In this defense of unfashionable Western historians, Solzhenitsyn was firing his first warning shots to the governments of the West. Within months of his arrival, he had begun to rock the boat, starting to side with Western dissidents as vociferously as he had sided with dissidents in the East. It was clear that, in spite of the claims of the Soviet press, Solzhenitsyn was no mere mouthpiece for the liberal humanists who ruled in the West. He had hinted as much in volume one of The Gulag Archipelago, stating that “I do not like these ‘left’ and ‘right’ classifications; they are conditional concepts, they are loosely bandied about, and they do not convey the essence.”9 Unfortunately, political thought during the Cold War years was pre-conditioned by such classifications, and anyone who failed to fit neatly on the left-right continuum was doomed to misinterpretation by the stagnant ideologues on both sides of the divide.
Solzhenitsyn had already alienated many dissidents in Russia by his failure to genuflect before the altar of Western two-party democracy. Such a system was no panacea for the problems of totalitarianism, not least because it led to a choice little better than that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. His pessimism was sometimes seen as authoritarian in nature, a misunderstanding exacerbated by some muddled thinking, or at least some muddled wording, in one of his essays in From under the Rubble. Yet his views were far from anti-democratic, as his enthusiasm for the political system in Switzerland indicated. He told Doctor Fred Luchsinger, editor-in-chief of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a Zurich newspaper, that he admired Swiss democracy because it was organized in small local units, such as the village and the canton. Unlike the centralized democracies in other Western countries, the emphasis in Switzerland was on local self-determination and the active participation of the entire population. It reminded him, he informed Luchsinger, of the democratic system in medieval Novgorod. On another occasion, he told his Swiss publisher, Otto Walter, that he was very impressed by the treatment Alexander Herzen had received when he sought political asylum in Geneva during the nineteenth century. The authorities in Geneva had asked the federal government in Bern whether they had any objections to Herzen’s request for asylum, and the government had replied that it was a matter for Geneva to decide for itself. “This”, Solzhenitsyn exclaimed, “really is democracy from the base, when a city can decide questions of national policy for itself.”10
Solzhenitsyn repeated his praise of the Swiss political system in an interview on American television in June 1974:
Swiss democracy has some amazing qualities. First, it is completely silent and works inaudibly. Secondly, there is its stability…. Thirdly, it’s an upturned pyramid. That is, there’s more power at the local level… than in the cantons, and more power in the cantons than with the government…. Furthermore, democracy is everyone’s responsibility. Each individual would rather moderate his demands than damage the whole structure. The Swiss have such a high sense of responsibility that there are no attempts by groups to seize something for themselves and elbow out the rest…. Naturally one can only admire such a democracy.11
In Solzhenitsyn’s eyes, the Swiss system represented his own passionate belief in self-limitation incarnated on a national level. It was proof that the principles he lived by could be employed on a practical basis by societies as well as by individuals. Once again, there are similarities between Solzhenitsyn’s views and those of E. F. Schumacher, who had given his Small is Beautiful the subtitle “A Study of Economics As If People Mattered”. In the Swiss democratic system, Solzhenitsyn believed that he was seeing politics as if people mattered.
Solzhenitsyn’s interview on American television was timed to coincide with publication of the long-awaited English translation ofThe Gulag Archipelago. As expected, its publication had a huge impact throughout the English-speaking world. “To live now and not to know this work”, wrote L. W. Webb in the Guardian, “is to be a kind of historical fool missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.”12 His views were echoed around the globe as The Gulag Archipelago became an international bestseller. Two million copies of the American paperback edition were published, the book being described by George Kennan in the New York Review of Books as “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levelled in modern times”.13
Solzhenitsyn had achieved his aim, fulfilling the promise he had made while still a prisoner in the camps he described so graphically in The Gulag Archipelago. As a completely unknown prisoner, languishing in the oblivion of the Gulag, he had vowed to let the world know about the Soviet Union’s sordid secret—an unspeakable secret that had hushed up the killing oftens of millions of people. Yet he could not have imagined the success which awaited him, the immensity of which was evoked by George Kennan: “The Soviet leaders cannot, just by ignoring it themselves or attempting to smother it with falsehood, consign it to oblivion or cause it to remain without consequences. It is too large for the craw of the Soviet propaganda machine. It will stick there, with increasing discomfort, until it has done its work.”14
Of course, the Soviet propaganda machine could always, in time-honored fashion, simply dismiss such reviews in the American press as the anti-socialist rantings of bourgeois reactionary forces. More difficult was the devastating effect that the French edition was having on the views of the socialist intelligentsia in France. Following publication of The Gulag Archipelago, the longstanding love affair between French intellectuals and the Soviet Union was brought to an uncomfortable end. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Aragon, and the other illustrissimi of the pro-Soviet old guard sank into gloom-laden old age, their lifelong delusions laid bare before their eyes. “What shall we do?” asked Sartre in a plea to his lover. “Where shall we go?” “A whirlwind is carrying me to the grave,” mourned de Beauvoir, “and I am trying not to think.”15
In contrast to the desolate atheism of Sartre and de Beauvoir, Solzhenitsyn was beginning to feel more hopeful about the problems facing the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union. On September 27, his open letter to the Third Council of the Russian Church Abroad was published in the daily newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo. It was written at the request of Metropolitan Filaret, who had asked him to present his views as to how the portion of the Russian Orthodox Church that existed in freedom could render assistance to the oppressed and captive portion in Russia. No doubt fueled by nostalgia for the native soil upon which he was no longer free to walk, Solzhenitsyn’s letter was full of heartfelt praise for the devoutness of his fellow countrymen. He spoke of churches filled to the brim, stating that, in the midst of the current castration of faith in the West, there were probably nowhere else on earth such crowded churches as those in the USSR.
Faith does not suffer when there is scarcely enough space to bow to the ground or to make the sign of the cross. Standing together shoulder to shoulder we support one another against persecution. And the number of faithful far exceeds the number who are willing and able to attend services. In the Ryazan region, with which I am most familiar, more than seventy per cent of all infants are baptized, despite all the prohibitions and persecution. In the cemeteries crosses are replacing the Soviet markers with their star and photograph.16