Sakharov And Solzhenitsyn: a Difference in Principle

By Andrei Sakharov

Despite their common struggle against the arbitrariness of the Soviet system, Sakharov and fellow Nobel laureate and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood far apart on fundamental questions of Soviet life.

We first met at the apartment of a friend of mine on Aug. 26, 1968. With his lively blue eyes and ruddy beard, his tongue-twistingly fast speech delivered in an unexpected treble and his deliberate, precise gestures, he seemed an animated concentration of purposeful energy.

He voiced his disagreements with me in incisive fashion. Any kind of convergence is out of the question. The West is caught up in materialism and permissiveness. Socialism may turn out to be its final ruin. Our leaders are soulless robots who have latched onto power and the good life and won't let go until forced to do so.

Solzhenitsyn claimed that I had understated Stalin's crimes. According to one estimate, 60 million people had died as a result of terror, famine and associated disease. My figure of 10 million deaths in labor camps was too low. I was also wrong to differentiate Stalin from Lenin: corruption and destruction began the day the Bolsheviks seized power, and have continued ever since. It's a mistake to seek a multiparty system; what we need is a nonparty system.

I felt enormous respect for him, since reinforced by publication of his epic work The Gulag Archipelago. Real life is never simple, however, and our relations are now difficult -- perhaps unavoidably so, since we are not at all alike and differ markedly on questions of principle.

The two continued meeting into the early 1970s, not always amicably. Once, Solzhenitsyn's first wife scolded Sakharov for harping on the issue of Jewish emigration and fretting about the harassment of his wife's children, pointing out that the Russian people faced greater worries. As Sakharov writes, Lusia was "outraged by the lecturing tone" and burst out, "Don't give me that 'Russian people' s---! You make breakfast for your own children, not for the whole Russian people!" Still, the Sakharovs were soon rallying to Solzhenitsyn's defense.

Right after New Year 1974, Solzhenitsyn's 13-year-old stepson visited our apartment, disappeared into the bathroom and returned with a book that had been concealed under his clothing: The Gulag Archipelago. The book was a shattering experience, evoking a somber world of gray camps surrounded by barbed wire, investigators' offices and torture chambers, icy mines in Kolyma and Norilsk.

On Feb. 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was taken from his home and placed under arrest. The next day a group gathered in our apartment and drafted the "Moscow Appeal" demanding Solzhenitsyn's release and an investigation of the crimes described in The Gulag Archipelago. But Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country and flown to West Germany.

Before discussing the issues that divide us, I wish to emphasize my profound respect for him, for his talent as a writer and for his historic achievement in uncovering the state's crimes. I agree with a great deal of what he says. But even where I share Solzhenitsyn's general thesis, I often find troubling the peremptory nature of his judgments, the absence of nuance and his lack of tolerance for the opinions of others. He displays a marked anti-Western and isolationist bias, at times lapsing into an exaggerated Russian nationalism.

In Solzhenitsyn's view, the West is losing its battle against totalitarianism, which is on the offensive everywhere. Inconsistent, disunited, lacking firm religious or moral guidelines, it is wallowing in the pleasures of the consumer society, in permissiveness. It is heedlessly destroying itself in the smoke and fumes of its cities and the din of hysterical music.

Certainly there is much bitter truth in Solzhenitsyn's complaints. I too have called attention to the West's lack of concerted action, its dangerous illusions, the factional gamesmanship, shortsightedness, selfishness and cowardice displayed by some of its politicians. Yet I believe that Western society is fundamentally healthy and dynamic, capable of meeting the challenges life continually brings.

The West's lack of unity is the price it pays for the pluralism, freedom and respect for the individual that are the sources of strength and flexibility for any society. It makes no sense to sacrifice them for a mechanical, barracks unity that may have a certain utility if one's goal is aggressive expansion but has otherwise proved to be a failure. Solzhenitsyn's mistrust of the West, of progress in general, of science and democracy incline him to romanticize a patriarchal way of life and craftsmanship, to expect too much from the Russian Orthodox Church.

Solzhenitsyn suggests that there are already clear signs of a national and religious renaissance, that Russians have always been hostile to the socialist system and even that they harbored defeatist sentiments during World War II. These ideas, which I may have oversimplified somewhat, are little short of myths. If our people and our leaders ever succumb to such notions, the results could be tragic.

Unlike Solzhenitsyn, I see faults and sound principles in both the socialist / and the Western systems. I believe that their convergence is possible, and I welcome that prospect as a chance to save humanity from the confrontation that threatens it with destruction.

I do not share Solzhenitsyn's antipathy toward progress. If mankind is the healthy organism I believe it to be, then progress, science and the constructive application of intelligence will enable us to cope with the dangers facing us. Having set out on the path of progress several millenniums ago, mankind cannot halt now -- nor should it.

Solzhenitsyn and I differ most sharply over the defense of civil rights -- freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom to choose one's country of residence, the openness of society. I have no doubt whatsoever as to the value of defending specific individuals. He assigns only a secondary importance to human rights and fears that concentration on them may divert attention from more important matters.

In The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn makes a great deal of my supposed naivete, my impracticality and especially my susceptibility to "pernicious" influences. Among those who (in his view) have hitched themselves to "this strange, huge, conspicuous balloon, which was soaring to the heights without engine or petrol" -- me -- Solzhenitsyn's sharpest, if covert, thrusts are aimed at my wife. Her "deleterious" influence, he suggests, led me to harp on emigration by Jewish refuseniks -- people "who did not feel that Russia was their own country."

It's a shame that Solzhenitsyn understood so little about me, my thoughts on emigration, human rights and other matters, and about the real Lusia and her true role in my life. Late in 1974 a German correspondent brought me a gift from Solzhenitsyn, a copy of The Oak and the Calf, with a warm and complimentary inscription from the author. I already knew what was in it, and when I saw the inscription, I couldn't help exclaiming, "Solzhenitsyn really offended me in this book!"

The correspondent grinned, "Yes, of course, but he doesn't realize it."