Yet even if Solzhenitsyn is right, the critics insist, he is still irrelevant because nobody is listening to him. “It is little consolation that his prophecies of catastrophe are fulfilled”, wrote Daniel Johnson in the Daily Telegraph on December 12, 1998. “He is unheard.” These words, written the day after Solzhenitsyn’s eightieth birthday, were not completely true. To commemorate his birthday, two documentaries were shown on Russian television, one of which was broadcast in hourly installments on three consecutive nights. A third documentary was blocked at the last moment, after Solzhenitsyn complained that it included unauthorized footage of his private life. In the same week, the celebrated cellist and composer Mstislav Rostropovich conducted a concert in Solzhenitsyn’s honor at the Moscow Conservatory, and a dramatized version of Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle was being staged at one of Russia’s leading theaters. Finally, when, as part of the birthday celebrations, President Yeltsin sought to award Solzhenitsyn the Order of St. Andrew for his cultural achievements, the writer controversially refused to accept the honor in protest of Yeltsin’s role in Russia’s collapse. “In today’s conditions,” he said, “when people are starving and striking just to get their wages, I cannot accept this reward.” He added that perhaps, in many years’ time when Russia had overcome its seemingly insurmountable difficulties, one of his sons would be able to collect it for him posthumously.1 Clearly, Solzhenitsyn, even as an octogenarian, was still capable of causing a great deal of controversy. Furthermore, the intense interest which his eightieth birthday aroused both in his homeland and in the media around the world contradicts the claims that he is either forgotten or irrelevant. On the contrary, seldom has a writer attracted so much publicity, both good and bad, throughout his life. Vilified or vindicated, loved or hated, Solzhenitsyn remains a provocative figure. Now, as he approaches the twilight of his life, it would seem timely to look back over the past eighty years. With the added insight provided by a recent in-depth interview with the writer himself, it is hoped that this book will help unravel Solzhenitsyn in a way that gets beyond the facts to the underlying truths underpinning his life, his work, and his beliefs.
Exactly who is Alexander Solzhenitsyn? The following pages will not only address this beguiling question but will, I hope, provide the beginnings of the answer.
CHAPTER ONE
CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION
The ninety-three years that have elapsed since the murder of Tsar Nicholas, the Empress Alexandra, three of their children, and four servants have been the bloodiest in Russia’s troubled history. It was the destiny of Alexander Solzhenitsyn to live through almost all of them. Lenin ordered the execution of the imperial family in July 1918; just five months later, Solzhenitsyn was born, and even while he nestled innocently in his mother’s womb, the world which he was about to enter was itself pregnant with change. In the nine months up to his birth on December 11, 1918, Russia was transformed beyond recognition. In March, the Bolshevik government, still consolidating its power after the October Revolution in the previous year, had fled from St. Petersburg beyond reach of the German artillery, which had advanced to within range of the city. Proclaiming Moscow as the new capital of the fledgling Soviet state, Lenin moved into the Kremlin, while the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, took over the Rossiya Insurance Company building on Lubyanka Square. In August, a month after the tsar and his family were murdered, the Bolsheviks destroyed their socialist rivals in a wave of repression known as the Red Terror, during which thousands of hostages were imprisoned and shot.
Meanwhile, a bloody civil war was raging across Russia. The newly formed Red Army, set up by the Bolsheviks, and the various anti-Soviet forces, known collectively as the Whites, were evenly matched in terms of numbers. Crucially, however, the Bolsheviks had control of the railways emanating from Moscow, which enabled them to switch resources from one battlefront to another. The Red Army also drew upon the experience of ex-Tsarist officers forced to serve under the vigilant eye of regimental commissars. Similar force was used throughout the country as Trotsky traveled round Russia shooting commanders who failed to hold their ground at all costs. By contrast, the Whites lacked the ideological fervor that was the basis of Bolshevik unity, encompassing within their ranks a wide range of political ideologies, from monarchists to anti-Soviet socialists. They had neither a unified command nor centralized lines of communication. Such factors were to contribute significantly to the eventual Soviet victory, although the war was still at its fiercest at the time of Solzhenitsyn’s birth.
Success in the economic sphere was not so simple for the post-revolutionary government. Soviet policies were causing chaos. Since money was almost worthless, the rural peasantry had no incentive to sell their scarce produce in the cities. The Bolshevik response was to send Red Guards into the countryside to seize food and to set up “committees of the poor”, which in turn incited class war against the wealthier peasants, or kulaks. In the cities, a form of labor discipline was introduced under the guise of “War Communism”, which differed little in its harshness from the pre-trade union days under the tsar. This was a reflection of Lenin’s demands, voiced in the first months after the October Revolution, for “the most decisive, draconic measures to tighten up discipline”.1 In December 1917, he suggested several means by which discipline could be imposed: “confiscation of all property… confinement in prison, dispatch to the front and forced labor for all who disobey the existing law”.2
On July 23, 1918, the Bolshevik government passed legislation stipulating that “those deprived of freedom who are capable of labor must be recruited for physical work on a compulsory basis”. Writing half a century later, Solzhenitsyn affirmed that “the camps originated and the Archipelago was born from this particular instruction of July 23, 1918.”3 On September 5, 1918, the Decree on the Red Terror, in addition to a call for mass executions, authorized the Soviet Republic to defend itself “against its class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps”.4
“At that time,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “the authorities used to love to set up their concentration camps in former monasteries: they were enclosed by strong walls, had good solid buildings, and they were empty. (After all, monks are not human beings and could be tossed out at will.) Thus in Moscow there were concentration camps in Andronnikov, Novospassky, and Ivanovsky monasteries.”5 Neither were monks the only victims. Nuns also warranted eviction. The Krasnaya Gazeta of September 6, 1918, reported that the first camp in St. Petersburg “will be set up in Nizhni Novgorod in an empty nunnery”, adding that “initially it was planned to send five thousand persons to the concentration camp”.
Thus it was that Alexander Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago were born within weeks of each other, children of the same revolution.
The turbulent and tyrannical world Solzhenitsyn entered in the winter of 1918 was made even less hospitable by the absence of his father, killed in a hunting accident six months before his son’s birth. Consequently, Solzhenitsyn could remember his father “only from snapshots, and the accounts of my mother and people who knew him”.6 From these accounts, Solzhenitsyn had gleaned that his father, Isaaki Solzhenitsyn, had gone from the university to the front as a volunteer and had served in the Grenadier Artillery Brigade. He recounts with pride the story of his father’s bravery in pulling ammunition boxes away from a fire which had been started by enemy shells. For this act of heroism, he was mentioned in dispatches. When almost the entire front had collapsed in the face of the German advance, the battery in which his father served remained in the front lines right up until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. He and Taissia Shcherbak, Solzhenitsyn’s mother, were married at the front by the brigade chaplain. He ended the war with three officers’ decorations, including the George and Anna crosses, but died soon after his return home in spring 1918. If he had lived, Isaaki Solzhenitsyn would have been twenty-seven years old at the time of his son’s birth at Kislovodsk, a fashionable Caucasian resort. His wife was twenty-three.