In the face of such defiance, Gorbachev’s hard-line government caved in beneath the weight and momentum of the opposition. In March 1989, during elections for the Congress of People’s Deputies, Soviet voters were for the first time in years allowed to choose from more than one candidate, some of whom were not even Party members. Despite the heavily rigged election process, prominent reformers such as Yeltsin and Sakharov were elected. When Sakharov, as combative as ever, called for an end to one-party rule, his microphone was switched off—a gesture that only highlighted the desperate nature of the communist hierarchy’s efforts to cling to power, especially as Sakharov’s speech was being broadcast live on Russian television.
In the same month as the elections, Twentieth Century and Peace, a magazine published by the officially sanctioned Soviet Peace Committee, defied the Kremlin’s ban on Solzhenitsyn’s works by following the example of the Baltic journals and publishing “Live Not by a Lie”. A commentary accompanying the essay credited Solzhenitsyn with helping to prepare the way for the present reforms.23 Meanwhile, in remote Kuban, another small journal also flouted the official ban by publishing a three-part guide to Solzhenitsyn’s work.24
Following the success of the reformers in the March election, Solzhenitsyn found that he had many friends in influential places. In April, several delegates in the Soviet parliament called for the restoration of his citizenship. The struggle, so long confined to the back-streets of the dissident fringe, was now being waged in the corridors of power.
On June 2, while thousands of Chinese students were occupying Tiananmen Square in the abortive hope that totalitarianism could be overthrown in the other communist superpower, Sakharov was shouted down in parliament as he accused the Soviet army of atrocities in Afghanistan. On the same day, another delegate, the writer Yuri Karyakin, caused a similar furor by proposing that the government should restore Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship and that it should inscribe the names of the millions killed under Stalin on the walls of KGB headquarters.25
Solzhenitsyn must have sensed final victory at the beginning of July when the Soviet Writers’ Union not only voted for his reinstatement as a member, but also urged the authorities to sanction publication of The Gulag Archipelago.
In spite of last-ditch efforts by hard-liners on the Central Committee to block its publication, the seemingly impossible happened in October when Novy Mir published the first long extract from The Gulag Archipelago. The journal published one-third of the work in three issues, adding a million to its readership in the process. Three million copies were sold. Interest in Solzhenitsyn was enormous, and the state-run publishing house Sovietski Pisatel announced plans to publish a collection of his works.
In the same month that the first extracts of The Gulag Archipelago were published, there were unprecedented counter-demonstrations in Red Square during the October Revolution celebrations. One of the banners read: “Workers of the World—we’re sorry”.
For the communist old guard, the previous year had been one of unmitigated disaster. Not only had problems within the Soviet Union escalated out of control, but the Soviet grip on its empire in Eastern Europe was being prised loose. During 1989, reformist movements had triumphed throughout the Eastern bloc, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.
In December 1989, the Soviet authorities indicated begrudgingly that Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship would be returned to him if he applied for it. His rejection of the offer was conveyed by Alya to the New York Times: “It’s shameful, after all that they have done to him, that the Parliament doesn’t have the simple courage to admit that they were wrong. They try to turn a moral and political question into a matter of bureaucracy and paperwork…. They kick him out and after that they want him to come and bow and ask permission to enter…. We’ve waited a long time. We will wait until they become wise.”26
Wisdom was not particularly evident in Gorbachev’s decision on January 19, 1990, to send Soviet tanks into Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, to crush the independence movement there. More than a hundred people were killed that night, fomenting further hatred of the Soviet regime and intensifying the struggle for independence. In February, scores of thousands converged on Red Square in the largest demonstration in Russia since the Revolution. The following month, voters registered their disgust with the communist regime in the local elections. In the Soviet republics, nationalists swept the board, paving the way for the declarations of independence that followed. In Russia, the anti-communist Democratic Platform gained majorities in the powerful city councils of Leningrad and Moscow. During the May Day celebrations, Gorbachev suffered the humiliation of being jeered by sections of the crowd in Red Square, and by the end of the month his arch-rival Boris Yeltsin had secured his election as chairman of the Russian parliament. Two weeks later, on June 12, Yeltsin played his master card, declaring Russian independence from the Soviet Union in imitation of the Baltic states.
After nearly three-quarters of a century of communist rule, Russia was reborn as a nation state. One by one, the outlying republics had declared their independence from the communist yoke, and now Russia itself had opted out. It was the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union, which had ceased to exist in anything but name, claiming to rule a vanished empire. In July 1990, the Soviet Communist Party held its last Congress. Yeltsin tore up his party card in full view of the cameras, and two million others followed his example before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Vermont, Solzhenitsyn observed the unfolding of events with a rising sense of joy. Surely it was now only a matter of time before he and his family could return home. Yet even amid the triumph there was no time for triumphalism. Such was his irrepressible personality that he was already writing a bold, polemical manifesto for the new Russia. He sensed that the end of the Soviet Union might be an exciting new beginning for his native land. Russia had been reborn, but now she needed to be rebuilt.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
REBUILDING ON GREEN FOUNDATIONS
In January 1990, Solzhenitsyn took his war of words with Russia’s modernists to the literal as well as the literary level. He announced through his Paris publisher Nikita Struve that he would be writing a specialized glossary of ancient Russian words and rare dialect as a means of defending the purity and beauty of the language from the encroachments of foreign neologisms and Soviet bureaucratic jargon.
The glossary, to be published in monthly installments in the Soviet review Russian Speech, was welcomed by traditionalist writers who had voiced their abhorrence of both the inelegant, politically correct vocabulary of the Soviet era and the emerging arriviste vocabulary of the new capitalism. The westernizing flavor of Gorbachev’s perestroika had added new words to the menu of the contemporary Russian language, including the capitalist buzzwords biznesmen and menedzher.