SOLZHENITSYN'S LONG CRY OF RAGE:
Malof, Saul
ent incapacity for the purely abstract kinds of love and what's necessary to be a real feminist, then clearly Lina hate that politics requires. Women used to be rather ...
...Wages are not Commonweal: 433...
...Only a "social fascist" would verses were "formalist," "cosmopolitan," Given these premises hardened by deny it...
...in power, the class struggle, far from country...
...Pepsi flows in the streets of in the Third District of the Nether beneath contempt...
...The Pact...
...In fact, Akhmatova's the foreign imperialists were expelled own free will, confess it...
...and on the left, fact the line of demarcation between the knock on the door, the menace to especially the remnants of the "old" "pre-history" and History-the dictatorhimself, his family, friends and support- left, for more complex and humanly ship of the proletariat was entrenched ers-and then his expulsion from the interesting ones...
...And-the most diffi- "war communism" was a permanent Commonweal: 431 condition...
...Perhaps, more than a half- lutionary resonance and at the same men and women pointed the finger, century after the Revolution, it is per- time measures the depth of an hislocked the door, closed the shutters, missible to apply a simple-minded torical tragedy...
...cally necessary to the survival and pros- methods) were after all recruits from 9 August 1974: 432 the Soviet people, nowhere else- put out the light, and prayed for rain...
...omnipotence of the political police...
...for others the Doc- no better than the gypsies and Baptists propaganda...
...tives...
...Russia's path of development neces- On the home front Marxism has left Dissidence entails two distinct fac- sarily should differ from Europe's...
...Harper & Row, 680 pp...
...Finland...
...over the years the and the Ukrainians, Georgians, Uzbeks, tional bourgeoisie and its agents within, worms of doubt had done their work...
...General Grigorenko's tations of Marxism may precipitate war Tr...
...is his metaphor for the immense net- not be disclosed was at least surmised, The Kirov assassination and subsequent work of detention centers and prison Solzhenitsyn's history and polemic mass arrests...
...In each first dissident publication to have of some dissidents tended toward na- case the Soviet Union neglects her docaused concern and even alarm in the tionalism or Slavophilism, a striving mestic needs in the interests of an Western media in almost twenty years...
...In order to support absosounded for Pablo Neruda: neither the with a strike by Harper & Row employ- lute belief, and reenforce absolute dePresident nor his Secretary of State of- es calling for a boycott of the book) nial of the most purblind kind, an awefered him asylum, honorary citizenship...
...or psychiatric wards of South Vietnam, paign in the Western media, including Historically, prior to the gradual eroGreece, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Spain, extensive excerpts of those portions sion and collapse of belief, belief was the Soviet Union: this list too is long which were likely to receive the widest total, passionate...
...There tors, a critique of existing reality and implications of these anachronistic ways are internal management problems...
...Their love is exclusive-monogamous, so to speak...
...The omnipresence and seeming only be estimated...
...Those whose in- some mechanism of repression, amountand the poet, a man of exquisite sensi- terest in it is casual will content them- ing to an annihilation of the little mesbility, died quietly before he could selves, one hazards to say, with glimpses, sages reality keeps sending us to anbecome a celebrated cause...
...Didn't Vishin- poems are "decadent" and Tsvetoyeva's and the White armies defeated, was sky demonstrate it beyond reasonable suicide proves it...
...Occidental Petroleum Urals, which had exceeded its quotas too clamorous to be dismissed out of has just signed a twenty-billion-dollar for eight straight years of eschewing hand, suspectible of simple explanation...
...Belief were founded in a redemptive vision the 20th Party Congress, or Hungary, sides, Babel fell silent ("Comrades," he of the Soviet Union as the harbinger or Prague...
...As literary critics they are austere, hierarchic, and accordingly will I not countenance all those obscure little writers who, if they are still alive, lan- the original publication was accom- cult question by far-what are the relaguish in limbo or exile or in the jails panied by an immense publicity cam- tions of belief and actuality...
...That is what makes them so suthat even personal attachments are supposed to be perior to the foolish men whom they have the misfortune formed out of strictly ideological and impersonal mo- to love...
...I-II...
...nor the un- tor's or internal emigri's...
...The occasion, as all the world knows, including its formidable bulk and para- The heroic myth, in its nursery verwas a concatenation of events which phernalia of notes and glossaries, names sion (and only the purity, innocence abruptly ended Solzhenitsyn's life as a and allusions, historical and political, and irreality of that version could subSoviet citizen: the seizure of the samiz- that are likely to mystify and finally serve the purpose), went something like dat manuscript of The Gulag Archipel- dishearten...
...They have room in their capacious hearts for one big writer at a time...
...nor it-just that, relinquished power, one asked after him...
...we've always known...
...and militarization in the Third World Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Letter is the Rarely was it noted that the ideas as part of its Marxist program...
...Conflicting interpreAmalrik, or Maj...
...wildly exagassociates-and the subsequest mass ar- imaginable masses of victims stretching gerated anti-Soviet diatribe, probably rests...
...appear to want it, Zionism was nothing were mere further supporting evidence Actually it was not so dramatic a con- other than petit-bourgeois chauvinism...
...sloth on Sunday...
...No creative lives in extreme jeopardy...
...The individuals, classes and categories of in- its covers, Encounter perhaps), or silencing or disappearance throughout dividuals, entire national and ethnic ghosted by Robert Conquest...
...The disas- across the necropolis of Soviet history: subsidized by the CIA (through one of trous early phases of the War...
...12.50) some sense) fact...
...and its appearance in English so was disbelief: no concession or doubt to a fascist putsch, no great alarm was seemed when it occurred (concurrently was possible...
...thority is not necessary to persuade us...
...The dissi- of perceiving things became clear when push to industrialize has placed undue dents' criticisms of Soviet reality were the Letter appeared...
...and, correspondingly, and infamous...
...The President and Vice SOLZHENITSYN'S President love him, and the Secretary of LONG CRY OF RAGE State and the Senate Minority Leader love him too: the list is long and illustrious...
...measure and say that if there were, though satellite colonies provided con- The next day the flat across the court- writers and intellectuals, dancers and tingents as well...
...doubt...
...Which is to say, conscience fraught with possibilities that caused power...
...If a true believer the manifest truth (though repressing sonality"-the old left never fully ascould only believe that Bukharin (to is the more accurate term) or devis- sessed the depth of scope of the deep, choose one of the countless examples) ing callow though not unimpressive pervasive, structural, systematic corrupwas an agent of the French or Germans arguments to the effects that the truth tion and complicity...
...great good end followed, the turbulence did not already know, and virtually Still, obsessed by the looming presof the indefinite present, which was in from the beginning, all the while that ence Stalin-pacified by the infinitely any case a "transitional period" dialec- theoretic reader of the old left-who consoling myth of personal aberration, tically inevitable, was a necessary gua- was in many ways a good man, better of rampant paranoia, of such euphemrantor of the fulfillment of History's than most of us-was either denying isms as "mistakes" and the "cult of pergathering intentions...
...Harper & Row, $3.50 physicist Andrei Sakharov's enlightened The U.S.S.R...
...by Thomas P. Whitney idea of humanizing Marxism, or the between China and the Soviet Union...
...Women used to be rather Wertmuller isn't one...
...which was unaffected, if not directly, then in the name of socialism, but quixotiis to say, to cultivating their gardens...
...or, to put a still more acute stage, as the enemy, 'The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An it no less clumsily, what can one cominternal and external, only momentarily Experiment in Literary Investigation...
...what is truly un- We know...
...Millions upon would the best of them feel compelled abandoned the "cadres" of the Revo- millions of victims: hardly a family to speak to power, not prophetically lution, and went back to sleep...
...The trials and purge of camps scattered throughout the country, would have seemed yet another defecthe Old Bolsheviks-of Lenin's closest a nation within a nation...
...Why...
...BOOKS SOLZHENITSYN'S CRY TO THE SOVIET LEADERS RICHARD M. MILLS, JUDITH M. MILLS Letter to the Soviet so long as they involved heightening and ecological crisis which has at its Leaders the role of the Soviet middle class as root the adherence to a no longer conALEKSANDR I. SOLZHENITSYN did the suggestions of historian Andrei structive ideology...
...Once the bearable is that for the most part, and knew before any of the irrefutable data postulate was granted, all means to the in all essentials, he tells us nothing we was assembled...
...Political lesbianism is behavior in proud of this, in fact...
...Famous while still a rumor, By this I have in mind what may be ending in triumphant resolution, entered called the problem of belief...
...supports industrialization discussion of human progress...
...The liquidation of is not the excruciatingly detailed map after when the full implications finally the opposition-the Social Revolution- of hell-the "Gulag Archipelago" which registered and what was not and could aries, the Trotskyites, the anarchists...
...we thing confounded explanation...
...Mandelstam's Acmeist transformed into a permanent civil war...
...ent incapacity for the purely abstract kinds of love and what's necessary to be a real feminist, then clearly Lina hate that politics requires...
...Didn't Bukharin himself, of his pects of socialism...
...Socialist Republic, even if they didn't ed, the implausible and improbable Until all at once belief crumbled...
...Trans- mitted to socialism "believe" of a soci- put to rout, reassembled itself and joined lated from the Russian by Thomas P. ety which is socialist in name and (in forces to demolish it...
...cally, absurdly, in utter desperation and to punching the clock and paying the There was no way the men and wo- surely without hope, as Solzhenitsyn rent...
...fiercely jealous, SAUL MALOFF possessive, nuclear...
...of the diabolic wiliness of the interna- version as that...
...Along the snippets, summaries by way of media nounce its presence, was necessary: banks of the Potomac, it may be, they reports...
...almost anticlimactic...
...Now, the Thirties of the artists and intellect- populations-how many millions can even Solzhenitsyn's immense moral auuals...
...Brezhnev sports a golf-cart, a Cadillac, tion the Committee on Culture of the Those little messages from the cor- a Lincoln Continental, bearhugs Chuck Second Stakhanov Tractor Collective rupt world outside were sordid lies, Connor...
...Vols...
...That once-popular, now-for- abstractionism a degenerate art-formevents into the very forms of reality, gotten term is due any minute for and since the Jews had their own Soviet selectively chosen and rigidly interpret- revival...
...It is called detente...
...Kronstadt...
...Now Nixon is feted aesthetic of silence") because he never than that and as consuming as a God- in the Kremlin, a stone's throw from was a writer in the first place...
...Writers' Union knew that...
...By Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn...
...or, when they grew Odessa and Kiev...
...When, following the convulsions ago,* his decision thereupon to publish Except on the ideological right, where of the October Revolution-by all odds the Russian-language edition in Paris, the book will be read for obvious and the pivotal event in modern history, in the violent denunciation and vilification, uninteresting reasons...
...They were Dubcek and Allende spoke of "so- revolution by an appeal to first princia new race, uncontaminated by the cialism with a human face...
...and they were the yard was empty, the house down the musicians, artists and poets would not same Soviet masses who made the street had been ransacked, the man at defect, flee, emigrate from it, even if Revolution in the name of the radiant the next workbench was unaccountably by doing so they knowingly place their new dawn and then walked away from absent, day after day after day...
...That is a form of emotional suicide, and if it is COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...no longer seeks to recall the betrayed the mind and heart to race...
...The collectivization of the What is most harrowing about Solz- At any time prior to Khrushchev's land-or, put another way, the liquida- henitsyn's long cry of rage and sorrow disclosures, and even for some time tion of the Kulaks...
...the name of a gorgeous vision of the and as in the case of Andrei Sakharov There was no way they could not splendid city could not have known (or Daniel, Sinyavsky, Amalrik, Bukhave known...
...I verybody loves Aleksandr I. Solz.i henitsyn...
...And therein lies the or Japanese or Finns or Monacans (the was a tissue of lies ("slanders" or bet- transcendent value of Solzhenitsyn's auprosecutors themselves must have lost ter still "vicious slanders" was, and topsy-in his inescapable reminder that track), then what finally was unbeliev- remains, the preferred usage in Pravda the interrogators, thugs, assassins of the and izvestia) or that, dialectically speak- GPU-NKVD-KGB-MVD (the names SAUL MALOFF is the author of the highly- ing, the events in question were histori- change but never the function or praised novel, Heartland (Scribner's...
...Among radical lesbians an ability to form ler's films is that they retain a womanish incapacity for only personal attachments is now held in such contempt abstract love or hate...
...In a hostile world, Whitney...
...Foreign they coincided with those made in the stern warning to the Soviet leaders that nations have come in to carry off invalWest...
...And providing the police in- men who had made the Revolution in does in his Letter to the Soviet Leaders, formers...
...not to menCity...
...No- No-none of this...
...But they have become self-con- a class with the revenge Mimi exacts for the betrayal of scious about it lately because womanhood itself has been his honor...
...Even the intoxicated mystic's vision of the Holy the Lubyanka, to the roar of the masses...
...When the terror a human face, one may be permitted language of bourgeois democracy, began, the vibrations of the heroic pe- to say, there can be no socialism worth which in that context takes on a revoriod still in the air, these very same the name...
...When Allende's Chile fell attention...
...Those still impervious are said, "I practice a new aesthetic-the of the splendid city itself-nothing less beyond discourse...
...that socialism had been sub- vedev, Ginzburg . . . the list is long truer-of the "good Russians," who verted...
...emphasis on economic progress to the easy for Westerners to accept when In it Solzhenitsyn has advanced a detriment of the environment...
...Without ples, but instead speaks the antiquated pollutions of history...
...that counterrevolutionaries, act- and will grow longer), by invoking had just made the Revolution, created ing of course in the name of the Revo- the most ordinary principles of liberal a society unprecedented in history and lution, had been installed in absolute humanism...
...otherwise it will be widely myths and fictions about man and soprefer prose to verse...
...The profound roots of be- tors' Plot, or Khrushchev's address to in their old-regime intransigence...
...The actual Civil War, though able...
...The the nation in no better a position...
...What distinguishes the heroines in Wertmulpoliticized...
...Turkistans, Armenians and so on were and a gigantic, cunning apparatus of For some, the Past...
...contract in Moscow...
...And the proposals were tolerable the USSR is on the brink of a political uable natural resources...
...to return to the past in the belief that international mission...
...The proposals for improving it...
...this...
...And if this is true of the that the dream had become a night- ovsy, Chukovskaya, Litvinov, Med"good Germans," it is as true-it is mare...
...bought and little read, for many reasons, ciety, and history...
...close at hand, within sight and sound...
Vol. 100 • August 1974 • No. 18
