Words of Advice from the Exile

For the first time since his deportation from the U.S.S.R. last month, Alexander Solzhenitsyn has broken his self-imposed silence. He did so in an apocalyptic 15,000-word open letter to the leaders of his country, which was written last September in Moscow and recently revised while he was in exile in Switzerland. It has remained unpublished until now. In the letter the Nobel-prizewinning writer lays out his program for the salvation of the Russian people. He appeals to the Kremlin masters to abandon the entire basis of their power: Marxist ideology, industrial development, nuclear supremacy and imperial domination of other nations. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn suggests that the Soviet leaders retain their present "absolute and impregnable power," while entreating them to rule out of love for the people.

Almost contemptuous of the future of Western democracy--especially in the U.S.--Solzhenitsyn asserts that for Russia there can be no alternative to authoritarian rule in the foreseeable future. This, he argues, must be based on national self-interest, and not on ideology.He believes that the Sino-Soviet conflict critically endangers Russia's future.

The remarkable open letter, obviously written more in sorrow than in anger, may well be Solzhenitsyn's farewell message to the Politburo. It reveals Russia's greatest writer as an uncomfortable and uncompromising prophet, a utopian conservative who fears for the future of his beloved country as much as he hates what the Soviet system has done to its past. English-language publication rights have been given to Index, a London-based magazine devoted to one of Solzhenitsyn's favorite causes, the abolition of censorship. Excerpts:

WAR WITH CHINA. You will have against you a country of almost a thousand million people, the like of which has never yet gone to war in the history of the world. The time span since 1949 [when the Communists took power] has not been long enough for the population to lose its high degree of fundamental industriousness (which is higher than ours today), its tenacity and submissiveness. And it is firmly in the grip of a totalitarian system no whit less vigilant than ours. Its army and population will not surrender en masse with Western good sense, even when surrounded and beaten. Every soldier and every civilian will fight to the last bullet, the last breath.

A conventional war would be the longest and bloodiest of all the wars that mankind has ever fought. Like the Viet Nam War, it will certainly last a minimum of ten to 15 years. War with China is bound to cost us 60 million souls at the very least and, as always in wars, they will be the very best souls--all our finest and purest people are bound to perish there. After this war, the Russian people will virtually cease to exist on this planet.

To die in an ideological war! And mainly for a dead ideology! This must not happen, ever! ... So give them their ideology! Let the Chinese leaders glory in it for a while. And for that matter, let them shoulder the whole sackful of unfulfillable international obligations, let them grunt and heave and instruct humanity and foot all the bills for absurd economies (a million a day just for Cuba) and let them support all the terrorists and guerrillas in the Southern Hemisphere too, if they like.

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST. A second danger is the multiple impasse in which Western civilization (to which Russia long ago chose the honor of belonging) finds itself ... Should we console ourselves by crying "sour grapes"? Should we argue, in all sincerity, that we are not adherents of that turbulent "democracy run riot" in which once every four years the politicians, and indeed the entire country, nearly kill themselves over an election, trying to gratify the masses? There, a judge, flouting his obligatory independence, panders to the passions of society and acquits a man who, during an exhausting war, steals and publishes Defense Department documents ... There are examples today of groups of workers who have learned to grab as much as they can for themselves whenever their country is going through a crisis, even if they ruin the nation in the process. Even the most respected democracies have turned out to be powerless against a handful of miserable terrorists.

Yes, of course, freedom is moral, but only if it keeps within certain bounds, beyond which it degenerates into complacency and licentiousness. Order is not immoral, if it means a calm and stable system. But order too has its limits, beyond which it degenerates into illegality and tyranny.

RUSSIAN AUTHORITARIANISM. Here in Russia, out of sheer lack of practice, democracy survived for only eight months, from February to October 1917. The emigre groups of Constitutional Democrats and Social Democrats to this very day still take pride in this and say that outside forces brought about democracy's collapse. But in reality that democracy was a disgrace. They invoked it and made promises for it with arrogance, but then they created only a chaotic caricature of democracy. They themselves were ill prepared for democracy, and Russia worse still.

Over the past half-century, Russia's readiness for democracy can only have diminished. I am inclined to think that its sudden reintroduction today would be merely a melancholy repetition of 1917 ... So should we not perhaps acknowledge that for Russia this path was either false or premature, and that, for the foreseeable future, Russia is destined to have an authoritarian order? Perhaps this is all she is ripe for today. Everything depends on what kind of authoritarianism lies in store for us.

CHRISTIANITY AND LEADERSHIP.

Should we console ourselves with the thought that for a thousand years Russia lived with an authoritarian order? And at the beginning of the 20th century, both the physical and spiritual health of her people were still intact. In those days, however, an important condition was fulfilled: that authoritarian order possessed a strong moral foundation. Although it was embryonic and rudimentary, it reposed, not on the ideology of universal violence, but on Christian Orthodoxy... Once this moral principle was perverted and weakened, the authoritarian order, in spite of the external successes of the state, gradually went into a decline and perished.

HOPE IN SIBERIA. Herein lies Russia's hope for gaining time and winning salvation: in our vast Northeastern spaces we can build anew, and not the senseless, voracious civilization of "progress." We can set up a stable economy without pain or delay and settle people there for the first time according to the needs and principles of that economy. These spaces allow us to hope that we shall not destroy Russia in the general crisis of Western civilization . . .

Yet suddenly, now, when it has been revealed that the world's energy resources are being exhausted we, a great industrial superpower, like the paltriest of backward countries, suggest that foreigners carry off our priceless treasure, Siberian natural gas ... Today, because of the confrontation with China, the danger is spreading until it threatens virtually all of Siberia. Two dangers merge, but by a stroke of good fortune a single way out of both of them presents itself: throw away the dead ideology that threatens to destroy us militarily and economically, throw away all fantastic, alien global missions and concentrate on opening up the Russian Northeast on the principles of a stable, nonprogressive economy.

THE END OF IDEOLOGY. To someone brought up on Marxism it seems a terrifying step suddenly to start living without the familiar ideology. But in point of fact you have no choice; circumstances themselves will force you to do so, and it may already be too late. In anticipation of an impending war with China, Russia's national leaders will in any case have to rely on patriotism, and patriotism alone ... The sense of this whole letter I am putting before you is patriotism, and that means the rejection of Marxism. For Marxism orders us to leave the Northeast unexploited, to let our women labor with crowbars and shovels, and to finance and accelerate world revolution ... I am certainly not proposing that you persecute or ban Marxism, or even argue against it (nobody will argue against it for very long, if only out of sheer apathy). All I am suggesting is that you rescue yourselves from it and rescue your state system and your people as well ... What have you to fear? Is the idea really so terrible? Are you really so unsure of yourselves? You will still have absolute and impregnable power. But let the people breathe, let them think and develop! If you belong to the people heart and soul, there can be nothing to hold you back!

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