There were still many problems to be surmounted, such as state interference in church affairs, poorly organized or non-existent parishes, and the lack of Christian education for the nation’s youth, but Russian young people were finding the way to church on their own, and the church was growing stronger in the fervor of its believers and converts, if not in its formal organization. With evident relish, Solzhenitsyn compared the resurrection of religious faith among the young with the militant atheism of Soviet youth in the honeymoon period following the Revolution. In the years immediately before and after the Revolution, the church was shunned and subjected to ridicule by young people and the intelligentsia. Solzhenitsyn remembered how many fiery adherents were claimed by militant atheism in the 1920s. “Those who went on rampages, blew out candles, and smashed icons with axes have now crumbled into dust, like their Union of the Militant Godless.” Fifty years on, and the enemies of faith had adopted a different and more subtle, though no less pernicious, persona: “Since the shiny bauble of unlimited material progress has led all of humanity into a depressing spiritual cul-de-sac, represented with only slight nuances of difference in the East as in the West, I can discover only one healthy course for everyone now living, for nations, societies, human organizations, and above all else for churches. We must confess our sins and errors (our own, not those of others), repent, and use self-restraint in our future development.”17
Even if he still remained contemptuous of the spiritual cul-de-sac into which the world had wandered, Solzhenitsyn’s words had seldom resonated with such optimism. It seemed that life in the admirable Swiss democracy was, for the liberty-starved writer, as fresh with freedom as the alpine air.
In December 1974, Solzhenitsyn finally traveled to Stockholm to collect his Nobel Prize, four years after it had been awarded to him. In April 1975, he visited Paris, appearing on the popular television program Apostrophe. The program attracted five million viewers, twice the usual number, and most were captivated by his passionate sincerity and charm. According to L’Express, Solzhenitsyn was “a new prophet, the herald of a great religious movement”, and Paris Match considered him “a genius… the equal of Dostoyevsky”.
On June 30, Solzhenitsyn delivered an address to two and a half thousand delegates of the AFL-CIO, America’s main trade union organization, at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. He expressed great admiration for America and the American people. The United States was “a country of the future; a young country; a country of still untapped possibilities; a country of tremendous geographical distances; a country of tremendous breadth of spirit; a country of generosity; a country of magnanimity”. Yet he also spoke about the situation in the Soviet Union where there was occurring a liberation of the human spirit. New generations were growing up which were “steadfast in their struggle with evil; which are not willing to accept unprincipled compromises; which prefer to lose everything—salary, conditions of existence and life itself—but are not willing to sacrifice conscience; not willing to make deals with evil”.18 As well as being an expression of praise for his fellow dissidents, Solzhenitsyn’s words were a measured attack on the American policy of detente, which he believed was a betrayal of his dissident friends in the Soviet Union and amounted to nothing less than a shameful compromise with evil.
Surprisingly, considering his pro-American stance, Solzhenitsyn’s visit to Washington was most conspicuous for the absence of any invitation to the White House. Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, was known to be uneasy about Solzhenitsyn’s outspoken opposition to detente, and it was widely suspected that it was he who had blocked the invitation. Certainly, the official excuses emanating from the White House were sufficiently lame to raise suspicions about the true motive for the official snub to Solzhenitsyn. President Ford was said not to want a meeting “without substance”. It seems a little odd that the President of the United States could find nothing of substance to discuss with the author who was currently shaking the Soviet empire with the revelations in The Gulag Archipelago, not least because he had found time to pose with both a beauty queen and with Pelé, the Brazilian soccer star, only a week or so earlier.
Simon Winchester, the Guardian’s Washington correspondent, praised President Ford for his reality and integrity in denying a hearing to the “shaggy author”, the “hairy polemicist” who had become the “darling of the redneck population” and who had talked to thousands of “sagging beer bellies” at the Hilton Hotel.19 Gratuitous insults and stereotypes aside, Winchester’s views were typical of those who now suspected Solzhenitsyn of political incorrectness. One State Department official managed to take the abuse against Solzhenitsyn one step further, foolishly rushing in where even Winchester had feared to tread. “Let’s face it”, he remarked, “he’s just about a Fascist”. This comment provoked the writer D. M. Thomas to justifiable words of contempt. How could anyone suggest that Solzhenitsyn, “a man who had fought the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, demanded freedom of speech and religion, the rule of morality, grass-roots democracy, ecology before profit, an end to military conscription, and an end to the Soviet empire was ideologically akin to Himmler.”?20
Many Americans were outraged at the White House’s cold-shouldering of Solzhenitsyn, and President Ford found himself politically embarrassed by the snub. Politicians were as annoyed as their electorates, and on July 15, Solzhenitsyn addressed an audience of some eighty congressmen at a reception in his honor held in the Senate Caucus Room. In early October, the Senate unanimously adopted a resolution to confer honorary citizenship on him, but once again the State Department, in a further example of Kissinger’s vindictiveness, intervened to prevent its implementation.
Having caused such controversy in the United States, Solzhenitsyn made his first visit to Britain in February 1976. He arrived as a celebrity, and The Times reported on February 23 that his portrait had been presented to the Victoria and Albert Museum by Felix Fabian. An entourage of journalists accompanied him as he visited Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon, before his arrival in London. At the BBC Television Centre, he criticized senior executives for the decline in the standard of its Russian service, calling for more information to be transmitted to a people bombarded with lies. He believed that the BBC should also broadcast to the minorities in the Soviet Union, for example, in Estonian, Latvian, and Ukrainian. Above all, the BBC Russian service should offer more religion to its listeners. Christianity, he explained, was the most vital form of dissent in Russia, and some communities were two or three hundred miles from a church. The BBC could and should bring the church into their homes.
The highlight of Solzhenitsyn’s visit was an interview on Panorama, the BBC’s flagship current affairs program. Five million people watched the original broadcast, while a staggering fifteen million saw the repeat, an audience normally only achieved by popular comedy shows or soap operas. The nation watched and listened, but Solzhenitsyn was already beginning to suspect that his words were falling on deaf ears:
My warnings, the warnings of others—Sakharov’s very grave warning directly from the Soviet Union—these go unheeded, most of them fall, as it were, on the ears of the deaf—people who do not want to hear them. Once I used to hope that experience of life could be handed on from nation to nation, and from one person to another…. But now I am beginning to have doubts. Perhaps everyone is fated to live through every experience himself in order to understand.21