The actual number of people proceeded against (including by way of prophylaxis) does not in itself alter the fact that the Soviet system was politically retrograde, allowing its opponents’ propaganda to score points. The regime possessed repulsive features that cost it dear in the international arena. But the scope of the repression we are dealing with for the post-Stalinist period – an average of 312 cases a year for twenty-six years for the two main political crimes (and in some cases, reduction or quashing of sentences by a higher court) – constitutes not merely a statistic, but an index: this was no longer Stalinism and it does not warrant description of the USSR as the ‘Evil Empire’, which was common in the West. Apocalyptic invective of this sort makes the Soviet Union seem rather innocent by comparison. Leaders should control their rhetoric, lest it rebounds.
Whatever their precise number, dissidents, of whom the most well-known were Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and later Sharansky, were aggressively followed and spied on by Andropov’s agencies. Compromising materials were confiscated and hostile witnesses sought out and induced to testify, and so on. But we will arrive at a better understanding of the specific approach adopted by Andropov, KGB chief since mid-1967, if we compare it with what ‘normal conservatives’ would have liked to see him do in each particular case. It is true that the latter no longer demanded the death penalty. But they still sought criminal prosecution and sentences that would be heavy enough to remove culprits from the scene, by exiling them to a remote region where they could not be seen or heard. In each instance, Andropov pressed for the adoption of a more clement course – in particular, expulsion from the Soviet Union. Sakharov, for example, was exiled to Gorky – a city whose climate and living conditions did not greatly differ from Moscow’s. The way that the West used each case (indeed, the whole dissident movement) for its own purposes, and the way in which different dissidents responded to the West’s appeal, could not escape the KGB chief or be a matter of indifference to him, quite independently of the fact that excessive ‘clemency’ might bring his career to an abrupt end.
There is an enormous literature in the West on the dissidents. We shall restrict ourselves to a few points and, in the first instance, to the case of Solzhenitsyn, who together with Sakharov was the most famous of them (even though one cannot imagine two more different personalities). When discussing Solzhenitsyn, we shall also say something about the remarkable case of an opponent from within the system – namely, the editor of the literary journal Novyi Mir, the poet Alexander Tvardovsky. Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and Tvardovsky constitute a ‘typology’ of political opposition and social criticism, even if they do not cover all its varieties and nuances, from open protest to silent ‘internal emigration’ via rejection through indifference and the pursuit of reforms from within the regime.
The Solzhenitsyn phenomenon has various facets. Viewed from afar (i.e. from abroad), he looked like a giant single-handedly taking on a dictatorial machine. The picture has become more complicated over time. Better knowledge of his personality would explain why he did not have only admirers in Russia. He also had many critics among liberal minded oppositionists, probably because they did not regard him as a democrat. As long as he waged his battle from the inside, foreign observers assumed that he was fighting for democratization of the system: the cause he was defending – greater freedom for intellectuals, and especially writers – would help to expand political freedom for all citizens. However, once he was exiled in the West it soon transpired – as in many other cases – that anti-communism was not automatically a vehicle for democracy. Solzhenitsyn’s struggle was in fact inspired by, and served, a profoundly anti-democratic ideology, combining elements of ‘national-statism’ with archaic traits of the Orthodox religion; it was hostile not only to the ills of the West but also to the very concept of democracy. In short, Solzhenitsyn harboured a deep authoritarianism of his own devising which, if not formulated when he first appeared on the public stage, developed in the course of his struggle – especially at the stage of his life when he sensed that higher powers were summoning him to ‘slay the dragon’, and single-handedly at that, by publishing his Gulag Archipelago.
Thrown in the face of the Soviet regime, a book like The Gulag Archipelago may be regarded as an act of literary-political revenge: condemnation of a system that had betrayed its own ideals and those of humanity by creating hell on earth for millions of people, including Solzhenitsyn. Yet he did not offer the slightest hint that by the time of its publication the Gulag as he had known it no longer existed. To have said as much would have been an act of political honesty and would have required of him a deeper critical analysis of the system, with arguments adapted to post-Stalinist Russia. But he did not offer one; and it was of no significance to him. It was much simpler to attack the Soviet Union for its Stalinist history and pretend that it still persisted – something that also fitted his self-image. For Solzhenitsyn considered himself the depository of higher values inherited from Russia’s distant past, and it was with reference to that past that he sought to suggest remedies for twentieth-century Russia.
There were excellent reasons why his celebrated novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in Tvardovsky’s Novyi Mir, should have been unanimously well received in Russia. Resistance to a degrading penal system was identified with indestructible human values, personified by a simple working man, a peasant, who had the inner strength to resist the degradation inflicted on him by his jailers. But there were equally good reasons why The Gulag Archipelago, written and published when the Gulag had essentially been dismantled, was badly received by many internal critics, who regarded it as an apocalyptic exaggeration doubtless very useful to the USSR’s enemies, but damaging for the democratic struggle against a system which, albeit modernized, remained quite primitive in many ways. Many critics of Soviet authoritarianism could not but reject Solzhenitsyn’s alternative, as well as his pretensions to the status of liberator. A fine writer, but politically inept and with a highly inflated sense of his own importance, Solzhenitsyn lacked sufficient grasp of reality to think in political terms. In this respect, the contrast with such figures as Andrei Sakharov, Roy Medvedev or Andrei Sinyavsky could not be more pronounced.
His autobiography The Calf and the Oak supplies us with some of the keys to his personality – notably his sense of having been selected to accomplish a mystical mission, but also some of the other, less attractive characteristics that prompted him to engage in a vicious (and quite unexpected) attack on Tvardovsky and his colleagues at Novyi Mir. These were the people who had fought so hard for Solzhenitsyn and his work in the Soviet Union, and who launched him onto the national – indeed, international – stage. He accused the editorial board of cowardice, self-glorification, ineptitude and duplicity. The response by Tvardovsky’s former deputy, Vladimir Lakshin – an outstanding literary critic and essayist – was powerful, indignant and devastating.[11] In his psychological portrait of Solzhenitsyn, Lakshin highlights the characteristics that helped him to survive the camps. In fact, he writes, Solzhenitsyn had assimilated the lessons of the Gulag only too well. He was a product of the camps, who identified with the zek and had always retained the zek mentality.
11
Vladimir Lakshin,