RUSSIA REBORN
On October 13 1979, Solzhenitsyn found himself once more the victim of government censorship. This time, however, it was not the Soviet government that sought to block his work but an ostensibly friendly regime. The Finnish authorities blacked out transmission of a Swedish television adaptation of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the Swedish-speaking population of the Aland Islands. The transmission was banned in Finnish territory because the Supreme Court had ruled that it might harm Finland’s relations with the Soviet Union.1 Yet if the icy politics of the Cold War still continued to raise its frosty head, Solzhenitsyn could shrug it off with the knowledge that the iciness was the chill of the morgue. He already believed that the Soviet regime was dead on its feet, and he sensed that his return to Russia was a distinct possibility.
I am firmly convinced… that I will return, that I will be in time for this business. You know, I feel so optimistic that it seems to me it is only a matter of a few years before I return to Russia…. I have no proof of it, but I have a premonition, a feeling. And I have very often had these accurate feelings, prophetic feelings, when I know in advance what is going to happen, how things will turn out, and that’s the way it is. I think—I am sure—that I will return to Russia and still have a chance to live there.2
When these words were spoken, few would have taken them very seriously. The Soviet Union stood secure, or so it seemed, an indestructible monolith, squatting its vast immovable bulk over the whole of Eastern Europe and extending its influence to every corner of the globe. In fact, the Brezhnev era was in many respects a period of relative stability. Consumer goods were heavily subsidized, and shoppers could be comfortable in the knowledge that basic foodstuffs such as meat and bread cost the same as they had done under Stalin thirty years earlier. The stability masked deeper problems, such as food shortages, a burgeoning black market, and unprecedented levels of corruption, but none of these appeared to represent a serious threat to the fabric of Soviet society. To suggest in 1980 that the whole Soviet edifice was about to collapse was as unthinkable as to suggest that the United States was on the verge of falling apart. It was assumed, tacitly at least, that both superpowers would be a fixture in world politics for decades to come. In this light, Solzhenitsyn’s words must have seemed absurdly, blindly optimistic.
Brezhnev was succeeded in November 1982 by the hard-line, former head of the KGB Yuri Andropov, reinforcing the impression that the Soviet monolith was as immovable as ever. In the same month, a play in Moscow about Lenin, Thus Shall We Win, was brought to a halt by a lone man shouting “down with Soviet fascism” and demanding Solzhenitsyn’s return.3 His solitary act of defiance may have displayed the indomitable nature of Solzhenitsyn’s supporters, but the gesture was at once both heroic and hollow, a Jacobite plea for the impossible.
In May 1983, Solzhenitsyn arrived in Britain for a high-profile visit during which he was more favorably received than he had been during his previous visit seven years earlier. The political complexion had changed considerably in the intervening years. Callaghan’s Labour government had been toppled in 1979 by the Conservatives’ triumph at the polls, and Britain was enjoying the afterglow of its victory in the Falklands war. On May 11, Solzhenitsyn was received by Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street in a private, hour-long courtesy call during which they discussed the cause of freedom.
On May 9, The Times had carried a photograph on its front page of Solzhenitsyn bearing an icon during an Orthodox service at the Russian Church in Exile in Kensington. The following day, he gave the Templeton Address at London’s Guildhall, the text of which was published by The Times. Entitled “Godlessness, the First Step to the Gulag”, this speech was perhaps more overtly religious than any of his previous appeals for a rediscovery of sanity amidst the madness of modern life. He began with a memory of his childhood, which served as a moral template for the rest of his speech, as indeed for the rest of his life and that of the century in which he had lived. “Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’”
Since then, he explained, he had spent nearly half a century researching the history of the Russian Revolution, which had “swallowed up some sixty million of our people”, but if he was asked to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of all that had happened he could not put it more accurately than to repeat the same words. “And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: ‘Men have forgotten God.’”
Quoting Dostoyevsky’s observations about the seething hatred for the church that had characterized the French Revolution—“revolution must necessarily begin with atheism”—Solzhenitsyn asserted that “hatred of God is the principal driving force” behind Marxism. As a result, the USSR had witnessed an uninterrupted procession of martyrs among the Orthodox clergy. Although the West had not suffered the communist experience, it too was “experiencing a drying up of the religious consciousness…. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short-lived value. It has become embarrassing to appeal to eternal concepts, embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system.”
He concluded his address with an appeal to eternal verities:
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest of worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher…. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. In the life of our entire planet, the divine spirit moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.4
Solzhenitsyn’s voice was as uncompromising as ever, his words as strident, but for once they seemed to be received by sympathetic ears. On May 12, the lead article in The Times had nothing but praise for the Russian writer’s timely reminder of “what happens to a society when men have forgotten God…. Fashionable opinion might be tempted to dismiss Solzhenitsyn as an embittered exile whose religious enthusiasm, born under Soviet oppression, is inappropriate for the liberal societies in the West. Fashionable opinion, as so often, would be wrong.”5
Once again Solzhenitsyn was succeeding in fanning the flames of controversy as few others could. On May 14, The Times published an angry rebuttal of both Solzhenitsyn’s Templeton Address and its own leader article in a joint letter from representatives of the British Humanist Society, the National Secular Society, and the Rationalist Press Association. In the same issue, several other letters were published that supported the tenets of Solzhenitsyn’s argument. For the next fortnight, debate simmered and boiled on The Times’ letters page as Solzhenitsyn’s supporters and detractors laid claim and counter-claim to the role of religion in modern society.