The Magical Chorus

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There were many European and American politicians, especially conservatives, who listened to Solzhenitsyn attentively. In 1976 the election platform of the Republican Party included a reference to Solzhenitsyn as a great beacon of human valor and morality. But when it came to real actions, the Americans were very cautious.

No American president—not Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton—met with Solzhenitsyn; they were not ready for even this symbolic gesture. Reagan did invite Solzhenitsyn to visit the White House in 1982 as part of a large group of other Soviet dissidents, some of them the writer’s implacable foes, which made it unacceptable for Solzhenitsyn; the press reported that the reason the president was not eager to meet separately with Solzhenitsyn was that the writer allegedly was a “symbol of extreme Russian nationalism.”

The real reason for American wariness of Solzhenitsyn was that they did not see any real alternative to negotiating with the Soviet Union, while the writer denounced such dealings as useless and even harmful. In the eyes of Western pragmatists, Solzhenitsyn was acting beyond his area of competence.

When he attacked the Soviet Union and its gulag, it was perceived as a truthful account by a fearless eyewitness and a great writer. But in his interviews and speeches, the most famous being the Harvard graduation address in 1978, Solzhenitsyn started criticizing the West, offering his profoundly conservative advice, and the attitude toward him changed markedly.

The Western press began referring to Solzhenitsyn as an outsider, an old-fashioned moralist, anti-Semite, monarchist, and religious fanatic, and even compared him to the Ayatollah Khomeini. (Many of these arguments came from recent immigrants from Russia; Solzhenitsyn tried to counter them, but in vain.) He repaid the Western press (and more broadly, Western culture as a whole) in kind, accusing it of arrogance, cynicism, irresponsibility, and immorality.

In the end, the gap between the writer and many of the Western intellectuals who had put in a lot of effort to publicize Solzhenitsyn as an international prophet, the new Leo Tolstoy, widened dramatically. By the time perestroika had begun in the Soviet Union, the peak of Solzhenitsyn’s influence in the West was behind him.

Back home, however, Solzhenitsyn’s reputation was higher than ever. Gorbachev was wary of him but was forced by public opinion to appear better disposed toward the writer, and in the fall of 1989 the Politburo gave permission to publish The Gulag Archipelago in the journal Novy Mir, where Tvardovsky had printed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962.

The subscription to Novy Mir instantly rose to 2,710,000. Sergei Zalygin, the editor, hurried to declare 1990 “the year of Solzhenitsyn,” proudly stating: “This concentration on a single author has perhaps not been known in any literature before and will not be known again.”³³

Fourteen years before that moment, in the West, Solzhenitsyn had predicted that if his Gulag Archipelago were widely distributed in the Soviet Union, “things would get very tough for the Communist ideology in a very short time.” As it happened, Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work became widely available to Soviet readers at a time when that ideology was already crumbling. That is why it is difficult to assess accurately the degree to which Archipelago’s publication (it sold a hundred thousand copies in book form in 1990, too) helped Yeltsin’s victory and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Solzhenitsyn imagined Soviet readers to still be the way he had known them many years earlier, when every important book was pored over by the public, read thoroughly and thoughtfully and then discussed heatedly. In the new reality, readers were bombarded by formerly banned and “subversive” books and were restless and inattentive. In addition, the pitched battle in politics, covered round the clock by television, also distracted even the most fervent book lovers.

Solzhenitsyn’s long stay in exile was an obstacle as well. The loss of contact was bilateral. The writer had spent his eighteen years in Vermont in great isolation, working up to fourteen hours a day. In all those years, he came to the phone only a few times, he claimed; the connection with the outside world was maintained by his indefatigable wife, Natalya.

Neither Leo Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana nor even Gorky, when he was on Capri, lived in such isolation. Therefore, they had a better idea of the evolution of their Russian audience. Also, both understood how the capitalist press worked (Gorky had been a reporter in his youth) and how to use it.

Eighty-year-old Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana readily received correspondents even from tabloids, if he felt he needed to express his position on a current issue, and he did not take offense at their pushiness. But Solzhenitsyn stopped giving interviews in 1983, explaining huffily, “I realized that no one was asking for my criticism and that I was wasting my time, which is precious to me, on nothing. I decided: enough, from now on I will concentrate only on my literary work.”³⁴

Solzhenitsyn’s political manifestos in the Soviet period had one serious flaw: there was no clear addressee. Solzhenitsyn as polemicist worked in one genre, appeals urbi et orbi. His statements could have a powerful public resonance when they appeared (also leaving potentially fascinating material for future historians), but their immediate practical effect usually remained nil. That was the fate of Solzhenitsyn’s famous texts “Letter to the Soviet Leaders”(1973) and “Live Not By Lies!”(1974).

A similar fate befell his next important manifesto, Rebuilding Russia [in Russian, How Shall We Organize Russia?], when he finally decided to break his silence for the first time in the years of perestroika. He finished the long article in the summer of 1990 and immediately responded to the invitation of Prime Minister of Russia Ivan Silayev to come to Moscow (he declined then, feeling it was premature) by asking him to publish his latest manifesto in a large edition.

His not-so-subtle hint was picked up instantly and Rebuilding Russia was printed simultaneously in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta, with a total circulation of twenty-seven million. Solzhenitsyn’s manifesto could be purchased at any newspaper kiosk in the land for a few kopecks. The writer later admitted that he “had never dreamed” of something like that. For the government, which still had direct control of the leading publications, it was a generous gesture, which, as it became clear, obliged it to nothing.

The ideas Solzhenitsyn expressed in Rebuilding Russia were radical for the times: he proposed liquidating the Communist Party, getting rid of the KGB, moving to a market economy, and privatizing land. His main point was immediately disbanding the Soviet Union, giving independence to the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Instead of the Soviet empire, the author proposed creating a new Russian Union that would include Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia, as well as the northern regions of Kazakhstan, settled by Russians.

The implementation of these ideas would be in the hands of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, but none of its leading factions supported Solzhenitsyn’s proposals in the fall of 1990—they did not suit Gorbachev, who was trying to preserve the Soviet Union, nor the political elites of Ukraine, Belorussia, or Kazakhstan. Solzhenitsyn’s article was rejected almost without discussion by both Communists and democrats.