It is clear from the irrepressible enthusiasm with which Solzhenitsyn discussed The Red Wheel that his work on this mammoth enterprise was the most important part of his life throughout the 1980s, taking precedence over everything else.
While Solzhenitsyn labored away at The Red Wheel in the secluded isolation of Vermont, the Red Wheel of Soviet politics was laboring onward into the swamps of stagnation. Yuri Andropov died in February 1984, barely a year after taking power, and was succeeded by the seventy-three-year-old Konstantin Chernenko. He also died only a year later, and in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev—at fifty-three the youngest member of the Politburo—took over the leadership. Within months of his accession, the famous buzzwords of the Gorbachev era, glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), could be heard on the lips of excited Russians. Perhaps at last the end of communist oppression was in sight. Older Russians, remembering the false dawn under Khrushchev, remained cautious.
Ironically, the emergence of glasnost in the Soviet Union coincided with rumors that Solzhenitsyn was about to become an American citizen. On June 24, 1985, the press waited expectantly for his arrival at an American court where a special ceremony had been arranged to confer citizenship on Solzhenitsyn and his family. In the event, Alya arrived with their eldest son, Yermolai, and was duly granted citizenship (each of the three sons would subsequently opt for US citizenship when they reached the age of eighteen), but it was Solzhenitsyn’s failure to appear that excited the interest of the media. Unconvinced by the official explanation given by the clerk of the court that he was ill, the press quoted a family friend who suggested that he may have wished to avoid the crowd of reporters.16 Years later, the mystery surrounding his non-appearance was explained by Alya. Throughout the years of exile, her husband “never wanted to, and did not, become a US citizen, since he could not imagine himself to be a citizen of any country except Russia (not the USSR!)”. During the early eighties, at the height of the Afghan war and at a time of failing hopes for short-term change in the USSR, Solzhenitsyn did in fact experience a moment of some doubt, but ultimately he decided to “remain stateless—right up until Russia’s liberation from communism, an event for which he had always hoped”.17 In short, he appears to have changed his mind at the very last minute, possibly prompted by recent changes in his homeland.
The cracks in the Soviet monolith were symbolized dramatically in April 1986 by the world’s worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the sort of ecological tragedy that Solzhenitsyn had forecast in his Letter to Soviet Leaders more than a decade earlier. The Soviet authorities desperately tried to smother all news of the catastrophe, concealing the matter for a full three days in cynical contradiction of the much-heralded glasnost. Muscovites suspected that something was amiss when trainloads of evacuated children began arriving at Kiev station, but it was only when meteorological observers in Sweden detected the radioactive cloud that the Soviet Union was forced to confess the worst.
In a similar cynical denial of his own principles of openness, Gorbachev brazenly denied the existence of political prisoners until Andrei Sakharov’s unexpected release from exile in the “closed” city of Gorky. Sakharov returned to Moscow to a hero’s welcome and vowed to fight for the freedom of all.
In spite of such double standards, the Soviet stranglehold was being greatly loosened under Gorbachev’s leadership. Corrupt officials who had abused their positions in the Brezhnev era were investigated publicly, as were allegations of black marketeering within the Party apparatus. The changing atmosphere within Soviet society inspired rumors that Solzhenitsyn’s books would at last be published in the USSR. In March 1987, a Danish newspaper reported that Soviet authorities were shortly to lift the ban on Cancer Ward.18 A year later, in April 1988, The Gulag Archipelago finally breached the Iron Curtain with its publication in Yugoslavia.19 On August 3, a Soviet weekly newspaper, Moscow News, hailed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as one of the great classics of Russian literature and an outstanding event in literary, moral, and spiritual life. Ten days later, the Soviet State Publishing Committee announced that it was liberalizing its official attitude to Solzhenitsyn’s works. Referring to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the committee agreed that it was up to individual publishing houses to decide whether or not to reprint those works that had been previously published in the Soviet Union. Publication of those of Solzhenitsyn’s books that had thus far only been published abroad, in other words the vast bulk of his work, was not to be authorized at present.20 Significantly, Novy Mir announced on the same day that it planned to publish George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Encouraged by the liberalizing tendencies within the state apparatus, Soviet dissidents stepped up their campaign for Solzhenitsyn’s return. In summer 1988, a short article appealing for his citizenship to be restored was published in the weekly journal Book Review.21 At the end of August, an unofficial committee lobbying for the erection of a monument to Stalin’s victims in Moscow invited Solzhenitsyn to join its board. He politely declined the invitation. In October, the first meeting of a Soviet human rights group called Memorial, set up to commemorate the victims of Stalinism, demanded public recognition for, and the restoration of Soviet citizenship to, Solzhenitsyn.
In a panic-stricken response to the growing reform movement, the Soviet old guard began to fight a furious rearguard action. At first, it seemed that they might be successful. Boris Yeltsin, the highly popular reformist mayor of Moscow, was sacked, and in the summer of 1988, Gorbachev abandoned his delicate balancing act between old guard and avant garde and realigned himself with the hard-liners. It looked like the same old story: all the promises of reform were to be broken in a renewed totalitarian backlash. With the neo-Stalinists again in the ascendency, Gorbachev set about installing hard-liners in prominent positions of power. On September 30, Vadim Medvedev was appointed as the Politburo member responsible for ideology. Two months later, he dramatically vetoed publication of Solzhenitsyn’s books in the Soviet Union on the basis that they were “undermining the foundations of the Soviet state”.22
On this occasion, however, the hard-liners had underestimated the forces aligned against them. Even as Gorbachev was siding with the old guard, liberals within the Communist Party formed the Democratic Union, the first organized opposition movement to emerge since 1921. Gorbachev banned its meetings and created a new Special Purpose Militia unit to deal with any disturbances. Meanwhile, in the Baltic republics, nationalist Popular Fronts were attracting mass membership. In November 1988, the small nation of Estonia audaciously broke away from the Soviet Union. In February of the following year, the Estonians raised the national flag above their parliament building in place of the hammer and sickle. At around the same time, two newspapers in the neighboring Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania published Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not by a Lie”, which had appeared in samizdat just before his exile.