“Imagine”, he continued, “the people have been thrust into poverty, such that a woman teacher does not have suitable clothes to wear when she goes to teach a class.” Teachers no longer have access to published material because it is too expensive; scientists “now receive less money than street sweepers;… doctors do not receive their salaries for halfa year, nine months or more; … workers need to strike in order to get their paychecks”. Furthermore, “people have lost the opportunity to travel around the country to visit relatives or to go to some cultural event because the cost of travel is prohibitive”. This material devastation has had damaging ramifications in the cultural sphere so that “the cultural space of the country has been torn…. There is almost a cultural atomization, a cultural rift certainly, in the country. What else could people in this position feel but that they have been abandoned, spiritually abandoned?” The link between material poverty and cultural impoverishment is inextricable: “If people cannot receive the necessary education, or at least access to that cultural level which that person has set for himself, if that cultural level remains somewhere up above, unreachable to him, he has therefore lost both materially and spiritually.”33
In Russia in Collapse, Solzhenitsyn had stated that Russia had entered a blind alley. In our interview, he reiterated this, stating that the central government possessed no plan of finding the way out of this blind alley. They were pursuing a course of simply trying to stay in power by any possible means.
Across the country, Russians, whether political or otherwise, have some kind of ideas about how to save the country, about how to find the way out. There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere. They may suggest some project, some plan for the future. I know this because a significant portion of these get mailed directly to me. These people hope that I will be able to say something and move it upwards, but in these circumstances I cannot do this…. It is said that we have freedom of speech here but the thing is that I can talk to you freely but Russia will not hear. If my voice is not heard then these people who are proposing various ways out of this blind alley will certainly not be heard.34
When asked what he felt about the influx of Western multinationals into the economic life of Russia, Solzhenitsyn was unequivocal about his misgivings. Russia was losing its economic sovereignty and was “becoming in many ways, I won’t say fodder, but is becoming available to multinationals”. Whereas in the past “we were able to rely on our own economic strength”, today “we have resigned ourselves from the resolution of simply standing on our own two feet”.35
Coupled with this economic influx from the West was the accompanying influx of other Western influences. Was this a form of cultural imperialism? “It could be termed cultural imperialism if the West’s current cultural level was high”, Solzhenitsyn replied. “Certainly our young people readily accept that which flows from the West”, but this is “exclusively materialist in character and is devoid of spiritual content, so I would call this not a Western imperialism but the imperialism of materialism”.36
Solzhenitsyn believed that the process of globalization was inevitable, but that it could proceed in different ways. “One would be a full standardization of life on earth. The other would be a careful preservation of national differences and cultures, and not only of national peculiarities and characteristics but those of civilization.” It should always be remembered that in addition to many different nations, there also exist “several large civilizations, large cultures”. At present, it seems that the world is moving toward the former alternative, that of global standardization. This is unfortunate.
This international standardization eats away at and destroys national self-identification. In the struggle for our own personal identity we have no other way but to also in the process struggle for our communal contact with our own homeland. This sense of homeland is tied to the continuum of many traditions, spiritual ones, cultural ones, and certainly religious ones. Internationalization tears people away from all traditions. It is almost as if it rids the person of individuality. Perhaps not their own personal individuality, but something which could be described as its spiritual nucleus, a spiritual kernel perhaps. There is an illusion of world unity which carries with it the threat to local cultures. It is an illusory unity.37
Nevertheless, the globalizing of the modern world has inextricably linked the paths of Russia and the West. Over the previous twelve years, Solzhenitsyn had stopped viewing Russia as something very distinct from the West.
Today, when we say the West, we are already referring both to the West and to Russia. We could use the word “modernity” if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China. With the exception of those areas, we should not use the word “the West” but the word “modernity”. The modern world. And yes, then I would say there are ills that are characteristic, that have plagued the West for a long time, and now Russia has quickly adopted them also. In other words, the characteristics of modernity, the psychological illness of the twentieth century is this hurriedness, hurrying, scurrying, this fitfulness—fitfulness and superficiality. Technological successes have been tremendous, but without a spiritual component, mankind will not only be unable to further develop but cannot even preserve itself. There is a belief in an eternal, an infinite progress which has practically become a religion. This is a mistake of the eighteenth century, of the Enlightenment era. We are repeating it and pushing it forward in the same way.38
There was, Solzhenitsyn believed, a stark and unavoidable choice facing mankind as it enters the third millennium. “There could be a model of what has been called sustainable development, Schumacher’s view of stable development, or there could be a model of unbridled, unlimited growth.”39 The former path was one of sanity, the latter potentially disastrous. The world was locked into the latter course, putting the future of both humanity and the planet at risk.