There were other parallels with Schumacher. Like Solzhenitsyn, Schumacher believed that economic activity subsisted within a higher moral, and ultimately religious, framework. Like Solzhenitsyn, he had made his first public profession of faith the previous year, in his case with his reception into the Roman Catholic Church. There was, however, one notable difference. Whereas Schumacher was lauded and applauded by Western leaders, including American President Jimmy Carter, Solzhenitsyn received nothing but a wall of silence in response to his Letter to Soviet Leaders. In 1974, Schumacher was awarded the CBE by the British government for his services to economics. In the same year, Solzhenitsyn was exiled by the Soviet government as a traitor.
In the last quarter of 1973, Solzhenitsyn remained preoccupied with the subject of Russia’s reconstruction along the lines he had outlined in his Letter to Soviet Leaders. Specifically, he was in the process of editing a collection of eleven essays, later to be published as From under the Rubble, which was intended to stir debate on matters of fundamental principle concerning the contemporary state of Russian life. Each essay sought to shed light both on the present evils and on possible future long-term solutions. Solzhenitsyn wrote three essays for the collection, the first of which, entitled “As Breathing and Consciousness Return”, included a reiteration of the thoughts on nationhood he had elucidated in his Nobel Lecture: “In spite of Marxism, the twentieth century has revealed to us the inexhaustible strength and vitality of national feelings and impels us to think more deeply about this riddle: why is the nation a no less sharply defined and irreducible human entity than the individual? Does not national variety enrich mankind as faceting increases the value of a jewel? Should it be destroyed? And can it be destroyed?”33
Having stated his own belief in the enriching variety of nations, he compared it with the desire of Andrei Sakharov for an intellectual world leadership, for world government. Such a government, Solzhenitsyn maintained, would be impossible under democracy, “for given universal franchise, when and where would an intellectual elite be elected to govern?” Consequently, any world government would need to be imposed because it would never be elected. It would constitute authoritarian rule. “Whether such a government proved very bad or excellent, the means of creating it, the principles of its formation and operation, can have nothing in common with modern democracy.”34
In October 1973, Solzhenitsyn wrote a postscript to his original essay in which he asked fundamental questions about the nature and meaning of “happiness” and “freedom”. The current conception that both were linked to material considerations, such as the absence of poverty or increasing disposable income, was inadequate. At their deepest and most meaningful level, happiness and freedom both found their fulfillment on a transcendent spiritual plane. To illustrate the point, he gave the example of the desire of the peasants for land in pre-revolutionary Russia: “The peasant masses longed for land and if this in a certain sense means freedom and wealth, in another (and more important) sense it means obligation, in yet another (and its highest) sense it means a mystical tie with the world and a feeling of personal worth.”35
Solzhenitsyn used this practical example of natural peasant yearnings as a springboard into a deeper discussion of metaphysical reality:
Can external freedom for its own sake be the goal of conscious living beings? Or is it only a framework within which other and higher aims can be realized? We are creatures born with inner freedom of will, freedom of choice—the most important freedom of all is a gift to us at birth. External, or social, freedom is very desirable for the sake of undistorted growth, but is no more than a condition, a medium, and to regard it as the object of our existence is nonsense. We can firmly assert our inner freedom even in external conditions of unfreedom…. In an unfree environment we do not lose the possibility of progress toward moral goals (that for instance of leaving this earth better men than our hereditary endowment has made us). The need to struggle against our surroundings rewards our efforts with greater inner success.36
On the other hand, a surfeit of comfort, which some mistake as freedom, leads to corruption. For this reason, the materially affluent Western democracies were in a state of spiritual confusion. The moral health of civilization had been preserved by past generations who had never known the modern conveniences of technological society: “A level of moral health incomparably higher than that expressed today in simian radio music, pop songs and insulting advertisements: could a listener from outer space imagine that our planet had already known and left behind it Bach, Rembrandt and Dante?”37
If the essay displayed Solzhenitsyn’s contempt for the moral bankruptcy of Western materialism, he still saved his fiercest scorn for the immoral totalitarianism of the Soviet system:
Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general, conscious lie. To this putrefaction of the soul, this spiritual enslavement, human beings who wish to be human cannot consent. When Caesar, having exacted what is Caesar’s, demands still more insistently that we render unto him what is God’s—that is a sacrifice we dare not make!38
In November, Solzhenitsyn wrote another essay for inclusion in From under the Rubble, entitled “Repentance and Self-Limitation”. A quarter of a century later he would still consider this one of his more important articles, expressing one of his key thoughts.39 In one important respect, it was his own considered reply to the issue of “National Bolshevism” that had caused such acrimony with the liberal critics of Novy Mir. Although he had disagreed strongly with the nature of their critique of National Bolshevism, feeling that they were attacking it for the wrong reasons, Solzhenitsyn was opposed to the xenophobic chauvinism and jingoism of the National Bolsheviks. In “Repentance and Self-Limitation”, he sought to dissect the essence of National Bolshevism, which made communism and patriotism inseparable, praised the Revolution and the subsequent history of the Soviet Union as a triumph of the Russian spirit, and believed that blood alone determined whether one was Russian or non-Russian. As for things spiritual, Solzhenitsyn wrote, all trends are admissible to the National Bolshevik. “Orthodoxy is not the least bit more Russian than Marxism, atheism, the scientific outlook, or, shall we say, Hinduism. God need not be written with a capital letter, but Government must be.”40
Against such triumphalist pseudo-fascism, dressed up in Marxist clothes, Solzhenitsyn placed his own view of love for one’s country:
As we understand it patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins, and penitence for them. We ought to get used to the idea that no people is eternally great or eternally noble… that the greatness of a people is to be sought not in the blare of trumpets—physical might is purchased at a spiritual price beyond our means—but in the level of its inner development, in its breadth of soul.