What Will Russia Be?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Between Two Millstones. Book Two: Exile in America, 1978-1994. Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020.

 

In Between Two Millstones Solzhenitsyn blends several literary genres—autobiography, essay, and a touch of diary.  Volume I consists of his memories from his first years of exile, following his departure from the Soviet Union in 1974, years in which he lived for a time in Western Europe before settling in Vermont. There, as Daniel J. Mahoney observes in his excellent Forward to this volume, “above all, he found a place to work” and “a serene and welcome home for his family.” [1] His main work consisted of researching and writing The Red Wheel, a vast historical novel tracing the origins of first the Russian and then the Bolshevik Revolutions, beginning in 1914. [2] His subsidiary work consisted of fending off both the blandishments and irritations of life in the great Western democracy, from speaking invitations to polemics to lawsuits—all swirling around him like mosquitoes in a Siberian summer. Whether great or petty, all of these activities centered on a central theme of his life: What will Russia be? What moral, spiritual, and political regime will replace the sordid rule of the Communists, by now in welcome but dangerous decline? These are the ruling questions of Volume II, which consists of Millstones parts two, three, and four.

Perhaps the most important spokesman for the alternative anti-Communist regime to the one that Solzhenitsyn prayed for, dedicated his life’s work to preparing, was the courageous dissident Russian physicist, Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov was the quintessential ‘modern.’ Impatient with what he took to be the dead hand of the past, he wanted a rapid, revolutionary change in Russia, a regime change countering the malign revolution of the Bolsheviks, but just as dramatic. He thought this both possible and desirable because he expected the new, ‘democratic’ regime to be democratic in the modern sense: a regime in which progressive-minded secular elites would lead the people to life modeled on the ideas of Enlightenment rationalism—technocratic, urban, internationalist. As Solzhenitsyn observes, Sakharov represented the democratic socialism that lost, violently, to the dictators of the proletariat in 1917, individuals who detested tyranny but also despised Russia —the Russia of Orthodox Christianity and farming villages, priests and peasants.

Such a revolution would not only bring violent conflict, Solzhenitsyn warned. It would also fail because its organizers did not understand what a regime is, and therefore would prove inept in founding one. A regime is more than a set of purposes, however ‘enlightened’ they may be. A regime is more than a set of institutions, however intricately designed. A regime is a way of life. What kind of democracy can ignore the way of life of a country’s people, those persons who wield sovereignty in any democratic regime worthy of the name? Without the patient cultivation of a way of life conducive to popular self-government, a regime change in the name of democracy must either dissolve into anarchy or lead the way to a new oligarchy—or both, in a fatal circle of self-destruction.

Solzhenitsyn completed the first volume of Between Two Millstones in 1978. [3] Volume Two consists of three such chronological sections, covering the periods 1978-1982, 1982-1987, and 1987-1994, the year when he and his family returned to Russia. He wrote each segment during the last year of each period of time, giving his memoir a ‘diaristic’ or contemporaneous quality, wherein he sets down his thoughts soon after the events he recounts, providing a sort of step-by-step assessment of his years in exile. Readers encounter a great-souled Russian and Christian man in medias res, as he thinks, feels, lives his way through the years of separation from his beloved homeland.

He launches his numerous and sharp criticisms of America from an underlying platform of gratitude. Where else was he, where else could he have been, so productive? In Vermont he lived in the “happy solitude” a writer needs, “and I never ceased to be surprised and grateful,” as “the Lord had indeed put me in the best situation a writer could dream of, and the best of the dismal fates that could have arisen, given [Russia’s] blighted history and the oppression of our country for the last sixty years.” Under the American regime he “was no longer compelled to write in code, hide things, distribute pieces of writing among my friends.” [4] He could conduct research freely. “I did not have to rush from pillar to post to survive,” having royalties from the worldwide sales of his books protected by copyright law and the right to the keep his earnings. With this “total independence”—broader “in scope and more effective than freedom alone”—the busy life of commercial republicanism “has flowed past me, having no effect on the rhythm of my work.” 

Unlike the Communists, Americans never attempted to separate him from his family. His wife and sons united with him; “the very spirit of our family and the unceasing, impassion work Alya and I were doing together also had its effect on our sons, ” as “they grew up friends, with a sense of family unity and teamwork.” “The alien environment,” too, “bound them together,” with “a consciousness of our unusual burden” as exiles, but exiles with a profound and noble mission: “to fill in the Russian history that’s been lost” for the sake of the Russians who would someday find themselves liberated from Communist tyranny. This purpose “communicated itself to all three of them.” “When you are immersed in a once-in-a-lifetime piece of work, you don’t notice, aren’t aware of other tasks.” “If the truth about the past were to rise from the ashes in our homeland today, and minds were honed on that truth, then strong characters would emerge, whole ranks of doers, people taking an active part—and my books would come in useful too,” restoring not only a true sense of the past but the moral compass that can only point ‘due North’ if magnetized for that.

By “happy solitude,” then, Solzhenitsyn means anything but being alone, or even being alone with God. He shows the reader how he and his wife could become the most intimate of collaborators in the work. “I have never in my life met anyone with such an acute lexical feel for the specific word needed, for the hidden rhythm of a prose sentence, with such taste in matters of design, as my wife, sent to me—and now irreplaceable—in my insular seclusion, where the brain of one author with his unvarying perceptions is not enough.” The Red Wheel‘s Russian steppes-like vastness required a second set of eyes, a mind with an unerring sense of direction, to prevent Solzhenitsyn from wandering off track, circling around to unintended repetition, losing himself in unclarity. “Living in isolation, it would have been impossible to manage such a massive job adequately. Alya didn’t allow me to lose my faculty of self-criticism,” “subject[ing] every phrase to scrutiny, as I did myself.” It was America, and Vermont in particular, that enabled the Solzhenitsyns to live the way of life they needed to live to continue and above all to continue their spiritual, moral, and political calling, and to complete the work they were called to.

Few Russian émigrés could join them, although there were some million and a half of them living in the West. “Clearly, we are not able to hold out when dispersed—it’s a defect in the Russian spirit: we become weak when not close together, in serried masses (and being told what to do).” The pull of the democratic republican regimes wrenched the Russianness out of almost all his countrymen, as they became “absorbed into alien soil, bringing up an alien generation.” “Russia’s salvation” can “only come from whatever Russia itself does within its borders,” too often by means of “a powerful hand to bring us together” and not from carefully cultivated self-government, which remained Solzhenitsyn’s preference from beginning to end. At this point, in 1982, he could only place his hopes in the “village prose” writers, the best-known of whom was Valentin Rasputin, men who faithfully sketched life in the countryside, among Russian country folk. The émigré writers, by contrast, too often aped their Western counterparts, wasting their time at ‘literary conferences,’ and at their best only rising to the level of Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliant but shallow avant-gardism or Andrei Sinyavksy’s satire. It was Sinyavksy, along with the ex-Communist dissident writer Lev Kopelov and the Paris-based novelist and translator Olga Carlisle, who built a cage around Solzhenitsyn’s reputation in the West, calumniating him as “a monarchist, a totalitarian, and anti-Semite, an heir to Stalin’s way of thinking, and a theocrat”—never mind the incommensurability of the items on the list.

In this, they reinforced American, and Western, confusion of the Soviet regime with the Russian nation. This helps to account for “the malice toward Russia” Solzhenitsyn often saw in his exile. “What brutes, they say, those Russians, not able to resist Communism while we [the West] managed to hold out.” The dogged secularism of the Russian exiles finds its enthusiastic echo among “the hostile pseudo-intellectuals” of the West. Despite his independence in America, Solzhenitsyn, and despite his freedom from house searches and interference with his writing, “I am not genuinely free” here, as writing is one thing but publishing another, and he was having trouble publishing his current writings in the United States. Between the United States and Russia under Soviet Communism, “the world is big, but there’s nowhere to go,” caught as he was between “two millstones.”

Despite venomous claims to the contrary, as a Christian Solzhenitsyn eschewed Russian nationalism, especially in the increasingly coarse and inept forms it took in the years just prior to the 1917 revolutions. At that time, “Russian nationalists emerged, of the kind who rushed to renounce Christianity” as well as socialist internationalism. Nationalists of this type “call on us to renounce our historical memory, to adopt a new paganism, or else be ready to adopt any faith you like from Asia.” In their more malignant forms, they do indeed incline to fascism. Not Solzhenitsyn. 

It was the repulsiveness of such a nationalism and the degradation of “the Bolsheviks’ murderous steamroller” that the “generous, educated ‘pan-humanism'” of Sakharov resisted. He was brought up in “that very milieu”; as a result, “he considers even the idea of nationhood, any appeal to the nation rather than the individual, a philosophical error.” “In nothing that he’d ever said or written was there any whiff of a recollection that our history was over a thousand years old. Sakharov does not breathe that air.” His genius at physics has only accentuated his intellectual and spiritual abstraction from the concrete nature of his own country. He looks at the Russian bear, with its ferocity, its love of its own, its determination, its restlessness—all of its characteristics, good and bad—as if it were a set of molecules in motion, not much different in that way from any other creature in the forest. His hopes for Russia were indistinguishable from the hopes of secular intellectuals in the West: “infinite scientific progress; universal (in other words not national) education for all; the need to overstep the bounds of national sovereignty, a single world legislation; a supranational world government; and economic development that mustn’t remain within the purview of the nation,” which must not “be in charge of its own way of life.” “What must such a worldview inevitably come down to? Nothing but ‘human rights,’ of course”—specifically a “human-rights ideology,” or “rights elevated”—some might say degraded—to “the rank of an ideology.” But ideas unmoored to the realities of life in a specific community can only derange any community they attempt to rule, and fail to rule; they amount to “our old friend anarchism.” But as the pre-revolutionary statesman Pyotr Stolypin understood, alone among his generation of Russian politicians, “civil society cannot be created before citizens are, and it is not the freeing up of rights that can cure an organism comprising a sick state and a sick people but, before that, medical treatment of the whole organism.”  Sakharov averred that true “homeland is freedom,” offering a ‘modern’ parallel to the apolitical Roman-Epicurean mot, “Where I am happy, there is my homeland.” “But if homeland is nothing more than freedom” (or nothing more than happiness), “why the different word?” 

“So much unites Sakharov and me: we were the same age, in the same country; we both rose up at the same time, uncompromising against the prevailing system, fought our battles at the same time and were vilified at the same time by a baying press; and we both called not for revolution but for reforms.” All this notwithstanding, “What divided us was—Russia.” Russia as distinct from the West, as distinct as Orthodox Christianity is from Roman Catholicism and the Protestantism of Wittenberg and Geneva, and as distinct as all forms of Christianity are from the ideology of modern scientism. 

Against the ethos of the modern West, in Europe, in America, and among ‘modernized’ Russians, Solzhenitsyn did not retreat but rather advanced into his own thinking and writing—advanced by returning to the men and women of the revolutionary time. The most important dimension of his exile in the United States is also the hardest to convey to readers, namely, the experience of writing The Red Wheel. The historical figures who peopled his novel preoccupied not only his waking thoughts but his dreams. He had vivid dreams of Czar Nikolai II, dreams in which he discussed Russian foreign policy and the royal succession (“he shook his head sadly that no, [his son] Aleksei could not rule as czar”). He dreamt of generals and agitators, monarchists and Bolsheviks. There was nothing mystical in this: “Surely this was bound to happen when I was spending hours looking at pictures of them, pondering them, thinking myself into their characters.” “For me, they had become the most contemporary of contemporaries and I lived with them day in, day out for weeks and months at a time, an many I quite simply loved as I wrote their chapters. How could it be otherwise?” At the same time, every character must be inserted, as in life, into “the framework of events” as they actually occurred. “If an author sets himself no such objective, all he can do is surrender to an irresponsible play of the imagination.” Irresponsibility was never Solzhenitsyn’s moral métier, it may be safely said.

Given his capacious yet intense, precisely focused spiritual and intellectual task, all the more dispiriting was the response of American literati and journalists to the translations of Solzhenitsyn’s previous work, much of it now appearing in English for the first time. While the new edition of The Oak and the Calf, his memoir of his years struggling against Communism while living in Russia, evoked “dead, dogmatic formulas” of condemnation from the Soviet press, this “mechanical” critique suggested “no personal animosity towards me,” only the reflexive defense of a nearly played-out regime, an empty ritual. But “I was not inveighed against with such bile, such personal, passionate hate, as I was now by America’s pseudo-intellectual elite.” Solzhenitsyn challenged their unimpeachable moralistic amoralism, their moral relativism. How, they demanded indignantly, “could I be so certain I was right”? Does Solzhenitsyn not know that “no one is in possession of the truth, indeed the truth cannot exist in nature, all ideas have equal rights”? “And since I do have that certainty, I must imagine myself a messiah.” “Here is the cavernous rift between the Western Enlightenment’s sense of the world and the Christian one.”

How to respond? Ignore it, as much as possible. “I easily resisted the temptation in the West to become a mere exhibit, a tub-thumper,” a ‘public intellectual.’ “I buried myself in my work, I didn’t bother anyone.” That didn’t stop the noise from “the irrepressible gutter press,” by which Solzhenitsyn doesn’t mean the gossip mags (which, thankfully, mostly passed him over for the more profitable targets, the celebrity entertainers and politicians) but the “creeping host,” the popular press—such publications as Paris-Match, France-Soir, and Stern, their reporters (as it were) annoying him with their “petty scurrying”—with their “tiny sorties on so many little legs,” a “creeping horde” of untiring writer-ants. “In any corner of the earth, any degenerate reporter can write any lies whatsoever about me—this is what their sacred freedom consists of! their sacred democracy! How am I to live here?” Worse, the lies in the Western press were more likely to be believed than those of the notoriously propagandistic Soviet press. To this were added frivolous but draining lawsuits by persons eager to tap into those newly-available publications royalties. 

True, it was not the Gulag. “What was this compared to the fact that others of my fellow-countrymen were being oppressed every day?” Yet no real writer can fail to understand. “The insignificance of the conflict compared to the work in hand was the killer. Indeed, that’s what they mean by it’s not the sea that drowns you but the puddle. It was the Western puddle now.” And that “puddle” might grow into a sea, “deluging not just me but the whole of Russia in waves of calumny, setting the all-too-ready West against her.” Or, shifting metaphors, “convincing the West that Russia and Communism had the same relationship as a sick man and his disease was clearly not in my power.” The “policy-makers” in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin “actually understand [this] very well; they just won’t say it out loud,” for fear of offending the professional ginners-up of public opinion, ever aiming at flattering their readers’ sense of superiority to those benighted Russians. “The only efforts it’s sensible to make are very moderate: to create, in whatever way possible, a more benign attitude to the real Russia.” With the election of Ronald Reagan to the U. S. presidency in 1980, a man who well understood the difference between Russia and its current regime, a man who understood the regime to be transient, the nation long-lasting, Solzhenitsyn hoped for a step forward in this task. Unfortunately, one of Reagan’s principal foreign-policy advisers, Richard Pipes, had made his academic bones by propounding the thesis that Russia produced Russian Communism, that the regime followed logically from the state. Pipes delayed and eventually helped to block a proposed meeting between Solzhenitsyn and the president.

In Part Three Solzhenitsyn chronicles the core years of the Reagan Administration, 1982-1987. He began them with visits to Japan and Taiwan, rimland bulwarks against the Communist regimes in Moscow and Peking. “In Japan, I discovered that you cannot fall in love with a country if its food is incompatible with you.” He also found Japanese religiosity perplexing. “The Japanese use Shintoism for all their happy occasions—but Buddhism for anything sad, and for funerals. All Japan’s cemeteries are Buddhist; there is no other kind.” He asks, “Is this an encouraging sign for the future of humanity, or a recognition that both religions are inadequate?” Both exemplify “divine worship,” and “undoubtedly” so. But in visiting the shrines he experienced “a pervasive sense of extreme otherness, an abyss between us.” “What is God’s intent” in separating the human race by religion? He remarks the presence of Orthodox believers, finding it “touching to see Japanese people in an Orthodox church and to hear our hymns in Japanese.” Many Western readers will be equally moved, as they do not know that Solzhenitsyn was a ‘liberal’ when it came to religious toleration, though scarcely a relativist.

Still, the foreignness of Japan struck him. “I traveled to Japan hoping to make sense of the Japanese character; its self-restraint, industriousness, and capacity for small-scale but intensive work. But, oddly, I experienced there an insurmountable alienation. Just you try and understand them.” He satisfied himself with attempting to convince them that Communist China wasn’t a land of peace, debating former Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Shinsaku Högen, who claimed that “China was a kindred country to Japan, and Communism there was not all that dangerous” because the Chinese “are a very intelligent people,” one “moving in the direction of progress.” For his part, Solzhenitsyn “sought passionately to prove that it was just the same kind of Communism as in the Soviet Union, that Communism was the same the world over.” From the vantage point of nearly forty years later, one can see that the Chinese Communists were indeed more intelligent than the Russian ones, but their notion of progress consists in keeping the Chinese Communist Party firmly in power, and in expanding that power assiduously, by no means neglecting military power.

In Taiwan, the food was better and so was the reception, his hosts having had every reason to share Solzhenitsyn’s revulsion at Chinese Communism. No Shintoism there—only Buddhism, whose “pursuit of immensity and quantity is hard to understand; I cannot grasp how it is connected to the transience of existence, which they preach.” And of course Confucianism, which reminded Solzhenitsyn a bit of Tolstoy. Although the Taiwanese responded to his anti-Communist message with enthusiasm, the president was too cautious to meet with him, fearful of needlessly offending Peking or Moscow. “The Taiwan government would like to achieve success without taking any risks.” In his speech he hinted that the United States might someday abandon Taiwan (Americans were still optimistic about relations with ‘the Mainland’), and it would be a bold thing to deny that possibility, even as Americans have awakened themselves to the malignity of the regime there.

Completing his journey to three geostrategic island nations, Solzhenitsyn went to Great Britain, meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She set him straight on the preponderance of nuclear forces favoring the Soviets, saying that a rapid buildup by the West would solve that problem; by 1987, as he wrote this section, he saw that “with Reagan’s help, she turned out to be right.” He wanted to criticize her for defending the minor British colony on the Falkland Islands against seizure by the current Argentine despot, thinking that “this insignificant bit of land” could hardly be worth the bloodshed on both sides. But as always his capacity for imagining himself ‘into’ the person in front of him prevailed: “Thatcher had such an awful cold and such a hoarse voice that I couldn’t launch that debate.” He chalks up her policy to “personal pride” and a desire for “success for her party” in the impending parliamentary elections.” “I left feeling a bitter sympathy for her,” but determining to “abandon all hope of ever urging any politician to make ethical decisions.” He was right not to engage her, but it isn’t hard to see Thatcher’s defense, indeed on moral grounds. If the Conservative Party government was leading to British economic revival and to successful resistance to Soviet plans for Europe (as it was), and a Conservative Party electoral victory was indispensable to the continuation of her government (as it was), and if what Solzhenitsyn calls a “fine and noble” relinquishment of the Falklands was likely to hurt her party’s chances (as she evidently thought), then why was the Falklands War not an important act in fighting the Soviet regime Solzhenitsyn deplored? 

“On the way back from England, Alya and I came to a firm agreement: now, finally, I would draw inward to work.” No more traveling, no more interviews. “Not a peep!” “Falling silent was also right for another reason: who was I to judge the West? I’d neither devoted my full attention to studying it nor observed it much at first hand.” [5] Far from the self-righteous ‘messiah’-figure his enemies depicted, Solzhenitsyn came away from his experience of foreign countries, East and West, with a deepened Christian humility. “I’ve fallen silent since 1983—towards both sides” in the Cold War. “In actual fact, the problems of the twentieth century cannot all be laid at the door of current politics,” anyway; “they’re a legacy of the three preceding centuries.” Only in the welcome, “boundless silence” of his home in exile, in the Vermont woods, could he read, write, deepen and refine his thoughts, work with his wife (“my soulmate”), consider his boys as they grew up in America but with an eye toward returning to their native country. “I still have my full strength—it must have been given me for a reason.”

Although Solzhenitsyn intended to withdraw from contemporary controversies, his enemies had other ideas, preferring to drag him in. He describes this aspect of his struggle with the apt phrase, “ordeal by tawdriness.” “Tawdriness is the preferred weapon of baseness, when outright violence is unavailable.” The Soviet rulers assassinated characters when they could not assassinate persons, a technique Lenin taught them, one he had learned from reading Marx. It was hardly unknown in the West, as seen in the work of Solzhenitsyn’s American biographer, Michael Scammel. “Uniformly lacking in elevated emotional and intellectual understanding,” taking “a low view of lofty subjects,” Scammel proceeded by two methods: first “to reduce my actions, movement, feelings, and intentions to the mediocre”—motives “that make most sense to the biographer himself”; second, to side with Solzhenitsyn’s detractors on all key issues, “probably not out of malice towards me but because, by his reckoning, it’s the best way to secure” the ‘sane and balanced,’ ‘even-handed’ stance of objectivity. In other words, Scammel was a journalist. So, for example, in Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to meet the celebrated Jean-Paul Sartre, a shameless apologist for a then-quirky brand of Marxism-cum-Heideggerianism which has now come into its own in the European and North American universities, Solzhenitsyn ‘must’ have been motivated by “a combination of pride and timidity.” “He doesn’t allow that I might have simply despised Sartre.”

From the ‘Left,’ the ubiquitous Sinyavsky never let up, calling Solzhenitsyn “a cancer on Russian culture” and insinuating that he was a warmongering anti-Semitic religious fanatic. This sort of thing even reached the floor of the United States Congress, where the solons reasoned along these lines: Solzhenitsyn has defended Stolypin; Stolypin was assassinated by Dmitri Bogrov, who was Jewish; Solzhenitsyn has condemned Bogrov; ergo, Solzhenitsyn must be anti-Semitic. The syllogism isn’t air-tight, but America’s Radio Liberty, which broadcast into the Soviet Union, was reprimanded for reading portions of August 1914 on air, thus presenting the work of an author who (in the locution of one Congressman) could be perceived as anti-Semitic.

Meanwhile, from the ‘Right,’ a much less prominent writer, Lev Navrozov, whose main journalistic outlet was the widely-unread New York City Tribune, managed to mount a conspiracy theory according to which Solzhenitsyn was really a Soviet Fifth Columnist, a KGB plant sent out to deceive the West. “Right-leaning America was rattled, became alarmed—and began to distance itself from that Solzhenitsyn.” I rather think Solzhenitsyn exaggerates Navrozov’s influence, but this is understandable. First, the firmly anti-communist Tribune may have had many New York City Russian émigrés in its readership. More important, “Alya suffered from this constant assault on us—suffered acutely,” as he, “unlike me,” “felt she really lived in this country” as the one who packed the children off to school in what was for them “their only country,” and where they heard questions and perhaps taunts from their classmates. Despite their agreement in 1982, by 1986 “Alya wanted me now to start actively defending myself.”

It was the Soviet regime that came to the rescue, unintentionally and sooner than expected. Even timely. A massive effort such as The Red Wheel may be easy to start, but it is damnably hard to finish—not only in the sheer volume of work involved, but in knowing when to stop the narrative. In a sense, he might have taken it to August 1918, a full four years after the ‘guns of August’ precipitated the events leading to revolution. But no: “By May 1917,” five months before the Bolsheviks took control, “the liberal ‘February fever'”—the euphoric intoxication of the people after the overthrow of czarism and the apparent triumph of democracy—was “utterly supine, sickly, doomed—anyone could come along and seize power, and the Bolsheviks did.” He could finish the novel with April 1917. Clearly, this would mean finishing the book with stern warning against precipitous democratization when Communism in Russia would join its czarist enemy in the proverbial dustbin of history. 

By the middle of 1986 the Solzhenitsyns were hearing reports of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s apparent preparations for as yet unspecified changes in the country. He seemed to be attempting to gather support from writers (Communist Party loyalists, to be sure) for reform. “What on earth was going on?” “A new way of life,” Alya ventured to say. He released Sakharov, although it was true that the physicist had announced his opposition to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. ‘Star Wars,’ as his adversary Senator Edward Kennedy called it, adroitly making a defensive weapons program sound like a preparation for warfare waged from outer space. Nonetheless, Solzhenitsyn sensed “the internally driven collapse of Communism,” which he had long predicted—death from premature decrepitude, because its earthly ‘religion’ has proved short on spiritual endurance; “the pool of willing sacrifices for the sake of a radiant future has run out and, resting on their laurels, both bosses and foremen have turned swinelike.” And the economy had failed. Indeed, Gorbachev’s “only success has been his cult in the West,” a cult that has maintained itself in the subsequent decades.

“Will God allow us to return to our homeland, allow us to serve? And will it be at a time of its new collapse, or of a sublime reordering?” With this dyad (we can now see) Solzhenitsyn was too ‘apocalyptic.’ Neither utter collapse nor sublimity awaited; reordering did, but it has proven unsublime. Having served as “a sword of division” (as a Christian often will do) for so many years, Solzhenitsyn hoped now “to bring together everyone” his heart could reach, “to act as a hoop binding Russian together.” “That, after all, is the real task.”

In the final section of his book, Solzhenitsyn recounts the event of 1987-1994, the year of his family’s return to Russia. But before departing from Part Three, two additional insights Solzhenitsyn came to during those years demand attention—one spiritual, the other moral. While preparing a speech in response to receiving the Templeton Prize (established “to call attention to a variety of persons who have found new ways to increase man’s love of God or man’s understanding of God,” according to the brochure he received), he determined to use the occasion to deepen his own “understanding [of] earthly life as a stage in the development of eternal life,” aiming at ending one’s earthly life “on a morally higher level than that dictated by one’s innate qualities.” In this, “a fellow countryman came to my aid,” Igor Sigorsky, the aircraft designer, “who also happened to be interested in the philosophy of creation.” Sharing Solzhenitsyn’s mathematical and scientific background, Sikorsky suggested a train of thought that led Solzhenitsyn to “grasp why suicide is such a great sin: it is the voluntary interruption of growth”—of the spiritual growth attained by facing our suffering squarely and opening our soul to God—the “pushing away of God’s hand,” the hand that would injure us for our own good, then guide us toward seeing that suffering prepares mind and heart for God, for precisely that task of moral heightening, of overcoming the sins that beset every human soul.  

On a major moral issue that came under heightened scrutiny during the Reagan years, Solzhenitsyn considers nuclear weapons. The West, America particularly, “had immorally introduced the atom bomb to the world—when they were already victorious!—and dropped it on a civilian population.” As so often with Solzhenitsyn, however, he brings an important nuance to this often-heard criticism. In his Templeton address “I came out against” U.S. “nuclear achievements” and indeed against “the whole idea of a nuclear umbrella.” At the same time, and unlike the ‘nuclear freeze’ advocates in the United States and the anti-nuclear protestors in Western Europe (the latter obviously “being fueled by the Soviets”), he argued that that “the moment it reached for the diabolical gift of the nuclear bomb, the West went out of its mind” in the sense that such “fine men of the West” as Bertrand Russell, George Kennan, Averell Harriman, and dozens of others” started to urge “their compatriots to make more, more, and still more concessions to Communism, anything to ensure there was no nuclear war.” “I never believed there would be: it would obliterate the Creator’s plan for humanity.” But it might lead to the moral and political collapse of Western resistance to the Soviet empire.

Instead, however, it was that empire which collapsed, an empire ruled by the charming but inept Mikhail Gorbachev. (“He had nothing—just the inertia of Communist Party succession.”) “Gorbachev was giving speeches laden with promises, but clinging on frantically to Party power and the banner of Lenin.” It should have been obvious to anyone with an acquaintance with the history of the Soviet Union that Gorbachev’s so-called economic liberalization was nothing more than a dusted-off version of Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s—window-dressing gestures toward capitalism intended to draw in Western investors, who alone could prop up a failing socialism. And this went on with more than a hint of Stalinism lurking in the wings, if needed: Gorbachev “had entrusted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the head torturer of the Georgian KGB.” The centerpieces of Gorbachev’s propaganda campaign were “Perestroika” (“restructuring”) and “Glasnost” (“openness”). “No one, it seemed, even in the Soviet Union, understood what, exactly, [perestroika] consisted of.” Local cooperatives and small village enterprises were envisioned, implemented, but almost immediately dissolved. Meanwhile, in the bureaucracy, “all the old nomenklatura” remained in place, “us[ing] the nation’s wealth to line their own pockets.” Swinelike they may have been, but Gadarenian they were not; they had no intention of throwing themselves off a cliff. “Glasnost” was more promising; Solzhenitsyn had called for it, some twenty years before. And Russians did talk freely. “Yes, they talked, oh how they talked—but was anyone doing anything?” Well, no. “Everything that was being done (apart from Glasnost getting under way) was so insubstantial, shortsighted, or even damaging that it was clear they were beginning to thrash about: they had no idea where to go next”—un-Gadarenian, indeed.

“In the meantime, all over the West, Soviet Perestroika and Glasnost were giving rise to unabated jubilation.” Solzhenitsyn’s silence perplexed the pundits. But it simply registered a discreet refusal to be bamboozled. His own books remained on the proscribed list, a fact that made “openness” look rather less wide-bordered than the Kremlin wanted it to seem. The excuse, as usual, was that Solzhenitsyn was too dangerous to read. As usual, Sinyavsky chimed in, complaining that Solzhenitsyn was “against” Perestroika, although Solzhenitsyn had neither said nor written anything about it. “With renewed vigor the essayist threw himself into an international tour to oppose me, and neglected no opportunity.” Sinyavsky updated his usual tropes: “Solzhenitsyn is the standard-bearer of Russian nationalism!” “He’ll return in triumph and take the lead in a clerical fascist movement!” He “is a racist and monarchist, and in five years he’ll be running Russia!”

For his part, Sakharov attempted more constructive activity, standing for a seat in the new national Congress, where Gorbachev quite literally silenced him on one memorable occasion simply by turning off his microphone. The move backfired. “During the course of the Congress, Sakharov won for himself the role of de facto leader of the opposition,” winning the role of the “persecuted defender” of the Russian people. “Thus the year 1989 marked the finest hour of Sakharov’s life.” Unfortunately, his actual proposals for Russian regime change were ill-conceived. He wanted to replace the over-centralized pseudo-federalism of the Soviet Union with what would have amounted to a loose system of sovereign states, each with its own citizenship, monetary system, armed forces, and police agencies, each “independent of central government” but, tellingly, “subject to the laws of a World Government” and thus not genuinely sovereign at all. As in all ‘act locally, think globally’ formula, this one deprecated the middle ground, the nation-state. “Russia would have been fatally splintered and weakened” by Sakharov’s plan, lacking as it did “even a scintilla of consciousness of Russia’s history and its spiritual experience?” Sakharov died soon afterwards. “In his Christian smile and his sad eyes, something fatal, unavoidable, had always been reflected.”

The Communist regime “had allowed the whole body of our country, its whole population, to become rotten.” In turmoil under these conditions, it isn’t the cream that rises to the top but the “scum.” Preoccupied with his great novel, “I had not rendered any useful assistance against the tumult and confusion of minds in the Soviet Union, either in untangling the mess of ideas or giving practical advice.” Although “the collapse of the Soviet Union was irreversible,” and a good thing, too, “how could we prevent historical Russia also being destroyed in its wake?” Solzhenitsyn’s pithy Rebuilding Russia, which he now wrote, recommended “moral cleansing,” “self-limitation,” and, institutionally, a real not phony reconstruction of local institutions of self-government. [6] Gorbachev condemned the book as, somehow, monarchist, knowing that he could rely on the reputations Solzhenitsyn’s enemies had already constructed both Solzhenitsyn himself and for Gorbachev himself. “I was not too late,” Solzhenitsyn remarks; “I was too early.” Time would indeed tell, whether Gorbachev’s scam would endure.

It didn’t, and Boris Yeltsin ousted Gorbachev. “But Yeltsin could not discern any overarching sense of history, or any of the splendid prospects opened up by this successful coup; it seemed that the only significance he saw in it was his victory over the man he hated, Gorbachev.” Under his less-than-vigilant eye, the rulers of the several ‘republics’ of the ‘federation,’ formerly “Communist masters,” now “turned into fervent nationalists and, one after the other, proclaimed ‘sovereignty and separation'”—reaffirming borders drawn not by the several nations but by Lenin and Stalin, who had deliberately mixed existing nations in order to keep them from launching any successful rebellion against the Soviet Union. 

Of all this, Western journalists remained unknowing. They simply wanted to know if Solzhenitsyn favored what they supposed was “Russia’s move to a market economy.” “Americans are genuinely unaware of the existence of Russia, even before the great October Revolution”—not literally, of course, but in the sense of “the whole mass of Russian history and Russian problems since the end of the nineteenth century,” upon which Solzhenitsyn had spent his life considering. “To Americans, did there exist, apart from the Market, any other characteristic, any trait, any aspect of a nation’s life?” Admittedly knowing America little more than Americans knew Russia, Solzhenitsyn would have found the answer to that question in President Washington’s Farewell Address, had he studied it. There, he would have seen that Americans very often want commercial, not political relations with foreign countries. But this doesn’t prevent them from defending their own political union, which, as Washington shows, consists of much more than a free-trade zone, though it does consist of that.

“In 1992, the gigantic, historic Russian Catastrophe began to unfurl: the nation’s life, morality, and social awareness unraveled, unstoppable; in culture and science rational activity ceased; school education and childcare descended into a fatal state of disorder.” He had “feared this,” but had he foreseen it? “Not this particular form of collapse—no. But I did see that the situation could go astray and become another February [1917]—that had for a long time been my greatest fear.” Together, the rivals Gorbachev and Yeltsin and precipitated and then accelerated the collapse. 

“But just where in Russia were the Russian patriots? Alas!—the patriotic movement these days had become hopelessly entangled with Communism.” This, because initially Stalin had linked the survival of the Communist regime against Hitler’s onslaught to a rhetorical appeal to the defense of the ‘Russian homeland,” a strategy that Communist scoundrels in the several ‘republics,’ including Russia proper, had lately resorted to, giving the world yet another instance of the old riposte about patriotism and scoundrels. For his part, Yeltsin managed to triple the size of the already “ponderous apparatus of the Soviet state,” making it look “like either a monster or a joke.”

In December 1993, at the age of 75, Solzhenitsyn learned that he could return to Russia. But there was one more blow, the worst yet. In March 1918 his oldest son died suddenly, leaving his wife and infant daughter. “We buried him in the Orthodox corner of the ever-green Claremont cemetery” in Vermont. “And so we left a tomb in America. Such was our farewell.”

“I had to get to Russia in time to die there.” And not only to die. “I’m thirsting to get involved in Russian events—I have the energy to get things done.” And he will return to political allies his enemies do not have. “I count as friends the vastnesses of Russia. The Russian provinces. The small and medium-sized towns.” “And if people come to understand Russia’s interests rightly, my books could also be needed much later, when there has been a more profound analysis of the historical process,” an analysis illuminated by the God who will not fail.
 

 

 

Notes

1. Mahoney is the author of the best introduction to Solzhenitsyn’s thought in English: The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth About a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker (Notre Dame: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014).
2. On this website, see “Solzhenitsyn on the Russian Revolution,” a discussion of his March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book I.
3. For discussion see “The Temptation of the West: Solzhenitsyn in America,” on this website.
4. In his own day, V.I. Lenin denounced “the accursed Aesopian language” he had undertaken when writing his anti-czarist polemics in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution; see his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Preface. Such a response to ‘logographic necessity’ is one of the very few commonalities between the Marxist Lenin and the Christian Solzhenitsyn. 
5. This wise self-admonition, like many such, didn’t prove easy to uphold. Some pages later, balking at applying for U.S. citizenship, Solzhenitsyn asks, rhetorically, “Really, what sort of country is America? Naïve (although supposedly so enlightened and democratic): through a clutch of its professional politicians, it blithely betrays itself on a daily basis, yet will fly into a sudden brief fury—but an utterly blind one—and destroy whatever is in its path.” He is thinking especially of such phenomena as vigilante actions by Americans against Russian churches and families in response to Soviet outrages overseas, as when a Russian Orthodox church was vandalized in response to the Soviet destruction of a Korean airliner. “Russian soil may not be accessible to me for a long time to come, perhaps until death, but I cannot sense American soil as my own.”
6. On this website see “Solzhenitsyn on Russian Reconstruction” for discussion of Rebuilding Russia and The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century.