The Messiah We Have Lost - By Ilya Milstein

Years and people

THE MESSIAH WE HAVE LOST

By Ilya Milstein
September 2006
Source

Solzhenitsin’s dream has come true: the authorities seek his advice

Soon Alexander Solzhenitsin will turn 85. It is the age of a patriarch – time to do some last reckoning looking at the world almost from above.

But the record is contradictory.

On the one hand, it is the Nobel Prize, world fame, an apparently well-to-do old age on his estate in Troitse-Lykovo near Moscow. On the other hand, it is a decline in the fame that a quarter century back was brighter than a hundred thousand suns, problems with his reputation, and diseases. He had disliked doctors all his life but last spring had a long stay in the Central Clinical Hospital: the diagnosis was hypertension and a pinched vertebral nerve. Last autumn he had to fight off old accusations of squealing during his years in the GULAG. Delicate as this matter is, one must recognize that the man hit back at his offenders with all his might, with a young man’s ardour and an old jailbird’s fury. Anyway, he is much talked about. Most important is that today he can feel he has won because the new Russia has embarked down the road he marked out.

How steel was tempered

The writer’s fate has long become a part of the myths and legends created with his participation. I mean his book The Calf that Butted the Oak and later his memoirs as an ÎmigrÎ, The Little Grain Between Two Grinders. These are amazing works, few authors have been as frank with their readers and as self-exposing without even guessing it. But even without those books Solzhenitsin’s life story deserves taking a closer look at. His biography alone does.

Born in Kislovodsk at the peak of the civil war in Russia, he manifested inclination towards literature and history, above all of the Great War butchery and February-October of 1917, from his early years. Fantastically: the giant heap of books that were to become The Red Wheel by the end of the 20th century was conceived in his youth but, of course, under a different title and with a different ideology. However, the idea has been materialized. His Tower of Babel has been built and is scratching the skies.

Looking back, one pities the Soviet regime: what an irretrievable loss was sustained by socialist realism! The boy educated in a Soviet school and a Soviet university (Physics Dept. of Rostov University), and the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and Arts (IFLI) was a true Leninist communist. Ferociously industrious, he possessed a rare talent, ambition, secretiveness and will. With such qualities he could have become a great physicist, an army general, or a party leader. But the youth’s strongest pull was literature, and this saved him from other and perilous temptations. As he recalls his past the author passes a very strong judgement on himself and makes no secret: his life might have turned out differently.

Then came the war, battles from Orel to East Prussia, the rank of captain, shooting his way out of an encirclement, decorations, an arrest for free thinking in censored letters in which the Red Army officer criticized the proletarian literature and the Supreme Commander-in-Chief. Eight years in prison and banishment for life: construction work in Moscow, a prisoners’ office in the vicinity of Moscow, a gulag in Kazakhstan. Cancer contracted in the gulag, and his miraculous deliverance from the disease. Years of teaching jobs in Kok-Terek. Freedom and exoneration.

Though well-known, these facts are still impressive. Especially his accounts of how he used to compose poetry and prose and, distrusting paper, would commit thousands of lines to memory. Later, in exile he would hide them, burn them and write anew, and memorize. How he missed feminine companionship and dared not have a relationship with any woman fearing that a Komsomol girl might betray him to the CheKa men. He withstood his wife’s betrayal and re-joined her again when set free. Then he abandoned her years later only to re-experience the post-Gulag nightmares when his ex-wife took her revenge by again going to the KGB.

His fate and character is a marriage of his natural traits and those he acquired through his ordeals: a literary talent developed into his future books while his soul grew a barbed wire fence around it. A student of philosophy and literature became a convict: sly, cautious, unsmiling, and merciless. The convict turned into a writer. He was a man with good memory who never forgave anyone anything and with a distinct sense of his great destination: to shout out the truth about the millions who had died in Lenin’s and Stalin’s prison camps, to brand the regime with all its crimes. And to express himself in history as well as in literature. Even then, in the ‘50s, his years and years of lonely, strenuous and mirthless thoughts about Russia’s destiny developed into a harmonious concept of this country’s past and future. Even back then he guessed where all ills came from.

He knew how to bring orderliness to Russia.

Solzhenitsin was a big misfortune for the Soviet government. Only a man like him could fight it from the trenches or standing upright, and barehanded. To go underground, to hideout – and then to reappear delivering mighty slaps with open letters, brief and well-aimed statements for the press, and most of all with his blockbuster books exploding in the West and in Russia’s samizdat. Solzhenitsin, an ex-artillery officer, knew hot to do that well.

From dawn to dusk

Three generations of his readers do not require any explanations and their great-grandchildren cannot be brought to realize what the author of the Archipelago meant to us in the 1960-80s.. What a shock the publication of his first book, One Day of Ivan Denisovich, was to society. How keen the Soviet reading public was to read his every word. How dismally puzzling and later hateful was his name for the party bosses and KGB men. What malignity whirled about him.

To those few who had known the whole truth about the Soviets, his prose and articles became guiding lights in the darkish world of post-Stalin USSR. To the majority, his books and his courage in defending his conviction, as well as his confronting the authorities practically all by himself were impressive and edifying examples. In this, of course, the might of Solzhenitsin’s literary gift was paramount.

Into his prose of those years were woven traditions of Russian critical realism, an original language that was a mixture of Soviet newspeak, pure Russian language and the Gulag argot. His gift for being a propagandist was most outstanding. Or for being a counterpropagandist, if you like. For Alexander Solzhenitsin was a Soviet man through and through, he attacked the “Bolshevist government” from the inside and with its own dogmas, its own weapon. He used them to turn the myth of the humanism of Marxism inside out. The gobbled up generations of Soviet people poured out of it like dead men out of a cannibal’s belly. He spoke to the era, authorities and citizens in their own language. The destructive charge of all his books written in Russia was tremendous. The dumbfounded leaders were unable to argue with him, and not only because they had been tongue-tied. There were no answers, while Solzhenitsin was loudly telling the Soviet people, with all the world to hear, what the Soviet government was: about the GULAG and millions of people who died in them, about exiled nationalities, about Lubyanka and the Kremlin, and about the ideological servants of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Hard as they tried the “most agile hard-core activists in the Writers’ Union”, his ex-wife and journalists fed from the Lubyanka trough could not get anywhere in polemics with him. He could only be killed. Or banished.

Luck was with Solzhenitsin: the aging men of the Communist Party’s Politburo did not dare put him in prison, nor have him shot nor arrange a traffic accident involving him. The stripped citizenship and banishment from the country were the most victorious moment in his life. The nuclear power lost out when it granted the author absolute freedom to write and personal freedom. Maybe that day in February of 1974 heralded the end of the Soviet regime. It managed somehow to agonize seventeen dreary years more. There are no regrets, of course.

It was regrettable, however, that that day a chapter in Solzhenitsin’s life came to a close.
A self-restricted gift

As a matter of fact, while he was in emigration (in truth even several years before) nothing happened to Solzhenitsin that was new in Russia’s long-suffering literature. The boundless skies of great fame for a Russian genius were too tight for him. He got tired of sinful human flesh, he felt like working as a god. To be a moral instructor to his contemporaries not through literature but directly by explaining to the errant citizens how they were to live, to pray, deal with others, what to eat and, generally, whither Russia was to go. He undertook “to shepherd the nation”, as Anna Akhmatova put it very aptly.

Gogol started carrying on a tragicomic correspondence with friends and starving himself. Leo Tolstoy launched a new religion, simplified and berated Shakespeare, and wrote stupid fairy stories for children. Dostoyevsky kept his Diary of a Writer, a sad confession of his poor soul tormented by his anti-Semitic visions and political illusions.

Solzhenitsin, too, was doomed to take the same road: to see the truth and to release large rations of it urbi et orbi. It is not just a matter of the nature and quirks of his private life and as an author that have forced him to believe in his uniqueness. It was that a certain part of Soviet, as well as of Western society, saw a prophet in him. He was expected to produce not books but the Word, not press releases but heavenly revelations, not creations but miracles.

This was the dream of half the life of the persecuted and hiding convict, a man in the underground: in the Gulag, in exile, in the editorial offices of a famous magazine, in the brief meeting with Khrushchev, and even in the Lefortovo cell on the eve of his deportation where he was waiting, in vain, for a respectful deputation of the Politburo. He had something to say to open-mouthed compatriots and foolish foreigners. By the whim of fate he became (as of today) the last Great Writer of Russia and played that role according to all the rules of the game. Up to the last, without ceding even an inch of his fatal idea.

The issue was, as always, the right way of life on this Earth of ours.

Life without lies. The Soviet government, having crashed to the ground, should convert itself into a theocratic one, with the Soviet people marching en masse to Church to see God. The West would impose self-restrictions having given up the devil’s temptations of an unbridled consumer society and soulless freedom in favour of the same theocracy. There is only one truth, and so there are no people as harmful as the pluralists. Because “a man’s conviction that he has found the truth is his normal condition… The consciousness that one serves God’s will with one’s life is the healthy consciousness of every person who understands God with a simple, not a proud heart”. Solzhenitsin wrote this addressing the peoples and governments over the heads of the “shitocrats” and only a highly naive reader could suppose that the humble prosaic would admit his rightness – one of many – with far from a proud heart. That is, he agrees with the pluralists.

“When sick, he saw a dream that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, unheard-of and unseen plague….But never, never before did people consider themselves so clever and steadfast in their truth as the infected saw themselves…Never have they counted their moral judgements and beliefs so steadfast”. This is Dostoyevsky, of course. It is the burdensome, half-dream raving of his underground hero serving his sentence for murdering the old woman loan shark and her meek sister. It is that very disease of “immortal rightfulness” that was the lot of many Russian geniuses that did not bypass Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and whose heavy form is still the affliction of Alexander Solzhenitsin. It is the disease all fanatics, irrespective of their literary talents or political convictions are suffering from. It was not by chance that one of Solzhenitsin’s old acquaintances said of his Lenin in Zurich, it is a self-portrait.

There is not much harm in whose portrait an exacting artist paints. The trouble comes when the picture does not turn out. From the mid-1970s we have been watching the sad and almost steady process of a wonderful writer turning into a dull, indefatigable and silly preacher. For Solzhenitsin it was the start of a period of solitary seclusion in Vermont, lonely vigils in a foreign land that he found alien and repugnant. Like Berezovsky in London these days he avidly follows the developments back home, while he is getting more and more out of touch. He writes much, more than in the busy Soviet times. He works 18 hours a day writing The Red Wheel. He is in a big hurry. He writes dull, burdensome historical books which perplex his loyal readers as they try and nearly fail to recognize the former Solzhenitsin while wading through his dead, affected and artificial vocabulary. It is the time of the self-restriction of his gift. After August of 1914 almost all of it is “trash”, as one of his former admirers put it.

Publicism is a different matter. He is his old self in his scathing and fierce articles because if his former gift is lacking he makes up for it with rage and passion. But there has been a radical change in the choice of subjects and persons of his polemics. The place of the writers’ congresses and Soviet leaders is now taken by Andrei Sinyavsky and other pluralist champions of human rights whom Solzhenitsin now finds more detestable than the CheKa investigators. He wasted no time in dissociating himself from the Democratic Movement of the USSR and, as he later confessed, is losing his closest friends. Those who risked their freedom, if not their lives, to bring him out of the underground to fame, those who reprinted and safeguarded his novels, short stories, and The GULAG. Instead he is becoming closer to those in emigration and later in the metropolis whom he would have feared and despised in his previous life. Like Sergei Zalygin, who used to sign the despicable anti-Solzhenitsin letters in the past and now is the editor of Novy Mir and a neophyte advocate of The Red Wheel. But these things are of no importance to Solzhenitsin: he who recalls the past is against us.

Success intoxicates people in different, sometimes very queer ways. But in every case it is self-betrayal, betrayal of one’s predestination and of one’s gift that is not fully perceived. Solzhenitsin was born a writer, one of “small” and “medium” works, even the GULAG is not a Cyclop-size novel story about the camps but a collection of brilliant short stories of human fates in the grips of soul crushing machines of destruction. Whatever the author’s convictions gained through suffering may have been, it was given to him to express them in strictly weighed artistic forms without claims to global historical generalizations and final verdicts. That is why Solzhenitsin in his best works is a true humanist writing in the best traditions of Russian classical prose. That is why in his worst books he is almost an untalented obscurant oblivious of the artist and God in himself. Being deprived of good taste is punishment for betraying his native literature.

VVP at the end of the tunnel

His homecoming in a Malenkov-style coat with the BBC TV cameras clicking looked like a malicious self-parody. His TV discourses were empty and soon became boring. His newest publicism was hitting hard but all of it off target. His literary portraits (of Vassily Grossman and David Samoilov) were written in a careless, superficial and evil language and had one purpose: to get even with dead men who were not there to respond. His notorious two volume collection Two Hundred Years Together is such a stupid book (good Jews stand for Russia, bad ones are against it, and the author is between them calling on all to repent, giving out cookies to useful Jews for their good words about Russians, and kicking bad ones for Russophobia) that one feels embarrassed to discuss it. Only his prose, the “small form” lights up with rare flashes of the talent he used to have (The Apricot Jam).

Today he lives like a recluse, a man of little interest to his compatriots who in the last few years have seen too many geniuses and prophets to need any now. Sometimes, out of boredom or indignation he would provoke media interest in himself and then the citizenry would again speak about him. Like those times when Solzhenitsin would recall his mission as a humanist writer and raise his voice in favour of capital punishment... Or, like now, he is thrashing Deitsch and other calumnists who attacked his good name. But his life has been fulfilled and he rarely digresses to deal with details.

The main thing has come true: the authorities seek his advice. There are reasons to believe that, starting from 1999, to not a small degree life in Russia has been progressing to Solzhenitsin’s scenario. His ideas are part of the foundations of Russia’s domestic policies.

He has a worthy disciple in the Kremlin though they do not meet often: officially only on one occasion.

... A three-year old film recorded the writer and the leader going down the corridor of the Nobel laureate’s estate. The camera also peeked into the author’s den. There, with an abundant library in the background, the two talked animatedly. Putin was listening to Solzhenitsin.

The event had a continuation. In a ten-minute interview shown on the government channel RTV, the author described in detail his recollections of the historic meeting. He looked happy. He liked Vladimir Putin immensely. Somewhat inconsistently and very emotionally he stressed the almost complete concurrence of his personal views and the state positions outlined by Putin. The host and his guest did not agree on only one point: Solzhenitsin thought that the “cleanup” of the Federation Council had been too mild. In his opinion the senators need not be elected, they must be the president’s appointees. “Not all at once..” must have been Putin’s response...

The author of Lenin in Zurich made special mention of the Russian president’s agile mind.

It is easy to guess why these two turned out to be close. Right after he was proclaimed the heir, Putin had a quite definite programme: “to freeze” Russia a bit calling it the establishment of order, to re-divide the property and consolidate his personal power with the law enforcers’ backing, and to clamp down on the media. This kind of scenario does not disturb the ex-convict any longer. Because the author’s world outlook has not changed since the time he proclaimed it in clear terms. Its essence is a mild authoritarianism without the communists and with the national idea as its basis. This is the root of his deep personal hatred of the cosmopolitan reformers of Gaidar’s era about which Solzhenitsin has written quite a few furious words. Consequently, the cancellation of robber privatization. Also it would be a good idea to redraw the borders with Ukraine and Kazakhstan. It is easy to guess that in Putin’s battles with the moguls or with Ukrainians over Tusla, the KGB colonel enjoys the full support of the author. For him, and even less for Putin, freedom of speech as such, as well as professional journalism have long ceased to be determining values. Solzhenitsin’s birthday was the completion of one more circle of his life. The first one had been mixed with his earlier romantic ideas of a happy marriage of Leninism to patriotism. At the end of it he has been embraced by VVP.

What kind of a person has Solzhenitsin discovered in Putin?

As we re-read The Russian Question.., we see the ideal statesman, in Solzhenitsin’s view, a new Stolypin whom Russia needs so much. A man “who at the same time would be wise, courageous and unselfish”. As we listen to the author’s ample lauding of the president we learn of Putin’s “hard work for the good of Russia” and of his “quick mind” which is a euphemism for the wisdom of the Kremlin. We also find in Solzhenitsin’s texts “the will” which the heir speaks tirelessly of (Putin’s adjective for it is “political”, Solzhenitsin’s more often is “human”) as he explains his vision of Russia’s overall prospects and the decisive actions needed for the cause. Though his wish “to waste them in the john” differed in style from the words of the Nobel Prize winner, the essence is the same: the author is for the war in Chechnya and denounces the Chechens, thus erasing all he had written about them in his Archipelago. Actually, Putin is simply repeating Solzhenitsin in the language available to him. They are natural allies.

It is more than just a matter of ideology.

The CheKa man in the Kremlin needs the moral backing of the man whom in years past he could have accompanied to the FRG as a member of a special escort. The former dissident is striving for the materialization of his “only true” futurological project. One gets the big picture from a distance: from the height of his fame, age, experience and patriotic desperation, Solzhenitsin saw in the smallish president all the things that others had missed. The subsequent developments proved that he had been right. Authoritarianism (already not very soft) is there. Orthodoxy is gaining ground and is acquiring the status of the official religion. A creeping revision of privatization has begun and the Khodorkovsky affair is a vivid example of it. From the time Putin took the reins in the Kremlin, Russia’s modern history has been a la Solzhenitsin, and the author is not at all worried by the fact that the KGB is at the nation’s helm. His patriotism is above such trifles.

Solzhenitsin is unquestionably right about one thing: the aspiration for freedom in Russia has always turned into a “triumph of pornography”, with October ever replacing February. Yet the state patriotic road has always led to the same dead end that always has plenty of barbed wire, cheap sausage and censorship for every thinking person. Fortunately, an artist had a choice sometimes, a chance not to participate in the affairs of the state, to distance himself from the Kremlins and the tsars. Solzhenitsin, however, possesses too much public temperament. Too much suffering went into building his self-rightness. The phantom pains that have queerly fused his hatred of the totalitarian regime with hopes for the police regime that is to save Russia are too strong.

“The wolf-hound is right, the cannibal is not”: in times long past this moral maxim had a very different meaning for him. One should have crushed the oppressive regime entrenched in the Kremlin and Lubyanka. According to Solzhenitsin, today Putin is right, his political enemies are playing the part of cannibals. They are being hunted down now. Solzhenitsin describes them sometimes even tougher than the heir when he thinks aloud about the “rejoicing, laughing nouveau riches and thieves, brokers, and hackneyed journalists…” Drown them, what else is there to do? Do it pitilessly. But somehow one pities Solzhenitsin.

Should something happen, God forbid, a new GULAG will be written by someone else. It is not a question of age at all. He just will not write it, that’s all there is to it