The Magical Chorus

me.”⁵³ Solzhenitsyn summarized it all in 2000 even more forcefully: “There is nothing left that had not been ruined or embezzled.”⁵⁴

Yeltsin, unlike Gorbachev, truly did want to end the Communist regime in Russia. But like Gorbachev, he often improvised, with disastrous results. Masses of people were impoverished and disillusioned in the concepts of democracy and the market economy. The crash of liberal ideals led to words like “democrap” and “piratization.” In the new ideological vacuum, as it had been at the turn of the century, bearded (and shaven) intellectuals diligently set about finding national identity, the elusive “Russian idea.”

Early in perestroika the philosophical works of the great fumbler Berdyaev, who died in exile in France in 1948, became fashionable. His book The Russian Idea, written during World War II, defined the main trait of the Slavic soul as religious Messianism: “The Russian nation was not a nation of culture primarily, as were the nations of Western Europe, it was more a nation of revelations and inspiration, it knew no measure and easily fell into extremism.”⁵⁵ But Berdyaev with his essays on Russian ambivalence always looked suspiciously cosmopolitan to nationalists.

Some of them now made historian Lev Gumilev (1912–1992) their new idol. The son of two famous poets— Nikolai Gumilev, who was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921, and Akhmatova—he was a complex, truly tragic figure. I met him in 1966, after Akhmatova’s death. As a young violin student at Leningrad Conservatory, I was asked to select music for the memorial service at the Writers’ Union. I suggested Bach, knowing how much she loved his music. Gumilev, who resembled Picasso and rolled his Rs, countered aggressively: “No, only Russian Orthodox composers!” As a compromise I played Prokofiev’s First Violin Sonata; naturally, neither Gumilev nor I could have known then that the Eurasianist composer was a follower of Christian Science.

Lev Gumilev was arrested four times—as he and most people presumed, because of the anti-Soviet stance of his parents—and he spent a total of fourteen years in prisons and camps, during which time he developed an original theory of ethnogenesis, according to which the biological dominant in the development of a nation was its passionarnost’ (“passionarity”), which he explained as a heightened drive to exploits and self-sacrifice, created by the influence of the biosphere.

Gumilev liked to boast that the idea of passionarity (“like all ideas of genius,” he would add with a chuckle) came to him in the camp. According to him, “every ethnos appears as the result of a certain explosion of passionarity, then, gradually losing it, enters a period of inertia, which ends eventually with the ethnos breaking down.”⁵⁶ He defined the lifespan of an ethnos as approximately fifteen hundred years, and contemporary Russia, he suggested, was close to the inertia phase, which would give her in the near future “three hundred years of a golden autumn, an era of harvest, when the ethnos leaves behind a unique culture for coming generations.”⁵⁷

This comforting idea, popular in the post-Communist chaos, had Eurasianist roots. Gumilev positioned Russia between Europe and Asia, in a role of uniting force, and insisted that Russia had always been on good terms with the Turks and Mongols: he believed that the Mongol invasions in the eighth century and later were not the historical disasters textbooks made them out to be. This made some traditionalists call Gumilev a Russophobe, but on the other hand, it was useful for the influential opponents of closer ties with the West. They repeated Gumilev’s casual phrase that the “Turks and Mongols can be sincere friends, while the English, French, and Germans, I am certain, can only be cunning exploiters.”⁵⁸

Contemporary Eurasianists call for the creation of a new empire on the ruins of the Soviet Union, with Russia at its center. The United States is the great Satan for the neo-Eurasianists, and they see the mission of the Russian people as stopping the American-sponsored expansion of the Western liberal model of economic and cultural development.⁵⁹ They propose creating new geopolitical axes: Moscow–Beijing, Moscow–Dehli, and Moscow–Tehran, and also uniting with the Arab world. Consequently, they argue, Russia’s cultural priorities must be Eastern, not Western.

For Solzhenitsyn, the idea of building a new global empire headed by Russia was always alien, despite the widespread perceptions to the contrary. “The grandeur of a nation is in the high level of its inner development, not the external,” he wrote. Solzhenitsyn dismissed the neo-Eurasianists as “good-for-nothing theoreticians.”⁶⁰ But he, too, perceived American cultural expansion into Russia as a clear and present danger.

In his 1998 book, Russia Collapsing, which can be seen as the final manifesto and spiritual testament of the octogenarian writer, Solzhenitsyn passionately warned that the twenty-first century could become “the last century for Russians” because of the looming demographic catastrophe (he pointed out that Russia’s population was decreasing by a million a year) and the degradation of the national character: “We are facing irreversible loss of the spiritual traditions, roots, and organic nature of our life,” which he defined as the “whole of our faith, soul, and character, our continent in the world cultural structure.”⁶¹

At the time, few people paid attention to Solzhenitsyn’s desperate warning about the national cultural crisis, which he considered more terrible than any political or economic failures. Solzhenitsyn was still seen as an important figure, but one that belonged to the past, to the eras of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. At the end of the century in Russia, he was seen by some as a tragic patriarch, a Russian King Lear.

Other observers also found theatrical comparisons but of a more skeptical nature—for them, Solzhenitsyn was a great director and actor who had a successful run in the show called Struggle Against Communism playing prophet and ascetic moralist. The essayist Boris Paramonov, who had visited Solzhenitsyn in Vermont, even suggested that “if Solzhenitsyn is going to play a role now, let it be a role that coincides as much as possible with his real image as diligent homeowner, who lives in a house of plenty. Those are the images he must project in Russia now, those are the ideals to present, instead of talking about morality, repentance, and salvation through suffering.”⁶²

As he had in Vermont, Solzhenitsyn isolated himself in his estate in Troitse-Lykovo outside Moscow, coming into the capital rarely, and as he had lived in exile in the United States, not coming to the telephone. Age took its toll on the writer, whose enviable stamina for many years had allowed him to work tirelessly and without days off. A stroke disabled Solzhenitsyn’s left arm. It became difficult for him to get up, to walk, to receive visitors. This curtailed his contacts with the outside world even more and increased the perception that he was an isolated, lonely, and tragic figure.

The sense that “time is out of joint” was increased by the general decline of “high” culture, painful for the intelligentsia. Public opinion polls suggested the rapid deterioration of the influence of intellectuals on the masses. Solzhenitsyn was the only writer still named regularly as a moral compass and cultural leader, even though the number of his loyal fans had decreased drastically. The other moral models mentioned were Andrei Sakharov (who died in 1989) and Dmitri Likhachev (who died in 1999), an expert on ancient Russian culture.

Tellingly, in the last years of the century, this short list of cultural icons included the actor and director Nikita Mikhalkov, a member of a controversial clan. His father, Sergei, a popular children’s poet and a three-time Stalin Prize winner, was the author of the lyrics approved by Stalin for the Soviet anthem in 1943 and who then reworked them in 2000 at the request of President Putin; his brother, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, a film director, worked successfully both in the Soviet Union and in the United States (The First Teacher, his debut in 1965, was Eurasianist in spirit; The Story of Asya Klyachina, Who Loved but Did Not Get Married, with Iya Savvina’s unforgettable performance as the lame country girl, was banned in 1967 and released only eleven years later; and in Hollywood, Runaway Train, with screenplay by Akira Kurosawa).