Understanding Solzhenitsyn

...On the other hand, he extols "Christian Orthodoxy, the ancient, seven-centuries-old Orthodoxy . . . before it was battered by Patriarch Nikon and bureaucratized by Peter the Great...

...3, 1971, carries a letter—signed by Petukhov, a Moscow priest...

...It belongs in the mainstream of Slavophile writings, in that it seeks to find Russia's salvation in the country's unique historical and religious traditions...

...Neither is a man so deeply committed to spiritual and intellectual freedom as Solzhenitsyn...

...It sets Solzhenitsyn apart from many other Soviet dissenters, particularly Sakharov, who strongly advocates Western concepts of political freedom and democracy...

...The doctrines of Eastern Orthodoxy, if not the institution, have over the past century or so inspired some of the most outstanding figures in Russian history, including the early Slavophiles—who thought the Orthodox faith had the potential to unite a divided society—and such diverse thinkers as Nikolai Berdya-ev, Lev I. Shestov or, for that matter, Leo Tolstoy...

...People in the East should without exception be concerned about what people are thinking in the West...

...Sakharov's pained reaction to some of the ideas expressed in the Letter has revived the century-old debate between the "Westerners" and the Slavophiles among Russian intellectuals, in itself a fascinating phenomenon...

...Essentially a moralist, he is equally revolted by the systematic violence of the Soviet regime and by the acquiescence to it on the part of individuals and goveinments in the West...

...Yet stripped of their apocalyptic overtones and read simply as social criticism, Solzhenitsyn's angry words make sense: "We have squandered our resources foolishly . . . sapped our soil, mutilated our vast expanse with idiotic 'mainland seas' and contaminated belts of wasteland around our industrial centers...

...Nowhere does Solzhenitsyn betray the effects of his isolation from the outside world more than in his excoriation of " 'democracy run riot' . . . every four years the politicians, and indeed the entire country, nearly kill themselves over an electoral campaign, trying to gratify the masses" Solzhenitsyn's hostility to the West derives as much from a reaction to the rampant cynicism and hypocrisy that he perceives in contemporary Western societies as from the traditional Slavophile abhorrence of Western civilization...

...Many have written about Soviet ideology as a system of lies, but few with such verve, passion and wit: "How else can something dead pretend that it is living except by erecting a scaffolding of lies...

...Now, it is true that Solzhenitsyn's Letter contains views and sentiments with which many of his admirers, East and West, are bound to disagree...

...and Peter the Great, whose pro-Western proclivities outraged his benighted followers by flouting their conviction that Russian Orthodoxy alone was the true Orthodoxy...

...Still, it would be wrong, not to say offensive, to assume that a belief in Russian Orthodoxy is in itself tantamount to embracing obscurantism and intolerance...

...Open modern Slavophilism has found its home in organizations like the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical Monuments, officially inaugurated in June 1966, and in journals such as Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard), the monthly organ of the Komsomol (Young Communist League), which frequently express ill-disguised chauvinistic and anti-Semitic views...

...Lest Solzhenitsyn be suspected of a touch of megalomania, it should perhaps be recalled that many other prominent dissidents have adopted the same procedure: All three of Sak-harov's famous memoranda, for example, were also addressed to the Party leaders, presumably with similar expectations...

...His credo, affirmed in his Nobel Lecture, is disarmingly simple: "All internal affairs have ceased to exist on our crowded Earth...

...So will his plea to concentrate on developing the USSR's vast northeastern expanses, to which he devotes a good portion of his Letter...

...Yet just as not all "Westerners" were radicals (Alexander Herzen, the most Western-minded of all the 19th-century Russian writers, was revolted by many of Western Europe's democratic institutions), so not all early Slavophiles (who bitterly opposed the repressive Tsarist regime) were "reactionaries...

...These deficiencies and qualities, as well as their inherent contradictions, emerge most forcefully in the passages where the author gives vent to his nostalgia for the past, his idealization of simple Russian virtues, and his spirited rejection of Western values—especially the belief in industrial and technological progress...

...And let's leave Africa to find out for itself how to start on an independent road to statehood and civilization, and simply wish it the good fortune not to repeat the mistakes of 'uninterrupted progress.' " And his proposal to grant independence to the non-Russian nationalities that comprise nearly half of the Soviet population will strike a responsive chord, too...

...Wholly convinced the USSR faces the threat of a major war with China, he ascribes even that to ideological causes: "Sixty million of our fellow countrymen may be killed .. . because the sacred truth is written on page 533 of Lenin and not on page 335...

...With their penchant for icono-clasm, American newsmen quickly seized upon the Letter as evidence that Solzhenitsyn is an "isolationist" (New York Times), a "Utopian conservative" (Time) and a "disbeliever in democracy" (Newsweek...

...from the pen of a contemporary Russian writer...

...The Letter was written and dispatched last September, in the hope of eliciting some sort of response from the Soviet leaders...

...And his March 1972 "Lenten Letter" to the Patriarch of All Russia revealed his hostility to a Church that cooperates with state authorities openly committed to the eradication of religion...

...A careful reading of Solzhenitsyn's Letter, moreover, makes it clear that he is not in principle opposed to democracy...

...In addition, the excerpts he heard may have been those the New York Times unfortunately saw fit to print and comment upon the very day that the full text, extensively revised by Solzhenitsyn himself, appeared in the London Sunday Times...

...But the most strident reaction of all came from Times columnist William Safire...

...Soviet civil rights activist Andrei Sakharov, for instance, has issued a critical response...

...people in the West should without exception care about what is happening in the East...

...Not unlike them, he also seems to think that Russia's troubles began when Peter the Great abandoned the ancient capital of Moscow and hordes of Protestant and Catholic workers descended on the country to help build its new capital...

...There can be no question, he says firmly, "of any peripheral nation being forcibly kept within the bounds of our country...

...But disagreements are one thing, and primitive condemnations (or facile comparisons) another...

...It is a profoundly Russian work—extreme, passionate, at times mystical, and frequently at odds with itself...

...His devoutness, then, is a peculiar mixture of contradictory and perhaps even conflicting emotions, but this does not justify wholesale condemnation or derogatory epithets...

...But this hardly makes him a determined foe of democracy or a dogmatic authoritarian, as some have alleged...

...In the long run, whether or not Solzhenitsyn believes that the Soviet leaders are reluctant "to change even a single syllable of what Marx said" is as irrelevant as whether their "adherence to the precepts of Marxism-Leninism" is a matter of mindless rigidity or political expediency (as Sakharov obviously believes...

...As for Solzhenitsyn's commitment to religion, on the one hand, he pleads for "a competition . . . not for power but for truth—between all ideological and moral currents, in particular between all religions," adding parenthetically: "I myself see Christianity today as the only living spiritual force capable of undertaking the spiritual healing of Russia...

...Likewise, his poignant evocation of the beauty and serenity of Russia's "old towns before they were invaded by multistory blocks" and "poisonous internal-combustion engines" is surely no less applicable to our country than to his...

...He comes to the "melancholy" conclusion that "the sudden rein-troduction" of a multiparty parliamentary system in the USSR might not work at this time, and goes on to say: "So should we not perhaps acknowledge that . . . for the foreseeable future, whether we like it or not, whether we intend it or not, Russia is nevertheless destined to have an authoritarian order...

...The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all...

...You are realists par excellence," he says to the Soviet leaders, "and you will not allow power to slip out of your hands...

...If Solzhenitsyn's practical suggestions are often oddly and hopelessly impractical, they nevertheless adumbrate a vision of an ideal future bound to appeal to millions of his countrymen whose lives have been ravaged by the regime's relentless "Drang nach Westen...

...Above all, one must view the Letter against the background of Solzhenitsyn's long, courageous and often lonely struggle for decency and truth in a country that for more than half a century has known little of either...

...Understandably, many Western observers have taken him to task for advocating such "retrogressive" notions...

...As he himself notes in acknowledging that "progressive Western scholars" are in large measure the source of his ecological observations: "It is not 'convergence' that faces us and the Western world now, but total renewal and reconstruction in both East and West, for both are in the same impasse...

...In view of the character of the Orthodox Church in Russia ever since its establishment in the 10th century—bigoted, authoritarian, and whenever possible a firm ally of the State, rather than an adversary— these words are, to say the least, discomfiting...

...Again, the parallels between his proposals and those of some 19th-century Slavophiles are unquestionably striking...

...Obviously, Solzhenitsyn's belief in the purifying mission of the Orthodox faith is more in keeping with early Slavophile notions than with the thinking of representatives or apologists of a servile and authoritarian Church...

...But I request and propose no special privileges for it, simply that it should be treated fairly and not suppressed...

...Italics mine.—A.B...

...To the best of my knowledge, nobody in the West has fully explained the relationship between Marxism-Leninism as a "guide to action" and as a tool, and if Solzhenitsyn fails to give us an adequate explanation, he does no worse than hundreds of Western Sovietologists...

...Varsonofii Khaibulin, a student of the Moscow Theological Academy...

...and one Fomin, a "senior research fellow"—placing the blame for the ills that have befallen Russia (including secularization and the persecution of Russian Orthodoxy) on "world Zionism-Satanism...

...In sum, Solzhenitsyn's Letter is not of the same order as most of his fictional writings or the remarkable Gulag Archipelago...

...Solzhenitsyn's call for an end to meddling in other countries' affairs, though rather jauntily phrased, will also surely find an echo among millions of Soviet citizens who view their government's economic (and political) aid to underdeveloped nations as unconscionable hypocrisy and a squandering of resources that could be put to much better use: "Let's leave the Arabs to their fate, they have Islam, they'll sort themselves out...

...Perspectives UNDERSTANDING SOLZHENITSYN BY ABRAHAM BRUMBERG When excerpts from Aleksandr Solzhenit-syn's 15,000-word Letter to the Soviet Leaders first appeared in the Western press, it looked—least to those who had not followed his work, fiction and non-fiction—as though the Nobel laureate had finally decided to shed the writer's mantle for that of the prophet...

...Solzhenitsyn, then, is not a political thinker, but a chronicler...

...All these notions might conceivably be classified as "Slavophile...

...Indeed, for all its faults (which, Solzhenitsyn notes in his introduction, he is ready to correct if confronted with "cogent and constructive criticism"), it may ultimately be regarded as one of the most important documents to come Abraham Brumberg is the editor of In Quest of Justice: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union Today...

...Even Sakharov, whose general philosophical approach is profoundly at odds with that of his compatriot, may yet come to revise some of his opinions, based as they are on easily misleading "excerpts broadcast over Western radio stations...

...What the Russian people want," wrote one of their principal representatives, Konstan-tin Aksakov, "is not political freedom but freedom of the spirit...

...And in the process he, like so many of his predecessors, seemed to be embracing sundry obscurantist Slavophile attitudes, including contempt for the "decadent West," an admiration for the pristine virtues of pre-Peter-the-Great Russia, and an ardent belief in the superiority of the Russian Orthodox Church...

...In a piece distinguished as much by vulgarity as by ignorance, the former White House savant admonished the Russian author for "disappointing] the people over here who are grabbing up your books like Minis," and informed him that "we need a Tolstoy, not a Rasputin...

...not a political analyst, but a critic—if you will, a poet...

...The final version (copublished here this month by the Index on Censorship and Harper & Row, 59 pp., $3.95), though in many respects curious and disturbing, is immensely powerful and entirely consistent with the author's previous writings...

...In pleading with the Soviet leaders to reject unbridled technological growth as "not only unnecessary but ruinous," and placing the blame for it (along with Marxism, that "dark un-Russian whirlwind") at Western doors, Solzhenitsyn certainly follows in the footsteps of the early 19th-century Slavophiles...

...Thus issue No...

...The samizdat publication Veche (the word for town-assemblies in medieval Russia), edited by V. Osi-pov, a one-time Marxist turned patriot, pretends to espouse the position of the early liberal Slavophiles, but frequently runs articles more reminiscent of the views of the Tsarist Black Hundreds...

...Solzhenitsyn's understanding of this history is called into question by his contempt for the two men (however disparate) who attempted to reform the Church: the 17th-century Patriarch Nikon, who struck fear in the hearts of the faithful by bringing some of the rituals more into line with the practices of the rest of the Eastern Church...

...In any event, it is hardly surprising that Leonid Brezhnev and Company took no public notice, for the Letter is above all an acrid attack on Marxism-Leninism, the ideology Solzhenitsyn holds responsible for all the ills of Soviet society, from agricultural stagnation to the arbitrary terror of Stalin and the judicial repressions of his successors...

...The important fact is that ideology permeates all facets of Soviet life, that it is employed as a justification for every policy, foreign or domestic, and that Solzhenitsyn gives us a devastatingly brilliant and incisive picture of how this works in practice...

...That is why you will not willingly tolerate real elections, at which people might not vote you in...

...While his pleas to "throw away the dead ideology" and let the Chinese "glory in it for awhile" are certainly naive, his description of the use of doctrine to justify political repression, economic inefficiency and social inequality is superb...

...In assessing the importance of the Letter to the Soviet Leaders, one must take into account not only the author's lack of realism but his humanity and uncompromising dedication to moral values...

...But they have nothing in common with the xenophobia, anti-Semitism and philistine provincialism that characterize the thinking of many Soviet patriots today—both those who advocate their ideas openly in the pages of Party journals (with the watchful connivance of the authorities) and those who contribute to samizdat...

...Everything is steeped in lies and everybody knows it—and says so openly in private conversation, and jokes and moans about it, but in their official speeches they go on hypocritically parroting what they are 'supposed to say,' and with equal hypocrisy and boredom read and listen to the speeches of others: how much of society's energy is squandered on this...

...What of Solzhenitsyn's disdain for Western parliamentary democracy, and his belief that the Party should remain in power if it allows free reign to "art and literature" and to "philosophical, ethical, economic and social studies...

...His 1969 story "The Easter Procession," describing the desecration of an Easter celebration in a Russian village, gave us an insight into the depth of his religious convictions...