Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  One practical result of the dramatic events in Russia, from Solzhenitsyn’s point of view, was the announcement in September that the treason charges against him had been officially revoked. This had been the last official obstacle barring his return to Russia. Its removal coincided with the completion, at long last, of the final book in The Red Wheel cycle. His work on this had been the other obstacle to his return: he had been determined to finish it before the inevitable disruption that the move from Vermont to Russia would entail.

  In April 1992, Solzhenitsyn was visited in Vermont by Vladimir Lukin, the new Russian ambassador to the United States. It was the first official recognition on the part of Russia’s new anti-communist leaders that Solzhenitsyn, to quote an article in The Times of May 14, “has become a legend in his homeland and revered by many as a saint”.35 Shortly afterward, he was visited by Stanislav Govorukhin, the film director who had achieved fame and notoriety in 1990 for his anti-Soviet film You Can’t Live Like This. Govorukhin spent the Orthodox Easter with Solzhenitsyn and his family, filming a documentary to be shown on Russian television. It was the first time that Solzhenitsyn had granted an interview to anyone from the former Soviet Union since his expulsion in 1974. During the course of the interview, he revealed that his wife would be traveling to Moscow in May to find a suitable home for the family’s return to Russia.

  On June 12, President Yeltsin announced his intention to telephone and possibly meet Solzhenitsyn during his forthcoming state visit to the United States. Four days later, within hours of his arrival in Washington, Yeltsin made an emotional thirty-minute call to Solzhenitsyn, during which he expressed repentance over the way former regimes had treated him and urged his return home, promising that “Russia’s doors are wide open.” Yeltsin promised to do everything he could to ensure that “one of the great sons of our nation” could work for the Russian people from within Russia and not from a foreign land. The two men discussed the urgent and painful problems facing their country, and Solzhenitsyn urged particularly that Russia’s peasants should be given land of their own as soon as possible. For his part, Yeltsin assured Solzhenitsyn that he was trying to restore Russia’s spiritual values and that Solzhenitsyn had “blazed a trail of truth” that he was seeking to follow. Unlike the leaders of the previous regime, he would tell the Russian people “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.36

  Yeltsin’s words were certainly warm, even if more cynical commentators suspected a colder motive for his courting of Solzhenitsyn’s support. As a writer in The Times observed, “Mr Solzhenitsyn still enjoys huge moral authority in Russia, and his support would be of considerable value to Mr Yeltsin.”37 Yet if actions spoke louder than words, it was clearly true that much had changed in Russia since Yeltsin’s dramatic rise to power. In fact, on the very day that Yeltsin phoned Solzhenitsyn, Russia made a significant break with its Soviet past by granting political asylum to a research student from communist North Korea who had applied to stay in Russia to become a Christian priest.38

  With the pace of change accelerating daily in Russia, it was no longer a question of if, but when, the Solzhenitsyns would return. Yet the months passed, and little altered as far as their domestic arrangements were concerned. On June 11, 1993, almost a year to the day after his conversation with Yeltsin, Solzhenitsyn, still firmly rooted in Vermont, attended his son’s graduation ceremony at Harvard. Ten days earlier, Alya, on another visit to Russia, had assured reporters that we are coming back and very soon, “it is a matter of months”.39

  News of Solzhenitsyn’s imminent return prompted an article in The Times by Bernard Levin, one of his most loyal allies throughout the years of exile. Entitled “A Giant Goes Home”, it was a eulogy to the Russian’s courage and achievement, overlaid with Levin’s scarcely concealed delight at the providential turn of events: “We have it on Shakespeare’s authority, no less, that the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. But can there ever have been any revenge so sweet, or any revolution of the clocks so meaningful, as the news that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is shortly to return to his homeland, Russia, after almost exactly twenty years of forced exile?”40

  The weeks and then the months slipped away, and still there was no sign of the exile’s long-awaited return. In September 1993, Ignat made his first journey back to Russia since he had left it as a bemused infant. On tour with the National Symphony Orchestra and Mstislav Rostropovich, he described it as “an unforgettable experience, twelve days that are a separate chapter in my life”.41 For the first time, he could see Russian words all around him, on shop fronts and road signs, everywhere: “seeing Russian with my own two eyes . . . hearing Russian spoken all around me—a din of hundreds of people walking along Tverskaia, and all speaking Russian”. With childlike excitement, he explored various corners of Moscow, the hometown of a dimly discerned childhood, and met people who had been until then only legendary shadows from his father’s past: “meeting friends of my parents, their comrades-in-arms, sitting and drinking tea with people who had risked their lives or livelihoods together with my father, and who were always present with us in spirit during the long years of exile”. The flow, the flood, of first impressions surged through his consciousness: the Kremlin, the blinding beauty of St. Petersburg, “and of course the concerts themselves with passionate Russian audiences”.42 One can picture Solzhenitsyn’s response as his son recounted his first excited impressions of Russia, and can only guess at the sense of longing it must have induced in his own exiled bones. Yet still he did not return.

  Instead, on September 14, even as Ignat was giving concerts to ecstatic Russian audiences in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Solzhenitsyn was in the Liechtenstein village of Schaan, receiving an honorary doctorate from the International Academy of Philosophy. His speech to the Academy was destined to be his valedictory address to the West, an appropriate finale to his years of exile.

  Commencing with the divorce of politics from ethics that, he said, had begun with the Enlightenment and had been given added theoretical justification by John Locke, Solzhenitsyn presented a masterful analysis of the world’s malaise. Whereas in Rebuilding Russia he had sought to solve society’s problems on a socio-political level by laying green foundations, now he was seeking deeper solutions to the fundamental problems of life by laying philosophical foundations. Moral impulses among statesmen had always been weaker than political ones, Solzhenitsyn admitted, but he stressed that the consequences of their decisions for society as a whole necessitated that “any moral demands we impose on individuals, such as understanding the difference between honesty, baseness and deception, between magnanimity, goodness, avarice and evil, must to a large degree be applied to the politics of countries, governments, parliaments and parties”.43 Within a Christian context, he quoted Vladimir Solovyev, who had stated that “political activity must a priori be moral service, whereas politics motivated by the mere pursuit of interests lacks any Christian content whatsoever”.44

  Solzhenitsyn proceeded to discuss the nature and meaning of “progress”. The whole of humanity had embraced the term, but few seemed to give any thought to what it actually meant: “[P]rogress yes, but in what? And of what? And might we not lose something in the course of this Progress?”45 “It was”, he reminded his audience, “from this intense optimism of Progress that Marx, for one, concluded that history will lead us to justice without the help of God.”46 In the twentieth century, Progress had indeed marched on, and was “even stunningly surpassing expectations”, but it was doing so only in the field of technology. Was this sufficient in itself, and had it been purchased at a price—perhaps at too high a price? Unlimited Progress was threatening the limited resources of the planet, “successfully eating up the environment allotted to us”. It was also threatening the life of the human soul. In the face of technocentric Progress with its “oceans of superficial information and cheap spectacles”, the human soul was growing more shallow and the spiritual life reduced.

  Our culture, accordi
ngly, grows poorer and dimmer, no matter how it tries to drown out its decline with the din of empty novelties. As creature comforts continue to improve for the average person, so spiritual development grows stagnant. Surfeit brings with it a nagging sadness of the heart, as we sense that the whirlpool of pleasures does not bring satisfaction, and that, before long, it may suffocate us.

  No, all hope cannot be pinned on science, technology, economic growth. The victory of technological civilization has also instilled in us a spiritual insecurity. Its gifts enrich, but enslave us as well. . . . An inner voice tells us that we have lost something pure, elevated and fragile. We have ceased to see the purpose.47

  As Solzhenitsyn concluded his address, he was bidding farewell to the West with a final plea for sanity. Yet as he prepared for a return to Russia, he knew that the same problems of “progress” awaited him in his homeland. The new Russians were accepting the new religion of consumerism with open, grasping arms, worshipping the latest gadgets as enthusiastically as their Western brothers. East and West were now marching together in a new unity, blinded not by the Light, but by the lights of a flashing, glittering technolatry. Unity without purpose.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A PROPHET AT HOME

  Toward the end of 1993, Solzhenitsyn had an audience with Pope John Paul II in Rome. It was a meeting of considerable significance. The two men represented, each in his own way, the triumph of the human spirit over the evils of totalitarianism. Furthermore, both men had contributed to the downfall of communism to an extent that probably surpassed any of their contemporaries.

  Solzhenitsyn had been a great admirer of John Paul II since the earliest days of his pontificate, describing the election of a Polish Pope as a gift from God. He had supported the Pope’s policies throughout the world, not merely in John Paul’s outspoken attacks on communism in Eastern Europe but also in his measures against Marxist-inspired liberation theology in South America. In a meretricious age, the Pope shone in Solzhenitsyn’s eyes as a towering, and all too rare, paragon of virtue. The danger was that the Russian might feel a sense of disappointment when he finally met the Pole in the flesh. It was a danger that never materialized; Solzhenitsyn retained vivid memories of his audience, describing their meeting and discussions as “very positive”. As a man, the Pope was “very bright, full of light”.1

  The audience lasted for an hour and a half and was characterized by what Solzhenitsyn described as very interesting conversations. In particular, the Pope appeared to be well acquainted with Solzhenitsyn’s socio-political writings. He mentioned the importance of Rerum novarum to the Church’s social teaching, perhaps sensing the affinity between the Church’s teaching and Solzhenitsyn’s views. As Solzhenitsyn remembered,

  Our only point of dissension was that I reminded him of the time in the 1920s when the Bolsheviks were crushing the Russian Orthodox Church. Some members of the Vatican hierarchy at the time entered into dialogue with the Bolsheviks as to how the presence of the Catholic Church could be expanded in Russia. The Pope responded that this was unfortunate and was the result of those individuals’ own initiative, but I do not believe it was only individual initiative. It is simply that the Catholic Church did not at the time understand to what degree the Bolsheviks were consistently against all religions. They thought perhaps that the demise of Russian Orthodoxy might represent an opening for Catholicism.2

  “We were in complete affinity except for that one point”, Solzhenitsyn insisted, stating that the bulk of their conversation centered on the place of religion in the modern world and its role. The audience took place on the fifteenth anniversary of the Pope’s ascension to the papacy, and Solzhenitsyn felt saddened that he appeared to have physically weakened by this point.3

  By comparison, the seventy-four-year-old Russian was in excellent health. It was not he who was visibly ailing but his country, which was emerging from communism in poor and deteriorating circumstances. As if he needed any reminder of the grim reality, news reached him in February 1994 that his Russian publisher had been gunned down in Moscow by the mafia, his death the consequence of sordid commercial rivalries rather than politics. It was, therefore, with no illusions that he and Alya began preparations for their return to Russia, which, at last, had passed beyond the realm of interminable rumor to that of imminent reality.

  On March 1, he made only his third appearance at a public event in Cavendish, Vermont, in the eighteen years he had lived there. The purpose was to bid farewell to the neighbors who hardly knew him but to whom, nonetheless, he felt a debt of gratitude. “Exile is always difficult,” he told the two hundred villagers who attended the meeting, “and yet I could not imagine a better place to live and wait and wait and wait for my return home than Cavendish, Vermont. . . . You forgave me my unusual way of life, and even took it upon yourselves to protect my privacy. Our whole family has felt at home among you.”4

  The farewells completed, Solzhenitsyn braced himself for a future that appeared to offer nothing but uncertainty. In the December 1993 elections, there had been a dramatic swing to the ultra-nationalists under the leadership of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In the so-called business world, crime and corruption were reaching new heights, as the murder of Solzhenitsyn’s publisher had graphically demonstrated. Car-bombs, not conferences, had become the favored means of settling business disputes. Even before his arrival on Russian soil, Solzhenitsyn had fearlessly made enemies in the worlds of both politics and commerce, attacking Zhirinovsky as a “clown” and declaring war on the mafia. In an interview with the New Yorker, Solzhenitsyn distanced himself in disgust from the crypto-fascism of the ultra-nationalists and stated that “the mafia understand that if I was not going to make peace with the KGB I certainly would not with them”.5 It was clear that there were many in the new Russia who were not looking forward to the writer’s return.

  In the same interview with the New Yorker, Solzhenitsyn admitted that he had overestimated the threat of a Soviet world takeover when he had first been exiled and that, in hindsight, his tone had seemed shrill. “When I fought the dragon of communist power,” he explained, “I fought it at the highest pitch of expression.”6

  At the end of April, Solzhenitsyn gave his last interview on Western television before his departure for Russia, appearing on the CBS program Sixty Minutes. Perversely, considering his recent outspoken attack on the xenophobic nationalists in Russia, he was asked to respond to an American commentator who had branded him “a freak, a monarchist, an anti-semite, a crank, a has-been, not a hero”. His reply was both measured and direct: “The Western press works in the following way: they don’t read my books. No one has ever given a single quotation from any of my books as a basis for these accusations. But every new journalist reads these opinions from other journalists. They have been just as spiteful to me in the American press as the Soviet press was before.”7

  Concerning his return home, he merely answered vaguely that “my hope is maybe I’ll be able to help somehow”,8 but one suspected that, whatever the future held in Russia, he would be pleased to leave the distortions of the Western media behind him. In the interim, however, they continued to dog his last days in the West. Anne McElvoy, writing in The Times, admitted that Solzhenitsyn had described Vladimir Zhirinovsky as “an evil caricature of a Russian patriot” but still insisted that Solzhenitsyn’s Rebuilding Russia was “dangerously nationalistic”.9

  If Solzhenitsyn nurtured any hope that there might be more clarity of vision in the East than there had been in the West, from either politicians or the media, he would soon be disillusioned. On the morning of May 27, as he set foot in Russia for the first time in more than twenty years, every shade of opinion in the political spectrum scrambled to appropriate him as one of their own. Alexander Rutskoi, a Russian imperialist and leader of the right-wing Accord for Russia, Boris Yeltsin, still the leader of the liberal reformers, and even Anatoli Lukyanov, a hard-line communist, all claimed Solzhenitsyn as a supporter of their own particular position.10r />
  Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn was more interested in meeting ordinary Russians. After a ten-hour flight from Alaska, he took his first steps on Russian soil at Magadan, which, appropriately enough, had once been the center of the Soviet labor camp system. It was a poignant moment for the former prisoner. “Today, in the heat of political change, those millions of victims are too lightly forgotten, both by those who were not touched by that annihilation and, even more so, by those responsible for it. I bow to the earth of Kolyma where many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of our executed fellow-countrymen are buried. Under ancient Christian tradition, the land where innocent victims are buried becomes holy.”11

  Arriving in the eastern city of Vladivostok flanked by his family, Solzhenitsyn received a hero’s welcome. The authorities greeted him with flowers, hugs, and the traditional welcome gifts of bread and salt. Mobbed by journalists and applauded by a crowd of two thousand, Solzhenitsyn spoke of his hopes and fears for the future: