Perhaps the antagonistic attitude of many toward Solzhenitsyn is rooted in a deeply ingrained hostility toward his Christian faith, a fact to which Solzhenitsyn biographer D. M. Thomas alluded: “To find that a writer believed passionately in Chairman Mao, or Stalin, or Ho Chi Minh, was acceptable to the liberal mind, but if he believed passionately in God it caused a frisson of discomfort and doubt.”4
Solzhenitsyn’s faith was expressed with eloquence in Russia in Collapse, most particularly in the chapter entitled “The Orthodox Church in these Troublous Times”. Commencing with a reminder, lest his readers forget, of the persecution of the church under communism, and the martyrdom of many Christians at the hands of the secular state, he expressed his hopes for the future of Orthodox Christianity in post-communist Russia:
And today it is with compassion that we should remember and understand from what ruins, from what humiliation, from what complete devastation and despoilment this Church of ours is rising….
Certainly, many are hoping and waiting—and rightly so—for the Orthodox Church to strengthen itself as an entirely independent and authoritative power in this country, since all governmental support only abates the spirit of the Church.5
He called upon the church to distance itself publicly from the “ostentatious television-based process of the government’s conversion to the Church (a practice so undignified and confused)” and to accept and embrace its “role in society and the everyday life of the people”: “While it legitimately separates itself from political power, the Church should not allow itself to become separated from society and its grievous needs. This century-long Orthodox tradition of remaining outside social issues is particularly distressing considering today’s disastrous condition of the Russian nation and people”.6
Significantly—considering the accusations often leveled against him that he is a chauvinistic Slavophile or extreme nationalist—he criticized “those who exalt patriotism to the detriment of Orthodoxy and place this patriotism above the latter”:
Certainly, we approach the faith with our personal and national differences and perceptions, but in the process of spiritual development—if we are successful at it—we become elevated to greater heights, to the dimension that is wider than being merely national. Our national pulverization, which took place in the twentieth century, stems precisely from our loss of the Orthodox faith and from our self-drowning in this new and ferocious paganism. With the rejection of the Orthodox faith, our patriotism acquires pagan characteristics…. [O]ur nation has been growing and living precisely in Orthodoxy for the past one thousand years. And it is inappropriate for us now to shrink back from our faith; instead we should apply it with prudence, with purity, with consideration of the new and forthcoming temptations of the twenty-first century.7
He attacked the secular and anticlerical forces in the media for their outspoken attacks on reemergent Orthodoxy, implying ironically that these very voices had been conspicuously silent during the “voiceless times” when it took courage to speak out: “And those who were spared by the Red Hoof in the voiceless times, now, in the Russia of glasnost, sneer at the Orthodox faith and at every imperfect exercise thereof, and show no respect for the tens of thousands of martyrs who had been trampled by the very same Hoof. How sad is this rupture of the Millennium of Christianity in Russia.”8
In the conclusion to the chapter, Solzhenitsyn reaffirmed, “in these troublous times”, his Orthodox faith and exhibited the deep well of hope that sprang from it:
In today’s devastated, crushed, dazed and corruption-susceptible Russia, it is even more evident that we will not recover without the spiritual defence of the Orthodox faith. If we are not an irrational herd, we need a dignified foundation for our unity. We, Russians, must hold the spiritual gift of the Orthodox faith with great devotion and persistence, for it is one of our last gifts, a gift we are already losing.
It was precisely the Orthodox faith, not the imperial power, that created the Russian cultural model. It is the Orthodoxy preserved in our hearts, traditions and deeds that will strengthen the spiritual meaning that unites the Russians above all tribal considerations. And even if we happen to lose our population numbers, territory, and even statehood in the upcoming decade, we will still be left with the only imperishable thing, the Orthodox faith and the noble perceptions of reality ensuing from it.9
Solzhenitsyn’s Orthodoxy led him to sympathize with the Serbians during the crisis in the Balkans in 1999, and he proved, even as an octogenarian, that he had not lost the ability to cause controversy, nor the ability to provoke outrage in the West. On April 8, 1999, he attacked the policy of NATO in Kosovo, stating that it had flagrantly ignored the United Nations and that it had “trampled” the UN’s Charter “under foot”: “NATO has proclaimed before the world for the coming century an old law, that of the jungle: the strongest is always right. If your high technology permits it, surpass a hundred times in violence the adversary you condemn.”10 Two months later, he again attacked the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, stating that he saw “no difference in the behavior of NATO and Hitler”, adding that, although he did not know how the Yugoslav problem could be resolved, he lamented that “for the third month before the eyes of the whole world a European country is being destroyed”.11 As the conflict in Yugoslavia brought the blood-soaked curtain down on the horrors of the twentieth century, and as the world looked timidly toward a doubt-filled future at the dawn of the new millennium, there were signs that Solzhenitsyn was being brought in from the cold, signs that at last the exiled prophet was being welcomed home. On September 20, 2000, hemet the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, who was at pains to illustrate that he had Solzhenitsyn’s approval of his government’s policies. In August 2001, Putin stated that, prior to his education reforms, documents had been sent to “very different people, known and respected by the country, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn”.12 It was all a far cry from the days of the Politburo. Four years earlier, in May 1997, Solzhenitsyn had been elected as a full member of the Russian Academy of Science, a far cry from the days of his expulsion from the Writers’ Union in 1969.
In spite of his being courted by those who inhabited the corridors of power, Solzhenitsyn retained his right to criticize the government vociferously. Like the character of Aslan in C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Solzhenitsyn was not a “tame lion”. Indeed, he was prone to bite the hand that paid him compliments. On December 14, 2000, he made a rare public appearance to accept a humanities award at the French Embassy in Moscow, using the occasion to attack the policies of post-communist Russia. In his acceptance speech, and during the news conference that followed it, he delivered what the Moscow Times described as a “devastating criticism of Boris Yeltsin’s decade”. Nor did Putin escape his wrath: he criticized the President for making several “political mistakes”, not least of which was Putin’s recent decision to reinstate the melody of the Soviet hymn as the national anthem.13 Solzhenitsyn returned to the political fray on February 21, 2001, speaking out against the trading of farmland on the eve of the opening session of the Russian State Council’s discussion of land reform. “Land should be owned, being the property of the farmer only and nobody else—not a plunderer or a landlord”, he told journalists. Instead of offering farmland for auction, with the inevitable result that it would pass into the hands of absentee speculators, arrangements should be made to facilitate low-interest loans to farmers so that they could purchase their own land. He also believed that farmland should be given free of charge to the descendants of those who were stripped of their land and exiled during Soviet times.14 His views were in conformity with those he had expressed over the years, from his Letter to Soviet Leaders in 1973 to his Rebuilding Russia in 1990, and show him to be part of an agrarian political tradition that, in the West, includes the land policies promoted by Chesterton and Belloc in the 1920s, and by E. F. Schumacher in the 1970s.