Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Between Two Millstones: Book I: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978. Peter Constantine translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018.
Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 56, Number 6, November/December 2019.
We know Solzhenitsyn the anti-Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn the chronicler of Leninist-Stalinist mass-murder and mass-incarceration, Solzhenitsyn the prophet of Western decline, Solzhenitsyn the Russian patriot and Christian witness. Here we meet Solzhenitsyn the writer, a man searching for a quiet place to gather his thoughts, refine them, and put them on paper. Between the ruthless tyranny of the East and the clamorous democracy of the West, he will not relinquish his vocations as dissident, prophet, witness, and patriot, but he needs to find a place where he can pursue these vocations in his way, the way of an heir to the legacies of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, legacies deformed by two generations of partisan hacks. “I do not fit in with either system”; Christians seldom do, entirely, with any, and surely not with the modern ‘project,’ East or West.
The exile he sketches began with his 1974 expulsion from the Soviet Union, the first and heaviest “millstone.” Solzhenitsyn published his sketches of his life there in The Oak and the Calf, which appeared a year later. The Communist-Party oligarchs (“a pack of horned devils flitting through the early dawn before the matin bell rings”) finally chose to persecute him from afar, having vainly tried imprisonment, poisoning, blandishments, and blackmail in Russia during the previous three decades. Hosted initially by the German Nobel Prize winner and recent president of PEN, Heinrich Böll, he immediately confronted an alien species of ‘writers,’ the Western journalists, whose “persistent tracking by photo and film crews, documenting my every step and move,” amounted to “the flip side of the relentless, but secret shadowing to which I was subjected at home” by the KGB. Although their “penchant for sensationalism” “saved me” by making it too costly for the Soviet regime to silence him, fundamentally any writer needs simple peace and quiet. By refusing most interviews (“Were they to ensnare me with glory?”), Solzhenitsyn meant no offense; nonetheless, what he intended only as “a literary defense mechanism” provoked media indignation. Under regimes of doctrinaire social egalitarianism, ‘celebrity’ bestowed by the princes of mass media takes the place of grace granted by God, its refusal anathematized as similarly sinful. He couldn’t avoid the censures, but at least he avoided “the danger of becoming a blatherer,” the temptation to issue statements on every passing ‘issue’ journalists through at him. “Political passion is embedded deep within me, and yet it comes after literature, it ranks lower.” To put it in language even ‘we moderns’ understand, Solzhenitsyn was playing the long game—knowing that what ‘the media’ giveth ‘the media’ can take away.
Looking back on the situation from the vantage point of 1978, when he wrote Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn remained grateful to the Russian novelist and fellow émigré Anatoli Kuznetsov, who likened a writer coming to the free West from the tyrannical East to a diver suffering from the bends, “coming from a high to a low pressure zone where one ran the risk of bursting.” “How right he was!” Above all, he knew, he must “continue working steeped in silence, not allowing the flame of writing to expire, not letting myself be torn to pieces, but to remain myself.” A writer’s discipline, but also a man’s, and a citizen’s: “It was so difficult to get used to the full freedom of life and to learn the golden rule of all freedom: to use it as little as possible.”
Offered a quiet home in Norway, he and his wife reconnoitered, only to see that Soviet military forces would likely invade there first, if a European war broke out. Zurich made more sense; Lenin had lived there, before being smuggled back to Russia by the Germans as a knife aimed at the all-too-soft underbelly of the czarist regime during the Great War. Solzhenitsyn was writing his vast historical novel, The Red Wheel, early chapters of which would appear in his 1976 title, Lenin in Zurich. Residence in Switzerland would prove indispensable not only for the necessary historical research but for what every novelist needs: a sense of the place, its physical and moral atmosphere. Finally, however, he saw he could not stay. After a press conference presenting From Under the Rubble, a collection of essays critical of the Soviet regime written by himself and some fellow dissidents, the Swiss authorities notified Solzhenitsyn that in future he must request authorization to hold such a meeting from the Zurich police. He now understood why so many Soviet exiles had left Europe for America. Europe had lost it sense of civic freedom. “We had to move on.”
But not before visiting a Swiss canton during the election of its chief magistrate, the Landammann. The winning candidate gave a fine, sober speech on the need never to surrender “to the folly of total freedom” while also never “making the state almighty.” In the face of the recent abandonment of the South Vietnamese people to the Communist North, raising the question of “whether America will remain loyal to its alliance with Europe,” Europeans must remember to associate their “individual freedoms” with “our obligations and self-defense”—a suggestion that the Swiss regime of self-defense by an armed and vigilant citizenry might deter Soviet-bloc aggression more effectively than the NATO alliance. More, the Landammann continued, “There cannot be a rational functioning state without a dash of aristocratic and even monarchic elements”—without a modern version of what Aristotle calls a ‘mixed’ regime, with its balance of popular representation, administrative expertise, and executive vigor: The Swiss Confederation, “now the oldest democracy in the world,” “did not spring from the ideas of the Enlightenment” but from experience, from “the ancient forms of communal life.” “This is the kind of democracy we [Russians] could do with,” Solzhenitsyn thought—a democracy resembling their own medieval town assemblies. Self-government in political communities small enough for personal knowledge of fellow-citizens: This was the best feature of Switzerland, of old Russia, and even, he would find, some parts of modern America. It is likely that Solzhenitsyn recalled the early Christian communes, as well.
Before leaving Europe, Solzhenitsyn found himself embroiled in political controversies with Russian writers who were far from being journalists, each of whom understood democracy, and politics generally, in ways that diverged sharply from his own moral sensibilities. The first was the renowned physicist Andre Sakharov, who, very much like a man accustomed to thinking in abstractions, in formulae, criticized Solzhenitsyn for having advocated a transition period, frankly described as “authoritarian,” between the Soviet regime and a popularly-based ‘mixed’ regime. Sakharov wanted an immediate regime change from Communist oligarchy to parliamentary democracy, with no intermediate steps. For Solzhenitsyn, “the collapse of Russia in 1917 was like a fiery image before my eyes, the insane attempt at transforming our country to democracy in a single leap,” a leap into “instant chaos” that issued not in democracy but in the triumph of Lenin’s tyranny. “This thirst for ‘instant’ democracy was the impulse of the big-city desk-dwellers, who had no notion whatsoever of real people’s lives.” “In my view, democracy means the genuine self-government of the people, from the bottom up,” whereas social-democratic, scientistic and literary political commentators alike “see it as being the rule of the educated classes” who undertake to lead the people. Solzhenitsyn’s stance, however sensible, could only further irritate the journalists, who now pegged him as “a reactionary and a nationalist.” He was a sort of Christian Aristotelian, not only in his esteem for the ‘mixed regime,’ the regime Aristotle esteemed as the best practicable regime, but also in his insistence on the importance of fitting regime institutions to a given people’s way of life, its “spirit” (as Montesquieu termed it), it “culture.” A ‘liberal’ like Sakharov “was in fact related to the socialist wing…by way of the fathers of the Enlightenment.” “Russia’s moral development” couldn’t advance on abstractions generated by such unreasonable rationalism.
A writer who should have understood the importance of culture was the émigré novelist Andrei Sinyavsky, a satirist who wrote under the pen name of Abram Tertz. Sinyavksy lived in Paris, where he edited the dissident journal Syntaxas. In its inaugural issue he wrote an article blaming Russia’s agony on Russia itself. “Even the lowest criminals—men who in their mindset are practically animals—revere their mothers,” Solzhenitsyn riposted. “But not Abram Tertz.” The two men remained sharply at odds for the remainder of Sinyavsky’s life, with Sinyavsky going so far as to assert that Solzhenitsyn’s exile was a KGB ruse. Solzhenitsyn was gentler in his critique of the celebrated émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov, who in a sense made the same error of “turning his back on Russia,” but not with contempt; Nabokov took a purely literary/esthetic stance, ignoring history for the cultivation of stylistic elegance. Although both a trained scientist and an accomplished novelist, Solzhenitsyn steered away from the pleasurable simplisms of both scientistic and literary politics—really anti- or a-political thought—by using political history as his intellectual ballast, keeping his mind on an even keel, provisioning himself to practice what Aristotle considered the preeminent political virtue, prudence.
It transpired that his sudden, secret departure from Switzerland foiled yet another KGB plot to murder him—forgiving and forgetting never having served as leading characteristics of the Soviet regime-ethos. Moving his family first to Canada—that “timid giant pushed aside in the onrush of the daring and the ruthless,” “immersed in a slumber of oblivion”—he finally chose residence in the United States. After visiting Alaska (“too much of a national park steeped in the nineteenth century”), the family next stopped in northern California, where an “Old Believers” Russian Orthodox community would not allow them to worship with them in the church or to eat at the same table with the adults. But his most important ‘stop’ turned out to be a two-month stay at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he delved into the vast collection of materials on the February Revolution of 1917, which preceded the Bolshevik Revolution, a year later.
Alone in the archives, “My eyes opened as to what had really taken place.” Having studied the 1917-1918 ferment for some forty years, in preparation for composing the Red Wheel, he now made crucial discoveries that “caused a shift in my thinking that I did not expect.” Previously, Solzhenitsyn had “clung to the universally accepted view that Russia in February 1917 had achieved the freedom that generations had striven for, and that all of Russia rejoiced and nurtured this freedom, but alas, alas, only for eight months, as the Bolshevik fiends drowned that freedom in blood, steering the nation to ruin.” But as he perused the documents in the Hoover collection, he say “that Russia was inescapably lost… from the very first days of March,” as a powerless Provisional Government took direction from “a narrow, closed committee in Petrograd, itself “hiding behind the many thousands of noisy members of the larger Soviet.” “A beguiling pink cloud” of leftish opinion continues to shroud what really happened, to this day. Readers of the latest volume of the Red Wheel to be published in English, March 1917, will see how Solzhenitsyn integrated these new insights into his narrative.
Although Solzhenitsyn frequently called for the institution of the rule of law in Russia, he never could accustom himself to its actual operation in the United States and in the West, generally. Facing important questions concerning translations and re-translations of his books, copyright tangles, and all the attendant difficulties, he found “the world of the Western law courts” to be “alien to me,” often because litigation was driven by calculations respecting the mass market of modern commercial democracy. Tocqueville would have understood the jarring effect of democratic egalitarianism on an aristocratic sensibility. For Tocqueville Christianity sharpens this conflict, having been revealed under aristocratic, hierarchic conditions amenable to truths delivered from ‘on high’ but being itself a teaching of equality, a revelation of the universal responsibility of all men “created equal” before God. One senses this tension in Solzhenitsyn’s soul, his life and work.
For his part, when it came to the rule of law, Solzhenitsyn would come to laud the much smaller, local law courts of medieval Russia, where litigation remained on a human scale. The “megacities” of America could offer no such justice. In the hands of a writer like Sinyavsky, all of this would be the stuff of comedy, but for Solzhenitsyn, for whom writing remained a matter of life and death—physical and spiritual—the Western legal process was a torment, reanimating in him the Christian impatience with what men like Luther and Calvin (somewhat unfairly) regarded as Old-Testament legalism. “Legal battles are a profanation of the soul, an ulceration,” Solzhenitsyn thunders. “As the world has entered a legal era, gradually replacing man’s conscience with law, the spiritual level of the world has sunk.” In the courts as in politics, “I was torn by the never-ending conflict within me: to write or to do battle?” In modest defense of Western legalism, it must be said that these battles eventually turned out well for him, as his works have appeared in good translations, with profits now going where he intended them to go—often to persecuted Soviet writers and their families. He even found a big-city lawyer he respected, the Washington insider William Bennett Williams, who assisted in the liberation of Russian dissident Aleksandr Ginzburg from a Soviet prison.
A friend found him a suitable property in rural Cavendish, Vermont, where he built a house for his family. His new home proved his refuge from modernity’s pressures, a place where he could think and write. Initially, his new neighbors took offense at the fence he built around his property, but he followed the smart suggestion of Governor Richard Snelling, who advised him to explain himself at the next town meeting. He not only explained his family’s unique security needs, but he took the opportunity to explain the difference between the words ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet,’ the former being to the latter “as ‘man’ is to ‘disease.'” “Immediately, the tension in the town eased, and a staunch neighborliness was established,” reaffirming Solzhenitsyn’s esteem for the personal touch of small-town life. He nonetheless continued to long for return to his own country, rightly anticipating that it would happen someday.
After making peace with his neighbors in early 1977, Solzhenitsyn’s life settled into a sort of routine. He spent most of his time gratefully at work on the Red Wheel, a work that “encompasses all of Russia—Russia in flux.” It was crucially important to write it all down, to look back, to understand and assess a time when “many people could not see what was coming upon them, not even a day ahead.” If Russians were to have even a slight chance of fostering a decent life for themselves in the future, they needed a reliable account of the errors of the past, the malice of those who exploited those errors, and the rare heroes who saw clearly and acted with acumen and justice. They needed a civic education to prepare their souls for the practice of self-government. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn also needed to tend to his reputation among Russians, not for reasons of petty vanity but because he needed to be trusted as a reliable witness and researcher, a truth-teller—precisely because he had indispensable moral-political and spiritual truths to tell them.
Unfortunately, many of his fellow exiles and dissidents distrusted him. They didn’t know him personally, but there was more: “In truth we had sprung from different roots, expressed different aspirations, and had almost nothing in common but the time and place of action.” Most of Solzhenitsyn’s cohorts were secularized, urban intellectuals who “remained unresponsive to the plight of the Russian countryside and especially to the renewed persecution of the Orthodox Church.” While many of the dissidents “took advantage of every person’s natural right to leave a place they do not want to live” (emphasis added), they turned their backs on the Russians, and the Russia, they left behind. They eschewed Russia as a place for Christians, and for the Orthodox Christianity that Solzhenitsyn never ceased considering the highest form of Christianity, even if his was a ‘genial orthodoxy,’ esteeming all decent forms of worship as bulwarks against atheism. Not for the new generation of exiles was the prayer Solzhenitsyn composed and recited with his sons in Vermont: “Grant us, O Lord, to live in health and strength, our minds bright, until the day when you will open our path home to Russia, to labor and to sacrifice ourselves so that she may recover and flourish.”
The dissident exiles found a sympathetic audience among the similarly secularized intellectuals in the West, who welcomed them, “offered financial support, and heaped [them] with praise.” Solzhenitsyn, however, offended American secularists with his Harvard commencement address in 1978. “For thirty years in the USSR, and for four years now in the West, I kept slashing and hacking away at Communism, but in these last years I had also seen much in the West that was alarmingly dangerous, and here I preferred to talk about that.” At Harvard he publicized his dissatisfaction with Western legalism, a standard “far lower than the true moral yardstick”; he criticized the mis-definition of freedom as “unbridled passion” and its consequence, the weakening of “a sense of responsibility before God and society.” It is well to speak of human rights, he observed, but more urgent to speak of human obligations; few in the West of 1978 were. He judged the likely consequences to be harsh. “The reigning ideology, that prosperity and the accumulation of material riches are to be valued above all else, is leading to a weakening of character in the West, and also to a massive decline in courage and the will to defend itself, as was clearly seen in the Vietnam War, not to mention a perplexity in the face of terror”—that is, the increasing acts of terrorism committed by Muslim militants against Western people. Most deeply, and perhaps most gratingly to his critics, Solzhenitsyn traced all of this to Enlightenment “rationalist humanism,” the “notion that man is the center of all that exists, and that there is no Higher Power above him.” In this “irreligious humanism” the democratic West and the oligarchic East join hands. “The moral poverty of the twentieth century comes from too much having been invested in sociopolitical changes, with the loss of the Whole and the High.” To lose the Whole and the High is to divest oneself of riches greater than those won by capitalists or promised by socialists.
It is almost needless to say that such criticisms found few sympathetic echoes. “It turns out that democracy expects to be flattered. When I called out ‘live not by lies!’ in the Soviet Union, that was fair enough, but when I called out ‘live not by lies!’ in the United States, I was told to go take a hike.” All the more reason to write, “When I return home to Russia one day, I am certain that everything will fall back into place; it is for that moment that I live and write.”
This first volume of Between Two Millstones ends with Solzhenitsyn’s account of his struggle to vindicate his reputation against KGB slanderers, one a former friend from childhood. Physical and spiritual exile from Soviet Russia and spiritual exile from the West were the exactions Providence inflicted on the writer who took up the task of prophetic witness against the world of his time.
In this book above all others, perhaps, Solzhenitsyn shows how he subtly shifted the emphasis of Russian Orthodox Christianity toward a path of greater sobriety. Just as Roman Catholic Christianity brings Aristotelian philosophy in as a supplement to Christian spirituality, thereby fulfilling the Christian command to strive for the prudence of serpents along with the innocence of doves, Orthodox Christianity brings in Platonic philosophy. Rightly understood, Platonic philosophy equally commends prudential reasoning on moral and political matters. (Hence the term political philosophy.) But Orthodox Christians thinkers too often avail themselves not so much of Platonism but of Neoplatonism, with its impatience for undertaking a spiritual and intellectual ascent beyond the conventions, the traditions, of the Christian’s immediate ‘worldly’ surroundings. It’s a bit too easy to be a saint in a desert; the Apostles set out to talk with their fellow-subjects in Imperial Rome, seeking to persuade them, not to leave them behind. In lauding and, more tellingly, practicing the life of moderation or self-limitation, strict justice, unshakable courage, and practical wisdom, in partnering with his wife to hold their family together, and in looking to the founding of a ‘mixed’ and balanced regime that respects long-settled ways of life including local self-government and work on the land, and in always intending to return to his own people, his own beloved country, Solzhenitsyn faithfully upheld his very Aristotelian and Christian agapic witness “between two millstones.” He hoped that someday Russians themselves would uphold that witness, take up its sacrificial burdens but also its true honor.
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