In November of 1962 – exactly 35 years ago – Novy Mir, the most authoritative Russian literary magazine at the time, published (upon the personal approval of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The novel made Solzhenitsyn world-famous overnight, presaging his future role in Russian and world literature as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Russian writer of this century.
Russian Life is taking the anniversary of this publication – and the 80th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which Solzhenitsyn documents in his most recent work, The Red Wheel – as an opportunity to look at the writer’s return to Russia after his twenty-year exile. Historian Roy Medvedev, who also suffered persecution under the Soviet regime, provides a retrospective of the great writer’s life and work. Medvedev, a staunch socialist, has long been a critic of Solzhenitsyn’s ideas, while respecting him as a great writer and thinker.
On the evening of February 14, 1974, a police car stopped near a house in the Bavarian Alps. It was the home of the famous German writer and Nobel laureate, Heinrich Böll. Out of the car emerged another Nobel laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had been arrested two days earlier in Moscow, accused of betraying his motherland, stripped of Soviet citizenship and exiled.
The news of Solzhenitsyn’s arrest and banishment flew around the world almost instantaneously. By the morning of the next day, the small mountain village was filled with thousands of journalists from newspapers and magazines, information agencies and television companies. Solzhenitsyn allowed himself to be photographed for only a few minutes, but refrained from any statement. “I have said enough about the Soviet Union,” he declared. “And now, I will be quiet.”
Twenty years later, on May 27, 1994, an Alaska Airlines flight landed at the Magadan airport in the Kolyma region. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stepped from the cabin and walked down the stairs onto Russian soil. The location for his reunion with Russia was no accident. His long exile had been a punishment for publishing in the West his main work, The Gulag Archipelago – a literary investigation of the crimes committed in the Soviet Union. And, according to Solzhenitsyn, Kolyma was the largest island in the amazing country of the gulag – geographically broken up into an archipelago, but psychologically bound into a continent that was once populated by many millions of political prisoners.
News of Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia was headline news in many countries, and hundreds of Russian and Western correspondents rushed to Vladivostok to describe and film this historic event.
Reactions to Solzhenitsyn’s return differed. “He is the only one,” wrote Sergei Yakovlev, editor of the journal Strannik, “who is capable of gathering the divided ... unhappy people under the banner of national rebirth, to return their hope and confidence in their strength and direct their energy toward a healthy, constructive channel.”
But not everyone had such flattering words to say about Solzhenitsyn. “Is he a prophet or not?” – asked Alexander Pumpyansky, editor of the journal Novoye Vremya. “A prophet is someone who foresees his era ... Solzhenitsyn has been mistaken so many times. For the entire last decade, so crucial for Russia’s fate, was he the first with the right word of support or caution? No, he kept silent. Does he understand the world on the brink of the third millennium, or is he hopelessly bogged down in distorted Russian history? From where does he draw his ideals of social order, isn’t it really from a world that does not exist?”
“I am opposed to Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia,” stated writer Yuri Nagibin. “This arrival wrecks both his nervous system and all of ours. I don’t like what Solzhenitsyn is doing now. A guy who has written twenty volumes thinks that he has grasped all of Russia, her past, present and future. That’s all nonsense! Even without him, there is no shortage of intelligent people here.”
The rudest appraisal of all came from a certain Grigory Amelin, in an article entitled To Live Not According to Solzhenitsyn. “ ... With a Hollywood beard and a conscience polished to an unbelievable shine, he appears in Russia like the First of May holiday, and how ridiculously out-of-date he is ... And who really needs him? Well, no one ... Put him in mothballs, mothballs! And put him on a pension.”
This article raised various reactions. “Solzhenitsyn is returning not to utopia, but to Russia,” wrote Izvestia correspondent Konstantin Kedrin. “He is traveling here, as Chekhov traveled to Sakhalin. The doctor comes to the patient – such is his duty, but how he is met on the doorstep is a different question. The patient is still a patient. From him, you can expect anything at all, even Amelin’s article. Great people live by different rules and they check the time by different clocks.”
It is difficult to admit even the great the right to live by some kind of special rules. It was obvious from the beginning that the life that awaited the writer in Russia would be far from easy.
In the Soviet years, dissidents and writers alike followed Solzhenitsyn’s fate in the West closely. They read his new books, though they did not always agree with his statements and assessments. But, for the majority of his countrymen, the writer was on the other side of the “iron curtain.” All his books and stories were removed from library shelves, and reading the Archipelago could result in a long camp sentence.
In the first years of his exile, Solzhenitsyn often published articles. He granted interviews and met with Western public figures, more rarely with writers, and even less with guests from Russia. But the Western lifestyle aroused in the author a disgust he did not bother to hide. And soon the Western press began to respond in kind, judging not only his views, but also his lifestyle. President Ford refused to meet with the writer; Solzhenitsyn himself refused to meet with President Carter. His public appearances and trips became increasingly rare, and from 1983 on, stopped altogether. He stopped answering the telephone, refused interviews and turned down almost all meetings. On the post office door in Cavendish., Vermont hung the following notice: “We don’t give out Solzhenitsyn’s address, we don’t show the way to his house.” To questions regarding Gorbachev’s politics, the writer replied: “What am I, a political observer?”
Solzhenitsyn did not comment on the beginning of perestroika, which found him hard at work on The Red Wheel, a multi-volume saga on the history of the Russian Revolution. This work, begun at the end of the 1960s and finally completed in 1991, turned out to be more difficult for the writer than it had at first seemed. Solzhenitsyn labored 12 to 14 hours a day in a three-story house not far from the quiet town of Cavendish. In scope and volume, the work far exceeded Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
As perestroika progressed, many books on Stalinist crimes began to be published. Increasingly, Lenin and other Communist ideologues came in for criticism, and cries went up for a reexamination of the October Revolution. It soon became possible to republish not only One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but also Cancer Ward, which had been prepared for publication as early as 1966. The question of publishing The First Circle, considered by many to be the author’s best novel, was raised. But Solzhenitsyn stood firm. The first of his works to be published in his homeland had to be The Gulag Archipelago – the reason for his exile, whose publication had so far been banned by the Politburo.
By 1989, the process of democratization had gathered force in the USSR, and it was no longer possible to control the flood of words. In that year, following a vote at the Writers’ Union and a statement from Gorbachev himself, Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel acceptance speech along with selected chapters from the Archipelago were published in the journal Novy Mir. Then, in March, 1990, the full three-volume text of the Archipelago appeared in stores and quickly sold out. One by one, Solzhenitsyn’s other works – The First Circle, Cancer Ward and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – were also published. Novy Mir Editor-in-Chief Sergei Zalygin excitedly proclaimed 1990 “The Year of Solzhenitsyn.”
But it was not to be. After avidly devouring Solzhenitsyn’s long-forbidden works, society and the intelligentsia alike reacted strangely. Very few newspapers came out with extensive reviews or critiques of the works, and discussion of them in public and literary circles was listless. This indifference came in stark contrast to the thunderous public reaction to Ivan Denisovich when it was first published in November 1962, when Solzhenitsyn was an unknown physics teacher in Ryazan. When the first volume of the Archipelago was published abroad in Russian in 1974, it made front-page news in Western newspapers. In fact, in the mid-1970s, there was no more popular or authoritative writer in the world than Solzhenitsyn.
So what happened? Partly, in the face of the unprecedented openness in publishing, Solzhenitsyn lost the magic of his bravery and novelty. What had been revolutionary in the sixties seemed old hat to the emancipated readership of the late 1980s and early 1990s. What is more, the printing of Solzhenitsyn’s novels coincided with the appearance of other prominent literary works which had formerly been known only to a few. It was at this time that Russia’s mass readership discovered the novels of Vladimir Voinovich, Vassily Aksyonov and Vladimir Nabokov, along with the poetry of Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam. After decades of spiritual starvation, Russians experienced a sensory overload of great writers. It is hardly surprising that Solzhenitsyn was lost in the shuffle ...
Solzhenitsyn returned to the literary and political life of the USSR in 1989, but the business of returning his Soviet citizenship dragged on. By the summer of 1990, Soviet citizenship had been restored to dozens of famous writers, scholars and public figures living abroad. But Solzhenitsyn was not among them. At the beginning of July, President Gorbachev’s assistant, Georgy Shakhnazarov, wrote urging him to restore Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship “without losing a single day.” Not only did Shakhnazarov argue that such a step would raise Gorbachev’s sagging image, he also wanted to make sure that Gorbachev made overtures to Solzhenitsyn before his popular rival, Yeltsin, had a chance to do so.
But Gorbachev hesitated. The return of the legendary physicist Andrei Sakharov to Moscow in 1987 had created serious problems for Gorbachev, and Solzhenitsyn’s return promised many more headaches. Finally, though, on August 15, 1990, Gorbachev signed a decree restoring the Soviet citizenship of 23 people, including Solzhenitsyn, Voinovich and Aksyonov.
Solzhenitsyn, however, was extended no special recognition, and, instead of being overjoyed by the decree, he was offended. Through his wife, he announced that he did not consider the decree sufficient for his rehabilitation. In response, Ivan Silaev, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Russian Federation, sent a telegram to Vermont inviting Solzhenitsyn and his family to Russia as his personal guests. But Solzhenitsyn refused. “For me, it is unthinkable,” he wrote, “to be a guest or a tourist in my homeland ... When I return to the Motherland, it will be to live and die there ... I cannot leave behind my books. Having been slandered for decades, I must first become understood by my countrymen, and not in one capital, but in the provinces and in any out-of-the-way corner.”
The year 1990 was rich in proposals for the reorganization of the Soviet Union and Russia. It seemed that everyone had their own ideas on the subject. By September, several analytical groups had developed over ten proposals for rebuilding Soviet and Russian economic and political structures. The “500 Days” project developed by the Shatalin-Yavlinsky group seemed the most promising to many.
At the height of discussions of this project in the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Solzhenitsyn entered the fray, sending to Moscow a brochure with the pretentious title How Should We Rebuild Russia? and the more modest subtitle Feasible Considerations. The brochure was published as an insert in two popular newspapers [Komsomolskaya Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta, the latter of which, ironically, had labeled the author “that vile scum of a traitor” just five years previous. – Ed.] with a combined print run of 30 million copies. It sold in newspaper kiosks for three kopeks apiece, thus reaching every “out-of-the-way corner” of the country.
There is no need to enumerate the more than 200 proposals contained in the brochure. Suffice it to say that many were fair and worth listening to. It was difficult, however, to accept the tone of Solzhenitsyn’s critique – rude, extremely biting and full of exaggerations. In the 20th century, Solzhenitsyn wrote, Russia “was exhaustedly chasing a blind and malignant utopia,” “killed tens of millions of her countrymen” and “introduced herself to the planet as a bloodthirsty, boundless invader.” “Under thoughtless directorship, we cut down our rich forests, we pillaged our incomparable natural resources, we overstrained our women, we let our children get sick, get wild and receive a false education.” Nor did Solzhenitsyn seem particularly pleased by the newly arisen freedom of the press, which “brings about an unbearable flood of excessive and petty information.”
But Solzhenitsyn did not limit himself entirely to criticism. He also proposed the creation of a Russian Union – a single state for Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusans. In the process, he managed to offend a variety of nationalities. He denied the existence of Ukraine as a separate nation with its own language. He declared the need to quickly get rid of “the oppressive load of the Central Asian underbelly” to which Russia had given up her life juices for decades. And he made some disrespectful comments about the Tatars, Bashkirs and all the “smallest peoples” who should be retained in the Russian Union, but without “burdening them with a state education.”
The brochure also contained a project for the constitutional reform of the Russian Union, including everything from the establishment of local government bodies and election systems to the establishment of supreme organs of representative and executive power. The brochure contained many correct, but even more unrealistic, suggestions. Many could have applied to peasant Russia at the end of the 19th century, but not to urban Russia at the end of the 20th. No one seemed prepared to take Solzhenitsyn’s suggestions into consideration. During a session of the Supreme Soviet, Gorbachev stated that the suggestions “of the great writer are unacceptable” and accused the latter of being stuck in the past.
The program of Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia was worked out thoroughly beforehand. Two specially outfitted train cars were rented – one for the writer and his family and one for the BBC, which financed the entire two-month trip in exchange for film rights. Stops of three to five days were planned in all large cities along the route from Vladivostok, west to Moscow – Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk ...
In all, there were 17 such stops, and the program at each was almost identical. Solzhenitsyn would visit memorial cemeteries, meet with village residents, appear on local television and stop in at enterprises, schools and hospitals. In addition, he would hold a big meeting, at which one to two thousand people were present, depending on the size of the hall. The writer would immediately announce that he had come not to speak, but to listen, and, over the course of one or two hours, he would attentively listen to the speakers, while writing in his notebook. Then he would give a brief speech, answer questions and autograph his books.
Solzhenitsyn’s visit to the Primorsky region [in the Russian Far East] was covered in detail by the Western and Moscow press. Much less was written about his meetings in Khabarovsk. And then, one by one, the Moscow and foreign correspondents went home. Solzhenitsyn complained bitterly of the lack of coverage, that he was being ignored for weeks on end. But the fact was that there was nothing new to report. The problems of residents of Russia’s small and large towns are virtually identical everywhere. The teachers and doctors of Khabarovsk experienced the same low salaries, lack of textbooks and medicine, hungry children and patients, rising crime and poor transportation systems as those in Omsk.
Everywhere he went, Solzhenitsyn was well-received and carefully listened to. The auditoriums where he spoke were always full. He spoke of Gorbachev’s deceptions and the new economic reforms (“The reforms of Gaidar are stupid, thoughtless. I refuse to consider them reforms, they have no plan and purpose ...”). He railed against the old, Communist regime and against the new “oligarchy.” He talked about the inundation of the Russian language with foreign words and about the problems in Chechnya (“Let Chechnya spread its embassies across the world, create its own army, fleet, industry, let it show itself!”).
In spite of his sweeping statements, Solzhenitsyn insisted that he had no plans to become a politician. Yet, by the end of May, 1994, he already occupied a place on the list of the hundred most influential politicians in Russia. By July, he ranked 12th on this list.
On July 21, Solzhenitsyn arrived in Moscow. At the Yaroslavsky train station, almost 20,000 people – by Moscow standards not many – had gathered. Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and writers Sergei Zalygin and Yuri Karyakin turned up to meet Solzhenitsyn. The latter gave a short, but strong speech – the best, in fact, that he would give in his next three years in Russia. “I have not lost hope,” Solzhenitsyn said, “that Russia will manage to climb out of this hole, though this will require high responsibility at the top and great effort from the bottom ...” In spite of its brevity and effectiveness, however, this speech was not published in its entirety in a single newspaper.
Back in 1974, the apartment in downtown Moscow belonging to Solzhenitsyn’s family had been confiscated. Now, city authorities presented the writer with a comfortable new apartment off the Arbat [Moscow’s fashionable pedestrian mall]. Solzhenitsyn also bought a house outside the city with a picturesque view of the Moscow river and remodeled it for work and the housing of archives.
The publication of Solzhenitsyn’s long article “The Russian Question Up to the End of the 20th Century” in Novy Mir was planned to coincide with the writer’s arrival in Moscow. But the journal was late coming out, and the article appeared at the end of August instead. The author’s new work was hardly discussed. Moreover, it was not just the western-minded liberals who had come to power in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union who ignored Solzhenitsyn. It was also those who, like Solzhenitsyn, called themselves patriots and nationalists.
Even before the writer’s arrival in Moscow, the leaders of the Russian national patriotic opposition reacted to Solzhenitsyn and his ideas with extreme reservation. Of course, considering Solzhenitsyn’s anti-communist stance, the negative reaction of such people as Gennady Zyuganov – leader of Russia’s communist party – was fully understandable. But the leader of the nationalist Russian Public Union, Sergei Baburin, also noted that “nothing will come of Solzhenitsyn’s appearance in Russia.”
In spite of Solzhenitsyn’s flat reception, however, the State Duma invited him to speak at one of its sessions. On October 28, Solzhenitsyn entered the hall surrounded by dozens of journalists. Though he repeated much of what he had said before about Russia’s suffering people and the problems with privatization and crime, Solzhenitsyn’s speech was nonetheless interesting and inspiring. Yet it generated little response from the audience. Half of the chairs stood empty, and Yegor Gaidar (whose economic reforms Solzhenitsyn had criticized) walked in half an hour after the beginning of the speech. Not one question was asked, either orally or in written form, and although the speech was broadcast on national television and printed in full in two newspapers, it was discussed very little beyond the walls of the Duma.
But Solzhenitsyn did not give up. Instead, he approached the leadership of the ORT television channel with a proposal for a television appearance – a series of short, 10-15 minute programs, in which the author would answer questions on a variety of topics. Solzhenitsyn chose the themes of the first programs himself – land reform, economics, refugees and culture. The programs began in August and aroused a flurry of interest from the public and press. Solzhenitsyn did not express any new ideas, but he spoke heatedly and interestingly, with the host asking questions that had been agreed upon in advance.
In September, these TV appearances continued, becoming a regular Monday evening event. The themes changed, as did Solzhenitsyn’s tone, which became more and more that of a lecture. The writer spoke with extreme confidence on problems of which he had only the most approximate grasp. He made a multitude of suggestions, but it was unclear how and by whom they were to be realized. By November, 1994, viewers’ interest in the show had waned, and the popular weekly Argumenty I Fakty published a critical article on the author entitled “Solzhenitsyn As a TV Star.”
Solzhenitsyn’s unsuccessful television appearances led to a decrease in his overall political rating. By the end of 1994, he had dropped from 12th place to 86th on the list of Russia’s one-hundred leading politicians, and, by the beginning of 1995, he was no longer included on the list at all. Then, on January 30, 1995, the writer sharply criticized the institution of television itself, whose services he had so clumsily used. “Today’s television is sold for money ... Our mass media must be told: think what you are bringing the people, why are you poisoning the people, driving them rabid?! Why?!” This was an overly primitive evaluation of both the role of Russian television and the public’s reaction to it.
By April of 1995, no one bothered to comment on, and almost no one to watch, Solzhenitsyn’s shows. Even Izvestia, the newspaper most loyal to the writer, began to turn against him. In the paper’s September 20th issue, Konstantin Kedrov, who had defended the rights of the great to live by their own rules just over a year before, wrote: “... genius is not always genius; inspiration, like love, passes” and accused Solzhenitsyn of repeating the ideas of Zhirinovsky and Zyuganov in a duller and less attractive form. Reactions of this kind led the leadership of ORT TV to pull Solzhenitsyn’s program from the air.
After his return to Russia, the writer found himself completely alone, both as a public figure and as an ideologist. Having rejected all existing social movements, he did not succeed in creating his own social or moral course and found himself without an ideological space. It was even difficult to determine the essence of his sermons. Many defined the writer as a religious moralist. But Solzhenitsyn spoke about God and religion least of all in Russia.
Dora Shurman called Solzhenitsyn a liberal; Boris Kapustin labeled him a national conservative; Alexander Yanov used the term Russian chauvinist. Vladimir Vozdvizhensky defined Solzhenitsyn’s ideology as retro-utopia, and this definition seems the most accurate. Having refused a reality that was terrible and alien to him, the writer proposed to Russia not a movement forward, but a return to the past – to the imaginary harmony of the Russia of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. As early as 1973, Solzhenitsyn was proposing his “retro-utopia.” In his Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union, he proposed to “thaw” the Russian Northeast and move the center of national life there, creating a new Russia – “without the ruinous mistakes of the 20th century” – whose economy would be based on small industry and agriculture.
Solzhenitsyn’s main suggestions of 1994-1996 also concerned a kind of retro-utopia. His main idea along these lines was the revival of the zemstvo [an elective district council in pre-Revolutionary Russia – Ed.] as a form of local self-rule. When introduced by Alexander II in 1864 in a country with a predominantly rural peasant population, the concept of relatively independent, local self-rule outside the overall vertical power structures was extremely effective. However, in today’s Russia, the former gentry are gone, and over 50% of the population lives in large cities. The country has a single system of electricity, gas, railroads, telephone and television. Under these conditions, other forms of local government are necessary.
Having settled in Moscow, Solzhenitsyn concentrated on publishing his works. He also wrote and published a dozen short stories and articles in Novy Mir in 1995-96. The themes of these stories varied from the Russian Civil War to the lives of convicts and writers. However, in terms of literary importance, they do not come close to that of the author’s stories of the early 1960s. Solzhenitsyn was disappointed at the silence of critics and the press and commented on the journal’s insignificant print runs. But the problem was not in the print runs, but rather in the literary weakness of the stories and articles.
A Yaroslavl-based publishing house published Solzhenitsyn’s editorials in three volumes, but with a print run of only 10,000. Izdatelstvo Voennoy Literatury (Military Literature Publishing House) published eight volumes of The Red Wheel and obtained the rights to publish a 24-volume collection of the writer’s works. But the subscription to this collection has been slow to date. In 1995, Solzhenitsyn was not even ranked among the 25 top-selling Russian authors.
The writer was especially saddened by the failure of The Red Wheel. The saga did not sell well, so the publishing house decided against a reprint. Critic Lev Anninsky wrote that “the ‘Wheel’ is bogged down in the clay of historical material.” Even though this response and many others in the same vein were biased and precipitous, the failure of the saga was obvious from the onset. One famous sculptor, answering a question on how he creates his masterpieces, said: “I just take a piece of granite and remove the superfluous.” To paraphrase this formula, Solzhenitsyn, while working on The Red Wheel, stored huge pieces of granite but did not have time to remove the superfluous.
However, this work is far from a total failure. Solzhenitsyn collected and partially processed a tremendous amount of material, and his work will be important, if not for the rank and file reader, then at least for an expert taking up the topic where Solzhenitsyn left off.
Back in the spring of 1994, many political observers were asking what kind of relationship could be possible between the well-known Russian writer, who had said many times that “his plume is guided by God,” and President Boris Yeltsin, who had called himself on many occasions the “master” of Russia.
Solzhenitsyn himself stated even before his return to Russia that he did not intend to praise Yeltsin either indirectly or face-to-face. It was known that Yeltsin had talked to Solzhenitsyn over the phone in 1992 during his first official visit to the United States. A cable with Yeltsin’s greetings was read out at a meeting in Vladivostok after Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia via this eastern port. “The President has a deep interest in the personality and views of Solzhenitsyn,” said presidential spokesman Vyacheslav Kostikov. “This attitude is determined by the scale of the writer’s personality, his talent, his heroic fate.”
In his 1994 book, The President’s Notes [published in the US under the title, The Struggle for Russia],Yeltsin wrote with poorly-hidden irritation: “In an interview with the Ostankino TV company, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn posed a question to the interviewer, to the viewers, to all people, to the President – ‘Would you treat your own mother with shock therapy?’ Our mother is Russia, and we are her children. To cure Russia with shock therapy is really cruel. It doesn’t behoove a son. Yes, in a sense, Russia is a mother. But at the same time, Russia is us. We are her flesh and blood, her people. I would cure myself with shock therapy and have done so many times. Only in this way – by being on the cutting edge, by breaking through – does a man make headway, survive altogether.”
In 1994, at the height of his popularity, there was talk of putting Solzhenitsyn forward as a presidential candidate. Democratic leader Galina Starovoytova stated that only Solzhenitsyn “with his instinctual flair, can help designate the future leader, having formulated the patriotic Russian idea in non-chauvinistic wording and terms.” A little-known Union of non-party members in Saratov went further, actually proposing Solzhenitsyn as a presidential candidate. In September 1994, answering the survey question, “Which of the politicians listed below expresses your opinion and position on all the major issues of Russia’s life?,” people cited Grigory Yavlinsky, followed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who outdistanced Yeltsin, Zyuganov, Zhirinovsky and Chernomyrdin.
The Argumenty i Fakty weekly wrote in an editorial: “Now one can make a prognosis on the struggle for the sympathies of Russia between two leaders: a President elected by the people, and a world-famous writer who has assumed the role of defender of those in need. Boris Yeltsin will feel very uncomfortable about Solzhenitsyn. For the president cannot echo the writer and lament over how badly the people live. He will need to either prove the contrary or change his policy ... Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s case is not like with the government: nobody demands money from him ... He does not have to curry anybody’s favor, for he does not have anybody to fear, he has authority on a planetary scale. He lived an accomplished life. There are and will be no bosses above him ...”
Yet, Solzhenitsyn’s addresses on television and in the State Duma weakened his authority. And it was at this juncture that he received an invitation to the Kremlin. His conversation with Yeltsin on November 16, 1994 (behind closed doors) lasted for more than an hour. Later, Natalya Solzhenitsyna, the writer’s wife, stated that the President listened attentively to her husband’s ideas and questions.
In 1995 and 1996, talk about putting forward Solzhenitsyn as a presidential candidate continued, but the writer, as expected, turned these offers down. During the presidential campaign, he refused to either criticize Yeltsin or speak in his favor. He continued to criticize many aspects of Russia’s foreign and domestic policy but never spoke about Yeltsin personally. Yeltsin apparently did not appreciate the writer’s silence or evasion. It was noticed by all that the two Nobel Peace Prize winners living in Russia – Mikhail Gorbachev and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – were not invited to Yeltsin’s inauguration ceremony on August 9, 1996.
On March 23, 1997, in an interview on the weekly television program, Itogi, Solzhenitsyn repeated his criticism of privatization and condemned the strangulation of domestic production. Russia will be able to revive, he said, only when robbers and corrupt officials return to the people their pillaged heritage. However, Solzhenitsyn admitted that he does not know how to bring this about. He lamented the lack of attention from television and the press toward his activities and no longer looked as self-assured as he had two years ago.
Now Solzhenitsyn says that the new national idea cannot be born in offices and commissions, that it must ripen in the hearts and minds of hundreds and thousands. As a temporary national idea, Solzhenitsyn cited the words of Count Pyotr Shuvalov from his letter to Empress Elizabeth: “The project of safeguarding the people.”
But, in the end, does a great Russia really require a great idea? Perhaps for now, the simple idea of prosperity and well-being shared by dozens of countries and peoples is enough for Russia.
At press time, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made another public appearance. Radio-Russia announced the airing of a 65-part series in which the author will read his historical novel The Red Wheel. In preparation for the radio broadcast, Solzhenitsyn gave an exclusive interview to the weekly newspaper, Moskovskiye Novosti, in which he commented on the upcoming 80th anniversary of the October Revolution. He said that the October Revolution was the logical continuation of the February Revolution, which has thus far been ignored by Russian historians. “That we mark 80 years of October, whether celebrating or deploring it, is the consequence of February,” he said. “The events of February to March 1917 were practically the only real revolution which happened in Russia.”
Repeating his ideas on how Russian authorities should think of organizing zemstvas as local government organs, Solzhenitsyn said that “over the last decade, we have made a number of cruel mistakes [which], in spirit, repeat the February Revolution. The same disaster is happening today as in February 1917.” He said that he felt his warning has come too late. “But maybe it is not late, maybe today somebody, after listening to this radio series, will think over what is happening now and find a way to somehow influence events... Perhaps ...”
Also just as we were going to press, Solzhenitsyn announced the creation of an annual literary prize. The prize will be valued at $25,000 and be funded from royalties from The Gulag Archipelago, which has been translated into 30 languages. In a statement, the author said that the prize will be awarded to works that help Russian society understand itself and make a “significant contribution to the development of [Russian] literary traditions.” Both Solzhenitsyn and his wife will be members of the jury for the prize.
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