Highly relevant, this analysis will only briefly detain us here. The crucial question, already alluded to, is what Solzhenitsyn was fighting for. The Novyi Mir milieu was broadly socialist or social-democratic, and the battles they engaged in, however cautiously, were rooted in that ideology. This, more than anything else, was what provoked Solzhenitsyn’s fury. Lakshin was highly dubious about the programme offered by Solzhenitsyn to his fellow citizens: ‘Judging by his idyllic conception of our pre-revolutionary past, he seems to think that Russia’s only future is… her past.’ This boiled down to advising the Soviet leadership to renounce its ideology in favour of nationalism and Orthodoxy: ‘What emerges from the fog of his verbiage is the triad proposed by Count Uvarov [in the nineteenth century]: Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nation.’ Lakshin does not deny Solzhenitsyn’s great talent or his role in fighting evil, but he deplores that fact that he seems incapable of deriving anything positive from it:
I cannot detect any sincerity in his faith, just as I find it hard to believe in Solzhenitsyn as a politician and a thinker – even though he has already acquired all the attributes of a familiar type of politician, with his insatiable urge to anathematize, to reject, and to demand of his supporters nothing less than an oath of total loyalty.
Lakshin’s rejection of Solzhenitsyn’s message becomes ever more bitter and adamant:
I don’t want to be in his paradise; I fear I would find myself in an ideally organized prison camp. I don’t believe in his Christianity because no one with his misanthropic bent and such self-worship can possibly be a Christian. And I am fed up with his hatred and rejection of everything in present-day Russia… But had he not exploded the edifice of untruth? Yes he had. But he has become an infernal machine convinced of his divine mission, which has begun to blow up everything around it. I fear he will blow himself up as well. Indeed, he is already in the process of doing so.
The fury, bitterness and complexity of the battles over the Soviet system, and the drama lived by those engaged in them, are conveyed by these few quotations. No one won; everyone was right; everyone lost. Solzhenitsyn returned to his country liberated from communism and found it ‘in a state of collapse’ (such was the title of his book, published in 1998). The amazing journal Novyi Mir was progressively throttled after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. It fought on until the Writers’ Union appointed a new editorial board without consulting Tvardovsky, thereby forcing him to resign (February 1970). He died shortly thereafter, a broken, bitter man who bequeathed a legacy of great poetry and personal nobility.
We have briefly dealt with some aspects of opposition and dissidence, after having mapped out the evolution of forms of political repression in the post-Stalin period. The sound and fury over dissidence at home and especially abroad, and the authorities’ treatment of it, should not be allowed to obscure the systemic trends that were at work in the Soviet Union. It is one thing when a worker cannot leave his job or legally protest against injustice in the workplace; it is quite another when he can do so. A system denying all rights was supplanted by a system of laws, rights and guarantees.
Eliminating the notion of ‘counter-revolutionary crime’, and replacing it by that of ‘especially dangerous crime against the state’, might seem merely cosmetic and utterly irrelevant to those persecuted and prosecuted for such crimes. In this context, biography counts for more than historiography. But for historians, changes involve transition to another stage. We have already signalled the fact that the Soviet leadership had a justifiably poor reputation abroad for political repression. And yet, when a penal system amounting to arbitrary punishment and slave labour is transformed into one where slave labour is abolished, where judicial procedures exist, where prisoners possess certain rights and means of challenging the prison administration, where they can maintain access with the outside world, consult a lawyer, protest legally against their treatment, and when the system recognizes that it has an interest in establishing a modicum of legality in the penal domain – when all this obtains, we are dealing with a different kind of regime. To suffer a term of imprisonment for political opinions produces a legitimate sense of injustice, and the biographical experience eclipses the historical dimension: ‘Why should I care if the punishment would have been worse ten years earlier?’ For their part, however, historians cannot discount what would have happened to prisoners – and their families – ten years earlier.
The secret police, which had hitherto operated completely unchecked – running amok, arresting, torturing, imprisoning and shooting almost at will – was now brought under controclass="underline" the KGB was no longer empowered to convict and sentence; and its investigations were subject to oversight by divisions within the Prosecutor’s Office at all levels created for the purpose. The Prosecutor General now exercised this power at the very heart of a dictatorial system which, in Stalin’s time, had also massacred a good number of unduly ‘nosy’ prosecutors. From March 1953 (and up until 1991), the department of the Prosecutor’s Office responsible for oversight of KGB investigations had to be informed of any case opened by the secret police and would open its own file at the same time. It was also empowered to re-examine cases in the event of appeals by convicted persons or their relatives. They could then refer the case back to the courts (instances of a reduction in sentence were quite frequent), or initiate an appeals process for the rehabilitation of the convicted person or the amendment of the offence (on the basis of a different article in the criminal code from that of the original trial).[12]
These facts and trends, like many others, can be submitted to two types of comparison, requiring us to subject each phenomenon to two different interpretations. Thus, in the first instance the Soviet Union can be compared with other countries. Here the inability of the regime to accept society’s increasing political differentiation, its fear and denial of independent opinions (a basic right in a modern civilized society), demonstrates the inferiority of the system, which had found ways of tolerating or professing more than one opinion, but generally of a rather conservative complexion. The Soviet Union paid a heavy political price for this in international opinion. And it may come as a revelation to some to learn that Soviet intellectuals were not the only ones concerned about this: such people were also to be found in the KGB’s ranks.
So it is scarcely surprising if the Soviet authorities resorted to an ‘active-reactive’ policy, introducing or reviving a whole range of laws specifically designed to counter critics who explicitly or implicitly sided with the Western bloc. As regards the system’s ‘inferiority’ (its dictatorial character), the laws against ‘anti-state crimes’ that were supposed to defend it from opponents were in themselves evidence of its failure – testimonium paupertatis. When its rulers wanted critics to be silenced, the various legal guarantees would be set aside and judges, secret services and prosecutors would operate hand in glove.
The second relevant historical comparison is with the country’s own past. The anti-state crime laws were now on the statute books for all to see; and to be prosecuted, people actually had to violate them. The intention to commit a criminal act was no longer sufficient to justify such arrests, which were now illegal. The new version of an extensive criminal code and the strengthening of legal institutions afforded a marked contrast with the past, even if the overall framework remained undemocratic. This aspect of political repression was a subject of continual debate among the leadership, jurists, and the KGB; and it explains the protests from different, mainly academic circles when they judged that the regime was not respecting its own legal rules. Such phenomena were part of the political scene and should be perceived as such.