Solzhenitsyn Resumes the Dialogue

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn was abruptly expelled from Russia as a traitorous "alien" last February, the Soviet leaders hoped to rid the U.S.S.R. of a commanding moral presence whose martyrdom had mesmerized the world. If he were yet another emigre, they calculated, the authority of the Nobel-prizewinning writer would gradually cease to be felt in the West and, more important, among Soviet citizens.

In Zurich last week, Solzhenitsyn demonstrated that even in exile he had no intention of allowing the Kremlin to destroy his influence. In his modest two-story home, he announced to the press the forthcoming publication of a volume of eleven essays designed to stir heated debate in the U.S.S.R.

Entitled From Under the Ruins, the essays, three of which were written by Solzhenitsyn, advanced some controversial solutions to Russia's problems. They range widely over a number of highly topical issues including the future of Christianity in Russia, the transformation of the economy and the explosive question of the U.S.S.R.'s restive minorities. The book will appear in Russian next week in Paris (Y.M.C.A. Press); an English translation will be published in the U.S. early next year by Little, Brown.

Risking Arrest. As if to echo Solzhenitsyn's appeal for a resumption of dialogue among Russian dissidents, an unauthorized press conference was called in Moscow to announce the book. Igor Shafarevich, a world-famous algebraist, told Western newsmen that the aim of the essays was to bring about fundamental changes in the U.S.S.R. Risking arrest, three other dissidents who contributed to the book were willing to be identified: Scientist Mikhail Agursky, Art Historian Yevgeni Barabanov and Historian Vadim Borisov.

The very title, From Under the Ruins, suggests that the Russian people, long buried under the weight of Marxist ideology, must break loose to confront the future by drawing upon Russia's pre-revolutionary past. Specifically, the book reaches back to a famous collection of articles called Vekhi (Landmarks) published a few years after Russia's abortive 1905 revolution. Among the contributors to Vekhi were Christian Philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev and Liberal Politician Pyotr Struve. Vekhi promoted a return to Russia's traditional spiritual values rather than an uncritical acceptance of Western materialism. "The inner life of the individual," the authors argued, is vastly more important than any social system.

Solzhenitsyn and his circle of friends take off from the Vekhi premises. They urge Russians to resist "the mercenary pursuit of more wages, titles, positions, apartments, dachas, cars and the chance to buy gaudy rags." Instead, they should seek an internal freedom of conscience, and redemption through penitence. Solzhenitsyn believes that millions in the Soviet Union were accomplices in Stalin's crimes. He calls upon the entire nation to confess to the guilt of the past. "Only through the repentance of a multitude of people can the air and the soil of Russia be cleansed, so that a new, healthy national life can grow up."

In the West, the essays may buttress the conviction of Solzhenitsyn's critics that he is a mystical reactionary who places too much faith in the values of the Orthodox Church and Old Russia. Among Soviet dissidents, however, his arguments are certain to enliven a debate about the nation's future. Solzhenitsyn and his circle reject the argument that truly significant change can come only from within the Communist system. Solzhenitsyn personally takes issue with a second line of thought, propounded by Physicist Andrei Sakharov, who believes that Russia's ultimate hope for freedom lies in a convergence with Western political systems.

Solzhenitsyn questions whether democracy would bring real freedom to Russia. "The multiparty parliamentary system is impracticable in Russia," he writes. "It has never been necessary to the prosperity and high achievements of mankind. Authoritarian regimes are not terrible in themselves--only those which are not answerable to God or their own conscience. Russia will most probably move from one authoritarian form of government to another. This will be the most natural and least painful path of development. Our present system is terrible not because it is undemocratic and based on force--a man can still live without harm to his soul under such regimes--what makes ours uniquely horrible is that it demands total surrender of the soul. What we need is not political liberation--only liberation of the soul from participation in the lie forced upon us."

Here are excerpts from two of Solzhenitsyn's essays:

ON THE DEBASEMENT OF THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA:

The intelligentsia! The term is one that Russians most love to argue over. Yet it is used in widely different ways, and its very vagueness tends greatly to diminish the value of their conclusions. The writers of Vekhi defined the intelligentsia not in terms of the level or nature of their education but according to their ideology. They were a sort of new, religionless, humanist order.

We read Vekhi today with a dual awareness, for the failings we are shown seem to be those not only of an era that is past, but in many respects those of our own times. Then: a general sense of martyrdom. Now: the desire is for self-preservation. Vekhi listed characteristics that seemed to be faults at the time --but today they may seem virtues. For example, in the past universal equality was an aim worthy of self-sacrifice. Then: the heroic intellectual dreamt of being the savior of mankind or Russia. He was convinced the only course was social struggle. Now: the only course is subservience. . .

By the beginning of the '30s, even the technical intelligentsia had been reduced to total submission. It was also well-schooled in treachery. It learned to vote obediently for whatever penalties were demanded. When one brother was annihilated, another brother would dutifully step into his shoes. By this time, there was no command so amoral that the Russian intelligentsia would not have obsequiously rushed to execute it.

But what of the Moscow intelligentsia today? They are aware of the shabbiness, the flabbiness of the party lie. Among themselves they ridicule it. And then cynically, in the same breath, in angry protests and articles, ringingly and rhetorically repeat the very same lie, reinforcing it by their pseudo eloquence and style! Where did [George] Orwell discover his doublethink, what was his model if not the Soviet intelligentsia of the '30s and '40s? And since that time, this doublethink has been worked to perfection and become a perennial, vitally important device.

What distinguishes the mentality of the Moscow intelligentsia more than anything else is its greed for awards, prizes, titles: "honored personage . . . laureate . . ." In shameful pursuit of all this, people stand to attention, break off all unapproved friendships, obey all wishes of their superiors and condemn any of their colleagues if the party orders them to do so. I think even the sorriest pre-revolutionary intellectual would refuse to shake hands with the most illustrious one in Moscow today.

Everyone who lives in our country pays a moral tax in the form of the obligatory ideological lie. But for the working class the tax is minimal. About all they now have to do is once in a while vote at some general meeting. Meanwhile the rulers of the state and the other propagators of ideology sincerely believe in their ideology and many of them have devoted themselves to it out of long years of inertia, out of ignorance and man's peculiar psychological habit of developing a philosophy to justify his main sphere of activity.

Oh, we crave for freedom, we denounce (in a whisper) anyone who ventures to doubt the desirability and necessity for total freedom in our country (meaning, in all probability, freedom not for everyone but certainly for the favored few). But we wait for this freedom to fall to our lot like some sudden, unexpected miracle that will occur without any effort on our part. We ourselves are doing nothing to gain this freedom. Never mind the old traditions of supporting people in political trouble, feeding the fugitive, sheltering the passportless or the homeless (we might lose our state-controlled jobs). Day after day, the Moscow intellectual labors conscientiously, sometimes even with talent, to strengthen the walls of the prison that contains us.

ON THE RETURN OF BREATHING AND CONSCIOUSNESS:

The transition from free speech to enforced silence is no doubt painful. What torment it is for a living society, used to thinking, to lose, as from some day determined by decree, the right to express itself in print and in public, year in and year out to bite back its words in friendly conversation and even under the family roof.

But the return passage, which our country will soon face--the return of breathing and consciousness, the transition from silence to free speech--will also prove a difficult and slow process, and just as painful because of the gulf of utter incomprehension that will suddenly yawn between fellow countrymen, even those of the same generation and same place of origin, even members of the same close circle.

For decades while we were silent our thoughts have straggled in all possible and impossible directions, we lost touch with each other, never learned to know each other, ceased to check and correct each other. While the stereotypes of required thought, or rather of dictated opinion, dinned into us daily from the electrified gullets of radio, endlessly reproduced in thousands of newspapers as like as peas, condensed into weekly surveys for political study groups, have made mental cripples of us and left very few minds undamaged.

Powerful and daring minds are now beginning to struggle upright, to fight their way out from under the heap of antiquated rubbish. But even they still bear all the cruel marks of the branding iron, they are still cramped by the stocks into which they were forced when they were half grown. And because of our intellectual disunity, they have no one to measure themselves against.

As for the rest of us, we have so shriveled in the decades of falsehood, thirsted so long in vain for the refreshing drops of truth, that as soon as they fall upon our faces we tremble with joy. We so rejoice in every little word of truth, so utterly suppressed until recent years, that we forgive those who first voice it for us--all their near misses, all their inexactitudes, even a portion of error greater than the portion of truth, simply because "something at least, something at last has been said!"

All this we experienced as we read Academician [Andrei] Sakharov's article* and heard the international reactions to it. Our hearts beat faster as we realized that someone had broken out from the deep, untroubled, cozy drowse in which Soviet scientists pursue their scientific work. It was a liberating joy to realize that Western atomic scientists are not the only ones who feel pangs of conscience--that a conscience is awakening amongst our own scientists too.

But Sakharov's hopes of convergence are not a well-grounded scientific theory but a moral yearning to save man from the ultimate nuclear sin, to avoid nuclear catastrophe. If we are concerned with solving mankind's moral problems, the prospect of convergence is a somewhat dismal one: if two societies, each afflicted with its own vices, gradually draw together and merge into one, "what will they produce? A society doubly immoral through cross-fertilization.

* Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom was published in book form in the West in 1968.

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