The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
BOOK REVIEWS 6 6t is you and your writing that started it all," says a man trembling with rage in an audience in Ulan-Ude, in Buryatia, three-and-a-half thousand miles from Moscow. "It has...
...The target of this fulmination blinks slightly, but otherwise shows little emotional reaction...
...He never refers to him in this latest book, but he does denounce as dangerous and harmful to Russia those very Balkan-meddling, pan-Slavist, anti-Turkish fantasies of the czars that Zhirinovsky has trumpeted as the key to Russia's salvation...
...As for Alexander I's demand thatRussia obtain a central portion of Poland in a re-partition of that country, Solzhenitsyn labels the acquisition "yet another poisoned gift, another rebellious nest, another burden on her shoulders, and yet another reason for Polish antipathy towards Russia...
...Then, in the late 1980s, cudgels were again taken up against the Russian writer by some who saw an anti-Semitic stereotype in his depiction of the Jewish terrorist Bogrov in his novel August 1914...
...Still, speaking well of the zemstvo system is about a thousand versts from proposing a restoration of the Soviet Union or the monarchy, not to mention the installation in power of "God-fearing despots...
...He flails Peter I (1689-1725)—he refuses to call him "the Great"—for reforms imposed with such brutality that about a million Russians died or fled the country from 1719-1727...
...If some of these themes sound like Augustinian precepts on the relationship of power to morality, that is because, in a sense, they are...
...What is left to demolish...
...Yuri Shchekochikhin, a Russian journalist writDavid Aikman, a former senior corespondent with Time magazine, is the author most recently of Hope: The Heart's Great Quest (Servant Publications...
...Solzhenitsyn's doubts about the West, and his yearnings for Russian patriotism, caused some to worry that when he first returned home last year, he might throw in his lot with ultranationalists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who has ranted about Russia's decline with a vehemence that makes Solzhenitsyn look positively complacent...
...Besides, a BBC television crew is on hand, accompanying the famous man on his long journey home and ready to record for posterity every moment of dramatic self-revelation...
...He cites—ironically—a New York Times report in March 1994, quoting Russian statistics that the life expectancy for Russian males has now fallen to 60, putting the country on a par with Bangladesh, Indonesia, and parts of Africa...
...The question, however, remains: Does Russia, in return, love him...
...He thinks that the moral demands people ordinarily impose on individuals in terms of honesty, generosity, and goodness should also be applied "in large degree" to the politics of governments, parliaments, political parties, and even entire countries...
...ing in Moscow's Literary Gazette shortly after Solzhenitsyn's return last year, denounced the Nobel laureate for his alleged idea of "bringing about a reunification of the old Soviet Union...
...From Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1973) through From Under the Rubble (1973), Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals (1991), and up to this latest work—his first in English since his return to Russia—Solzhenitsyn's ideas about his country and the morality of national behavior show a remarkable consistency of theme and direction...
...He still steers clear of the ultranationalists, and even on his fortnightly television talk show—which is often critical of the Yeltsin government—Solzhenitsyn avoids partisan political positions...
...Solzhenitsyn never lost faith during his long exile that Communism would collapse and that he would return in his lifetime to a free country...
...In a very deep sense, Solzhenitsyn is right...
...Go back to your blessed America...
...He sums up this phenomenon, along with falling birthrates, a continuing deterioration of Russia's education system, and rising crime and corruption, as constituting what he calls "the Great Russian Catastrophe of the 1990s...
...Perhaps The American Spectator October 1995 71 as they grow, influence each other, and join efforts, they will gradually revitalize our nation...
...He is against empire-building of any kind, whether by Russia or another state...
...The situation is so dismal, he laments, that even the Russian language has succumbed, mindlessly absorbing English business terms like "marketing," "rating," "voucher," andimprobably—"establishment" He may not appreciate that the penetration of commercial and technical English into Russian, however aesthetically jarring at times, may actually herald Russia's arrival as a "normal" state on the global scene, rather than its irreversible decline...
...But Solzhenitsyn dismissed Zhirinovsky contemptuously as "a caricature of a Russian patriot...
...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Solzhenitsyn plunges the reader almost brusquely into a catalogue of the Romanov dynasty's worst moments...
...y ounger Russians, it is said, hardly read anything of Solzhenitsyn these days...
...It has brought our country to the verge of collapse...
...Solzhenitsyn also believes that "self-limitation," or old-fashioned modesty of ambition, is at the heart of civilized behavior not just in human relationships but in the arena of international politics...
...fulminated with liberalesque outrage against the Russian writer's alleged ideal of "a Christian authoritarianism governed by God-fearing despots...
...But his nonfiction writing about Russia, about politics and morality, is another matter...
...But Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, 78, is no more likely to return today to the U.S.—blessed or otherwise—than he was in June 1994, when the BBC caught this moment of confrontation (fascinatingly depicted, along with several others, in the PBS "Frontline" program "The Homecoming" last April...
...The entire work is some 5,000 pages long, and only the first volume, August 1914, is available in English...
...Solzhenitsyn himself still projects an uplifting confidence in the long term about Russia's future...
...There is absolutely nothing in Solzhenitsyn's writings remotely favorable to anything Soviet, much less to the imperial polity that such a project would entail...
...After an involuntary though highly productive exile from his motherland, first in Switzerland and then for eighteen years in Cavendish, Vermont, Solzhenitsyn clearly now revels in being able to live in the country where his heart has always belonged, his beloved Russia...
...He even criticizes Dostoevsky for the novelist's unhealthy belief in "Russian exclusiveness and messianism...
...Though he has addressed the Russian parliament, he doesn't like party politics at all, and thinks that what passes for it in Moscow today is more oligarchic than democratic...
...The seventy years of Russian Communism, of course, whose brutal miseries surpassed all of the Romanov follies put together...
...But this brings him up to the present day, and with it the book's title question...
...The connection between the two is Solzhenitsyn's view that no matter how "pragmatic" a government may be in its short-term policies, if those policies are not morally sound by traditional—and explicitly Christian—criteria, the country over which it rules will suffer...
...The second is Solzhenitsyn's 1993 address to the International Academy of Philosophy of Liechtenstein, in which he spells out his views on progress, politics, and morality in the post-Communist world...
...That, in fact, may have been a clever ploy designed to elicit Western liberal disapproval of Solzhenitsyn...
...For a great writer to remind his people of this may be his most important gift to them...
...But it was apparent, following him through rural Russian villages and provincial schoolyards in June 1994, that many ordinary Russians, both simple and educated, still look to Solzhenitsyn as a beacon of light and truthfulness in a nation barely groping its way out of the twilight of seven decades of Leninist dictatorship and mendacity...
...Speaking of the thousands of Russians who have written to him over the years yearning for honesty and competence in national life, he writes, "Our hope is pinned precisely and exclusively on this healthy nucleus of living people...
...Solzhenitsyn publicly denied any anti-Semitic sentiment and pointed out (correctly) that he had enjoyed excellent personal and collegial relations in the days of his protests against Soviet power before his expulsion from the USSR...
...The New York Times actually warned its readers that Solzhenitsyn's Harvard ideas were "dangerous," while the Washington Post claimed he was advocating "boundless cold war...
...He believes nations should take public responsibility for their actions as nations, and if necessary repent and apologize for things they have done wrong...
...Though Russia obviously needs biztzesmeny, technocrats, and who knows whatother human paraphernalia of modern commerce, she also needs time for the reservoirs of human trust and truthfulness to rise again in her parched soul...
...Ever since his Harvard commencement address of 1978, "A World Split Apart," American liberals have turned on Solzhenitsyn particularly savagely for his criticism in that speech of what he called the "spiritual exhaustion" and "decline in courage" of the secular Western intelligentsia...
...T he Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century is actually two rather different works combined...
...Solzhenitsyn clearly implies that, by failing to focus properly on its own internal needs, Russia might miss the boat again...
...From the very beginning of his career as a major literary figure—after the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)—Solzhenitsyn has seemed more comfortable in the role of moral mentor to his country than political THE RUSSIAN QUESTION AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1135 pages /$15 reviewed by DAVID AIKMAN 70 The American Spectator October 1995 scientist Though he has made some specific political proposals—a union of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and northern Kazakhstan, for example—the only consistent reference to Russian historical institutions has been his praise of the pre-revolutionary zemstvo system, a representative assembly of an entire geographical area that operated throughout Russia in czarist times...
...Petersburg...
...As for the strutting, cellphoneclutching biznesmeny who frequent Moscow's Western-style hotels and nightclubs, they almost certainly do not consider him relevant to their lives...
...Gorbachev himself, when still in power, once even denounced Solzhenitsyn as a "monarchist...
...And, above all, does it need him...
...he other intemperate judgments are remarkable in retrospect not just for their silliness, but for the ease with which they can be refuted by Solzhenitsyn's own published, and easily available, writings...
...At heart, for Solzhenitsyn, it is a brutally simple issue: Will Russia even survive as a nation...
...He is truly home...
...Or, as he puts it at the end of his historical survey: "We must build a moral Russia, or none at all—it would not matter then anyhow...
...He has heard far worse denunciations before—on both sides of the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans—and he is still barely more than halfway through an almost languid, eight-week railroad journey of discovery across this sprawling country...
...It is a measure of the immense breadth of Solzhenitsyn's literary and moral achievement that even quite intelligent people who claim to be uncomfortable with his ideas don't, at bottom, seem to know what those ideas are...
...The first is an often acerbic survey of the follies and missed opportunities of Russian history throughout most of the Romanov dynasty...
...The zemstvo performed useful local services in health-care, infrastructure maintenance, and suchlike, but it had little political impact on the autocracy in Moscow or St...
...It may be decades before the nonRussian-speaking world can assess the literary value of The Red Wheel cycle, Solzhenitsyn' s gargantuan panorama of the events in Russia leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917...
...Today's Russia doesn't need you...
...It is hardly an academic query...
...He takes to task the Empress Catherine II (1762-1796, and not "the Great" either) for "the false, hollow and accursed idea" of Russian intervention in the Balkans...
Vol. 28 • October 1995 • No. 10
