Through all the years of my exile, I followed intensely the life of our nation. I never doubted that communism would inevitably collapse, but I was always fearful that our exit from it, our price for it, would be terribly painful. And now I feel redoubled pain for Russia’s last two years, which have been so very trying for people’s lives and spirits. . . . I know that I am returning to a Russia tortured, stunned, altered beyond recognition, convulsively searching for itself, for its own true identity.
He told the crowd that he planned to travel through the heart of Russia, beginning in the east and going through Siberia, which he had only ever seen previously through the grate of a prison train window. He wanted to meet ordinary people along the way, so that he could test and revise his own judgment, “understand truly” their worries and fears, and “search together for the surest path out of our seventy-five year quagmire”.12
Solzhenitsyn’s triumphant return was witnessed by the world’s media and was covered in depth by the BBC, which had bought the rights to film the homecoming. The BBC filmed the whole journey from the Solzhenitsyn home in Vermont to the joyful arrival at Vladivostok, interviewing the writer at his desk in Vermont minutes before he took his final leave of it. There was time for a moment’s melancholy. He told his interviewer that this, after all, was his home too and that in some respects his years in Vermont had been the happiest and most productive of his life. All departures were a kind of death, he said. He had finished his great work. There was no time to start anything else, anything of substance. That too was a death. He could not hope to live for long back in Russia. He was going home to die.
During his interview with the New Yorker three months earlier, he had been asked whether he feared death. His face had lit up with pleasure. “Absolutely not! It will just be a peaceful transition. As a Christian, I believe there is life after death, and so I understand that this is not the end of life. The soul has a continuation, the soul lives on. Death is only a stage, some would even say a liberation. In any case, I have no fear of death.”13
Although the BBC had purchased the exclusive rights to film the return, the best view of events as they unfolded was seen by the family itself. Recalling his father’s return to Russia, Ignat described the weeks leading up to it as unforgettable:
. . . the daunting logistical preparations, including, prosaically, packing hundreds of boxes of books and papers; the mounting suspicion of the media that “something is up”, and smiling to myself thinking, “Just you wait; none of you expect this”. And indeed, much of the world press were not only taken by complete surprise with the manner of my father’s return, but appeared personally offended that they were not consulted on whether or not returning through the Far East was a good idea! I sensed very clearly that a historic moment was approaching, not just in our family life but in a wider sense as well; but, as usual, such things were quietly understood among us, nobody ever said “isn’t this momentous?”; everybody knew and, with complete trust in one another, we moved as a team, each with his own place and responsibility. Thus, Stephan travelled with my parents from Cavendish to Boston to Salt Lake to Anchorage to Magadan to Vladivostok, while Yermolai flew there from Taipei, where he was working, to greet them off the plane and then to accompany father throughout the two-month-long journey across Siberia, while mother and Stephan flew ahead to Moscow to prepare a home, etc. Meanwhile, I stayed on in Cavendish with grandmother to ship out all those boxes, deal with the media on the Western side, and in general to “hold down the fort” on that end.14
The story of the odyssey is taken up by Yermolai:
It was hardly anything I could have imagined even a few years before—travelling together with him across the vast stretches of Russia, for nearly two months. It was wonderful on a personal level to spend “quality time” with him, and to see how much he stirred people. Some were stirred toward hope and faith, others—to anger, and to claims of his irrelevance. What I always found telling in the case of the latter (then, before, and since, in both Western and Russian media), was that their agitation—at times bordering on hysteria—in declaring his marginality undermined their own contentions. Why should they get so worked up about it if he was “irrelevant”?15
As father and son traversed the country throughout June and July, Solzhenitsyn made forthright speeches claiming that Russia was in the grip of a ruling clique and required grassroots democracy. He urged spiritual revival and called for a crusade against the country’s moral and cultural decline. He was a prophet coming home, but, as so often with prophets at home, his own people were the last to be receptive to his words. Two thousand people greeted him on his arrival in Moscow on July 21, but the city had changed almost beyond recognition, both physically and metaphysically. D. M. Thomas evoked the transformation in starkly symbolic terms: “Pushkin’s statue faced a McDonald’s. The West was moving in. Send us your trivia, your TV game shows, your dazzling trash, your pornography! Russia was begging.”16
The trivializing of culture was reflected in Russian tastes for literature. In 1994, the bestselling titles in Moscow bookshops included novelized versions of the Charles Bronson film Death Wish, an Italian television series Octopus, and a Mexican soap, Simply Maria. A British journalist looking for Solzhenitsyn’s books found none in the fiction department of House of Books, Moscow’s largest bookshop. He was told to try the secondhand department. Such stories reinforced claims that Solzhenitsyn was out of fashion and out of date in modern Russia, the ultimate heresies in a novelty-addicted culture.
Far from feeling horrified at the neglect of Russian literature in the face of this invasion of Western pulp fiction, many critics appeared to relish their nation’s cultural decline and gloated over Solzhenitsyn’s popular demise. “Everyone knows his name, but no one reads his books”, wrote Grigori Amelin, a young Moscow critic, in May 1994. “Our Voltaire from Vermont is a spiritual monument, a hat-rack in an entrance hall. Let him stay in mothballs forever. . . . [P]ut this eunuch of his own fame, this thoroughbred classic with a hernia-threatening Collected Works, a Hollywood beard and a conscience polished so unbelievably clean it glints in the sun, out to pasture.”17 In similar vein, the novelist Victor Yerofeyev felt qualified to dismiss Solzhenitsyn’s work without any apparent understanding of it. “The humanistic pathos of Solzhenitsyn, which informs all his writings, seems no less comic, no less obsolete, than Socialist Realism as a whole. . . . A Slavophile Government Inspector has come to call on us, dragging behind him all the traditional baggage of Slavophile ideology.” Yerofeyev then added a dose of petty snobbery by deriding Solzhenitsyn as “a provincial schoolteacher who has exceeded his authority and overreached himself”.18
An explanation for the hostility Solzhenitsyn provoked in Russia was offered by Doctor Michael Nicholson of University College, Oxford. Doctor Nicholson, who with Professor Alexis Klimoff was the translator of Solzhenitsyn’s Invisible Allies, had been studying Solzhenitsyn from samizdat documents since the 1960s, had written his thesis on “Solzhenitsyn and the Russian Literary Tradition”, and had taught the Russian’s works with evident enthusiasm to generations of Oxford undergraduates. He believed Solzhenitsyn was only considered irrelevant in modern Russia because of the “anarchic, amoral zeitgeist” that had replaced Marxist dogma. Relativism looked good after the years of communist prohibition and inhibitions and was easier to accept than Solzhenitsyn’s alternative set of values.19 It was this turnaround that was responsible for Solzhenitsyn’s hostile reception in the new Russia:
The fact that Solzhenitsyn had contributed more than most to the collapse of the Soviet Union did not ensure his assimilation into a new Russia, which he knew, even before his departure from Vermont, to be showing signs of embarrassment and boredom with the monumental features of its past—the heroic no less than the villainous. Literary Russia had become more sympathetic towards postmodernism than to engagement, to pluralism than to truthseeking, while the legendary voracity of the Soviet reading public seemed to have evaporated
with the Soviet Union itself.20
Nicholson suggested that Solzhenitsyn may have felt similarly to another returning émigré, Zinovy Zinik, whose sense was that Russia in the 1990s had become like a land of disorientated immigrants: “The people here [have] emigrated to a new country. The old country slipped off from under their feet, and they are now in the new one. And it is as alien to them as it is to me.”21
Solzhenitsyn was thrown into this alien environment in the autumn of 1994 when he was given his own fifteen-minute television talk show on Channel One. Meetings with Solzhenitsyn was given a prime-time slot and attracted a respectable 12 percent of Moscow viewers, though it could not compete with the 27 percent who tuned into Wild Rose, another Mexican soap, on one of the rival channels. By this time, Russian viewers were as addicted to soaps as were their counterparts in the West. D. M. Thomas reported that a terminally ill man had written to a newspaper, offering his life savings to anyone who could tell him the ending of yet another Mexican soap, The Rich Also Cry.22
One of Solzhenitsyn’s rival talk-show hosts, Artyom Troitsky, a rock critic with a post-midnight program called Café Oblomov, spoke for many new Russians when he questioned the need for Solzhenitsyn’s show: “Why should anyone now care about The Gulag Archipelago? I’m afraid Solzhenitsyn is totally, totally passe.” In his own efforts not to become passe and to remain relevant, Troitsky had metamorphosed from serious “rock” dissident to editor of Russian Playboy. Another new Russian quick to pass judgment on Solzhenitsyn’s emergence as a television celebrity was Victor Yerofeyev, who took the opportunity to indulge once more in petty snobbery: “It’s better to have him speak than write. He writes such ugly Russian. He is once again what he always was at heart—a provincial schoolteacher.”23
Perhaps it was inevitable that Solzhenitsyn would not survive for long in the world of television. On April 23, 1995, a report in the Sunday Times suggested he was facing a television ban for “criticizing the regime”, and five months later the program was finally axed. Solzhenitsyn remains convinced that the decision was politically motivated. “The program was terminated because the powers-that-be were afraid of the issues being discussed.”24 Whether his removal was due to these outspoken attacks on the government or whether it was merely that he did not fit into the modern scheduling requirements is a matter of conjecture. The new upbeat program that replaced Solzhenitsyn boasted as its first guest La Cicciolina, an Italian parliamentarian and porn queen. Russia was getting what it wanted—and it wasn’t Solzhenitsyn.
The sense of despondency induced by Russia’s cultural decline was expressed in Solzhenitsyn’s speech at Saratov University on September 13, 1995. “We are still holding together as a single unified country,” he told his audience, “but our cultural space is in shreds.”25 The despondency was also evident in his announcement in December that he would refrain from voting for either Yeltsin or his communist opponent in the presidential elections. “I was approached by television asking for my opinion”, Solzhenitsyn explained. “I asked them whether they would broadcast what I had to say. Yes, they said. I replied that both Yeltsin and the communists are not worthy of being elected, that they have not put forward programs, that no programs have been discussed. Neither of these sides has repented anything that they have done in the past, and I propose to vote against both. (There was an option to vote against both.) They did not broadcast this!” His eyes glinting with amusement, Solzhenitsyn pointed out with evident relish that 5 percent of the population did vote against both. “These people figured it out for themselves”, he laughed.26
Increasingly disgruntled at the road Russia was taking, Solzhenitsyn retreated into the sort of reclusive life that had characterized his years in Vermont. The large house where he and Alya now resided in acres of isolated woodland in leafy countryside just outside Moscow was not dissimilar to their former home in the United States. Seeking seclusion, he returned to his writing, ever the source of solace throughout his troubled life, and began to observe Russia’s demise more passively, though still as passionately, from the sidelines. Yet his increased isolation did not stifle his ability to make carefully planned assaults on the Russian leadership when the opportunity arose. One such opportunity presented itself in November 1996, when he timed an attack on the government in the French newspaper Le Monde to coincide with a two-day visit to Paris by Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Russian Prime Minister.
Such was the force of his fulminations that the Reuters news agency described it as a “blistering attack . . . on Russia’s new political leaders, saying they were no better than the communist rulers he spent much of his life opposing”.27 In his article, entitled “Russia Close to its Deathbed”, Solzhenitsyn wrote that Russia was not a democracy and would never develop a genuine market economy. Russia’s rulers “get away with . . . genuine crimes that have plunged the country into ruin and millions of people into poverty, or condemned thousands to death—yet they are never punished”. During the last decade, “the ruling circles have not displayed moral qualities that are any better than those during the communist era”. Indeed, in many cases, the same communist cliques remained in power: “Former members of the communist elite, along with Russia’s new rich, who amassed instant fortunes through banditry, have formed an exclusive . . . oligarchy of 150 to 200 people that run the country.”28
Solzhenitsyn claimed that the Duma parliament was crushed by presidential power, that local assemblies were more like servants obedient to local governors, and that television channels were subservient to President Boris Yeltsin, who had been elected without any debate on his past rule or any articulated program for the future. “The government . . . enjoys the same impunity as the former communist power and cannot be called a democracy.”29 Such a situation would have unleashed a social explosion in other countries, he wrote, but this would not happen in Russia because society, bled for seventy years under communist rule and weeded of political opponents, had no strength left. (In July 1998, Solzhenitsyn was to reiterate his belief that communism had weakened and exhausted the Russian spirit: “It is as if, just having survived the heaviest case of cholera, to immediately upon recuperation get the plague. It is very hard to withstand.”30)
Meanwhile the government had no coherent economic strategy, and ill-conceived and ill-prepared privatization had proved disastrous, handing over national wealth for a fraction of its value to incompetent individuals. “Such easy gains are unprecedented in the history of the West”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding that corruption had reached a level the West could not imagine. “Market economy has not yet seen the light, and, as things are going, it never will.”31
Two years later, Solzhenitsyn’s views had not moderated. In 1998, he wrote Russia in Collapse, in which he elaborated on the scathing sentiments expressed in his article for Le Monde. Discussing these with the present author, Solzhenitsyn’s disgust with the status quo in Russia was all too evident:
We are exiting from communism in the most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed. Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun, and no one at any point has declared a coherent program. The name of “reform” simply covers what is blatantly a process of the theft of the national heritage. In other words, many former communists, very flexible, very agile, and others who are basically almost confidence tricksters, petty thieves coming in from the sides, have together in unison begun to thieve everything there is from the national resources. It used to belong to the state, . . . but now under the guise of privatization, all of this has been pocketed. For massive enterprises, for large factories, large firms, sometimes only one to two percent of its value is paid when they are privatized. The top, the oligarchy, are really so preoccupied with this fever of thieving that they really did not stop to think of the future of Russia. They didn’t even think of trying to maintain the government treasury, to think of the gov
ernment finances; it is simply a frenzy of thieving. Suddenly they realize that as the government they have to rule the country, but there’s no money left. So now in a very humiliating way, they have to bend the knee and ask the West for money—not just now, but there has been an ongoing process. Now they are borrowing money to pay for wages from last year and the beginning of this year, so that now at least one-third, perhaps one-half, of the nation has been cast into poverty, has been robbed. In addition, education has deteriorated and decayed. Higher education also. Science has decayed; medicine, manufacturing has stopped; factories have closed down; and now for almost twelve years no major new factory has been built. In this sense, they are stabbing to death all the viable—in the sense of alive—direction of the people’s life. And all these loans from abroad are merely stopgap measures designed to keep the oligarchy in power.32
“Imagine”, he continued, “the people have been thrust into poverty, such that a woman teacher does not have suitable clothes to wear when she goes to teach a class.” Teachers no longer have access to published material because it is too expensive; scientists “now receive less money than street sweepers;. . . doctors do not receive their salaries for halfa year, nine months or more; . . . workers need to strike in order to get their paychecks”. Furthermore, “people have lost the opportunity to travel around the country to visit relatives or to go to some cultural event because the cost of travel is prohibitive”. This material devastation has had damaging ramifications in the cultural sphere so that “the cultural space of the country has been torn. . . . There is almost a cultural atomization, a cultural rift certainly, in the country. What else could people in this position feel but that they have been abandoned, spiritually abandoned?” The link between material poverty and cultural impoverishment is inextricable: “If people cannot receive the necessary education, or at least access to that cultural level which that person has set for himself, if that cultural level remains somewhere up above, unreachable to him, he has therefore lost both materially and spiritually.”33
Solzhenitsyn Page 33