Thrust out into the cold from the Russia he loved, he now found himself being cold-shouldered by the West, exacerbating his sense of exile.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAMPION OF ORTHODOXY
In the aftermath of the storm surrounding his comments in Spain, Solzhenitsyn’s public appearances, though less frequent as he became more defensive, met with increasing degrees of hostility. At the end of March 1976, his outspoken criticisms of British complacency and loss of will in the face of her international responsibilities prompted a dismissive response from the new Prime Minister, James Callaghan, who stated that he totally rejected Solzhenitsyn’s views.1
A few weeks later, Solzhenitsyn was interviewed by Georges Suffert, editor of Le Point. Throughout the interview, Suffert displayed a thinly disguised air of animosity and was unmoved by his quarry’s efforts to describe his discovery of life and God in the labor camps. Instead, he interjected with a quite unprovoked question about whether Solzhenitsyn wanted a world war, to which the Russian responded that only Suffert’s “cock-eyed” conception of history could have prompted such a query. “Inner purpose is more important than politics” of any kind, he declared.2
On April 27, the screening of a BBC television interview with Solzhenitsyn on The Book Programme, during which he discussed the recently published English translation of Lenin in Zurich, met with a furious response from the Soviet Union. Sir Charles Curran, the BBC’s director-general, had been warned on two occasions prior to the program’s transmission that broadcasting the interview would jeopardize Curran’s proposed visit to Moscow. The Soviets carried out the threat and postponed the visit, informing Curran of their decision two days later. A telegram from Sergei Lapin, chairman of the state committee of the Soviet Council of Ministers for television and radio, stated that the BBC television program of April 27 on Solzhenitsyn’s slanderous book confirmed once again that the BBC continued with Cold War attitudes and encouraged libelous attacks against the Soviet Union.3
Away from the prying eyes of the media, Solzhenitsyn was making plans to move his family from Zurich in the heart of Europe to Vermont in the backwaters of the United States. He was looking for an escape from the insanity of media manipulation to the tranquility of a country retreat where he could concentrate once more on his writing. He had first struck upon the idea of living in Vermont during his travels through Canada, Alaska, and the United States in 1975. A three-day visit to Vermont’s Norwich University, at the invitation of its Russian department, had impressed him immensely, and he had been comforted by the echoes of his beloved Russia in the state’s climate and countryside, its crisp, cold air and evergreen forests. He had asked a young architect called Alexis Vinogradov to look out for a suitable property in the area and authorized him to purchase and oversee the renovation of a property on the outskirts of Cavendish, a Vermont village. In the summer of 1976, Solzhenitsyn asked for, and was granted, a permanent residence visa for the family, and in September, the Solzhenitsyns left Switzerland for the United States.
For several months after his arrival, the villagers saw no sign of the famous writer who had moved into their midst. A large fence was erected around the property, and the reclusive Russian showed no intention of emerging into public life. It was not until the following February that Solzhenitsyn was finally seen in public, when he and Alya attended the annual town meeting in the school gymnasium.
Yet the peace that the Solzhenitsyn family had managed to salvage from the intrusive eyes of the media belied the international turmoil that their very existence was still causing. On April 3, 1977, the Soviet government continued its ultimately futile war of attrition by stripping Alya of her Soviet citizenship for making statements prejudicial to the Soviet Union.4 Meanwhile, in London, Collet’s International Bookshop confessed that the books of Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov were not being sold for fear of offending the Soviets. The shop admitted that it had received extended credit from the Soviet Union, running into six figures.5
Amid the hostility, there were a few voices of sympathy speaking out in Solzhenitsyn’s defense. In England, the formidable Bernard Levin came to his aid. In an article entitled “Solzhenitsyn’s Roar of Defiance on the Long Winter March into Night”, published in The Times on November 18, 1977, Levin offered an alternative view to the dismissive way in which Prussian Nights had been discussed by some of the reviewers. He spoke of Solzhenitsyn’s arrival in the West as being
like some huge volcano, his expulsion representing the most complete confession of moral bankruptcy and turpitude yet made by his country’s rulers….
It soon became clear that the volcano was by no means extinct; Solzhenitsyn’s television appearances in this country (and in the United States) had an effect so great and continuing that the only appropriate analogy is with the way in which some astronomers think the universe started; the echoes of Solzhenitsyn’s Big Bang continue to vibrate in the mind, and the fallout is still fluttering to earth.
Having defended Solzhenitsyn so evocatively, Levin proceeded to evoke the power of his poem:
Epic poems, and that is what Prussian Nights is, are not much in fashion nowadays: Chesterton’s Lepanto was a long time ago. And I suspect that this very fact has coloured the reaction of some of those who have written about Solzhenitsyn’s. For it has to be read in a single sitting, if the sweep and force of the work are to be properly felt…. The most powerful aspect of the poem is the way the poet matches the drive of his verse, its pulsing metre and varying pace, to the demands of his account of the Russian armies’ drive. The reader is swept along with the advance, checking when it does, watching Solzhenitsyn’s men pause to eat, loot or rape; this sense of being part of the poem is what makes me say that the reader should treat it as a single span across history, to take individual lines or even scenes being little more use in grasping the whole than to scoop a single pailful from a rushing river.
Levin concluded by describing Prussian Nights as a mighty achievement that confirmed Solzhenitsyn’s place as a spiritual and artistic giant.6
Yet if he was a giant in the spiritual or artistic sphere, he was still a David in the face of the Goliaths of international power politics. In February 1978, Alya issued a statement about the latest attempts by the KGB to destroy a fund founded by her husband to help dissidents in the Soviet Union. The fund—known somewhat awkwardly as the “Russian Social Fund to Help Those Who Are Persecuted and Their Families”—had been set up by Solzhenitsyn soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union. He had donated all royalties from The Gulag Archipelago to provide the initial finance, and the fund had subsequently helped hundreds of families, mainly in the form of clothing or medicine or by the provision of traveling expenses for relatives to visit prison camps.
Alya was president of her husband’s fund, while its main executor inside the Soviet Union had been Alexander Ginsburg, a prominent dissident, who had held the post for three years, until his arrest in February the previous year. Soon after Ginsburg’s arrest, security authorities had exiled the other main figures working for the fund to Siberia or persecuted them into emigration. Alya explained in her statement that Ginsburg’s wife, Irina, had taken over for her husband as the main executor but was being hindered by Soviet prison authorities in her efforts to provide assistance to prisoners and their families. The authorities had refused to pass on warm clothes and a Bible and had severely limited the contents of food parcels. Alya also claimed that KGB agents operating in Switzerland were attempting to obtain details of those people receiving assistance from the fund so that they could step up the government’s efforts to block its work.7