Even if the origins of the schism were slightly earlier, Solzhenitsyn was still surprised by the hostility his Lenten Letter aroused. He had intended the letter to be low-key, releasing it only to the limited circulation of the narrow ecclesiastical samizdat network, with the idea that it would gradually find its way to all those whom it really concerned. Inevitably, however, considering his controversial international reputation, it was published almost immediately in the West and provoked a flood of interest in the Western media. He learned that the letter and the coverage it had received in the West had left the KGB spluttering with rage—a rage more violent than that excited by most of his actions before or since. There was no mystery here, he added. “Atheism is the core of the whole Communist system.” Yet if the anger of the KGB was scarcely surprising, he was not prepared for the hostility of normally sympathetic circles, observing that the move had aroused disapproval and even disgust among the intelligentsia too: “How narrow, blind and limited I must be, thought some, to concern myself with such problems as that of the Church.” Yet regardless of the opposition and the consequent loss of powerful allies, Solzhenitsyn remained defiant: “Though many people condemned me, I have never regretted this step: if our spiritual fathers need not be the first to set us an example of spiritual freedom from the lie, where are we to look for it?”6
In the Lenten Letter, Solzhenitsyn had berated the Patriarch for addressing his pious words only to the world’s Russian émigrés, ignoring the needs of the beleaguered believers in Russia itself: “Yes, Christ bade us to go seek the hundredth lost sheep, but only after ninety-nine are safe. But when the ninety-nine who should be at hand are lost—should they not be our first concern?”7 There followed a plea for the church to speak out against the persecution of religious practice in the Soviet Union, before he concluded with a call to sacrifice. External fetters, he insisted, were not so strong as the spirit, which was capable of overcoming all persecution. “It was no easier at the time of the birth of Christianity, but nevertheless Christianity withstood everything and flourished. And it showed us the way: the way of sacrifice. He who is deprived of all material strength will finally always be triumphant through sacrifice. Within our memory our priests and fellow-believers have undergone just such a martyrdom worthy of the first centuries of Christianity.”8
For all the hostility it caused in irreligious circles, Solzhenitsyn’s public acknowledgment of his Christianity was greeted with joy and admiration among Christians in both East and West. One admirer was Father Alexander Schmemann, dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York State, who had read the Lenten Letter as soon as it was published in the West. He was deeply impressed by its elevated style and biblical rhythms and detected in Solzhenitsyn’s words the mark of prophecy. Father Schmemann was a regular broadcaster of religious programs to the Soviet Union, and he made Solzhenitsyn’s letter the subject of his Easter sermon, broadcast by Radio Liberty:
In the Old Testament, in the history of the ancient chosen people, there was the astonishing phenomenon of the prophets. Strange and extraordinary men who could not experience peace and self-satisfaction, who swam, as they say, against the tide, told the truth, proclaimed the heavenly judgement over all untruth, weakness and hypocrisy…. And now this forgotten spirit of prophecy has suddenly awakened in the heart of Christianity. We hear the ringing voice of a lone man who has said in the hearing of all that everything that is going on—concessions, submission, the eternal world of the church compromising with the world and political power—all this is evil. And this man is Solzhenitsyn.9
Solzhenitsyn heard the broadcast and was much encouraged. Father Schmemann was someone whose judgment he respected, not least because the priest had been one of the first to discern the Christianity at the heart of his own work. As early as 1970, Father Schmemann had written that Solzhenitsyn’s books were explicable in terms of the “triune intuition of creation, fall, and redemption”. Although at the time Schmemann was unaware whether Solzhenitsyn accepted or rejected Christian dogma, ecclesiastical ritual, or the church itself, he nevertheless insisted that here was a Christian writer who had “a deep and all-embracing, although possibly unconscious perception of the world, man, and life, which, historically, was born and grew from Biblical and Christian revelation, and only from it”.10 Solzhenitsyn had read Father Schmemann’s article and wrote that it was “very valuable to me… it explained me to myself…. [I]t also formulated important traits of Christianity which I could not have formulated myself.”11
It is clear, therefore, that Solzhenitsyn already held Father Schmemann in high regard and was particularly pleased that such a figure had spoken so seriously about his Lenten Letter. A few months later, he recalled how profoundly he had been moved to hear that his favorite preacher had given his approval and how he felt that “this in itself was my spiritual reward for the letter, and for me, conclusive confirmation that I was right”.12
Another by-product of Solzhenitsyn’s public profession of faith would be as vociferously negative as Father Schmemann’s broadcast had been positive. Solzhenitsyn’s religious “regression”, coupled with what was perceived as his reactionary revisionism in August 1914, ensured that the communist press in the West now fell in with the official Moscow line. Solzhenitsyn was no longer the persecuted writer unjustly expelled from the Writers’ Union; he was now a dangerous renegade seeking to rewrite and blacken the glorious history of the Revolution. Communist journals in the West queued up to condemn August 1914, and their negative reviews were reprinted gleefully in the Soviet media.
Solzhenitsyn’s treatment at the hands of Western communists during this period prompted a bitter response in his autobiography, where he complained that “under the laws of leftist topsyturvydom, red sinners are always forgiven, red sins are soon forgotten. As Orwell writes, those very same Western public figures who were outraged by individual executions anywhere else on earth applauded when Stalin shot hundreds of thousands; they grieved for starving India, but the devastating famine in the Ukraine went unnoticed.”13 By the early seventies, the red sins carried out by the Soviet government may not have been as brutal as those perpetrated under Stalin’s murderous regime, but the red sinners of the KGB were still as active as ever. On August 8, 1971, KGB agents sought to assassinate Solzhenitsyn as he queued in a department store in Novocherkassk. According to a later confession by Lieutenant Colonel Boris Ivanov, one of the KGB operatives involved in the plot, the “whole operation lasted two or three minutes” and involved the surreptitious administering of a deadly poison to the intended victim’s skin. As Solzhenitsyn left the shop, completely oblivious of the deadly toxin that had been administered, the KGB agents assumed that he had only a short time to live. “It’s all over”, the officer-in-charge of the operation informed Ivanov. “He won’t live much longer.”14
Recalling the incident many years later, Solzhenitsyn told Russian journalists that he had been feeling well and that he and a friend had “visited the cathedral and the shops”. He went on to describe the effects of the toxin: “I don’t remember any injection, I certainly didn’t feel it, but by mid-morning the skin on my left side suddenly started to hurt a great deal. Towards evening (we had stopped to see people we knew), I continued to deteriorate and had a very large burn. The following morning I was reduced to a terrible state: my left hip, left side, stomach and back were covered with blisters, the largest of which were fifteen centimeters in diameter.”15