Solzhenitsyn

by Joseph Pearce

  “Is that Tolkien?” Solzhenitsyn asked, eyes widened in surprise. “Yes, again correct.”

  As those piercing eyes met mine across the table, another image from Tolkien entered my head. This time the quote remained unspoken, but the image of Treebeard, the wizened voice of wisdom in The Lord of the Rings, with his “deep eyes . . . slow and solemn, but very penetrating”, filled my mind. For an instant, Solzhenitsyn’s eyes and those of Treebeard were united: “One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake.” Like Pippin, I felt that those eyes were considering me with the same slow care they had given to their own inside affairs for endless years.

  “I recently started writing, once more, small prose poems”, Solzhenitsyn continued, breaking the spell. “One of these is called ‘Aging’, growing old. It’s only a few lines. The conclusion, the point that emerges from those few lines is that growing old is not a path downward, but in fact movement up.” This, of course, is opposite to the vision of the materialists, who see the aging process only as evidence of physical decay, heralding nothing but the unmentionable approach of death. This in turn had led to the modern idolization of youth, with further detrimental effects on society. “The old possess a collective experience. There’s no substitute for experience. Youth may only have premonitions, guesses, but it does not yet possess the foundations upon which to build that up. Therein lies the advantage of an advanced age.”

  Inevitably, the subject of advanced age brought the conversation back to thoughts of retrospection. In his autobiography, The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn had hinted at the role of providence in his life. To what extent, did he believe that his life’s labors had served a purpose greater than the sum of their parts?

  There are two questions here. The first question is how do I view providence, and I have already said today that I am deeply convinced that God participates in every life, and the other issue is that people understand this in varying degrees. Some clearly recognize this, others do not. In addition, life does not necessarily have to be externally significant. It can be the most humble of lives, but it can always feel this contact with God. So the fact that I have this feeling is no exception. It is simply another example of this. That is the first question. The second question about whether what I have done is more than the sum of its parts. That which I have done is divided into the books I have written; each book has its own weight and its own meaning, and the concept of a “sum” does not readily fit in with this artistic creativity. The second would be my sort of societal actions. My societal actions have sum, and they have had an influence on the process both in my homeland and in the West. . . . Currently, I consciously step back from this, because I do not see in my own homeland the ability to be able to influence the course of events, in the conditions of which I was telling you concerning the cultural atomization of the country. The other method is to write books addressing the problems directly, but books aren’t going to penetrate anywhere. For instance, this book, Russia in Collapse, is sold in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and who knows when it will penetrate into the provinces. It is impossible to determine. And my age demands that I finish the work that I have previously begun, which is what I am now doing.

  As Solzhenitsyn entered the twilight years of his life, it seemed that an air of resignation had swept away any last remaining plans, desires, or ambitions. There was little he still wished to achieve. “I only want to finish those works which I have already begun and not more than that. Of course, I would try to influence the course of events here in Russia, but I don’t see the ways of doing so. I have already had two mild heart attacks.”

  The melancholy atmosphere evaporated with the very suggestion that Solzhenitsyn’s prodigious productivity could be coming to an end. The mention of retirement triggered one of those infectious chuckles, accompanied as ever with the reassuringly boyish glint of the eye. “I’m afraid that I will not be able to finish everything, and after death, I think I will still have enough unpublished material for several volumes . . . so now is not the time to retire!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  TROUBLOUS TIMES

  As the dust settled on the ruins of the Soviet Empire, and as Russia struggled to emerge—battered, bruised, but perhaps not entirely broken—from the ruins, the enormity of Solzhenitsyn’s legacy was finally coming of age. Within the first ten years of its publication, The Gulag Archipelago had sales of more than thirty million and had been translated into at least thirty-five languages. It, and its author, could not be ignored. Loved or loathed, the man and his work straddled the final years of the Soviet Union like a colossus of outraged conscience. Thirty years later, as the Soviet corpse sank beneath the soil of Russia, Solzhenitsyn had earned his place of honor in the pantheon of those who fought the monster when it was still very much alive, and not only alive but deadly.

  In exposing the bloody nails with which Lenin and Stalin had nailed Russia and its people to the communist cross, Solzhenitsyn had become a nail in the communist coffin. “[Y]ou have still not realized that with the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago, that hour in history has struck which will be fatal to you”, wrote the Russian dissident L. L. Regelson, in an open letter to the Soviet leaders shortly after the Gulag was published.1 In similar vein, the Frankfurter Allegemeine, a leading German newspaper, attested to the ominous nature of the Gulag’s publication: “The time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet system from the appearance of Gulag.”2

  These appraisals of Solzhenitsyn’s legacy are remarkable for the fact that they were written by those who do not share his religion or his politics. The praise, when given, is often given grudgingly. Others are not so charitable, belittling Solzhenitsyn’s importance in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.3 It is a sad reflection of the present age and its meretricious Zeitgeist that Solzhenitsyn is often held in scorn in spite of his irrepressible courage in single-handedly defying tyranny. In a cowardly age, courage is evidently undervalued.

  Perhaps the antagonistic attitude of many toward Solzhenitsyn is rooted in a deeply ingrained hostility toward his Christian faith, a fact to which Solzhenitsyn biographer D. M. Thomas alluded: “To find that a writer believed passionately in Chairman Mao, or Stalin, or Ho Chi Minh, was acceptable to the liberal mind, but if he believed passionately in God it caused a frisson of discomfort and doubt.”4

  Solzhenitsyn’s faith was expressed with eloquence in Russia in Collapse, most particularly in the chapter entitled “The Orthodox Church in these Troublous Times”. Commencing with a reminder, lest his readers forget, of the persecution of the church under communism, and the martyrdom of many Christians at the hands of the secular state, he expressed his hopes for the future of Orthodox Christianity in post-communist Russia:

  And today it is with compassion that we should remember and understand from what ruins, from what humiliation, from what complete devastation and despoilment this Church of ours is rising. . . .

  Certainly, many are hoping and waiting—and rightly so—for the Orthodox Church to strengthen itself as an entirely independent and authoritative power in this country, since all governmental support only abates the spirit of the Church.5

  He called upon the church to distance itself publicly from the “ostentatious television-based process of the government’s conversion to the Church (a practice so undignified and confused)” and to accept and embrace its “role in society and the everyday life of the people”: “While it legitimately separates itself from political power, the Church should not allow itself to become separated from society and its grievous needs. This century-long Orthodox tradition of remaining outside social issues is particularly distressing considering today’s disastrous condition of the Russian nation and people”.6

  Significantly—considering the accusations often leve
led against him that he is a chauvinistic Slavophile or extreme nationalist—he criticized “those who exalt patriotism to the detriment of Orthodoxy and place this patriotism above the latter”:

  Certainly, we approach the faith with our personal and national differences and perceptions, but in the process of spiritual development—if we are successful at it—we become elevated to greater heights, to the dimension that is wider than being merely national. Our national pulverization, which took place in the twentieth century, stems precisely from our loss of the Orthodox faith and from our self-drowning in this new and ferocious paganism. With the rejection of the Orthodox faith, our patriotism acquires pagan characteristics. . . . [O]ur nation has been growing and living precisely in Orthodoxy for the past one thousand years. And it is inappropriate for us now to shrink back from our faith; instead we should apply it with prudence, with purity, with consideration of the new and forthcoming temptations of the twenty-first century.7

  He attacked the secular and anticlerical forces in the media for their outspoken attacks on reemergent Orthodoxy, implying ironically that these very voices had been conspicuously silent during the “voiceless times” when it took courage to speak out: “And those who were spared by the Red Hoof in the voiceless times, now, in the Russia of glasnost, sneer at the Orthodox faith and at every imperfect exercise thereof, and show no respect for the tens of thousands of martyrs who had been trampled by the very same Hoof. How sad is this rupture of the Millennium of Christianity in Russia.”8

  In the conclusion to the chapter, Solzhenitsyn reaffirmed, “in these troublous times”, his Orthodox faith and exhibited the deep well of hope that sprang from it:

  In today’s devastated, crushed, dazed and corruption-susceptible Russia, it is even more evident that we will not recover without the spiritual defence of the Orthodox faith. If we are not an irrational herd, we need a dignified foundation for our unity. We, Russians, must hold the spiritual gift of the Orthodox faith with great devotion and persistence, for it is one of our last gifts, a gift we are already losing.

  It was precisely the Orthodox faith, not the imperial power, that created the Russian cultural model. It is the Orthodoxy preserved in our hearts, traditions and deeds that will strengthen the spiritual meaning that unites the Russians above all tribal considerations. And even if we happen to lose our population numbers, territory, and even statehood in the upcoming decade, we will still be left with the only imperishable thing, the Orthodox faith and the noble perceptions of reality ensuing from it.9

  Solzhenitsyn’s Orthodoxy led him to sympathize with the Serbians during the crisis in the Balkans in 1999, and he proved, even as an octogenarian, that he had not lost the ability to cause controversy, nor the ability to provoke outrage in the West. On April 8, 1999, he attacked the policy of NATO in Kosovo, stating that it had flagrantly ignored the United Nations and that it had “trampled” the UN’s Charter “under foot”: “NATO has proclaimed before the world for the coming century an old law, that of the jungle: the strongest is always right. If your high technology permits it, surpass a hundred times in violence the adversary you condemn.”10 Two months later, he again attacked the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, stating that he saw “no difference in the behavior of NATO and Hitler”, adding that, although he did not know how the Yugoslav problem could be resolved, he lamented that “for the third month before the eyes of the whole world a European country is being destroyed”.11 As the conflict in Yugoslavia brought the blood-soaked curtain down on the horrors of the twentieth century, and as the world looked timidly toward a doubt-filled future at the dawn of the new millennium, there were signs that Solzhenitsyn was being brought in from the cold, signs that at last the exiled prophet was being welcomed home. On September 20, 2000, hemet the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, who was at pains to illustrate that he had Solzhenitsyn’s approval of his government’s policies. In August 2001, Putin stated that, prior to his education reforms, documents had been sent to “very different people, known and respected by the country, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn”.12 It was all a far cry from the days of the Politburo. Four years earlier, in May 1997, Solzhenitsyn had been elected as a full member of the Russian Academy of Science, a far cry from the days of his expulsion from the Writers’ Union in 1969.

  In spite of his being courted by those who inhabited the corridors of power, Solzhenitsyn retained his right to criticize the government vociferously. Like the character of Aslan in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Solzhenitsyn was not a “tame lion”. Indeed, he was prone to bite the hand that paid him compliments. On December 14, 2000, he made a rare public appearance to accept a humanities award at the French Embassy in Moscow, using the occasion to attack the policies of post-communist Russia. In his acceptance speech, and during the news conference that followed it, he delivered what the Moscow Times described as a “devastating criticism of Boris Yeltsin’s decade”. Nor did Putin escape his wrath: he criticized the President for making several “political mistakes”, not least of which was Putin’s recent decision to reinstate the melody of the Soviet hymn as the national anthem.13 Solzhenitsyn returned to the political fray on February 21, 2001, speaking out against the trading of farmland on the eve of the opening session of the Russian State Council’s discussion of land reform. “Land should be owned, being the property of the farmer only and nobody else—not a plunderer or a landlord”, he told journalists. Instead of offering farmland for auction, with the inevitable result that it would pass into the hands of absentee speculators, arrangements should be made to facilitate low-interest loans to farmers so that they could purchase their own land. He also believed that farmland should be given free of charge to the descendants of those who were stripped of their land and exiled during Soviet times.14 His views were in conformity with those he had expressed over the years, from his Letter to Soviet Leaders in 1973 to his Rebuilding Russia in 1990, and show him to be part of an agrarian political tradition that, in the West, includes the land policies promoted by Chesterton and Belloc in the 1920s, and by E. F. Schumacher in the 1970s.

  Two months later, on April 25, he spoke out against the takeover of the NTV nationwide television network by the state-controlled media giant, Gazprom. Condemning the dangers inherent in state-controlled media, he also attacked Russian television for being “largely callous and sometimes even derisive to the real plight of the people”. Furthermore, independent media was only useful insofar as it possessed “internal and domestic governance, without sourcing dollars from abroad”.15 Four days later, he called upon the Russian government to end its moratorium on capital punishment as a means of fighting terrorism. “Sometimes, capital punishment is needed for the sake of saving the nation and the state”, he said. “In Russia matters stand this way at the moment.” The troubles in Chechnya remained “an unfinished chapter in Russian history, and a grim political problem. Therefore, the wave of terrorism is rising in this country. . . . Those in Europe who are telling us to abolish capital punishment do not know the trials Russia has gone through.”16

  As ever, Solzhenitsyn’s candor made him as many enemies as friends. Amongst the friends was the American political philosopher Daniel J. Mahoney, whose book Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology was published in 2001. Mahoney argued that Solzhenitsyn’s greatest contribution to modern political culture was to be found in his call for modern man, and the modern mind, to throw off the shackles of utopian presumption in order to ascend from ideology to the transcendent truths of a Christian concept of reality. Ironically, Solzhenitsyn’s crucial contribution was also the reason for much of the hostility toward him. “Contemporary intellectuals and journalists will not tolerate any serious challenge to the enlightenment or progressivist assumptions underlying modern liberty”, stressed Mahoney.17

  Amongst the enemies was Vladimir Voinovich, a novelist and former Soviet-era dissident who published a book in July 2002, Portrait Against the Backdrop of a Myth, which criticized the “cult of person
ality” surrounding Solzhenitsyn. If Mahoney’s work emphasized the ascent from ideology, Voinovich’s volume seemed to be a descent to the personal. “I am not against Solzhenitsyn but against an untouchable figure, against the cult of personality”, Voinovich told reporters in Moscow at the press-launch of his book. “As a writer he wasn’t bad, even excellent at times, but notions about his greatness, his genius, his prophetical abilities and moral purity are part of a myth.”18 It is certainly noteworthy that Voinovich should publish such a plaintive volume in the light of the continuing insistence by many of Solzhenitsyn’s detractors that he was “irrelevant” and “forgotten” in modern Russia. In the book itself, Voinovich recounts his first meetings with Solzhenitsyn in the 1960s. “We were all in ecstasy about how he wrote, how he carried himself and how he spoke. He said, for example, a writer needs to live modestly, dress simply, and ride in a common train.”19

  If much of Voinovich’s book, particularly those parts detailing his growing disenchantment with the burgeoning celebrity status of Solzhenitsyn, appeared to be the product of old-fashioned envy, his criticisms of Solzhenitsyn’s political ideas were at least valid expressions of real political differences. “In his project for reviving Russia,” Voinovich wrote, Solzhenitsyn “puts the rights of the individual lower than the interests of national security.” He complained of Solzhenitsyn’s meeting with President Putin, reminding his readers that the Russian President was a former KGB agent, and he objected to Solzhenitsyn’s strong nationalist position, especially his defense of Russia’s war against the rebels in Chechnya.20

  Solzhenitsyn made new enemies with the publication in 2001 and 2003 of Dvesti let vmeste, orTwo Hundred Years Together, a two-volume history of the Jews in Russia. Cathy Young, a columnist for the Boston Globe, reacted furiously, accusing him of anti-Semitism.21 Others, in both Russia and the West, echoed her concerns. Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress, was unhappy with the book but was conciliatory in his response: “This is a mistake, but even geniuses make mistakes. Richard Wagner did not like the Jews, but was a great composer. Dostoyevsky was a great Russian writer, but had a very skeptical attitude towards the Jews.”22 Solzhenitsyn was not without his defenders, however. Daniel J. Mahoney responded to Cathy Young’s “unbelievably shoddy account” of Solzhenitsyn’s writings: