Solzhenitsyn, with Alya Svetlova for spiritual succor and support, waited expectantly, bracing himself for the impending storm.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I FEEL SORRY FOR RUSSIA”
During 1969, the West continued to court Solzhenitsyn. His books were selling strongly in Europe and America, and Western publishers were clamoring and competing for new translations of his work. Two of his plays, Candle in the Wind and The Love Girl and the Innocent, were published in Frankfurt and London, respectively. Scarcely did the liberal intelligentsia in the West suspect that Solzhenitsyn, far from being a champion of Western values, was as little enamored of capitalist consumerism as he was of communist totalitarianism.
His own views were still developing at this time, but they sprang from Russian tradition and had little in common with the materialism that was in the ascendancy in Europe and the United States. Rooted in the spiritual struggles in the camps, Solzhenitsyn’s central belief was in selfless self-limitation as opposed to the selfish gratification of needless wants. As he watched Russians gorging themselves on gadgets and other consumer goods, taking their lead from the West, he felt a sense of nausea. This was not what life was about.
It was only a matter of time before his views brought him into conflict not only with his old enemies in the communist hierarchy but with his old friends among the liberal dissidents. The conflict came to a head in September 1969 when Solzhenitsyn’s differences with the editors of Novy Mir were made public. The cause of the dispute was a polemical debate that Novy Mir had been conducting with the monthly magazine Molodaya Gvardia (Young Guard). The disagreement arose from two articles by the literary critic Victor Chalmayev, published the previous year in Molodaya Gvardia. Chalmayev’s views were dubbed “National Bolshevik” by his opponents and were essentially a reactionary mishmash of garbled Marxism and Russian patriotism, a confusion of mutually contradictory premises. Chalmayev had denounced the West as being hopelessly corrupt and degenerate, “choking on a surfeit of hate” and the fount of all evil. Attempting to build bridges with it by importing its technology or, even worse, its consumer goods or its culture would be both wrong and dangerous. The only result would be that the West’s poison would spread to the East. Compared with the corrupt decadence of the West, the traditions of Russia were pure and ethical, fed by a “sacred spring”. In recent years, this Russian spirit had degenerated under the trivializing impact of Western imports such as television, cinema, and the mass media, but it could be revitalized by returning to its roots, drawing inspiration from the Russian village, the moral and spiritual values of the Russian people, and the pure idioms of popular speech. Chalmayev referred mystically to the sacramental power of the native soil and even invoked Holy Russia with her “saints and just men born of a yearning for miracles and loving kindness”. All this, Chalmayev asserted in a bizarre leap of logic, had culminated in the glorious Russian Revolution, that “sacramental act” which was the finest expression and the crowning moment in a thousand years of Russian history. It was not that Solzhenitsyn agreed with Chalmayev’s articles per se—indeed there were aspects of them which he found abhorrent—but he disagreed with Novy Mir’s grounds for attacking them.
Amidst the outcry and controversy that followed publication of Chalmayev’s articles, Novy Mir published its own response to his views in the June 1969 issue. The author of Novy Mir’s riposte, Alexander Dementyev, poured scorn on Chalmayev’s patriotism and his extraordinary “un-Leninist” genuflections to church history. Chalmayev’s slavophilism was reactionary and his praise of a Russian rural idyll unrealistic. Worst of all was his hostility to technological modernization. Such hostility was not Marxism-Leninism, Dementyev wrote, but a “dogmatic perversion”. Marxism-Leninism was internationalist, progressive, and in favor of modernization.
When Solzhenitsyn paid a visit to the offices of Novy Mir in September, it was assumed that he would agree wholeheartedly with Dementyev’s liberal Marxist critique of Chalmayev’s article. Yet Solzhenitsyn was neither a liberal nor a Marxist and felt that Dementyev had attacked Chalmayev for all the wrong reasons. The parts of Chalmayev’s articles with which he had disagreed most were the eulogizing references to the Revolution and the absurd assertion that Marxism, itself a decadent import from the West, had anything to do with the noble aspects of Russian history. Certainly, he shared Novy Mir’s disgust with Chalmayev’s bombastic and bigoted tone, his cheap, jingoistic rhetoric, and his extreme xenophobia. Nevertheless, he was encouraged to find in the article certain positive and healthy themes and ideas, which, to the best of his knowledge, were appearing in an official Soviet publication for the first time. He was pleased by Chalmayev’s appeal to Russian, as opposed to Soviet, patriotism; was delighted by his praise for the early Russian church and Russian saints, and the appreciation of Russian village life and folk culture; and shared Chalmayev’s reverence for the uniqueness of Russian national tradition.
The gulf between Solzhenitsyn and the liberal Marxists of Novy Mir could hardly have been more apparent. Whereas they had rejected Russian national tradition in the name of the Revolution, he had arrived at the diametrically opposite view—that it was necessary to reject the Revolution in the name of national tradition. This, of course, was a dangerous heresy in the Soviet Union and would have been too much even for the ears of the tolerant liberals at Novy Mir. Choosing the path of reticence, he avoided dispraising the Revolution and even refrained from mentioning that he shared with Chalmayev many of his criticisms of the West, while making it clear that he disagreed with the nature of Dementyev’s reply.
Increasingly alienated from some of his allies, Solzhenitsyn prepared himself for the next wave of persecution by his enemies. It was not long in coming. On November 4, 1969, he attended a meeting of the Ryazan writers organization, of which he was a member. The meeting opened with a report about the measures being taken by the Writers Union to intensify ideological-educational work among writers. As part of this campaign, charges had been laid against several members of the Moscow section, including Lev Kopelev, and against one member of their own section in Ryazan, namely, Solzhenitsyn. One of the members, Vasily Matushkin, reminded the meeting that the Writers Union existed to bring together people who shared the same views—who built up communism, gave it all their creative work, and followed the path of socialist realism. “Accordingly, there is no room for Solzhenitsyn in a writers organization; let him work on his own. Bitter though it is, I am bound to say, A. I., that our paths differ from yours and we will have to part company.” Another member complained that the ideological quality of Solzhenitsyn’s writings did not help in building a communist society and cast slurs on the Soviet Union’s glowing future. One by one, the members of the group condemned Solzhenitsyn and called for his expulsion. Solzhenitsyn’s defense was as defiant as ever: “No! it will not be possible indefinitely to keep silent about Stalin’s crimes or go against the truth. There were millions of people who suffered from the crimes and they demand exposure. It would be a good idea, too, to reflect: what moral effect will the silence on these crimes have on the younger generation—it will mean the corruption of still more millions.”1