Like a latter-day John the Baptist calling on his fellow countrymen to repent, Solzhenitsyn reminded them that
we Russians are not traversing the heavens in a blaze of glory but sitting forlornly on a heap of spiritual cinders…. And unless we recover the gift of repentance, our country will perish and will drag down the whole world with it. Only through the repentance of a multitude of people can the air and the soil of Russia be cleansed so that a new, healthy national life can grow up. We cannot raise a clean crop on a false, unsound, obdurate soil.41
The concept of repentance and self-limitation was not applicable to nations only. It was equally applicable to individuals, in fact more so, because any national repentance could only start in the hearts and minds of individuals. “We are always anxiously on the lookout for ways of curbing the inordinate greed of the other man, but no one is heard renouncing his own inordinate greed.” It was this selfishness, this pride, at the very heart of man which lay at the root of society’s problems.
After the Western ideal of unlimited freedom, after the Marxist concept of freedom as acceptance of the yoke of necessity—here is the true Christian definition of freedom. Freedom is self-restriction! Restriction of the self for the sake of others!
…This principle diverts us—as individuals, in all forms of human association, societies and nations—from outward to inward development, thereby giving us greater spiritual depth.
The turn toward inward development, the triumph of inwardness over outwardness, if it ever happens, will be a great turning point in the history of mankind, comparable to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance…. If in some places this is destined to be a revolutionary process, these revolutions will not be like earlier ones—physical, bloody and never beneficial—but will be moral revolutions, requiring both courage and sacrifice, though not cruelty—a new phenomenon in human history.42
A quarter of a century later, Solzhenitsyn had succumbed to more than a trace of scepticism: “I believe that if people knew how to self-limit they would be morally much higher. Unfortunately, the idea of self-limitation is not successful if you try to propagandize it. It does not resonate. Mostly, I think, only highly religious people are willing to accept this idea. For instance, if you try to propagandize the idea of self-limitation to governments or states and say that they should learn not to grab what belongs to others, this does not have an effect.”43
Solzhenitsyn’s third and final essay for From under the Rubble was entitled “The Smatterers”, combining a pessimistic appraisal of the recent past, a plaintive cry against present trends, and a defiant optimism about the future. He finished it in January 1974 and passed it to Liusha Chukovskaya, the trusted friend who had helped him for the previous eight years. He requested that she type it, along with the other two essays destined for From under the Rubble, but was surprised when she returned a few days later and launched into a raging tirade against him, against which her previous disquiet over the Lenten Letter paled into insignificance. She had been horrified by the content of the essays and thrust a sheaf of notes listing her disagreements into his hands. Her anger was heightened by the confirmation that for all those years she had helped a man with whom she now knew she disagreed on fundamentals.
Chukovskaya was not alone in her apprehensions about the direction that Solzhenitsyn seemed to be taking. Another helper, Mirra Petrova, disliked what she perceived as a reactionary drift in Solzhenitsyn’s work, particularly in August 1914 and October 1916, and despised every mention of religion. Solzhenitsyn also alienated his old friend Lev Kopelev, who was very critical of the contents of the Letter to Soviet Leaders. For his part, Solzhenitsyn thought that Kopelev had reverted to his earlier communist sympathies, feeling that his old ally had become a fierce and abiding foe.
Solzhenitsyn grieved at the cooling or loss of previous friendships, understanding the apprehensions of erstwhile allies but finally unable to accept their disagreements. It must have seemed as though he was losing the warmth of many of those closest to him, finding himself out in the cold in the grimmest heat of battle. Yet he still had the indomitable strength of Alya to lean on. She had just given him their third son in as many years, and he knew that, in her at least, he had an ally who agreed with all he was doing and saying. She was his rock, standing firm amid the storms that his own efforts were unleashing upon both of them. Nevertheless, the joys of fatherhood and family life could not dispel entirely the sorrows incurred through the sacrifice of old friendships. In a moment of melancholy in December 1973, he had asked himself, “[W]hen will the din of battle cease? If only I could go away from it all, go away for many years to the back of beyond with nothing but fields and open skies and woods and horses in sight, nothing to do but write my novel at my own pace.”44
Little could he know that within two months his prayer would be answered, although scarcely in the way he had envisaged. He was about to find himself thrust out in the cold by his enemies as well as his friends. Out in the cold and a long way from home.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
COLD-SHOULDERED
The publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago in Paris in December 1973 provoked the full fury of the Soviet authorities. Typical of their splenetic response was an article in Pravda on January 14, 1974, entitled “The Path of Treason”, in which The Gulag Archipelago was described as “another slanderous book by A. Solzhenitsyn”. It was clearly designed to fool and cheat gullible people with all kinds of fabrications about the Soviet Union, and Solzhenitsyn was literally choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, for the Soviet people. The Gulag Archipelago contained nothing but “the outpourings of a deranged imagination” and was “stuffed with cynical falsifications concocted to serve the forces of imperial reaction”. Its author was seeing the Soviet system through the eyes of those who were shooting and hanging communists, revolutionary workers, and peasants, while they were defending the black cause of counterrevolution. Solzhenitsyn was guilty of moral degradation, spiritual poverty, and, perhaps worst of all, was “playing the role of a Christian fool”. The history of the labor camps documented in the book was nothing but a vicious fabrication, and, anyway, was unnecessary because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had already subjected abuses of the Soviet legal system in the days of the personality cult to unqualified criticism. The article concluded with an ominous threat: “Solzhenitsyn deserves the merit for which he has so zealously strived—the fate of a traitor from whom all Soviet working people, and every honest man on earth, cannot but turn away in anger and disgust.”1
Four days after the appearance of the Pravda article, Solzhenitsyn issued a statement in his own defense, complaining that the furious press campaign had concealed the book’s purpose from the Soviet reader: “Pravda lies when it says that the author ‘sees with the eyes of those who hanged revolutionary workers and peasants’. No! with the eyes of those who were shot and tortured by the NKVD. Pravda asserts that in our country there is ‘unqualified criticism’ of the pre-1956 period. So let them just give us a sample of their unqualified criticism. I have provided them with the richest factual material for it.”2 Several leading dissidents sprang to Solzhenitsyn’s defense, putting themselves at considerable risk as the campaign against him became ever more vociferous and hysterical. Andrei Sakharov and four other dissidents put their name to a letter in which they expressed their deep concern about the “new threats to Alexander Solzhenitsyn” contained in a recent statement by TASS, the Soviet news agency.