Solzhenitsyn also believed that the spirit of decentralization should go beyond the rights of small nations to be free from the yoke of internationalism or imperialism. It should extend to the rights of small communities, and even families, to be free from the yoke of central state planning. “The key to the viability of the country and the vitality of its culture lies in liberating the provinces from the pressure of the capitals”, he wrote. Provinces should “acquire complete freedom in economic and cultural terms, together with strong… local self-government”.26 The need patiently and persistently to expand the rights of local communities would be an essential part of the gradual reshaping of the entire state organism. Only through a strong and revitalized local government could genuine democracy exist:
All the failings noted earlier would rarely apply to democracies of small areas—mid-sized towns, small settlements, groups of villages, or areas up to the size of a county. Only in areas of this size can voters have confidence in their choice of candidates since they will be familiar with them both in terms of their effectiveness in practical matters and in terms of their moral qualities. At this level phony reputations do not hold up, nor would a candidate be helped by empty rhetoric or party sponsorship.
These are precisely the dimensions within which the new Russian democracy can begin to grow, gain strength, and acquire self-awareness. It also represents a level that is most certain to take root because it will involve the vital concerns of each locality….
Without properly constituted local self-government there can be no stable or prosperous life, and the very concept of civic freedom loses all meaning.27
The enduring influence of Solzhenitsyn’s years in Zurich and his admiration for the Swiss political system is clearly discernible, although he was certainly aware of, and enamored by, similar systems that had existed in Russia’s medieval past. Whatever the principal motivation behind his advocacy of decentralization and subsidiarity in political life, he had nailed the lie that he was in any way undemocratic in his beliefs—not that this would stop the accusations being made, particularly by those who could not see beyond the futile oscillations of the Western two-party democracies.
Similar radical thinking energized Solzhenitsyn’s calls for the restructuring of the Russian economy. What was needed was the reestablishment of independent citizens: “But there can be no independent citizen without private property.” Seventy years of propaganda had instilled in Russians the notion that private property was to be feared, but this was merely the victory of a false ideology over “our human essence”. The truth was that ownership of modest amounts of property, which did not oppress others, must be seen as an integral component of personality, and as a factor contributing to its stability.28 Solzhenitsyn professed to having no special expertise in economics and had no wish to venture definitive proposals, but the overall picture was clear enough:
[H]ealthy private initiative must be given wide latitude, and small private enterprises of every type must be encouraged and protected, since they are what will ensure the most rapid flowering of every locality. At the same time there should be firm legal limits to the unchecked concentration of capital; no monopolies should be permitted to form in any sector, and no enterprise should be in control of any other. The creation of monopolies brings with it the risk of deteriorating quality: a firm can permit itself to turn out goods that are not durable in order to sustain demand.29
There is a remarkable affinity between these proposals and those advocated by Schumacher in Small is Beautiful and by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in their calls for distributism. Schumacher, Chesterton, and Belloc had all gained a large degree of their initial inspiration from the social teaching of the Catholic Church, particularly as espoused by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum novarum. By 1990, Solzhenitsyn was certainly conversant with the ideas of these kindred spirits and indeed with the Pope’s crucial encyclical. He had come across the works of Schumacher and Chesterton soon after his arrival in the West but stressed that he had already arrived at similar conclusions himself entirely independently.30 Since the central tenets of Rebuilding Russia were largely a development and a maturing of the ideas he had originally expressed years earlier in his Letter to Soviet Leaders, it is clear that the affinity was a question of great minds thinking alike rather than one mind borrowing from another. “There was no direct influence because I was always submerged and immersed in things Russian. I touched upon world issues to the extent that these touched upon Russian questions and Russian concerns, but that which I was drawing from and writing toward was Russian, so it would be a coincidental affinity not a direct one.”31
In many respects, Rebuilding Russia was one of Solzhenitsyn’s most remarkable endeavors—and perhaps will prove to posterity one of his most important. Although it was written with Russia specifically in mind, there is much of general interest. It deserves to stand beside Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Chesterton’s The Outline of Sanity, and Belloc’s Essay on the Restoration of Property as a permanent monument to the concepts of smallness, subsidiarity, and economic sanity during a century characterized primarily by its headlong rush toward unsustainable growth and politico-economic giantism.
Solzhenitsyn concluded Rebuilding Russia on a note of genuine humility, blended with words of sober realism. It was “impossibly difficult to design a balanced plan for future action”, he wrote, and there was “every likelihood that it will contain more errors than virtues and that it will be unable to keep pace with the actual unfolding of events. But it would also be wrong not to make the effort.”32 In making the effort, he had fulfilled his duty, but perhaps he already sensed that, not for the first or the last time, his words would fall on deaf ears.
By 1990, most Russians were simply sick and tired of politics. All they wanted was an easy way out of the post-communist mess in which the Soviet Union had found itself. An easy life. To a disillusioned people intent on the path of least resistance, Solzhenitsyn’s solution seemed too much like hard work. Much better to listen to the prophets of boom, who were promising a land of limitless consumer goods. A people intent on self-gratification was not likely to feel attracted to Solzhenitsyn’s plea for self-limitation. In fact, in Rebuilding Russia, Solzhenitsyn had seen the danger and had foretold its consequences: “If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structures or by any industrial development: a tree with a rotten core cannot stand.”33
When Rebuilding Russia was published, a spokesman for President Gorbachev promised that the Soviet leader would study the document.34 Whether he did so is unknown. What is certain is that Solzhenitsyn’s practical proposals for a revitalized Russia had not, to borrow a phrase of Chesterton, been tried and found wanting but had been wanted and not tried. Worse, they had been both unwanted and untried.