The Greatness of Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008)

David Aikman

A Second Look

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a gadfly Soviet poet prominent in the 1950s and 1960s, described Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as “our only living classic.” Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist and author, not often given to hyperbole, described him as, quite simply, “the greatest man now alive in the world.” British newspaper columnist Bernard Levin wrote, “A single man with no power—he wasn’t a king, a dictator, a general—but with the power of the moral force of his own will and beliefs and character, has compelled the world to listen to him.”

As the tributes to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died in Moscow the first weekend in August, continue to pour in, the Russian writer will be most vividly remembered for who he was and what he represented in the 1960s and 1970s. Starting with his short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, a searing portrayal of a typical—actually better-than-average day in the life of a prisoner in the Soviet gulag—Solzhenitsyn insisted on bringing Soviet citizenry and Soviet political leadership face-to-face with their complicity in one of the greatest crimes against humanity in the twentieth century. That novel, and his second and third novels, First Circle, and Cancer Ward respectively, shone a searing literary light on the inferno that Lenin and Stalin’s political system had constructed in the Soviet Union. First Circle, not surprisingly, was a title deliberately chosen from Dante’s own Inferno.

The story of Solzhenitsyn’s battle with the Soviet authorities and the Soviet regime in all its clumsy thuggishness has been told many times. At first lionized for One Day because Khrushchev was still struggling to de-Stalinize the Soviet Communist Party, Solzhenitsyn fell afoul of a changing Soviet political climate after Khrushchev was ousted from power in 1964 and replaced by Brezhnev. The new Soviet leader wanted as little as possible changed in Soviet life. Angered and emboldened by KGB pressure on him, his family, and his faithful manuscript keepers, Solzhenitsyn became increasingly confrontational with the authorities in the 1960s, publishing book after book overseas. The last straw for the Kremlin was the 1973 publication in Western Europe of The Gulag Archipelago, the brilliantly detailed portrayal of the gulag system in all its capricious cruelty. The Soviets in early 1974 literally bundled him onto an Aeroflot airliner about to leave Moscow for Frankfurt. Thus began his exile in the West.

A definite sea change in attitudes towards Solzhenitsyn took place during his twenty years of life outside of Russia, eighteen of which were spent in the rural hamlet of Cavendish, Vermont. In 1978, he had polarized American intellectual elites with his Harvard commencement address, “A World Split Apart.” Conservatives warmed to his biting portrayal of American popular culture and media practices, in all their superficiality and crassness, while liberals were deeply offended by his criticism of the press and his apparently ill-tempered lack of appreciation for the rough-and-tumble of the American society in its exuberant energy. The New York Times, in one of its sillier editorials, characterized his worldview as “dangerous.” The Washington Post went ever further off the rails, saying that Solzhenitsyn was advocating “boundless cold war.” As we shall see, nothing could have been further from the truth.

When I first met Solzhenitsyn for an interview in Vermont in May of 1989, he had probably gotten over the hysterical criticism that cascaded onto his head after his Harvard speech, but he was now having to deal with new accusations of anti-Semitism. These stemmed from his portrayal of Bogrov, the Jewish assassin of Russian Prime Minister Stolypin in a revised edition of his novel August 1914. Some critics thought that, by getting inside the head of Bogrov, Solzhenitsyn was generalizing about Jewish thought processes as inherently conspiratorial and revolutionary.

I was nervous before the interview. Arranging it had been a complicated process, and the only way to reach the Solzhenitsyn estate in Vermont was to follow the car of Solzhenitsyn’s American secretary to the main entrance. The general store where the rendezvous took place displayed prominently a sign reading, “No restrooms, no bare feet, no directions to the Solzhenitsyns.” I was steeling myself inwardly to make the acquaintance of a Russian Jeremiah.

In person, however, Solzhenitsyn turned out to be full of energy, warm, humorous, and hospitable. He made his points seated at a work table in his writing room, speaking in a high tenor voice in precise Russian, his piercing blue eyes boring into me as he spoke. Speaking of the anti-Semitism issue, he said this: “It would be impossible to have any anti-Semitism in any genuinely artistic work. No real artist could be prejudiced toward any entire nation without destroying the artistic integrity of his entire work.” Out of modesty he omitted to mention that his wife’s mother was Jewish, that one of his closest friends in the gulag, Lev Kopelev, was himself Jewish and had totally repudiated any characterizations of Solzhenitsyn as anti-Semitic. Kopelev, in fact, had actually been the one to introduce the manuscript Shch-262 (Solzhenitsyn’s gulag number and the initial title of One Day) to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Solzhenitsyn’s first publisher at the literary periodical Novy Mir. Yet the controversy about his attitude towards Russia’s Jews (as opposed to the entire global ethnic Jewish community) became active after his return to Russia in his 2001–2 book on the Russian-Jewish connection, Two Hundred Years Together.

In my interview with him, Solzhenitsyn declined to speak of the momentous changes then taking place in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev or about the apparent weakening of the control of Communism in Eastern Europe. But in 1994, when I next spoke with the writer on his return trip to Russia, he was more forthright. In Khabarovsk close to the Russian Far Eastern border with China, he made it clear he had no sympathy for Vladimir Zhirinovsky, then a leader of the Russian nationalist ultra-right. The man, he said, was “an evil caricature of a Russian patriot.”

Solzhenitsyn planned his return to Russia carefully, taking advantage of an offer by the BBC to finance a train trip from Khabarovsk to Moscow over several days in return for exclusive journalistic coverage on the train. Once he had been welcomed back to Moscow by former admirers, however, it was clear that most ordinary Russians no longer considered him relevant to their lives. They wanted consumer prosperity and the glitter of capitalism, the very things that had repulsed Solzhenitsyn when he was in the U.S.

In fact, at the official level, Solzhenitsyn had already become something of a living monument in his native Russia. President Boris Yeltsin welcomed him enthusiastically, but Solzhenitsyn didn’t return the warmth; he was in despair at the greed and anarchy that seemed to have engulfed Russia after the collapse of Communism. In 2007, the writer did agree to receive from Vladimir Putin the highest civilian award of Russia, the State Prize of the Russian Federation. Solzhenitsyn admired Putin for bringing prosperity to Russia and restoring her great-power status in the world, but he was never uncritical of the Russian autocrat’s attitude towards political opponents.

The greatest of all misconceptions about Solzhenitsyn—which have surfaced in some of the obituaries—is that he was a Russian nationalist, a sort of sentimental Orthodox Christian chauvinist. Nothing could be further from the truth. In his 1994 book, The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century, he reiterated a theme that occurs again and again in his writings: nations, like individuals, have moral responsibilities towards their own citizens and towards other nations. “We must build a moral Russia, or none at all,” he wrote.

When I interviewed Solzhenitsyn for the third and last time, it was in 1995 in the very same Moscow apartment where he had been seized by the KGB in 1974 and bundled out of the Soviet Union. He was keen to show me how the car that came to take him away had been driven so close to the apartment front entrance that its open back door blocked all escape routes. He seemed less patient and relaxed than he had been back in Vermont. But once again, he returned to his theme of the need for people living in freedom to exercise a moral responsibility towards the truth. He thought Russia should express repentance for the cruelties it had exacted as a Communist regime on its own people and the peoples that had been conquered by Soviet power. Then he quoted from scripture. “’You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free,’ he said, citing John 8:32.

“It is fascinating, astounding. What does this mean? It means that the path to freedom lies not in the fact that the parliament made a law of greater freedom today, but [rather] that you have to go through the truth. And if you go through truth just a little then you will no longer say things such as, “Well, if the people are good, truth doesn’t matter.”

Just a few months after I spoke with Solzhenitsyn in Moscow, another great moral contemporary of his who had also come to maturity under Communism, the Polish Pope John Paul II, used almost exactly the same words in his speech to the UN General Assembly in New York. “Freedom is ordered to the truth,” he said, “and is fulfilled in man’s quest for truth and in man’s living in the truth. Detached from the truth about the human person, freedom deteriorates into license in the lives of individuals, and in political life, it becomes the caprice of the most powerful and the arrogance of power.”

Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech, far from being merely a cranky list of complaints about America’s shortcomings (though Solzhenitsyn could indeed be cranky) was a cry of dismay at the perilous state the world was now in because of the discordant rates of human development in different parts of it. A careful reading of it shows that Solzhenitsyn was aware of a profound degree of mutual incomprehension afflicting the human race, an incomprehension heightened by the apparent ubiquitous global triumph of Western values. It is unlikely that the Russian writer had any inkling of the explosion of violent Islamism around the world in the 1990s. But he seems to have grasped intuitively the dangerous conflagration likely to arise from the encounter of traditional, tightly held belief systems with modernity. In his Nobel speech of 1970 (transmitted to Stockholm as a manuscript but not delivered by Solzhenitsyn because he feared he would not be permitted to return to Russia) he warned of the dangers of a humanity that had failed to learn key, tragic lessons of human behavior. He wrote then,

“Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification.”

It’s probable that Solzhenitsyn had in mind the rising tide of leftist, revolutionary violence that seemed to be triumphing in many parts of the world the second half of the 1970s. Yet his words of thirty-eight years ago have an eerily prophetic wing in light of the emergence of global Islamism today. “Dostoevsky’s DEVILS,” the Nobel address continued (in a reference to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils, sometimes also called The Possessed, which delves into the murderous activities of nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries), “apparently a provincial nightmare fantasy of the last century, are crawling across the whole world in front of our very eyes, infesting countries where they could not have been dreamed of; and by means of the hijackings, kidnappings, explosions, and fires of recent years they are announcing their determination to shake and destroy civilization!”

Solzhenitsyn was in no sense an advocate of socialism or of politically correct multiculturalism, and even less of the craven attitude he detected in some Western leaders towards bullying Soviet Communism. What he decried was the arrogance of contemporary Western secular civilization, to which, he said, the twentieth century had brought “the clear realization of this [Western] society’s fragility.” The West, he said in his Harvard speech in 1978, had become so blind to its sense of superiority to the rest of the world that it was displaying an “incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this.”

The accuracy of Solzhenitsyn’s assessments of Western incomprehension of other parts of the world was displayed within only a few months of the Harvard speech when Iran, a major U.S. ally in the Middle East, astonished the best analysts of the American government by falling in January 1979 to Islamic revolutionaries led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

What was Solzhenitsyn’s prescription for avoiding future debacles of this kind? A certain cultural humility, he wrote, a willingness to admit, and even repent of past national mistakes, a breadth of comprehension of the differing pace of development in global cultures and the reluctance of many of them to mimic unquestioningly the secular triumphalism of the West.

I asked Solzhenitsyn in 1995 whether he felt he had personally fulfilled his life’s calling. “At the end of my life,” he replied, “I will have fulfilled my debt.”

Debt? What debt? Then I realized that by “debt,” Solzhenitsyn meant everything fellow-prisoners had taught him about life, philosophy, faith, and Russia in the Soviet gulag. Did he, in a certain way, “cherish” his ghastly experience in the camps, I had asked him in 1989? “Yes,” he replied, “because in those circumstances human nature becomes very much more visible. I was very lucky to have been in the camps—and especially to have survived.”

What a man. What an example. What a loss.  

Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.

Features, Arts and Culture, Being Human, Character and Ethics, Public Square, David Aikman, Mon 11 Aug 2008