been given back their Soviet citizenship. The following month, he made his first return to Moscow since his defection to conduct the Washington National Symphony Orchestra. At a crowded press conference, he relayed a message from Solzhenitsyn: “Tell our people I will come back, but only when every person has a chance to read my books.” Rostropovich stated optimistically that “when we left, the Soviet Union was a huge island of lies, now it is cleansing itself”, but he added that he and his wife would not be totally content until Solzhenitsyn was returned to his people. Stung into an official response, Nikolai Gubenko, the Soviet Minister of Culture, said that he would work to restore citizenship to anyone who left under duress.14

  Solzhenitsyn’s demand that everyone should have the chance to read his books at last seemed likely to be met. Plans were already under way in Russia to publish all his works over the next two years. Throughout the following months, many of his works were published in his own country for the first time, becoming instant bestsellers. Seven million copies of his books were sold in the first year alone, so that 1990 became known as “The Year of Solzhenitsyn”.15 The huge success added to the pressure on the authorities to restore his citizenship. In April 1990, the staff of Literaturnaya Gazeta sent an open letter to Gorbachev calling for Solzhenitsyn’s rehabilitation. Ominously, the news was accompanied by reports that the conservatives and liberals in the Soviet Communist Party were on the verge of a major split.16 Yet even while it looked as though the people of Russia were about to suffer another bout of the Soviet Union’s insufferable politics, Solzhenitsyn sent a timely reminder that there were more important issues than the deadening dichotomy of left and right. At the end of April, he announced that he would be donating his share of the royalties on the Soviet sales of The Gulag Archipelago to help with the restoration of a sixteenth-century monastery.17

  With pressure mounting, it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. On August 16, Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship was finally restored, nearly seventeen years after it had been taken from him. Twenty-two other victims of Soviet oppression had their citizenship restored on the same day, including Viktor Korchnoi, the chess grandmaster, and Oskar Rabin, the artist whose open-air exhibition had been bulldozed on the orders of Brezhnev. A Soviet spokesman said it was “a way of apologizing, belatedly, but apologizing”.18 Within days, Ivan Silayev, the Russian Prime Minister, sought to make political capital from the decision by inviting Solzhenitsyn to the Soviet Union as his personal guest. Solzhenitsyn refused.19 He was not prepared to be used as a pawn in the highly volatile game of power politics unfolding in Russia. Instead, he was preparing a major move of his own.

  On September 18, an important new essay entitled “Rebuilding Russia” was published simultaneously in two Soviet newspapers: Komsomolskaya Pravda, the communist youth daily, and Literaturnaya Gazeta. The fact that his essay was being published as a sixteen-page supplement in two journals that previously would only have mentioned him in scathing pejoratives was further evidence of his sudden and dramatic rehabilitation. Solzhenitsyn specified that his author’s fee should be donated to the fund for the victims of Chernobyl, a gesture indicative of the environmental concerns at the heart of his vision.

  The essay commenced with a catalog of the disasters that had befallen Russia as a result of the “laboured pursuit of a purblind and malignant Marxist-Leninist utopia”. This included the destruction of the peasant class together with its settlements, which in turn had “deprived the raising of crops of its whole purpose and the soil of its ability to yield a harvest”. Large swathes of the countryside had been flooded “with man-made seas and swamps”, and the cities had been “befouled by the effluents of our primitive industry”. Furthermore, “we have poisoned our rivers, lakes, and fish, and today we are obliterating our last resources of clean water, air, and soil, speeding the process by the addition of nuclear death, further supplemented by the storage of Western radioactive wastes for money. . . . We have cut down our luxuriant forests and plundered our earth of its incomparable riches—the irreplaceable inheritance of our great-grandchildren”.20

  The danger for the new Russia, Solzhenitsyn warned, was of a mindless leap from the wanton waste of Marxism to the uncontrolled greed of unbridled materialism. “For centuries both manufacturers and owners took pride in the durability of their merchandise, but today (in the West) we see a numbing sequence of new, ever new and flashy models, while the notion of repair is disappearing: items that are just barely damaged must be discarded and replaced by new ones, an act inimical to the human sense of self-limitation, and a wasteful extravagance.”21 This was inherent to a decadent system hell-bent on permanent and ultimately unsustainable economic growth at whatever cost to the future of the planet. The West had succumbed to a “psychological plague”, which was “not progress, but an all-consuming economic fire”,22 a plague more than merely economic in nature. It had contaminated the very moral fabric of Western life and was threatening to do the same in Russia:

  The Iron Curtain of yesterday gave our country superb protection against all the positive features of the West: against the West’s civil liberties, its respect for the individual, its freedom of personal activity, its high level of general welfare, its spontaneous charitable movements. But the Curtain did not reach all the way to the bottom, permitting the continuous seepage of liquid manure—the self-indulgent and squalid “popular mass culture”, the utterly vulgar fashions, and the by-products of immoderate publicity—all of which our deprived young people have greedily absorbed. Western youth runs wild from a feeling of surfeit, while ours mindlessly apes these antics despite its poverty. And today’s television obligingly distributes these streams of filth throughout the land.23

  Against the rising tide of licentiousness there was Solzhenitsyn’s perennial call for self-limitation and the plaintive appeal of the poet for peace from the unendurable stream of information, much of it excessive and trivial, which was diminishing the soul. Modern man was being crushed by the omnipresence of technology. There was ever more clamor of a propagandist, commercial, and diversionary nature. “How can we protect the right of our ears to silence, and the right of our eyes to inner vision?”24

  Above all, however, and as the title suggested, Rebuilding Russia was more than the product of a plaintive voice crying in the wilderness, or a prophetic warning of what awaited a heedless generation. It was a positive vision of a new Russia, restructured according to sound and sensible principles and based upon sustainable and traditional values. It welcomed the resurgence of nationalism in the various constituent parts of the Soviet Union and looked forward to the final dissolution of the Soviet empire and the reemergence of independent nations in its place. “Every people, even the very smallest, represents a unique facet of God’s design.” To reinforce the point, Solzhenitsyn quoted the religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyev, who had written, paraphrasing the Christian commandment: “You must love all other people as you love your own.”25

  Solzhenitsyn also believed that the spirit of decentralization should go beyond the rights of small nations to be free from the yoke of internationalism or imperialism. It should extend to the rights of small communities, and even families, to be free from the yoke of central state planning. “The key to the viability of the country and the vitality of its culture lies in liberating the provinces from the pressure of the capitals”, he wrote. Pro
vinces should “acquire complete freedom in economic and cultural terms, together with strong . . . local self-government”.26 The need patiently and persistently to expand the rights of local communities would be an essential part of the gradual reshaping of the entire state organism. Only through a strong and revitalized local government could genuine democracy exist:

  All the failings noted earlier would rarely apply to democracies of small areas—mid-sized towns, small settlements, groups of villages, or areas up to the size of a county. Only in areas of this size can voters have confidence in their choice of candidates since they will be familiar with them both in terms of their effectiveness in practical matters and in terms of their moral qualities. At this level phony reputations do not hold up, nor would a candidate be helped by empty rhetoric or party sponsorship.

  These are precisely the dimensions within which the new Russian democracy can begin to grow, gain strength, and acquire self-awareness. It also represents a level that is most certain to take root because it will involve the vital concerns of each locality. . . .

  Without properly constituted local self-government there can be no stable or prosperous life, and the very concept of civic freedom loses all meaning.27

  The enduring influence of Solzhenitsyn’s years in Zurich and his admiration for the Swiss political system is clearly discernible, although he was certainly aware of, and enamored by, similar systems that had existed in Russia’s medieval past. Whatever the principal motivation behind his advocacy of decentralization and subsidiarity in political life, he had nailed the lie that he was in any way undemocratic in his beliefs—not that this would stop the accusations being made, particularly by those who could not see beyond the futile oscillations of the Western two-party democracies.

  Similar radical thinking energized Solzhenitsyn’s calls for the restructuring of the Russian economy. What was needed was the reestablishment of independent citizens: “But there can be no independent citizen without private property.” Seventy years of propaganda had instilled in Russians the notion that private property was to be feared, but this was merely the victory of a false ideology over “our human essence”. The truth was that ownership of modest amounts of property, which did not oppress others, must be seen as an integral component of personality, and as a factor contributing to its stability.28 Solzhenitsyn professed to having no special expertise in economics and had no wish to venture definitive proposals, but the overall picture was clear enough:

  [H]ealthy private initiative must be given wide latitude, and small private enterprises of every type must be encouraged and protected, since they are what will ensure the most rapid flowering of every locality. At the same time there should be firm legal limits to the unchecked concentration of capital; no monopolies should be permitted to form in any sector, and no enterprise should be in control of any other. The creation of monopolies brings with it the risk of deteriorating quality: a firm can permit itself to turn out goods that are not durable in order to sustain demand.29

  There is a remarkable affinity between these proposals and those advocated by Schumacher in Small is Beautiful and by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in their calls for distributism. Schumacher, Chesterton, and Belloc had all gained a large degree of their initial inspiration from the social teaching of the Catholic Church, particularly as espoused by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum novarum. By 1990, Solzhenitsyn was certainly conversant with the ideas of these kindred spirits and indeed with the Pope’s crucial encyclical. He had come across the works of Schumacher and Chesterton soon after his arrival in the West but stressed that he had already arrived at similar conclusions himself entirely independently.30 Since the central tenets of Rebuilding Russia were largely a development and a maturing of the ideas he had originally expressed years earlier in his Letter to Soviet Leaders, it is clear that the affinity was a question of great minds thinking alike rather than one mind borrowing from another. “There was no direct influence because I was always submerged and immersed in things Russian. I touched upon world issues to the extent that these touched upon Russian questions and Russian concerns, but that which I was drawing from and writing toward was Russian, so it would be a coincidental affinity not a direct one.”31

  In many respects, Rebuilding Russia was one of Solzhenitsyn’s most remarkable endeavors—and perhaps will prove to posterity one of his most important. Although it was written with Russia specifically in mind, there is much of general interest. It deserves to stand beside Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity, and Belloc’s Essay on the Restoration of Property as a permanent monument to the concepts of smallness, subsidiarity, and economic sanity during a century characterized primarily by its headlong rush toward unsustainable growth and politico-economic giantism.

  Solzhenitsyn concluded Rebuilding Russia on a note of genuine humility, blended with words of sober realism. It was “impossibly difficult to design a balanced plan for future action”, he wrote, and there was “every likelihood that it will contain more errors than virtues and that it will be unable to keep pace with the actual unfolding of events. But it would also be wrong not to make the effort.”32 In making the effort, he had fulfilled his duty, but perhaps he already sensed that, not for the first or the last time, his words would fall on deaf ears.

  By 1990, most Russians were simply sick and tired of politics. All they wanted was an easy way out of the post-communist mess in which the Soviet Union had found itself. An easy life. To a disillusioned people intent on the path of least resistance, Solzhenitsyn’s solution seemed too much like hard work. Much better to listen to the prophets of boom, who were promising a land of limitless consumer goods. A people intent on self-gratification was not likely to feel attracted to Solzhenitsyn’s plea for self-limitation. In fact, in Rebuilding Russia, Solzhenitsyn had seen the danger and had foretold its consequences: “If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structures or by any industrial development: a tree with a rotten core cannot stand.”33

  When Rebuilding Russia was published, a spokesman for President Gorbachev promised that the Soviet leader would study the document.34 Whether he did so is unknown. What is certain is that Solzhenitsyn’s practical proposals for a revitalized Russia had not, to borrow a phrase of Chesterton, been tried and found wanting but had been wanted and not tried. Worse, they had been both unwanted and untried.

  In fairness, it was very unlikely that Gorbachev had much time to study Solzhenitsyn’s proposals, even had he any desire to do so, and even less likely that he would have been able to do anything about them. By the autumn of 1990, he was being outmaneuvered on all fronts by his opponents. Yeltsin and his liberal allies in the Russian parliament had outflanked Gorbachev with the declaration of Russian independence, while the hard-liners within the Soviet hierarchy were gaining the ascendancy within the Communist Party and were putting the increasingly isolated Soviet leader under ever-greater pressure.

  In the midst of this feuding, Solzhenitsyn was being used as a convenient political pawn. In December, the liberals in the Russian parliament awarded him the Russian state literature prize for The Gulag Archipelago, an honor that was tied up with the desire of the Yeltsin camp to score points against their Soviet communist opponents. In the meantime, the hand of the communists had been strengthened by a series of leadership reshuffles that had placed control of both the Interior Ministry and the media in the hands of old-guard reactionaries. On December 20, in protest at these developments, the liberal Soviet Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnadze resigned, warning ominously that “dictatorship is coming”.

  The effects of Gorbachev’s hard-line reshuffle became apparent on January 13, 1991, when thirteen Lithuanians defending the national television center were killed by Soviet troops. Yeltsin flew immediately to the Baltics and signed a joint declaration condemning the Soviet violence. A week later, a quarter of a million people protested on the streets of Moscow against
the killings, the largest demonstration ever seen on the streets of the Russian capital. Only hours later, with a callous disregard for public opinion, Gorbachev’s forces stormed the Interior Ministry in Riga, the capital of Latvia, killing a further five people. The Russian press, overwhelmingly on the side of Yeltsin and the liberals, backed the Baltic states against Gorbachev’s repression. In response, Gorbachev threatened to tighten control of the media and, as if to back his threats with action, he added more hard-liners to the Politburo and gave wider powers to the security forces.

  A popular backlash against Gorbachev’s efforts to turn back the communist clock was evident in June when the citizens of Leningrad voted in a referendum to rename the city St. Petersburg. In the same month, Boris Yeltsin emerged triumphant in the Russian presidential election, winning an overwhelming majority in spite of Soviet attempts to block his campaign.

  The stage was set for the final conflict between the Soviet old guard and Yeltsin’s liberals. It came on August 19 when the country awoke to the soothing sounds of Chopin on the radio and Swan Lake on the television. There was no cause for alarm, the listeners and viewers were informed, but a state of emergency had been declared “in the public interest”. In an uncanny echo of Khrushchev’s removal from office almost thirty years earlier, it was announced that Gorbachev had resigned for health reasons. The country was now ruled by the self-appointed “State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR”, a grandiose title for the group of hard-liners appointed to their posts by Gorbachev during the recent reshuffles. With little or no public support, the hard-liners soon realized that Russians would no longer kowtow to the tactics of terror. In defiance of a curfew order, a hundred thousand people took to the streets and defied the tanks. On the morning of August 21, only two days after the state of emergency had been declared, it was announced that several tank units had defected to Yeltsin’s side, and by the afternoon, the takeover had collapsed completely. Its leaders fled. One group flew to the Crimea, where they were arrested on arrival, and several others committed suicide. Meanwhile Gennady Yenayev, the group’s nominal leader, took neither of these drastic courses of action, choosing instead merely to drink himself into an oblivious stupor. Thus began and ended what Russians call the putsch, what history would record as the final farcical collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, the humiliating end of seventy-four years of communist rule.