Solzhenitsyn was thrown into this alien environment in the autumn of 1994 when he was given his own fifteen-minute television talk show on Channel One. Meetings with Solzhenitsyn was given a prime-time slot and attracted a respectable 12 percent of Moscow viewers, though it could not compete with the 27 percent who tuned into Wild Rose, another Mexican soap, on one of the rival channels. By this time, Russian viewers were as addicted to soaps as were their counterparts in the West. D. M. Thomas reported that a terminally ill man had written to a newspaper, offering his life savings to anyone who could tell him the ending of yet another Mexican soap, The Rich Also Cry.22
One of Solzhenitsyn’s rival talk-show hosts, Artyom Troitsky, a rock critic with a post-midnight program called Café Oblomov, spoke for many new Russians when he questioned the need for Solzhenitsyn’s show: “Why should anyone now care about The Gulag Archipelago? I’m afraid Solzhenitsyn is totally, totally passe.” In his own efforts not to become passe and to remain relevant, Troitsky had metamorphosed from serious “rock” dissident to editor of Russian Playboy. Another new Russian quick to pass judgment on Solzhenitsyn’s emergence as a television celebrity was Victor Yerofeyev, who took the opportunity to indulge once more in petty snobbery: “It’s better to have him speak than write. He writes such ugly Russian. He is once again what he always was at heart—a provincial schoolteacher.”23
Perhaps it was inevitable that Solzhenitsyn would not survive for long in the world of television. On April 23, 1995, a report in the Sunday Times suggested he was facing a television ban for “criticizing the regime”, and five months later the program was finally axed. Solzhenitsyn remains convinced that the decision was politically motivated. “The program was terminated because the powers-that-be were afraid of the issues being discussed.”24 Whether his removal was due to these outspoken attacks on the government or whether it was merely that he did not fit into the modern scheduling requirements is a matter of conjecture. The new upbeat program that replaced Solzhenitsyn boasted as its first guest La Cicciolina, an Italian parliamentarian and porn queen. Russia was getting what it wanted—and it wasn’t Solzhenitsyn.
The sense of despondency induced by Russia’s cultural decline was expressed in Solzhenitsyn’s speech at Saratov University on September 13, 1995. “We are still holding together as a single unified country,” he told his audience, “but our cultural space is in shreds.”25 The despondency was also evident in his announcement in December that he would refrain from voting for either Yeltsin or his communist opponent in the presidential elections. “I was approached by television asking for my opinion”, Solzhenitsyn explained. “I asked them whether they would broadcast what I had to say. Yes, they said. I replied that both Yeltsin and the communists are not worthy of being elected, that they have not put forward programs, that no programs have been discussed. Neither of these sides has repented anything that they have done in the past, and I propose to vote against both. (There was an option to vote against both.) They did not broadcast this!” His eyes glinting with amusement, Solzhenitsyn pointed out with evident relish that 5 percent of the population did vote against both. “These people figured it out for themselves”, he laughed.26
Increasingly disgruntled at the road Russia was taking, Solzhenitsyn retreated into the sort of reclusive life that had characterized his years in Vermont. The large house where he and Alya now resided in acres of isolated woodland in leafy countryside just outside Moscow was not dissimilar to their former home in the United States. Seeking seclusion, he returned to his writing, ever the source of solace throughout his troubled life, and began to observe Russia’s demise more passively, though still as passionately, from the sidelines. Yet his increased isolation did not stifle his ability to make carefully planned assaults on the Russian leadership when the opportunity arose. One such opportunity presented itself in November 1996, when he timed an attack on the government in the French newspaper Le Monde to coincide with a two-day visit to Paris by Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Russian Prime Minister.
Such was the force of his fulminations that the Reuters news agency described it as a “blistering attack… on Russia’s new political leaders, saying they were no better than the communist rulers he spent much of his life opposing”.27 In his article, entitled “Russia Close to its Deathbed”, Solzhenitsyn wrote that Russia was not a democracy and would never develop a genuine market economy. Russia’s rulers “get away with… genuine crimes that have plunged the country into ruin and millions of people into poverty, or condemned thousands to death—yet they are never punished”. During the last decade, “the ruling circles have not displayed moral qualities that are any better than those during the communist era”. Indeed, in many cases, the same communist cliques remained in power: “Former members of the communist elite, along with Russia’s new rich, who amassed instant fortunes through banditry, have formed an exclusive… oligarchy of 150 to 200 people that run the country.”28
Solzhenitsyn claimed that the Duma parliament was crushed by presidential power, that local assemblies were more like servants obedient to local governors, and that television channels were subservient to President Boris Yeltsin, who had been elected without any debate on his past rule or any articulated program for the future. “The government… enjoys the same impunity as the former communist power and cannot be called a democracy.”29 Such a situation would have unleashed a social explosion in other countries, he wrote, but this would not happen in Russia because society, bled for seventy years under communist rule and weeded of political opponents, had no strength left. (In July 1998, Solzhenitsyn was to reiterate his belief that communism had weakened and exhausted the Russian spirit: “It is as if, just having survived the heaviest case of cholera, to immediately upon recuperation get the plague. It is very hard to withstand.”30)
Meanwhile the government had no coherent economic strategy, and ill-conceived and ill-prepared privatization had proved disastrous, handing over national wealth for a fraction of its value to incompetent individuals. “Such easy gains are unprecedented in the history of the West”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding that corruption had reached a level the West could not imagine. “Market economy has not yet seen the light, and, as things are going, it never will.”31
Two years later, Solzhenitsyn’s views had not moderated. In 1998, he wrote Russia in Collapse, in which he elaborated on the scathing sentiments expressed in his article for Le Monde. Discussing these with the present author, Solzhenitsyn’s disgust with the status quo in Russia was all too evident:
We are exiting from communism in the most unfortunate and awkward way. It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed. Our government declared that it is conducting some kind of great reforms. In reality, no real reforms were begun, and no one at any point has declared a coherent program. The name of “reform” simply covers what is blatantly a process of the theft of the national heritage. In other words, many former communists, very flexible, very agile, and others who are basically almost confidence tricksters, petty thieves coming in from the sides, have together in unison begun to thieve everything there is from the national resources. It used to belong to the state, … but now under the guise of privatization, all of this has been pocketed. For massive enterprises, for large factories, large firms, sometimes only one to two percent of its value is paid when they are privatized. The top, the oligarchy, are really so preoccupied with this fever of thieving that they really did not stop to think of the future of Russia. They didn’t even think of trying to maintain the government treasury, to think of the government finances; it is simply a frenzy of thieving. Suddenly they realize that as the government they have to rule the country, but there’s no money left. So now in a very humiliating way, they have to bend the knee and ask the West for money—not just now, but there has been an ongoing process. Now they are borrowing money to pay for wages from last year and the beginning of this year, so that now at least one-third, perhaps one-half, of the nation has been cast into poverty, has been robbed. In addition, education has deteriorated and decayed. Higher education also. Science has decayed; medicine, manufacturing has stopped; factories have closed down; and now for almost twelve years no major new factory has been built. In this sense, they are stabbing to death all the viable—in the sense of alive—direction of the people’s life. And all these loans from abroad are merely stopgap measures designed to keep the oligarchy in power.32