Our only point of dissension was that I reminded him of the time in the 1920s when the Bolsheviks were crushing the Russian Orthodox Church. Some members of the Vatican hierarchy at the time entered into dialogue with the Bolsheviks as to how the presence of the Catholic Church could be expanded in Russia. The Pope responded that this was unfortunate and was the result of those individuals’ own initiative, but I do not believe it was only individual initiative. It is simply that the Catholic Church did not at the time understand to what degree the Bolsheviks were consistently against all religions. They thought perhaps that the demise of Russian Orthodoxy might represent an opening for Catholicism.2
“We were in complete affinity except for that one point”, Solzhenitsyn insisted, stating that the bulk of their conversation centered on the place of religion in the modern world and its role. The audience took place on the fifteenth anniversary of the Pope’s ascension to the papacy, and Solzhenitsyn felt saddened that he appeared to have physically weakened by this point.3
By comparison, the seventy-four-year-old Russian was in excellent health. It was not he who was visibly ailing but his country, which was emerging from communism in poor and deteriorating circumstances. As if he needed any reminder of the grim reality, news reached him in February 1994 that his Russian publisher had been gunned down in Moscow by the mafia, his death the consequence of sordid commercial rivalries rather than politics. It was, therefore, with no illusions that he and Alya began preparations for their return to Russia, which, at last, had passed beyond the realm of interminable rumor to that of imminent reality.
On March 1, he made only his third appearance at a public event in Cavendish, Vermont, in the eighteen years he had lived there. The purpose was to bid farewell to the neighbors who hardly knew him but to whom, nonetheless, he felt a debt of gratitude. “Exile is always difficult,” he told the two hundred villagers who attended the meeting, “and yet I could not imagine a better place to live and wait and wait and wait for my return home than Cavendish, Vermont…. You forgave me my unusual way of life, and even took it upon yourselves to protect my privacy. Our whole family has felt at home among you.”4
The farewells completed, Solzhenitsyn braced himself for a future that appeared to offer nothing but uncertainty. In the December 1993 elections, there had been a dramatic swing to the ultra-nationalists under the leadership of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In the so-called business world, crime and corruption were reaching new heights, as the murder of Solzhenitsyn’s publisher had graphically demonstrated. Car-bombs, not conferences, had become the favored means of settling business disputes. Even before his arrival on Russian soil, Solzhenitsyn had fearlessly made enemies in the worlds of both politics and commerce, attacking Zhirinovsky as a “clown” and declaring war on the mafia. In an interview with the New Yorker, Solzhenitsyn distanced himself in disgust from the crypto-fascism of the ultra-nationalists and stated that “the mafia understand that if I was not going to make peace with the KGB I certainly would not with them”.5 It was clear that there were many in the new Russia who were not looking forward to the writer’s return.
In the same interview with the New Yorker, Solzhenitsyn admitted that he had overestimated the threat of a Soviet world takeover when he had first been exiled and that, in hindsight, his tone had seemed shrill. “When I fought the dragon of communist power,” he explained, “I fought it at the highest pitch of expression.”6
At the end of April, Solzhenitsyn gave his last interview on Western television before his departure for Russia, appearing on the CBS program Sixty Minutes. Perversely, considering his recent outspoken attack on the xenophobic nationalists in Russia, he was asked to respond to an American commentator who had branded him “a freak, a monarchist, an anti-semite, a crank, a has-been, not a hero”. His reply was both measured and direct: “The Western press works in the following way: they don’t read my books. No one has ever given a single quotation from any of my books as a basis for these accusations. But every new journalist reads these opinions from other journalists. They have been just as spiteful to me in the American press as the Soviet press was before.”7
Concerning his return home, he merely answered vaguely that “my hope is maybe I’ll be able to help somehow”,8 but one suspected that, whatever the future held in Russia, he would be pleased to leave the distortions of the Western media behind him. In the interim, however, they continued to dog his last days in the West. Anne McElvoy, writing in The Times, admitted that Solzhenitsyn had described Vladimir Zhirinovsky as “an evil caricature of a Russian patriot” but still insisted that Solzhenitsyn’s Rebuilding Russia was “dangerously nationalistic”.9
If Solzhenitsyn nurtured any hope that there might be more clarity of vision in the East than there had been in the West, from either politicians or the media, he would soon be disillusioned. On the morning of May 27, as he set foot in Russia for the first time in more than twenty years, every shade of opinion in the political spectrum scrambled to appropriate him as one of their own. Alexander Rutskoi, a Russian imperialist and leader of the right-wing Accord for Russia, Boris Yeltsin, still the leader of the liberal reformers, and even Anatoli Lukyanov, a hard-line communist, all claimed Solzhenitsyn as a supporter of their own particular position.10
Meanwhile, Solzhenitsyn was more interested in meeting ordinary Russians. After a ten-hour flight from Alaska, he took his first steps on Russian soil at Magadan, which, appropriately enough, had once been the center of the Soviet labor camp system. It was a poignant moment for the former prisoner. “Today, in the heat of political change, those millions of victims are too lightly forgotten, both by those who were not touched by that annihilation and, even more so, by those responsible for it. I bow to the earth of Kolyma where many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of our executed fellow-countrymen are buried. Under ancient Christian tradition, the land where innocent victims are buried becomes holy.”11
Arriving in the eastern city of Vladivostok flanked by his family, Solzhenitsyn received a hero’s welcome. The authorities greeted him with flowers, hugs, and the traditional welcome gifts of bread and salt. Mobbed by journalists and applauded by a crowd of two thousand, Solzhenitsyn spoke of his hopes and fears for the future:
Through all the years of my exile, I followed intensely the life of our nation. I never doubted that communism would inevitably collapse, but I was always fearful that our exit from it, our price for it, would be terribly painful. And now I feel redoubled pain for Russia’s last two years, which have been so very trying for people’s lives and spirits…. I know that I am returning to a Russia tortured, stunned, altered beyond recognition, convulsively searching for itself, for its own true identity.
He told the crowd that he planned to travel through the heart of Russia, beginning in the east and going through Siberia, which he had only ever seen previously through the grate of a prison train window. He wanted to meet ordinary people along the way, so that he could test and revise his own judgment, “understand truly” their worries and fears, and “search together for the surest path out of our seventy-five year quagmire”.12