In fact, although he conveyed no details to Natalya, Solzhenitsyn had taken steps only weeks earlier to do just as he said. On September 5, he had written a letter of constructive criticism to the leaders of the Soviet Union, in the hope of evoking some sort of positive response from them about the nation’s destiny. As a sign of good faith, he had not treated it as an open letter and did not release it to his friends or to the press. On the contrary, he had endeavored to keep its very existence a secret, dispatching individual copies to leading figures in the Soviet government. It was a genuine attempt at dialogue.
Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to Soviet Leaders was in many respects a visionary document, detailing the way in which civilization in both the East and the West was in peril—the peril of “progress”.
How fond our progressive publicists were, both before and after the revolution, of ridiculing those retrogrades… who called upon us to cherish and have pity on our past, even on the most god-forsaken hamlet with a couple of hovels… who called upon us to keep horses even after the advent of the motor car, not to abandon small factories for enormous plants and combines, not to discard organic manure in favour of chemical fertilizers, not to mass by the million in cities, not to clamber on top of one another in multi-storey blocks.25
The world had been “dragged along the whole of the Western bourgeois-industrial and Marxist path” only to discover
what any village greybeard in the Ukraine or Russia had understood from time immemorial… that a dozen maggots can’t go on and on gnawing the same apple forever; that if the earth is a finite object, then its expanses and resources are finite also, and the endless, infinite progress dinned into our heads by the dreamers of the Enlightenment cannot be accomplished on it…. All that “endless progress” turned out to be an insane, ill-considered, furious dash into a blind alley. A civilization greedy for “perpetual progress” has now choked and is on its last legs.26
Solzhenitsyn’s visionary rhetoric was not aimed solely at condemning past crimes but was an urgent effort to convince the Soviet government of its responsibility as the guardian of the future: “We have squandered our resources foolishly without so much as a backward glance, sapped our soil… and contaminated belts of waste land around our industrial centres—but for the moment, at least, far more still remains untainted by us, which we haven’t had time to touch. So let us come to our senses in time, let us change our course!”27 To secure the future and create a land of clean air and clean water for our children, he went on, it was necessary to overcome the dictatorship of short-term economic considerations and to renounce many forms of industrial production that result in toxic waste.28
Amidst the political polemics, the text of the Letter to Soviet Leaders was enlivened by the aesthetic ruminations of a literary master. Thus a discourse on the need for disarmament concluded with a plea for peace—not the peace of the politician but the peace of the poet:
In reducing our military forces we shall also deliver our skies from the sickening roar of aerial armadas—day and night, all the hours that God made, they perform their interminable flights and exercises over our broad lands, breaking the sound barrier, roaring and booming, shattering the daily life, rest, sleep and nerves of hundreds of thousands of people, effectively addling their brains by screeching overhead…. And all this has been going on for decades and has nothing to do with saving the country—it is a futile waste of energy. Give the country back a healthy silence, without which you cannot begin to have a healthy people.29
A similar observation offered an alternative to the utterly unnatural life people were forced to endure in modern cities. Against the huge industrial conurbations, Solzhenitsyn contraposed life in the “old towns—towns made for people, horses, dogs… towns which were humane, friendly, cosy places, where the air was always clean, which were snow-clad in winter and in spring redolent with garden aromas streaming through the fences into the streets…. An economy of non-giantism with small-scale though highly developed technology will not only allow for but will necessitate the building of new towns of the old type.”30
At the conclusion of his heartfelt address, Solzhenitsyn pleaded for equally fair treatment for all ideological and moral currents, in particular between all religions. He stated that personally he considered Christianity the only living spiritual force capable of undertaking the spiritual healing of Russia but proposed no special privileges for it, simply that it should be treated fairly and not suppressed. Besides the freedom to worship, he called for “a free art and literature… allow us philosophical, ethical, economic and social studies, and you will see what a rich harvest it brings and how it bears fruit—for the good of Russia”.31
Although Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to Soviet Leaders was written specifically from a Russian perspective, there were remarkable parallels between its central message and that of the radical economist E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, which was being published almost simultaneously in the West. Schumacher’s book was destined to have a dramatic impact on Western thought; its publication served to bolster the environmentalist lobby and launch the “green” movement. Schumacher’s call for sustainable development, eco-friendly economics, and human-scale enterprises echoed Solzhenitsyn’s own thoughts. “I came to the same conclusions in parallel with him but independently”, Solzhenitsyn stated. “If you have read my Letter to Soviet Leaders you will see that I say much the same thing as he did at about the same sort of time.”32