On June 5, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, signed a decree honoring Solzhenitsyn “for exemplary achievements in the area of humanitarian activities”. The award was announced by State Hermitage Museum director Mikhail Piotovsky and Yuri Osipov, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, at a Kremlin news conference. Responding to news of the award on her husband’s behalf, Alya told reporters that Solzhenitsyn viewed it as recognition that his life’s work had been noticed: “It gives a certain hope, and Alexander Isayevich would be glad if this hope really was fulfilled in life, hope that our country will learn from the lessons of destroying itself in the twentieth century and never repeat it.”6 As with the funeral of Rostropovich, Solzhenitsyn’s failing health prevented his being able to attend the pomp and circumstance of the official awards ceremony at a hall in the Kremlin on June 12, his wife once again serving as his representative. Yet, later the same day, as a mark of the respect with which he was now held by Russia’s ruling elite, Putin visited Solzhenitsyn’s residence to present the award in person. According to Russian press reports, the two men discussed Solzhenitsyn’s ideas about the political situation in contemporary Russia at some length.7
Many people in the West seemed confused and bemused by Solzhenitsyn’s evidently comfortable relationship with Putin, and some were quick to sense a hypocritical rapprochement between Solzhenitsyn and what they perceived to be the new totalitarianism in Russia. Such misreadings of the man were put to rest by Alya Solzhenitsyn in mid-June, within days of the award ceremony in Moscow, during her keynote address at an international Solzhenitsyn conference at the University of Illinois. Among the many aspects of modern Russia with which her husband “by no means agree[d]” were the party-dominated nature of the legislature, the absence of meaningful local self-government, and the rampant corruption that continued to plague Russian society. Most of all, Solzhenitsyn lamented that “there was no process of cleansing” when communism collapsed; “we heard no words of repentance from any of the party bureaucrats”. Without such repentance, Solzhenitsyn believed that Russians had “robbed themselves of the essential experience of historical catharsis”.8
In an endeavor to put the Putin-Solzhenitsyn relationship into perspective, Daniel Mahoney, author of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology and co-editor of The Solzhenitsyn Reader, insisted that it was “a terrible mistake to assume that Solzhenitsyn is an uncritical supporter of the status quo in Russia today”. Nonetheless,
[Solzhenitsyn] surely credits Putin for taking on the most unsavoury of the oligarchs, confronting the demographic crisis (it was Solzhenitsyn who first warned in his speech to the Duma in the fall of 1994 that Russians were in the process of dying out), and restoring Russian self-respect (although Solzhenitsyn adamantly opposes every identification of Russian patriotism with Soviet-style imperialism)…. The point is [Mahoney concluded], that Solzhenitsyn remains his own man, a patriot and a witness to the truth.9
In actual fact, although Solzhenitsyn had certainly come in from the cold since his days as a dissident, he was only pursuing in his discussions with Putin what he had sought to pursue with the Politburo of the Soviet Union thirty-four years earlier, in his Letter to Soviet Leaders. The only difference was that Putin was prepared to listen to Solzhenitsyn’s wisdom, and to discuss it with him in person, whereas the communist old guard had sought to silence him. If Putin was really prepared to listen to Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about the population implosion caused by the culture of death, or about the need to tackle corruption, or the necessity of strong local democracy, or the difference between true nationalism and chauvinistic imperialism, why should Putin be criticized for listening or Solzhenitsyn for speaking his mind?
In the midst of Solzhenitsyn’s acceptance of the award for “humanitarianism” from Putin, and in the midst of the outrage and confusion that it was causing in the West, A. N. Wilson wrote an essay in the Daily Telegraph praising Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward as “an overpoweringly wonderful book”. “One Nobel prizewinner who is thoroughly deserving of his laurel crown is Alexander Solzhenitsyn”, Wilson began, describing Solzhenitsyn as “a great man”. The essay concluded with Wilson’s comparison of Cancer Ward with Kingsley Amis I Want It Now and Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object, two novels that were first published in 1968, the year of Cancer Ward’s first publication. Wishing “no disrespect” to Amis and O’Brien, Wilson nonetheless asserted that, “set beside the Western lightweights”, Solzhenitsyn “seems rather more impressive, ever more so with the passage of time”.10
On June 23, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Solzhenitsyn. Not surprisingly, the recent controversy over his acceptance of an award from Vladimir Putin was one of the key questions asked. The question, and Solzhenitsyn’s reply, warrant quotation in extenso:
Der Spiegel: Thirteen years ago when you returned from exile, you were disappointed to see the new Russia. You turned down a prize proposed by Gorbachev, and you also refused to accept an award Yeltsin wanted to give you. Yet now you have accepted the State Prize which was awarded to you by Putin, the former head of the FSB intelligence agency, whose predecessor, the KGB, persecuted and denounced you so cruelly. How does this all fit together?
Solzhenitsyn: The prize in 1990 was proposed not by Gorbachev, but by the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, then a part of the USSR. The prize was to be for The Gulag Archipelago. I declined the proposal, since I could not accept an award for a book written in the blood of millions.
In 1998, it was the country’s low point, with people in misery; this was the year when I published the book Russia in Collapse [Russia in the Abyss]. Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order. I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits.
The current State Prize is awarded not by the president personally, but by a community of top experts. The Council on Science that nominated me for the award and the Council on Culture that supported the idea include some of the most highly respected people of the country, all of them authorities in their respective disciplines. The president, as head of state, awards the laureates on the national holiday. In accepting the award I expressed the hope that the bitter Russian experience, which I have been studying and describing all my life, will be for us a lesson that keeps us from new disastrous breakdowns.