In the midst of Solzhenitsyn’s acceptance of the award for “humanitarianism” from Putin, and in the midst of the outrage and confusion that it was causing in the West, A. N. Wilson wrote an essay in the Daily Telegraph praising Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward as “an overpoweringly wonderful book”. “One Nobel prizewinner who is thoroughly deserving of his laurel crown is Alexander Solzhenitsyn”, Wilson began, describing Solzhenitsyn as “a great man”. The essay concluded with Wilson’s comparison of Cancer Ward with Kingsley Amis I Want It Now and Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object, two novels that were first published in 1968, the year of Cancer Ward’s first publication. Wishing “no disrespect” to Amis and O’Brien, Wilson nonetheless asserted that, “set beside the Western lightweights”, Solzhenitsyn “seems rather more impressive, ever more so with the passage of time”.10
On June 23, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Solzhenitsyn. Not surprisingly, the recent controversy over his acceptance of an award from Vladimir Putin was one of the key questions asked. The question, and Solzhenitsyn’s reply, warrant quotation in extenso:
Der Spiegel: Thirteen years ago when you returned from exile, you were disappointed to see the new Russia. You turned down a prize proposed by Gorbachev, and you also refused to accept an award Yeltsin wanted to give you. Yet now you have accepted the State Prize which was awarded to you by Putin, the former head of the FSB intelligence agency, whose predecessor, the KGB, persecuted and denounced you so cruelly. How does this all fit together?
Solzhenitsyn: The prize in 1990 was proposed not by Gorbachev, but by the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, then a part of the USSR. The prize was to be for The Gulag Archipelago. I declined the proposal, since I could not accept an award for a book written in the blood of millions.
In 1998, it was the country’s low point, with people in misery; this was the year when I published the book Russia in Collapse [Russia in the Abyss]. Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits.
The current State Prize is awarded not by the president personally, but by a community of top experts. The Council on Science that nominated me for the award and the Council on Culture that supported the idea include some of the most highly respected people of the country, all of them authorities in their respective disciplines. The president, as head of state, awards the laureates on the national holiday. In accepting the award I expressed the hope that the bitter Russian experience, which I have been studying and describing all my life, will be for us a lesson that keeps us from new disastrous breakdowns.
Vladimir Putin—yes, he was an officer of the intelligence services, but he was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag. As for service in foreign intelligence, that is not a negative in any country—sometimes it even draws praise. George Bush Sr. was not much criticized for being the ex-head of the CIA, for example.11
Asked whether the Russian people had learned the lessons of their communist past, Solzhenitsyn responded optimistically, referring to the “great number of publications and movies” on the history of the twentieth century as “evidence of a growing demand” for greater knowledge of the recent past. He was particularly pleased that the state-owned television channel had recently aired a series based on the works of Varlam Shalamov, whose Kolyma Tales is a classic of Gulag literature. The television adaptation showed “the terrible, cruel truth about Stalin’s camps”, said Solzhenitsyn. “It was not watered down.”12
Solzhenitsyn also expressed pleasure at “the large-scale, heated and long-lasting discussions” that had followed in the wake of his own republished article on the February Revolution. “I was pleased to see the wide range of opinions, including those opposed to mine, since they demonstrate the eagerness to understand the past, without which there can be no meaningful future.”13
A large part of the interview was devoted to Solzhenitsyn’s perennial desire that Russia develop “local self-government” and his regret that power was too centralized under Putin’s leadership. He cited his personal experience of local democracy during his years in exile in Switzerland and Vermont and held such models of “highly effective local self-government” worthy of emulation in Russia. He also regretted that there was still no effective political opposition to Putin’s administration, stating that “an opposition is necessary and desirable for the healthy development of any country”.14
Asked what could be done about the huge gap between rich and poor in modern Russia, Solzhenitsyn answered in terms that placed subsidiarity at the heart of economic revitalization. Although vast fortunes were amassed during the “ransacking” of the economy under President Yeltsin, nothing would be gained by taking a socialist approach to the problem: “The only reasonable way to correct the situation today is not to go after big business—the present owners are trying to run them as effectively as they can—but to give breathing room to medium and small businesses. This means protecting citizens and small entrepreneurs from arbitrary rule and from corruption.”15
Discussing the cooling of relations between Russia and the West, Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of the history of the previous fifteen years highlighted the sharpness with which he viewed contemporary events. When he had returned to Russia, he had discovered that the West was “practically being worshipped”. This was caused “not so much by real knowledge or a conscious choice, but by the natural disgust with the Bolshevik regime and its anti-Western propaganda”. The positive view of many Russians toward the West began to sour following “the cruel NATO bombings of Serbia”: “It’s fair to say that all layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings.” The situation worsened as NATO sought to widen its influence to the former Soviet republics. “So, the perception of the West as mostly a ‘knight of democracy has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.”16
As for the West, it was “enjoying its victory after the exhausting Cold War” and was observing the anarchy in Russia under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It seemed as though Russia was becoming “almost a Third World country and would remain so forever”. In consequence, the reemergence of Russia as a political power caused unease in the West, a panic “based on erstwhile fears”. It was “too bad” that the West was unable to distinguish between Russia and the Soviet Union.17
On a less gloomy note, Solzhenitsyn expressed his appreciation of German culture, particularly in the work of Schiller, Goethe, and Schelling, and his admiration for “the great German musical tradition”: “I can’t imagine my life without Bach, Beethoven and Schubert.” He was also passionate in his defense of the Russian Orthodox Church, defending it from the accusation that it was becoming “a state Church”:
On the contrary, we should be surprised that our Church has gained a somewhat independent position during the very few years since it was freed from total subjugation to the communist government. Do not forget what a horrible human toll the Russian Orthodox Church suffered throughout almost the entire twentieth century. . . . Our young post-Soviet state is just learning to respect the Church as an independent institution. The “Social Doctrine” of the Russian Orthodox Church, for example, goes much further than do government programs. Recently Metropolitan Kirill, a prominent expounder of the Church’s position, has made repeated calls for reforming the taxation system. His views are quite different from those of the government, yet he airs them in public, on national television. . . . As far as the past is concerned, our Church holds round-the-clock prayers for the repose of the victims of communist massacres in Butovo near Moscow, on the Solovetsky Islands and other places of mass burials.18
As the interview drew to a close, Solzhenitsyn was asked what faith meant to him. He replied that faith was “the foundation and
support of one’s life”. He was then asked whether he was afraid of death. “No,” he replied, “I am not afraid of death any more. . . . I feel it is a natural, but by no means the final, milestone of one’s existence.”
“Anyhow,” his interviewers responded, “we wish you many years of creative life.”
“No, no”, Solzhenitsyn replied. “Don’t. It’s enough.”19
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CONSUMMATUM EST
At the beginning of August 2007, barely a week after Der Spiegel published Solzhenitsyn’s reference to the Christian martyrs killed at the hands of the communists at the Butovo cemetery outside Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church sponsored a commemoration of these very martyrs at the cemetery itself. President Putin and his government were conspicuous by their absence at the event, a fact for which they were roundly condemned in the Russian press. Three months later, in an apparent act of penance for his earlier sin of omission (if one can use such language about the motives and actions of politicians), President Putin visited Butovo and issued a statement about the evils of ideology and about the millions who had perished at the hands of the communist regime. On the same day, the Orthodox Church canonized hundreds of victims of communism.
On December 9, two days before his eighty-ninth birthday, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed on the “Vesti Nedeli” (News of the Week) program on Rossiya Television to mark the publication of a new edition of The Gulag Archipelago. Although Russia had “reasserted its influence in international relations, and regained its role in the world”, he cautioned that internally, “morally, we are far from what we wish and what we need to be”. Russia needed “spiritual development” that transcended politics.1
On March 31, 2008, A. N. Wilson once again emerged as Solzhenitsyn’s British champion, much as Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge had been his champions in the 1970s. Having waxed lyrical about Cancer Ward the previous year, Wilson now praised The First Circle: “I have been reading The First Circle, and for a week, nothing else has had much reality for me. It is not only the most devastating indictment of Stalinism; it is also a superb novel, all set within the space of three days.”2 Having discussed the literary merits and moral quality of the novel, Wilson turned his attention to Solzhenitsyn himself:
In his titanic struggle against the Stalinist state, Solzhenitsyn was victorious. Then the truths he had so heroically, and single-handedly, revealed to the world, became commonplace. . . . [L]overs of the truth will always salute him. The First Circle ends with some of the prisoners being transferred to labour camps in vans labelled “Bread” or “Meat”. The correspondent of a French newspaper, Liberation, seeing the vans pass down a Moscow street, writes, “One must admit that the city’s food supplies are admirably well-organised.”
We in the West were as blind as that reporter until Solzhenitsyn started to write. We owe it to him, and to ourselves, and to those who suffered, not to forget.3
On April 2, Solzhenitsyn was again causing controversy, this time by accusing the Ukrainian government of “historical revisionism”. In an interview with the Russian daily newspaper Izvestia, Solzhenitsyn condemned efforts in the Ukraine to have the great famine of 1932-1933 recognized internationally as Russian genocide against the Ukrainian people. Against such “revisionism”, Solzhenitsyn countered that the famine was caused by the corrupt ideals of the communist regime, under which all suffered equally, Russians and Ukrainians alike. The suggestion that it was genocide was a bizarre “fable” that had “surpassed the wild suggestions of the Bolshevik propaganda machine”: “Still, defamation is easy to insinuate into Westerners’ minds. They have never understood our history: You can sell them any old fairy story, even one as mindless as this.” Three days later, and to its great credit, the Boston Globe published a good translation of the full text of Solzhenitsyn’s words in Izvestia, under the headline “Ukrainian Famine Not a Genocide”. Rarely had Solzhenitsyn’s words been treated so objectively and fairly in the Western media.
It was perhaps fitting that Solzhenitsyn’s final public statement should incorporate three of the prevailing passions of his life: the condemnation of communism, the defense of historical truth, and the love of Russia. He died of heart failure on August 3, 2008, at his home outside Moscow, after a life of dauntless and unswerving service to the cause of justice and truth. Few indeed could claim as justly, in the words and with the spirit of St. Paul, that he had fought the good fight, that he had finished the race, and that he had kept the faith (see 2 Tim 4:7). It might even be decorous to compare Solzhenitsyn not merely with St. Paul, but with Christ Himself. Few had lived their lives nailed to the cross of suffering and crowned with the thorns of scorn as had Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and few could utter with their final breath the final words of Christ, consummatum est, so worthily.
The funeral service and committal was held in the cathedral of the Donskoi Monastery on August 6. Solzhenitsyn scholar and translator Michael Nicholson, who attended the service, described it as “extremely intense and moving” and described how the graveside was mobbed for long after the service as people tried to leave flowers and kiss the temporary wooden cross.4 Less than two weeks later, Solzhenitsyn received a further victory over his communist foes, this time posthumously, when it was announced that Moscow’s Great Communist Street (ulitsa Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya) was to be re-named “Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street”.5 In order to bestow this honor, which had been sanctioned by a decree from President Putin, the city officials had to amend an existing rule stipulating that only people dead for at least ten years could be honored with a street name. “Life has shown that there are cases when you don’t need to wait ten years to evaluate a person’s contribution to the history of Russia and Moscow”, said Moscow City Assembly Chairman Vladimir Platonov.6 The irony implicit in the secular canonization of a man who had spent most of his life condemning secularism and the secularization of political life was all part of the grim humor surrounding the Divine “comedy” of his life.
And the comedy continued. On September 11, on the eve of the fortieth day after Solzhenitsyn’s death, when Russian Orthodox custom calls for commemoration of the dead, Vladimir Lakeyev, a Communist Party leader in Moscow, read a statement saying that Great Communist Street was named after the Bolsheviks who fell in battle there in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Renaming the street, one of the most prestigious thoroughfares in Moscow, after Solzhenitsyn was “inadmissible”, said Lakeyev, because the current name “reflects the feat of communists who gave their lives for freedom, the happiness of the people and the strengthening of the state”. By contrast, Solzhenitsyn was “a public figure who devoted his life to fighting the Soviet people’s state and spoke out with anti-communist and anti-state positions”.7 Shortly afterward, the website of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party declared that “citizens across the country continue to express their displeasure with the campaign of canonization of the false prophet”.8
On September 23, in spite of the communist protests, the Moscow government gave preliminary approval to amendments to the law that would fully legalize the name change, thereby ratifying the presidential decree, dated August 12, stating that a plaque in honor of Solzhenitsyn should be erected on the street and that the new street signs and the plaque should be in place by January 1, 2009. Intriguingly, the presidential decree specified the text of the plaque, identifying Solzhenitsyn as a Nobel Prize winner and a winner of the State Prize of Russia but making no mention of the Gulag. Meanwhile, in a further darkly comedic coup de theatre, a small group of communists and residents of Great Communist Street demonstrated with placards blazoned with the slogan “Don’t Live a Lie”. It was all so bizarrely surreal that it would not have been out of place in Orwell’s dystopia.
As if to call the bemused observer back to some sense of sanity, the priests at St. Martin the Confessor, a beautiful Orthodox church on Great Communist Street, erected a sign outside the church with its pre-1917 address, 15 Bolshaya Alekseyevskaya, which honor
s the church of St. Aleksy, a medieval Orthodox saint. Explaining their decision to erect the sign, the Reverend Valery Stepanov, who serves at the church and hosts a television show about Moscow, said that “we shouldn’t be like the communists, who went around renaming everything. But”, he added, “Solzhenitsyn Street is better than Great Communist Street.”9
Meanwhile, far from the confusions and contradictions aroused on the streets of Moscow by Solzhenitsyn’s death and emerging legacy, writers in the West were queuing up to pay their tributes to one of the giants of the twentieth century. In death, if not in life, Solzhenitsyn could be forgiven and even praised, albeit grudgingly, by those who had long since ostracized him for his devastating critique of the West’s liberal ascendency.
One year after Solzhenitsyn’s death, on August 3, 2009, Vladimir Putin sent a telegram to Solzhenitsyn’s widow in which he described Solzhenitsyn as “a global individual, whose creative and ideological heritage will always hold a special place in the history of Russian literature and in the chronicles of our country”.10 On the same day, Dmitry Medvedev, who had succeeded Putin as Russian President, also sent a telegram to Alya Solzhenitsyn. Its contents seemed to suggest that perhaps, at last, her husband’s deepest aspirations were being heeded even by his country’s politicians. The telegram is, in any event, a fitting tribute by the President of Russia to his nation’s greatest modern hero:
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