TASS declares that Solzhenitsyn is a traitor to the fatherland and that he is slandering its past. But how can one believe that “past errors” have been condemned and corrected and at the same time consider slanderous an honest effort to collect and publish people’s historical testimonies about a part of those crimes which are on our collective conscience? It is impossible to deny that there were mass arrests, inhuman conditions, forced labor, deliberate annihilation of millions of people in the camps. There was the abolition of the kulaks, the persecution and destruction of hundreds of thousands of religious believers, deportations of whole peoples, anti-worker and anti-peasant laws, persecution of former prisoners of war. There were other crimes, appalling in their ruthlessness, cowardice and cynicism.3
Responding to this letter by Sakharov and others, the American writer Saul Bellow added his voice to those seeking to protect Solzhenitsyn from further persecution. Writing in the New York Times, Bellow declared that the word “hero”, long in disrepute, had been redeemed by Solzhenitsyn. In a counter-threat to the Soviet authorities, Bellow warned that further persecution of Solzhenitsyn—deportation, confinement in a madhouse, or exile—would be taken as final evidence of the complete moral degeneracy of the Soviet regime.4
In the event, the Soviet regime displayed its moral degeneracy just three weeks later. Solzhenitsyn was arrested at his Moscow home on February 12, 1974, and taken to Lefortovo prison where he was charged with treason. On the following day, having been stripped of his Soviet citizenship, he was expelled from his homeland as a traitor. There is little doubt that under Stalin he would have been executed, an indication that the Soviet system had modified its methods if not its intolerant credo. The subtle shift of approach had not been lost on the dissident L. L. Regelson, who wrote an open letter to the Soviet government on February 17, protesting at Solzhenitsyn’s banishment:
You have, it seems, gradually begun to understand that in a spiritual battle an opponent slain is more dangerous than an opponent still living…. But… you have still not realized that with the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago, that hour in history has struck which will be fatal to you… that tens of murdered millions have risen up against you…. They have long been knocking for entrance into our lives, but there was none to open the door…. The Gulag Archipelago is the indictment with which your trial at the hands of the human race begins…. May the paralysis with which God punished your first leader serve as a prophetic prefiguring of the spiritual paralysis which is now inexorably advancing upon you.
…Perhaps some of you may begin to ask yourself: And is there One over us all who will demand a full reckoning?
Never doubt it—there is.
He will demand a reckoning. And you will answer…. Take Russia out of the hands of Cain, and give her back to God.5
Six weeks after Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion, his family was allowed to leave for Switzerland to join him in his new life in exile. On March 27, two days before their final departure, Alya had organized a farewell gathering of friends. Many well-known dissidents were in attendance, including Lev Kopelev, Yuli Daniel, and Alexander Ginsburg, as well as a number of Western correspondents. In the true spirit of her husband, and in keeping with her own resilient character, Alya made a fiery and defiant statement to those assembled. “It is painful to part from Russia,” she said, “painful that our children are condemned to a life without a homeland, painful and difficult to leave friends who are not protected.” Concerning her husband’s expulsion, she stressed that “they can separate a Russian writer from his native land, but no one has the power and strength to sever his spiritual link with it, to tear Solzhenitsyn away from it. And even if his books are now set ablaze on bonfires, their existence in his homeland is indestructible, just as Solzhenitsyn’s love for Russia is indestructible.” In conclusion, she echoed the words of the wives of the Decembrists—the rebel aristocrats who had defied the Tsar in December 1825—who had followed their husbands into exile a century and a half earlier. “My place is beside him, but leaving Russia is excruciatingly painful.”6
His wife and family now safely with him, Solzhenitsyn began to come to terms with his new life. Throughout all the years of struggle against Soviet censorship, he had never sought to defect to the West. On the contrary, his love for Russia was such that he had earnestly desired to remain on Soviet soil whatever the cost. Nevertheless, there was no denying the sense of liberation that accompanied his arrival in Zurich. At long last, he was able to enjoy the freedom to write and say exactly what he wanted without the threat of imprisonment.
Before the end of his first year in exile, he completed work on his autobiography The Oak and the Calf, published in 1975. Shortly afterward, he finished a supplement to this entitled Invisible Allies, which was not published for a further twenty years for fear of incriminating his friends and allies still resident in the Soviet Union. The first year of exile also saw the publication of Prussian Nights, Solzhenitsyn’s poetic account of his memories of front-line service in the Second World War. Meanwhile, he was working on Lenin in Zurich, his indictment of Lenin’s collaboration with Russia’s enemies during the previous war. Such a revisionist approach to Lenin’s shady business deals and to the role of the Germans and big business in the bankrolling of the Bolshevik Revolution would have been tantamount to blasphemy in the Soviet Union. Although Stalin had been dethroned and attacked for nurturing a personality cult, the cult surrounding Lenin was still sacrosanct. He was still the ultimate stainless communist icon, and Lenin in Zurich was seen by the Soviets as an act of unforgivable iconoclasm.
Solzhenitsyn had been helped considerably in his research for Lenin in Zurich by several historical studies that had been published in the West but were not available in the Soviet Union. Unwittingly, by expelling Solzhenitsyn to the West, his enemies in Russia had opened up a whole new world of research to him, placing powerful new weapons at his disposal. In the author’s note at the end of Lenin in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn expressed gratitude to the writers of these historical studies “for their close attention to events which determined the course of the twentieth century, but which have been carefully concealed from history, and which because of the direction taken by the development of the West have received little attention”.7 Questioned about this cryptic conclusion to his study of Lenin, Solzhenitsyn reiterated that the four authors explicitly named and to whom he was particularly indebted in his research for the book were moving against the wind of the century: “Both the meaning and the facts which they relayed were cast in doubt and certainly most people asked the question ‘why do we need this?’ Specifically, one of the books which had concentrated on Lenin’s ties with Germany was simply rejected even though there were stacks of documents to verify its claims and people just continued to deny that these things had ever happened.”8