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Solzhenitsyn’s Return to Russia

By Terrence Crimmins
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In 1994 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the man who had turned himself from a political

prisoner of the Soviet dictatorship into a best-selling author who won the Nobel Prize for

Literature, began his return to Russia, leaving Cavendish, Vermont, his home of exile for

almost twenty years. His neighbors there liked the Russian writer, though they didn’t see

much of him, save one appearance at a town parade. They shared with him a respect for

the right to privacy, which they were more than happy to accord him. Joe Allen, owner

of the Cavendish General store, expressed some sadness at Solzhenitsyn’s departure,

hoping the writer would stop by to say good-bye. A wooden sign staked to the front of

the building, which he had to secure because people kept stealing it, informed passers by

not to ask for directions to the home of the Russian recluse.1

Solzhenitsyn was not so welcomed as one might expect in America, and he made

more than a few waves during his stay, starting from his speech at Harvard

Commencement in 1978. The academic community expected the kind of speech that had

been the trademark of Russian émigrés, praising the United States as a beautiful and free

country as opposed to the evil and dictatorial Soviet Union. Perhaps their expectation

was higher as this was the man who had exposed the Soviets for what they really were.

The audience, however, did not know Solzhenitsyn. His speech criticized Western

culture, and portrayed the state of affairs in America as an orgy of sinful degradation. He

frankly expressed his own disgust at the American capitalist tendency to pander to

people’s pleasures, and eliminated any chance of his ever being perceived as an

unquestioning champion of the West. Perhaps the remark that most affected his

reputation was the manner in which he lambasted the American media as an irresponsible

institution with no sense of justice for the results of their actions. Rhetorically he asked if
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the newspapers ever resolved their previous mistakes by correcting them in headlines the

following day. This query, by suggesting that the American media made mistakes and

even worse suggesting that they should be corrected in the next day’s headlines, was not

the sort of statement that would endear him to the American press. Perhaps Boston

Globe columnist Alex Beam had this speech at least partially in mind when he wrote a

1993 column entitled “Shut up Solzhenitsyn.” 2 Beam casually portrayed the author as a

village hack who happened to go to a gulag and write a book about it that helped to bring

down the Soviet Union but, otherwise, he was an ignorant fellow who ought to cease and

desist with his comments about world controversy and just shut up. Beam lambasted one

after another statements and speeches of Solzhenitsyn during his stay in the United

States, asserting that Solzhenitsyn was a tragicomic fool. Was the great Russian writer

and Nobel Prize winner really such an ignorant man? Solzhenitsyn himself complained

that his western critics never read him and, in the case of Mr. Beam, this is probably true.

Was he really a hack who ought to just shut up?

The Harvard speech was not the only speech where Solzhenitsyn was critical of

America. On June 30, 1975 he gave a speech in Washington that warned America to be

vigilant in its opposition to Russia, and make sure that the Communist Dictatorship falls. 3

Speaking before a convention of the AFL-CIO labor union, he thanked the American

unions and their workers for being a steady foe of Communism, and criticized others for

a lack of vigilance:

When liberal thinkers and wise men of the West, who had
forgotten the meaning of the word "liberty," were swearing
that in the Soviet Union there were no concentration camps
at all, the American Federation of Labor, published in
1947, a map of our concentration camps, and on behalf of
 4

all of the prisoners of those times, I want to thank the

American workers' movement for this.4

It is clear from these speeches that Solzhenitsyn, whatever he said, was not too shy to

confront people he disagreed with.

The Harvard Commencement was titled “World Split Apart,” and firmly placed

the author’s critique of the West in an international context. 5 He criticized the Western

nations from having become societies that had begun to wallow in self-destructive bogs

where their only goal was hedonism and pleasure. He declared that the leaders of such

societies no longer had the courage to confront the Soviet behemoth. Western

democracies should not converge with the systems of the East, he said, blatantly pointing

out that welfare states that pandered to popular pleasures were in danger of creating the

kind of society that forgot what freedom was, and would end up, through their own orgies

of pleasure and laziness, sinking into a moral turpitude that prevented any kind of action

at all. What was needed, he asserted, were courageous and freedom loving people to

stand up to the Soviet dictatorship, for the only way to get rid of it was confrontation,

even perhaps even violence. This was not the kind of talk that would endear him to the

American media.

In 1993, before returning to his homeland, Solzhenitsyn took a trip to Europe

for sixth months, where he continued to make a distinct impression. In Paris he surprised

the French Premier by arriving in a taxi, not a limousine, before they departed for lunch.

It was his remarks about the French Revolution that raised the most eyebrows, however,

as he asserted that the Revolution was a mistake. Speaking at a conservative celebration

of the 200th anniversary of massacres in Vendee, a region that was a stronghold of the

Catholic Church at the time of the Revolution, he said that the French Revolution was an
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error that, in part, led to the error of the Russian Revolution. This stance won him the

approval of conservative politicians, whom he joined in lamenting the massacres in the

Vendee, an area where staunch Catholics had vicious battles with the anti-religious

revolutionary extremists.6 Solzhenitsyn capped his conservative credentials with a visit

to the Polish Pope John Paul II, whom he joined for private and quiet reflections after a

very public handshaking.

Back in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin was anxious to greet the great writer, and was

making preparations for what he might very well have regarded as a prime political

opportunity. He bought and remodeled a house for the Solzhenitsyns, assuming that he

would arrive directly in Moscow. How could it be any other way? Like the Americans

in Harvard Square, Yeltsin did not know Solzhenitsyn. The famous exiled writer chose

to begin his trip home at the other end of the continent, in Vladivostok, on the Pacific

Ocean, from whence he would make a five-week trip across Russia on the Trans-Siberian

Railroad, making many stops along the way to talk to the Russian people and reacquaint

himself with their lives and problems. Solzhenitsyn would also, as it turned out, become

acquainted during his travels with the effects of Yeltsin’s “Shock Therapy” and quasi-

dictatorship.

While he was being received in Vladivostok with the traditional welcoming

gifts of bread and salt, kneeling down to kiss the soil and then- as he did throughout his

trip -going off to talk quietly with his hosts, the media in Moscow were not so sure.

The Moscow daily Nezavismaya Gazeta quoted many

Russian emigrants as describing Solzhenitsyn as "the new
Great Inquisitor," "the snake that crawled out of Russia, but
left its tail there," and even "the fifth column of Soviet
propaganda" with all the attributes of being an anti-
Westerner, anti-democrat, and anti-Semite.7
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Such were the fears amongst the members of the Russian intellectual elite in

Moscow which soon grew tired of waiting for Solzhenitsyn’s return. The writer himself

had received a telephone call in America by Boris Yeltsin in 1992 during a visit by

Yeltsin to America, where the President apologized to the writer for his exile. 8 Four

prominent writers met and expressed great respect for the famous writer but feared that if

he was going to be too brash with his political criticisms that the new generation of

Russians wouldn’t listen, because he had been away too long.9

Siberia was the location of the gulag where Solzhenitsyn’s first work of fiction

on the Soviet prison system, a novella entitled A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was

set.10 The first page of this work sets the tone for the rest of the book, as the reader sees

Ivan getting up before daylight, at 5:00 AM, and wrapping himself as best he can in an

assortment of clothes and rags to fend of the Arctic winter temperatures while he

performs his sixteen hour day of forced labor as a bricklayer. Using the ordinary

workday of an ordinary gulag laborer, Solzhenitsyn created a tragic drama that helped

open Soviet and western eyes to the terrible atrocities that took place in Stalin’s slave

driven communist autocracy. His more famous work, The Gulag Archipelago,11 is

perhaps his most difficult to read. As a work of non-fiction, its prose is not crafted into

the kind of artistic beauty that made some of his other works literary masterpieces, and

the reader has to plow through seemingly endless documentation of the horrors that

occurred throughout the Soviet Union in a succession of gulags from one end of the

Euro-Asian continent to the other. The result is a rather sobering and overwhelming

feeling at the intricate web of evil that Stalin had created though Solzhenitsyn, displaying

the Christian sentiments that he had embraced as a gulag resident, affirmed later that he
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had no resentments about his own stay there, and merely noted that he had been

imprisoned for bad behavior and then released. The bad behavior that had put him there

was his own critique of Stalin in a letter.

Solzhenitsyn was a decorated Soviet artillery officer in the Second World War

and, knowing that his mail was going to be read by censors, coded his remarks about

Stalin by mentioning a stupid man with a large mustache. This not so subtle statement,

however, was not coded enough, apparently, and the future author was arrested and sent

to the gulag. His training in mathematics, however, may have saved his life, as he was

sent to one of the upper tier of gulags, where he worked with scientists on projects for the

Soviet army. This was the subject of the book that many consider to be his best, The

First Circle.12 The title refers to Dante’s Inferno, where there are seven circles of hell,

and Solzhenitsyn, thus, believed that he was in the least hellish circle of the gulags. The

novel paints a detailed portrait of the strange idiosyncrasies of a prison full of scientists

doing slave labor research for an uncaring government bureaucracy. They casually lie

about their work and results, functioning in an atmosphere of latent rebellion, always

aware of the gross stupidity of those who lust for and attain power in the world. In the

middle of the book is a short portrayal of Stalin who is awake, like the devil, in the

middle of the night, in the bedroom at his dacha, drinking wine and embroiled in manic

confusion about who will be arrested or killed the next day, while his minions stand ready

to do his bidding. Whatever else his critics say of him, it obviously cannot be said that

Solzhenitsyn was not familiar with the gulag system.

Solzhenitsyn’s plane first landed at Magadan on May 28, 1994, a city on the

northeastern coast of Siberia, the site of many of the worst of the labor camps. The writer
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descended briefly to pay homage to the victims before flying to Vladivostok, where he

was received by a larger crowd that he greeted with a speech. 13 The speech asserted that

he had not been away too long, but that the problems Russia faced were great. He

lamented, in his two-hour speech, that the blight of Communism had altered the people

he had known, and tried to sound a note of optimism, suggesting that there might be a ray

of hope ahead. He cited one of his enemies, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. This controversial

man was the clownish leader of the Ultra National Liberal Party who, along with the

Communists, occupied most of the seats in the new State Duma, an institution that

President Yeltsin had hoped would replicate the old powerless Czarist Parliament.

Yeltsin had, at that time, rewritten the Constitution that gave him the power to rule by

decree just as Stalin had, and had formed an alliance with Zhirinovsky of political

convenience. Solzhenitsyn assured the people who greeted him that Zhirinovsky’s

strident nationalist rabble rousing was not in the best interest of the Russian people.14

Zhirinovsky responded two weeks later, asserting that Solzhenitsyn should

return to America. Russia didn’t need someone who had been away for twenty years to

slander the Russian people, who didn’t need any advice about how to reconstruct their

government. Zhirinovsky referred to an article that Solzhenitsyn had written on the

subject entitled How to Rebuild Russia. Zhirinovsky compared Solzhenitsyn to Lenin, in

that both men returned from abroad with a host of ideas on how to change the country, an

analogy that clearly ran counter to the feelings of a man who had been imprisoned as a

result of Lenin’s revolutionary regime.15 As Zhirinovsky’s political party had a lot of

seats in the Duma at that time, and an alliance with Yeltsin, the battle lines were clearly

drawn.
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Solzhenitsyn then boarded a train that had been provided by the British

Broadcasting Service, which some observers said resembled one of the privileged trains

that the Communist bosses used to travel on. 16 Though Solzhenitsyn’s wife soon

departed to fly to Moscow the author continued his train ride, stopping at all the stops at

every town, hamlet or city along the lengthy tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. At

each stop he sought to speak to and feel out the people as to their true problems in this

time of, as he saw it, recovery from the ravages of Communism.

Solzhenitsyn was far from ignorant in this regard, and the book that is perhaps

most informative about that is rarely quoted. From Under the Rubble,17 edited by

Solzhenitsyn in 1974, was a prescient work indeed, as the title refers to the emergence of

Russia from the tyranny of Communism, an event that did not begin to occur for over

nine years after the book was published. This work does, however, quite accurately

predict many of the difficulties that the USSR and Russian Federation would experience

when they emerged from the Soviet hegemony, including the explosive inter-ethnic

tensions. The first article, by Solzhenitsyn, is entitled “As Breathing and Consciousness

Return.” It is an empathetic call for resurrection from the ideological cement of social

engineering that Communism had entailed. What most stands out in this work is the

subdued tone and the delicate understandings of the human condition. There are no brash

calls here for change, which is in stark contrast to his public utterances. The book does

not, however, shy away from critiquing the past. In his controversial Harvard speech

Solzhenitsyn mentioned this book’s second article, “Socialism in Our Past and Future,” 18

and told his audience who were waiting for him to criticize the Soviet system to look

there, before launching into his blistering attack on American culture. This article, by
 10

Igor Shafarevich, is a no holds barred attack on socialism as a philosophy and as a

governmental system. The goal of Socialism, says the author, is to rob society of

individualism by having the state bureaucracy strip away the social gradations that enable

humans to have distinct identities, and then use its systems of control to dominate the

minds and actions of citizens. This type of social engineering, Shafarevich says, will

eventually, if continued, cause the death of all humanity, as it is a life-draining control

system that would sink humanity gradually and conclusively into a lifeless state. Perhaps

the book’s most prophetic chapter addresses ethnic tensions, predicting that as the cement

of Soviet hegemony retreated back toward Russia newfound political freedom would

result in animosities that would fuel ethnic conflicts. The events in Yugoslavia in the

nineties bore witness to the value of this prediction. From Under the Rubble spent a lot

of time musing about the difficulties of a transition to democracy, and the realities of

whether, after being repressed so long under a totalitarian dictatorship, the people would

be ready to govern themselves. Solzhenitsyn was a firm believer in democracy but he

was also a realist, and the book points out that the danger of newfound freedom to a

people who had for some time not possessed liberty is that, like a child with a fragile toy,

they would be unable to contain their emotions and govern wisely. This is where

Solzhenitsyn sees the value of religion and spiritual values in the destiny of Russia, as he

views the Russian people as deeply spiritual, and believed that it is the duty of the leaders

to make people aware of this, as theological principles prevent rash actions that lead to

political disarray in their newfound freedom. Russia needed leaders who championed the

true greatness of the Russian people, men and women who recognized the deep character

and ultimate wisdom of the populace. The danger of the new society was that what
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Solzhenitsyn called “Smatterers,”19 or isolated “intelligentsia”, who are out of touch with

the mainstream and possess a selfish and narrow view of the people, and look out only

for their own interests. These were the people whose self centered attitudes had, in

essence, caused the revolution, and Solzhenitsyn felt that it was essential for such persons

to wake up and become aware of and part of national Russian consciousness and the true

needs and desires of the people.

At Irkutsk, a city on Lake Baikal about one-third of the way across Siberia,

Solzhenitsyn made his political opinions known, giving a speech that was typical of those

he made on his trek across the continent.20 At that time in Yeltsin’s presidency, the

government was making radical changes in the economy that Solzhenitsyn opposed.

Yeltsin, as opposed to his predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had believed that reform

had to stay within the socialist framework,21 was at that time steering Russia on a crash

course toward a free market economy, which had impoverished the Russian people, who

weren’t being paid for months on end. The economy of the Soviet Union had not

collapsed because of inherent socialist weaknesses, but because of difficulties introduced

in the reform process.22 Behind the bold figurehead of Yeltsin were former party hacks

who saw the opportunity to literally take over ownership of the state corporations for

their own profit and, unbeknownst at the time to the American Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard

economic reformer who was quite influential in the drive toward a free market economy,

these men had only their own selfish interests at heart. 23 Solzhenitsyn’s speech in Irkutsk

warned that the wealthy were taking advantage of the troubled economic times to buy up

land at prices only they could afford, and that privatization would result in the creation of

an economic dictatorship. Solzhenitsyn was seeing something worse than he had ever
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feared, the replacement of the Soviet state by elements even more destructive, a clique of

dictatorial and selfish officials in the guise of capitalists who were going to form an

oligarchy for their own profit and inflict serious damage on the Russian economy. 24 This

kind of criticism was not what Boris Yeltsin wanted to hear.

As the great train got closer and closer to Moscow, writers and politicians took

sides on the question of Solzhenitsyn. But the men he called “smatterers” turned out

more often than not to be in the majority. Solzhenitsyn’s message was, it now seems

clear, quite true, but it was not easy to hear at the time. Even Jeffrey Sachs has changed

some of his earlier opinions, and came to lament the bad conditions that his “shock

therapy,” or rapid conversion to a free market economy, produced. Though some have

criticized Solzhenitsyn as an extremist who said shocking, unpredictable things, if what

he said is analyzed it doesn’t seem that radical. In one interview, Solzhenitsyn voiced a

very cautious approach:

The major mistake of reformers is that they followed the

habitual revolutionary road - "to destroy the foundations,
and then..." But, even a fool can see that what is required in
this case is an evolutionary approach, a smooth and slow
transition. The old economic mechanism has to be
preserved, but reanimated from below. Another cause of
our troubles is that the reforms were initiated under
conditions in which people lacked knowledge of their rights
and responsibilities25

The economic policies that Solzhenitsyn advocated are somewhat similar to the

manner that the Chinese government transitioned to a free market economy. Engineered

by Deng Xiaoping, this method called for leaving state institutions intact and allowing the

free market to grow in from below and gradually replace the old state apparatus. What

Sachs’ shock therapy did, essentially, was turn over the state owned industries to greedy
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investors who “purchased them” in “auctions” for insiders, at only a fraction of their

actual value. In other words, the problems of the socialist economy were dumped into a

so-called instant free market “capitalism.” Solzhenitsyn merely pointed this out.

He was not, however, any more kind to Gorbachev in his analysis, saying in an

interview with a Swiss newspaper in 1993 that Gorbachev’s importance had been

exaggerated by the West, because the leader who was seen as the engineer of the

beginning of the end for the Soviet system wasted his chance, during his years in power,

to make any real changes. The way Solzhenitsyn saw it, Gorbachev had not created a

legislature, and the Communists were still in control.26 Thus Solzhenitsyn thought that

what the West perceived as the downfall of the Soviet system had, at least in part, some

of the old Communist Party powers still at the helm.

When he arrived in Moscow on August 19, 1994, he gave a speech in the

famous Yaroslavskiy Railway Station. While the Moscow Mayor and several local

dignitaries were present, Solzhenitsyn did not paint a pretty picture of Yeltsin’s Russia.

Everyone knew that getting rid of communism would not be easy, he said, but he hadn’t

thought it would be so painful. Farmers across Russia were forced to sell their crops at

rock bottom prices, and their social safety nets that prevented poverty were no longer

there, so a rise in crime was an inevitable result. There was no real democracy in Russia,

only petty party haggling, and the Russian people had no real control over their fate. The

only solution, Solzhenitsyn told the crowd, lay in the strength of the Russian people, in

whom he had immense faith. They must exercise patience with their foolish leaders and,

eventually, guide them onto the right path. His remarks drew cheers from the crowd,

some of whom told him that he should become a deputy.27

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Were the masses of Russians going to rise up and take the great writer’s words

to heart? For good or for ill we shall never know, for the government controlled

television network cut off Solzhenitsyn’s speech shortly after he’d begun it, announcing

that it would be a rebroadcasted two hours later at 11:00 PM. It was not shown again,

however, until 1:00 AM, when the government (especially Yeltsin) hoped that most

everyone would be asleep and miss the angry words of the returned exile “hero.” They

feared that such controversial remarks might cause a revolution, and it would be

irresponsible to broadcast them.28

Solzhenitsyn had another chance to speak to the Russian people when he

addressed the State Duma, or Peoples’ Deputies, as they are called, on October 28. The

Duma had invited him to speak. He started is speech by recalling the history of the State

Dumas before the First World War, the only time Russian possessed a parliamentary

body, and noted its ineffectiveness at that time in cooperating with the much needed

reforms proposed by Minister of the Interior P. A. Stolypin, who attempted to reconcile

the nobility with the rebellious peasants. Having returned from his Siberian journey to

canvass the opinions of the Russian people, Solzhenitsyn informed them, they were

currently rebelling against similar undemocratic authorities as had been the case under

Stolypin and the Czar. There was no real democracy in present day Russia, he said, and

the country had to go back to the local control that it had earlier attempted in those

bygone days at the start of the 20 th century in the zemstvos, or local peasant councils.

The Duma gave Solzhenitsyn a rather unenthusiastic reception, however, for

Solzhenitsyn brutally outlined the financial disasters caused by Boris Yeltsin’s reforms.

Russian raw materials were being sold overseas by ruthless profiteers who deposited their
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ill-gotten gains in foreign banks. Land was being sold at prices only the rich could

afford. Moscow bureaucrats were horribly out of touch with the people in the

countryside. There was no real democracy. People from Vladivostok to Moscow

informed him that they were still repressed by whatever governmental institutions that

remained from the previous regime. In essence, the great writer said, things hadn’t really

changed in the least, and Russia was still being run by a clique of selfish bureaucrats who

looked out only for their own interests.

Solzhenitsyn had written a book along similar lines before he left Cavendish,

Vermont. Entitled The Russian Question,29 it provides a brief history of the rulers of

Russia from the seventeenth century onward, where he did not portray them positively in

the least. From the earliest imperial dynasties, it seems, Russian rulers have been more

interested in glorifying themselves by occupying foreign lands than seeing to the needs of

the Russian people. Peter the Great, as he is so often called, was not so great to

Solzhenitsyn, who portrayed him as engaging in reckless foreign wars whose exploits

cost the nation much needed resources that should have been provided to the Russian

people. Solzhenitsyn portrays the history of Russia’s leaders in a negative fashion as

exploiters of the people, implying that new leadership is needed that will attune itself

more to the needs of the diverse peoples of the Euro-Asian continent who make up its

population, but no one yet had made an effort to do so. The tone of his address to the

Duma, essentially, simply informed the legislators that they were just more of the same.

This opinion was not enthusiastically received. Not only politicians but

members of the intelligentsia began to attack Solzhenitsyn as man who was out of touch

with Russian problems, had been gone too long and really wasn’t shouldn’t be expressing
 16

such uninformed opinions. Solzhenitsyn did have a two-hour meeting alone with Boris

Yeltsin. Many would like to have been a fly on the wall for that one, which might have

been, it might be supposed, to resemble a meeting of Albert Einstein and Moe of the

Three Stooges. Solzhenitsyn even was given his own television show by Yeltsin- a

twenty minute spot once every two weeks in which, his critics charged, he paid little

attention to his guests and gave lengthy monologues about how Russia should change

according to his own personal prescriptions. This show, like his speech at the Moscow

train station, was cut off by the government after a few months, and Solzhenitsyn faded

further and further into the background in his native land. He must have felt like the

captain of the ship in the allegory of Plato’s Republic, who is tied up and unable to do

anything while unknowing so-called sailors incompetently mess things up on the ship of

state.

Internationally, as well, Solzhenitsyn’s voice is not so prominent. The Red

Wheel, his magnum opus on the Russian Revolution, has not yet been translated into

English, supposedly because of the translator’s objections to historical inaccuracies

within the book. Another historical novel that has been translated, August 1914,30 also

contained a number of historical inaccuracies. But it is a compelling book about the

Soviet Army in World War I, and follows the campaigns of its armies and the strategies

and actions of its generals. The campaigns of the two major army groups are, to some

extent, incorrectly dramatized to give the reader a taste of these military men who later

helped Stalin build up his totalitarian government. On the other hand the book exhibits

Solzhenitsyn’s strength in describing the Russian people and their feelings. The accounts

of the Russian Army occupying territory from which the Germans had purposely
 17

retreated to lure them into a trap are most informative. Descriptions of the advancing

Russian soldiers’ incredulity at finding toilets in Germany, which did not exist in their

own country, is a very telling scene. The novel does, despite its historical inaccuracies,

provide a telling sense of the Russian experience of the war that spawned, at least

partially, the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn, having served himself as an officer in the Russian

Army in the Second World War, was certainly aware of how it felt to be a member of the

country’s armed forces, and this provides some authenticity to the book.

That was Solzhenitsyn’s great strength as a writer and a public persona. He was

a quite gifted intellectual and a man closely in touch with the public sentiments, which

are two rarely combined qualities. His opinions about the new “post Communist” Russia

were very well informed, but certainly not what the country’s leaders or western nations

wanted to hear. So he was cast out like an ingrate and probably wanted, like Diogenes, to

go out in search of an honest man. His critiques resemble another man who was both a

Christian and a social critic, C. S. Lewis, whose 1947 book The Abolition of Man,31

starkly echoes many of the critiques made by Solzhenitsyn. Lewis excoriates modern

society for being a haven for, as he puts it, “men without chests.” Modern culture, so

called, is a cacophony of generalizations created by know it all in a glance infidels who

have no real appreciation for the culture or the history of the world of which they are a

part. Like the smatterers that Solzhenitsyn warned about in 1974 in From Under the

Rubble, Lewis displayed a deep concern that “modern” electronic culture was turning out

a new generation of philistines whose broad generalizations about the state of the world

were self-serving pronouncements that did not educate the public about the real depth and

richness of the mosaic of history. Solzhenitsyn, likewise, in his two hour conversation
 18

with Boris Yeltsin, for example, was probably trying to impress upon a man he

considered a corrupt imposter with no real historical understanding of the need to

comprehend the wisdom and potential of the Russian people.

The enormous historical changes that Russia is going through, however, are on

very deep tracks that are not easily changed by preaching of whatever depth. The

conversion of the country is along the stages of a process seen in many other such

changes, including, God forbid, the French Revolution. The changeover to a free market,

as some would term it, started out with a moderate phase under Gorbachev before

progressing to a stage of utopia crisis-ridden radicalism under Yeltsin and then reverted

to conservatism under Putin. Similarly the French Revolution went through a moderate

phase before the radicals under Robespierre took over and then a reversion to

conservatism under Napoleon. These stages can be argued about incessantly, of course,

as to what conservatism really means, etcetera. But the point is that radical changes in

the political and economic processes of large nations are not smooth and go through

lengthy dramas before the body politic shed outmoded habits, as past experience shows,

quite slowly. Such is politics.

Art, however, or writing, in Solzhenitsyn’s case, is a means to help the people

to understand their real potential. Some commentators who liked reading the old

Solzhenitsyn said, sympathetically, that perhaps he should give up instead of making so

many outrageous public pronouncements that make him a public spectacle, and

undermine his aura as a writer. He is after all the mysterious man who wrote a book that

played a large part in bringing down the Soviet regime. In my opinion, his even more

rare public pronouncements serve a real purpose. I think he had a deep understanding of
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history and his criticisms of present day Russian politicians are right on target. Even if

no one wants to listen, he disseminates very important and valuable information. Despite

what some say, he should not shut up. Perhaps, through his books, he never will. A

prophet, after all, is never heard in their own country.

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Bibliography

Lewis, C. S., The Abolition of Man, McMillan Company, New York, NY, 1947

Kotz, David and Weir, Fred, Revolution from Above, The Demise of the Society System,
Routledge, London and New York, 1997

A World Split Apart, Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises,
Thursday, June 8, 1978

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Bantam Books, New
York, NY, 1963.
The Gulag Archipelago, Harper and Rowe, New York, NY, 1974.
The First Circle, Bantam Books, New York, NY, 1969
From Under the Rubble, Little, Brown and Company, Boston,
MA, 1974.
The Russian Question, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, NY,
1995.
August 1914, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, NY, 1989

Thomas, D. M., Alexander, Solzhenitsyn, A Century in His Life, St. Matins Press, New
York, NY, 1998, p. 511.

Material from news reports by Associated Press, Moscow News Service, Press
Association Limited, Current Digest of the Soviet Press, United Press International, and
Central News Agency- Taiwan were all used in this report.
1
Vermont Town Saying Farewell to Solzhenitsyn,BYLINE: By ROSS SNEYD, Associated Press Writer, June 10, 1993.
2
SHUT UP, SOLZHENITSYN Published on February 10, 1993 Author(s):    Alex Beam, Globe Staff
3
Copyright: A. Solzhenitsyn 1975/1976/1979
OCR: EEN, 08/14/2002

4
Ibid. P. 1.
5
A World Split Apart, Alexander Solzhenitsyn at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises, Thursday, June 8, 1978
6
Associated Press, September 26, 1993, Solzhenitsyn Joins in Marking Massacres During Revolution
7
Copyright 1994, Central News Agency – Taiwan, May 27, 1994.
8
The Associated Press, June 15, 1992,
9
Ibid.
10
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Bantam Books, New York, NY, 1963.
11
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Gulag Archipelago, Harper and Rowe, New York, NY, 1974.
12
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The First Circle, Bantam Books, New York, NY, 1969.
13
Thomas, D. M., Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A Century in His Life, St. Matins Press, New York, NY, 1998, p. 511.
14
Ibid. p. 513.
15
Associated Press, July 21, 1994
16
Op. Cit., Thomas, p. 515.
17
Solzhenitsyn et. al., From Under the Rubble, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, MA, 1974.
18
Ibid. p. 26-67.
19
Ibid. p229.
20
United Press International, June 19, 1994
21
Kotz, David and Weir, Fred, Revolution from Above, The Demise of the Society System, Routledge, London and New
York, 1997, p. 4-5.
22
Ibid. Chapter 3.
23
Ibid. Chapter 9.
24
United Press International, June 19, 1994
25
Copyright 1994 Moscow News,  (Russia), July 29, 1994
26
The Press Association Limited, Press Association, September 16, 1993
27
Copyright 1994, The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, August 17, 1994
28
Copyright 1994 The Current Digest of the Soviet Press , August 17, 1994
29
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Russian Question, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, NY, 1995.
30
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, August 1914, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, NY, 1989.
31
Lewis, C. S., The Abolition of Man, McMillan Company, New York, NY, 1947.