In fairness, it was very unlikely that Gorbachev had much time to study Solzhenitsyn’s proposals, even had he any desire to do so, and even less likely that he would have been able to do anything about them. By the autumn of 1990, he was being outmaneuvered on all fronts by his opponents. Yeltsin and his liberal allies in the Russian parliament had outflanked Gorbachev with the declaration of Russian independence, while the hard-liners within the Soviet hierarchy were gaining the ascendancy within the Communist Party and were putting the increasingly isolated Soviet leader under ever-greater pressure.
In the midst of this feuding, Solzhenitsyn was being used as a convenient political pawn. In December, the liberals in the Russian parliament awarded him the Russian state literature prize for The Gulag Archipelago, an honor that was tied up with the desire of the Yeltsin camp to score points against their Soviet communist opponents. In the meantime, the hand of the communists had been strengthened by a series of leadership reshuffles that had placed control of both the Interior Ministry and the media in the hands of old-guard reactionaries. On December 20, in protest at these developments, the liberal Soviet Foreign Minister Edvard Shevardnadze resigned, warning ominously that “dictatorship is coming”.
The effects of Gorbachev’s hard-line reshuffle became apparent on January 13, 1991, when thirteen Lithuanians defending the national television center were killed by Soviet troops. Yeltsin flew immediately to the Baltics and signed a joint declaration condemning the Soviet violence. A week later, a quarter of a million people protested on the streets of Moscow against the killings, the largest demonstration ever seen on the streets of the Russian capital. Only hours later, with a callous disregard for public opinion, Gorbachev’s forces stormed the Interior Ministry in Riga, the capital of Latvia, killing a further five people. The Russian press, overwhelmingly on the side of Yeltsin and the liberals, backed the Baltic states against Gorbachev’s repression. In response, Gorbachev threatened to tighten control of the media and, as if to back his threats with action, he added more hard-liners to the Politburo and gave wider powers to the security forces.
A popular backlash against Gorbachev’s efforts to turn back the communist clock was evident in June when the citizens of Leningrad voted in a referendum to rename the city St. Petersburg. In the same month, Boris Yeltsin emerged triumphant in the Russian presidential election, winning an overwhelming majority in spite of Soviet attempts to block his campaign.
The stage was set for the final conflict between the Soviet old guard and Yeltsin’s liberals. It came on August 19 when the country awoke to the soothing sounds of Chopin on the radio and Swan Lake on the television. There was no cause for alarm, the listeners and viewers were informed, but a state of emergency had been declared “in the public interest”. In an uncanny echo of Khrushchev’s removal from office almost thirty years earlier, it was announced that Gorbachev had resigned for health reasons. The country was now ruled by the self-appointed “State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR”, a grandiose title for the group of hard-liners appointed to their posts by Gorbachev during the recent reshuffles. With little or no public support, the hard-liners soon realized that Russians would no longer kowtow to the tactics of terror. In defiance of a curfew order, a hundred thousand people took to the streets and defied the tanks. On the morning of August 21, only two days after the state of emergency had been declared, it was announced that several tank units had defected to Yeltsin’s side, and by the afternoon, the takeover had collapsed completely. Its leaders fled. One group flew to the Crimea, where they were arrested on arrival, and several others committed suicide. Meanwhile Gennady Yenayev, the group’s nominal leader, took neither of these drastic courses of action, choosing instead merely to drink himself into an oblivious stupor. Thus began and ended what Russians call the putsch, what history would record as the final farcical collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, the humiliating end of seventy-four years of communist rule.
One practical result of the dramatic events in Russia, from Solzhenitsyn’s point of view, was the announcement in September that the treason charges against him had been officially revoked. This had been the last official obstacle barring his return to Russia. Its removal coincided with the completion, at long last, of the final book in The Red Wheel cycle. His work on this had been the other obstacle to his return: he had been determined to finish it before the inevitable disruption that the move from Vermont to Russia would entail.
In April 1992, Solzhenitsyn was visited in Vermont by Vladimir Lukin, the new Russian ambassador to the United States. It was the first official recognition on the part of Russia’s new anti-communist leaders that Solzhenitsyn, to quote an article in The Times of May 14, “has become a legend in his homeland and revered by many as a saint”.35 Shortly afterward, he was visited by Stanislav Govorukhin, the film director who had achieved fame and notoriety in 1990 for his anti-Soviet film You Can’t Live Like This. Govorukhin spent the Orthodox Easter with Solzhenitsyn and his family, filming a documentary to be shown on Russian television. It was the first time that Solzhenitsyn had granted an interview to anyone from the former Soviet Union since his expulsion in 1974. During the course of the interview, he revealed that his wife would be traveling to Moscow in May to find a suitable home for the family’s return to Russia.
On June 12, President Yeltsin announced his intention to telephone and possibly meet Solzhenitsyn during his forthcoming state visit to the United States. Four days later, within hours of his arrival in Washington, Yeltsin made an emotional thirty-minute call to Solzhenitsyn, during which he expressed repentance over the way former regimes had treated him and urged his return home, promising that “Russia’s doors are wide open.” Yeltsin promised to do everything he could to ensure that “one of the great sons of our nation” could work for the Russian people from within Russia and not from a foreign land. The two men discussed the urgent and painful problems facing their country, and Solzhenitsyn urged particularly that Russia’s peasants should be given land of their own as soon as possible. For his part, Yeltsin assured Solzhenitsyn that he was trying to restore Russia’s spiritual values and that Solzhenitsyn had “blazed a trail of truth” that he was seeking to follow. Unlike the leaders of the previous regime, he would tell the Russian people “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.36
Yeltsin’s words were certainly warm, even if more cynical commentators suspected a colder motive for his courting of Solzhenitsyn’s support. As a writer in The Times observed, “Mr Solzhenitsyn still enjoys huge moral authority in Russia, and his support would be of considerable value to Mr Yeltsin.”37 Yet if actions spoke louder than words, it was clearly true that much had changed in Russia since Yeltsin’s dramatic rise to power. In fact, on the very day that Yeltsin phoned Solzhenitsyn, Russia made a significant break with its Soviet past by granting political asylum to a research student from communist North Korea who had applied to stay in Russia to become a Christian priest.38
With the pace of change accelerating daily in Russia, it was no longer a question of if, but when, the Solzhenitsyns would return. Yet the months passed, and little altered as far as their domestic arrangements were concerned. On June 11, 1993, almost a year to the day after his conversation with Yeltsin, Solzhenitsyn, still firmly rooted in Vermont, attended his son’s graduation ceremony at Harvard. Ten days earlier, Alya, on another visit to Russia, had assured reporters that we are coming back and very soon, “it is a matter of months”.39