03.09.2008

Solzhenitsyn: false prophet

Paul Flewers, author of 'The new civilisation? Understanding Stalin's Soviet Union 1929-1941', investigates how a hero of western anti-communism came to be abandoned by his former promoters

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died on August 2 at the age of 89. Back in the 1970s, both before and following his expulsion from the Soviet Union, he symbolised the western image of the Soviet dissident, the lone writer standing steadfastly against the might of the totalitarian Soviet state, fighting to reveal the truth about the Soviet Union against the distortions assiduously promoted by its rulers in the Kremlin.

Although Solzhenitsyn’s record as a dissident was inevitably raised in the obituaries, he had been out of the public view for some years, not merely after his return to Russia in 1994, but prior to it, as a result of his extreme cold war views becoming somewhat outdated during the glasnost period, the broadly considered feeling that his artistic abilities were fading and the growing alienation from his increasingly cranky conservative views.

Limits of de-Stalinisation

Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet loyalist when he fell foul of the system in 1945 after some criticisms of Stalin in his private letters came to the notice of the authorities. Incarcerated in the prison camp sector, he was released in 1956 as the Soviet Union underwent the process of de-Stalinisation, and he drew upon his prison life in his first published novel, One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, which appeared in the liberal journal Novi Mir in 1962. A resounding success, it was hailed by his contemporaries, as its vivid prose corresponded with their experiences of the Stalin era, and in many ways it symbolised the dawn of a hoped-for new era of reform in the Soviet Union.

However, the fall of Khrushchev in 1964 resulted in the end of de-Stalinisation, the regime retreated from the partial liberalisation of Khrushchev’s days, writers critical of the system found themselves persecuted, and Solzhenitsyn’s works were no longer to be published in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn publicly opposed this censorship, and he fought vainly to obtain the publication of his next two novels, also based upon his experiences as a prisoner, Cancer ward and The first circle. Banned from publication at home, they were to appear in the west during 1968-69.

Although Solzhenitsyn was originally of the opinion that the Soviet system could be reformed into a democratic form of socialism, by the late 1960s he had rejected the entire Soviet experience and was harking back to pre-revolutionary days, seeking solutions in Slavophile and orthodox christian ideas. Nevertheless, as Michael Scammell’s biography states, “to the outside world, Solzhenitsyn remained a liberal - a ‘progressive’ even - firmly associated with Novi Mir and its policy of more or less loyal opposition and its programme of a ‘return to Leninism’”.

This image was accepted even amongst western Marxists: for example, the Ceylonese Trotskyist, V Karalasingham, wrote in 1969 that he was “the spearhead and symbol of the struggle against bureaucratism and for socialist democracy in the Soviet Union”, and that his opposition was based “on the socialist programme of Marx and Lenin”.

Although this particular illusion was soon dispelled, it only affected a few Marxists, and a bigger misinterpretation was to emerge in the west, as Solzhenitsyn came to represent the popular image of the Soviet dissident. This was also mistaken, for, although he suffered at the hands of the Soviet regime for his beliefs just as they did, he did not represent them politically. In the broad range of ideas expressed by Soviet dissidents - from Marxism on the far left to fascism on the far right - the idiosyncratic rightwing religious outlook to which he had rapidly moved was only one view amongst many, and not a particularly popular one at that. His parading as the authentic voice of Soviet dissidence meant that large numbers of people in the west came to see his intemperate and distorted viewpoint as being representative of oppositional thinking in the Soviet Union and eastern bloc as a whole.

Alongside writing his novels, Solzhenitsyn had been assiduously collecting data for a magnum opus on the prison camp system. When one of the carefully concealed manuscripts was seized by the authorities, he authorised its publication in the west, copies having already been smuggled out, and the first of the three volumes of The gulag archipelago was published in early 1973. This inevitably led to trouble, and Solzhenitsyn and his family found themselves deported from the Soviet Union in February 1974. He stayed in Switzerland for two years, then lived in the USA until his return to Russia in 1994.

Exposing the gulag

The gulag archipelago was published to great applause in the west. It was particularly championed by rightwing publications and commentators, as were his outspoken public statements on Soviet foreign and domestic policies, which keyed in with the former’s anti-communist agenda.

In one sense, however, what The gulag archipelago presented was not completely unknown in the west, as accounts of the Soviet prison system by escapees such as Vladimir Chernavin and Ivan Solonevich had already appeared by the mid-1930s, and further first-hand memoirs of Soviet repression were to be released on a regular basis over the coming decades. David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky’s pioneering account of forced labour in the Soviet Union appeared in 1948, and Robert Conquest’s The great terror was published in 1968. On the other hand, The gulag archipelago struck a popular chord in the west that these other books singularly failed to do.

The gulag archipelago was used principally as a weapon against the left, as its motif was that a workers’ revolution fought under the banner of Marxism can lead only to Stalinist totalitarianism, with its violence, mass murder, prison camps and prohibition of intellectual freedom. For Solzhenitsyn, oppositionists within Bolshevism, be they Trotskyists or Democratic Centralists, were no better than the victorious Stalinists. Although (as he admitted) they faced Stalinist oppression with steadfastness and bravery, he wrote them off with the brusque aside that “if they had come to power, they would have brought us a madness no better than Stalin’s”.

That Solzhenitsyn made no attempt to provide any political analysis in this huge work - for example, completely overlooking the context of the violence meted out by the Soviet authorities during the civil war of 1918-21: the desperate resistance of a beleaguered regime against indigenous counterrevolution and foreign intervention - and that Bolshevism was seen as a totalitarian, power-seeking movement from the very start, was in a way actually an advantage. Its association of the very idea of Marxian socialism with totalitarianism was crude and simplistic in the extreme, but the effect, not least because the trilogy was produced by a Soviet citizen, an authentic prisoner of Stalin’s camps to boot, prohibited by the Soviet regime from telling his story, was far-reaching.

As Daniel Singer wrote, “And who is better placed to proclaim that you start with Marxism and inevitably end up with barbed wire than the articulate and passionate survivor of the gulag?”

The gulag archipelago brought to its audience a vast array of information about the prison camp system in the Soviet Union, and, irrespective of their deep disagreements with the author, critics of Solzhenitsyn’s political views have praised it on that account. The leftwing Soviet dissident, Roy Medvedev, wrote that “all the main facts” in the first volume were “perfectly correct”, and that the “scrupulous artistic investigation” in the second volume was “based on authentic facts”. Singer considered that, whilst it was absurd to endorse Solzhenitsyn’s philosophy just because his description of the camps was accurate, it was “equally irrational to reject his testimony because of his outlook”.

The gulag archipelago is not an easy work to read. The sheer mass of the accounts of the repression, ill-treatment and incarceration suffered by the victims and the cruelty and stupidity of those running the system tends to numb the mind. Another reason for its difficult nature is the author’s wearisome style; barely a page goes by without a heavy-handed sarcastic aside about the perfidy of the Soviet authorities or the victims’ meek acceptance of their fate. Solzhenitsyn’s repugnance towards anything vaguely Bolshevik led him to write on not a few occasions in a most unpleasant tone, leaving any knowledgeable reader with a decided feeling of discomfort.

In the first volume about the great terror and in particular the Moscow trials, he claimed: “If you study in detail the whole history of the arrests and trials of 1936 to 1938, the principal revulsion you feel is not against Stalin and his accomplices, but against the humiliatingly repulsive defendants - nausea at their spiritual baseness after their former pride and implacability … Dumbfounded, the world watched three plays in a row, three wide-ranging and expensive dramatic productions, in which the powerful leaders of the fearless Communist Party, who had turned the entire world upside down and terrified it, now marched forth like doleful, obedient goats and bleated out everything they had been ordered to, vomited all over themselves, cringingly abased themselves and their convictions, and confessed to crimes they could not in any wise have committed.”

He compared their conduct in Moscow with the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov’s spirited display in a Nazi court only a few years previously: “Dimitrov had answered the Nazi judges like a roaring lion, and, immediately afterwards, his comrades in Moscow, members of that same undying cohort which had made the whole world tremble - and the greatest of them at that, those who had been called the ‘Leninist guard’ - came before the judges drenched in their own urine.”

Eager to besmirch the reputation of every leading Bolshevik, Solzhenitsyn then turned on the exiled Trotsky, declaring that there was no basis for assuming that, if he had fallen into the hands of the secret police, “he would have conducted himself with any less self-abasement, or that his resistance would have proved stronger than theirs”. Apparently, “the terror Trotsky inspired as chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council was something he acquired very cheaply, and does not at all demonstrate any true strength of character or courage”. Here, Solzhenitsyn was merely following his Stalin-era tutelage, deliberately overlooking the great personal courage that Trotsky showed in many dangerous situations during the civil war.

In the second volume, Solzhenitsyn sneered at the party loyalists who were baffled at their arrest and conviction, and tried to explain their plight as the result of mistakes, infiltration of the security services by foreign powers and other rationalisations. “Not one of them tried to fight back,” he snorted with disgust.

And yet Solzhenitsyn spent a lot of space in The gulag archipelago detailing how the lengthy process of arrest, interrogation and incarceration in Stalin’s prison system reduced the vast majority of the men and women who fell into its grip to baffled, humiliated and demoralised wrecks. Sleep deprivation, semi-starvation, physical ill-treatment, humiliation, isolation, political blackmail (particularly for the loyalists), threats to families … he was well aware of the cruel methods that were used to obtain confessions and compliance.

The obvious satisfaction at the deaths of the old Bolsheviks that is evident in Solzhenitsyn’s unseemly gloating is rendered all the more unsavoury when one considers his own behaviour after his arrest. Like most Soviet loyalists, he did not fight back. Furthermore, in a state of confusion and utter demoralisation, and therefore, as Scammell put it, “more anxious than ever to make a good impression on the authorities”, he signed up to be an informer, although he drew back from denouncing anyone once he regained his composure. It is not for us to condemn those of Stalin’s victims who could not withstand the truly awful pressures placed on them - very few people could uphold their honour under such treatment - but it ill behove Solzhenitsyn not merely to condemn, but to jeer and sneer at, those who in a state of demoralisation and confusion led them to break under the pressure and debase themselves, because he himself narrowly escaped a similar fate.

Even in the occasional moment when Solzhenitsyn praised oppositional Bolsheviks, he would append a sneer. When Trotskyists led a hunger strike in a labour camp in 1937, he considered that “they were heroic people”, yet he could not resist adding that another protest planned that year, to commemorate the October revolution, demonstrated “a sort of hysterical enthusiasm mixed with futility, bordering on the ridiculous”.

But how did this differ from his writing for his own desk drawer? The only reason that the world came to know of Solzhenitsyn as anything more than a passing figure, or indeed came to know of him at all, was because the Soviet regime under Khrushchev and even under Brezhnev was somewhat more liberal than it was under Stalin, and that he had powerful champions in the west, ones whom the Soviet regime felt it best to appease by deporting him. Otherwise, his literary travails would have been as equally futile or ridiculous as the Trotskyists’ plans - if, that is, were one to employ his criterion.

Moreover, the trilogy showed distinct indications of some very reactionary sympathies on Solzhenitsyn’s part. What else can one conclude from someone who considered that the white guards who committed atrocities against workers and peasants were “the exceptional few”, and attempted to justify the behaviour of those Russians who for ideological reasons joined the forces of the Nazi puppet, Andrei Vlasov?

Stereotypes

Despite the lionisation of Solzhenitsyn in the west and the fulsome praise that his works received, the more knowledgeable commentators were willing to appraise his writings in a less uncritical manner. The crudity of the portrayal of the Bolshevik leader in his Lenin in Zurich led such strong critics of Leninism as Boris Souvarine and Robert Service to criticise him and attempt to put right the historical record.

The latter wrote: “Solzhenitsyn has placed all his material beneath an historical lens of an extremely distortive capacity; for he wants to show that the social and political upsurge of 1917 was an alien and reprehensible affair, born out of a commitment to foreign ideology and fashioned by the hands of émigré intellectuals.”

The portrayal of Jews in Solzhenitsyn’s novels provoked various commentators to see a decidedly murky side to him. One fellow émigré, Mark Perakh, felt that Jews were nearly always presented in a negative manner - in contrast to the heroes, who were almost always Russians. The Marxist literary critic, Paul Siegel, considered that the overblown portrayal of Alexander Parvus in Lenin in Zurich was “reminiscent of anti-semitic depictions of Jews in print and in cartoons as shabby pawnbrokers, fences and itinerant pedlars”, “grasping merchants”, “degenerate voluptuaries” and “devious and ruthless financial manipulators secretly gathering immense power into their hands”. Solzhenitsyn’s fondness for old Russia was leading him down some very dubious pathways.

Eternal cold war warrior

Solzhenitsyn made some remarkable assertions in his books and speeches. Writing in the third volume of The gulag archipelago of prison camps existing during the post-Stalin era, he wrote that they differed “not in regime, but in the composition of their population”.

There were no longer “millions and millions” of people charged with political offences. “But there are still millions inside and, just as before, many of them are helpless victims of perverted justice: swept in simply to keep the system operating and well fed. Rulers change, the archipelago remains. It remains because that particular political regime could not survive without it. If it disbanded the archipelago, it would cease to exist itself.”

Solzhenitsyn’s intention here was to portray the post-Stalin era as quantitatively less severe than the period in which he was imprisoned, but otherwise the same. However, although there were still around a million inmates in Soviet prison camps at the end of the 1950s, this was because a very high proportion of Soviet citizens convicted of crimes were sent to camps rather than conventional prisons, and, in any case, the vast bulk of prisoners were non-political and had been jailed through due process. Solzhenitsyn overlooked the fact that the post-Stalin Soviet regime made a concerted attempt to institute a working system of law.

Certainly, and particularly after Khrushchev’s fall, the Soviet regime convicted dissidents in a most unfair manner, and one was still confronted by a police state which clamped down hard upon political dissent. Between 1957 and 1985, there were a total of 8,124 trials for “anti-Soviet manifestations”, and during 1957-74 just under 14,000 people were prosecuted for such offences. During 1967-74, over 120,000 Soviet citizens were brought into interview by the KGB for a quiet word about such things, but were not taken to court.

The Soviet regime was indeed repressive, but it was a far cry from the arbitrary murderousness of Stalin’s days. Furthermore, whilst the labour camp sector played an important economic role during the Stalin era, its contribution to the national economy after 1956 cannot be considered as central to the system. Solzhenitsyn was presenting an obsolete image of the Soviet Union.

Some of Solzhenitsyn’s statements on international matters were equally tendentious, and sounded extreme even at the time. In mid-1975, addressing the top leadership of the US trade union movement, where some of the most fervid cold warriors could be found, he declared that the east-west trade and the less abrasive relations with the Soviet Union occurring under détente were a capitulation to Moscow and thus suicidal for the west.

He continued: “The communist ideology is to destroy your society. This has been their aim for 125 years and has never changed; only the methods have changed a little. When there is détente, peaceful coexistence and trade, they will insist: the ideological war must continue! And what is ideological war? It is a focus of hatred: this is continued repetition of the oath to destroy the western world.”

Moreover, in words that courted ridicule then, let alone now, he claimed that Portugal would “very shortly” be a member of the Warsaw Pact. A communist victory in Vietnam would mean “a million persons” being “simply exterminated”, and a further “four to five million” would “find themselves in concentration camps”. Solzhenitsyn gave the distinct impression that he had no idea of the reality of the nature of western communist parties, the conservative global role of the Kremlin or the situation in either Portugal or Vietnam. And he was selective in his sympathy: the three million deaths resulting from US bombing in Vietnam did not seem to worry him; nor did the victims of US-backed terror in Pinochet’s Chile and Suharto’s Indonesia.

But then did Solzhenitsyn really believe everything that he was saying? Were the inhabitants of the Kremlin really revolutionary Marxists bent on world revolution? After all, he also insisted that nobody in the Soviet Union took Marxism seriously, including the ruling elite (not that he himself had any grasp of Marxism; his ignorance of the subject was so embarrassingly gross that it can only be partially blamed upon his Stalinist miseducation). In promoting an image of Soviet foreign policy that was unchanged from Lenin’s day and one of Soviet internal norms that were unchanged from the time of Stalin, was he merely playing to the gallery, telling cold warriors what they wanted to hear, trying to scare and outrage them into adopting a more aggressive stance towards the Soviet Union, as part of his own personal grudge towards those who, it cannot be denied, had treated him so unpleasantly?

Falling out of favour

Solzhenitsyn eventually became somewhat of an embarrassment to his western hosts. Although his extreme anti-Soviet attitudes endeared him to the more fervent cold war warriors, he increasingly condemned western society as irredeemably corrupt, money-obsessed, crime-ridden, permissive and spiritually bankrupt. The rot had set in long before The communist manifesto appeared: indeed, Marxism was only a further development of the “rationalistic humanism”, the worship of man and the denial of man’s “evil within himself”, that had long dominated thinking in the west.

His anti-communism was integral to an essentially pre-capitalist outlook. And so, however useful it was to some elements in the west in respect of its encouraging opposition to détente, its broader value was limited, as it was not combined with the necessary endorsement of modern capitalism. Solzhenitsyn’s grumbling criticisms of western society eventually left him with an image as an old-fashioned curmudgeon, and his usefulness in respect of western foreign policy dwindled as the cold war wound down after Gorbachev took over in 1985.

After his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn was largely forgotten in the west. Even back at home as a Russian nationalist, he was out on a limb, effectively harking back to a mythical Russia in which localised institutions - along with a strong central figure - would make political decisions, and the economy would be in the hands of small entrepreneurs. His programme of a revived pre-1917 society - or, rather, his romantic view of it - has little or no relevance to any social stratum in today’s Russia.

He did raise some ripples of disapproval in the west when his latter-day historical writings harped on about the number of Jews amongst the revolutionaries who fought to overthrow tsarism. Now, whilst there are valid historical reasons for investigating the ethnic make-up of the Russian revolutionary movements, there is also a long-running trend amongst Russian nationalists to point to the number of non-Russian revolutionaries, and especially Jews, in order to assert that opposition to tsarism was an alien, anti-Russian implant in an otherwise healthy society, and to make parallels for today. Anti-semitism is by no means a spent force amongst Russian nationalists. Western authorities are split on their opinion, but some think that this, rather than any academic interest, was the motive behind Solzhenitsyn’s final ruminations.

An inverted Stalinist

Solzhenitsyn’s great courage in opposing Soviet censorship and bullying was combined with an equally strong streak of obstinacy. Nevertheless, this stubbornness, a quality perhaps necessary for a political dissident, often manifested itself in irascibility, an inability to work with others and what Medvedev described as “so much ingratitude, such pettiness, so much injustice and lack of objectivity in his appreciation of people who in fact contributed a great deal to his literary career”. Richard Pipes, a virulent anti-communist writer, whose views on the Soviet experience were close in many ways to Solzhenitsyn’s, wrote in his obituary: “Anyone who disagreed with him was not merely wrong, but evil. He was constitutionally incapable of tolerating dissent.”

Solzhenitsyn not only fell out with most other Soviet dissidents, but had no qualms about violently criticising them in an often dishonest and personal manner. No sooner was Solzhenitsyn in exile than he turned sharply upon Alexander Tvardovsky, the editor of Novi Mir who had done much to get his One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich into print and fought for him once he fell out of official favour, causing another erstwhile colleague, Vladimir Lakshin, to condemn his outburst as “a blatant untruth” or “that nasty, slimy, slanderous kind of half-truth that is worse than a conscious lie”. Medvedev considered that Solzhenitsyn’s attack upon Tvardovsky bore a remarkable resemblance to those in the official Soviet press. One gets the feeling that in many ways - his intolerance, his unpleasant personal attacks, his distortions - Solzhenitsyn was an inverted Stalinist.

The Solzhenitsyn affair did the Soviet regime no end of damage. Its persecution of him and other dissident writers made it look bullying and cowardly, petty-minded, tawdry and incapable of dealing with awkward political criticism and necessary historical debate except by means of harassment, repression and slander. Already suffering from a severe image problem, Moscow’s treatment of Solzhenitsyn more or less finished off any residual support that the Soviet regime enjoyed amongst western intellectuals.

Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn’s legacy was largely negative. For all the literary value of his initial novels and the factual information that he collected in The gulag archipelago series, his writings added no new insights into understanding why the Soviet regime evolved as it did. Even by the shabby standards of cold war anti-communism, Solzhenitsyn’s level of historical understanding was remarkably poor. The banal idea that there was a direct, ineluctable process leading from The communist manifesto to Stalin’s terror was hardly new, and has long been convincingly challenged by a wide variety of authorities.

Moreover, the time when The gulag archipelago first appeared was also when Soviet studies started to break in a substantial way from cold war orthodoxy, and western scholars started to develop analyses of the Soviet Union that investigated its history in a far deeper and profound manner than had up to then normally been the case. Solzhenitsyn’s historical works, appearing with a huge wave of publicity powered by the drama of his treatment at the hands of the Soviet regime and his enforced emigration, served to boost the dogmatic cold war historiography at the very moment when it came to be challenged. The crude nature of Solzhenitsyn’s historical analysis and his hysterical pronouncements on international relations served both to boost anti-communist sentiments in the west and to undermine not only Stalinism, but all forms of socialist thought.

Solzhenitsyn was a product of Stalinism; he spent his teenage and early adult years under its baleful norms. He first believed in it, started to think critically about it and then fell victim to it. He abandoned first Stalinism and then not merely Marxism, but eventually the very idea of modernity itself, without letting hold of the dogmatism and intolerance integral to the methodology of Stalinism. Disenchanted by the failure of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation systematically to reform the Soviet Union, he slid into a political and religious obscurantism which, however handy it was in part for a while as a weapon in the hands of cold war propagandists, ultimately rendered him isolated and to a large degree irrelevant.

Solzhenitsyn’s fight against the Soviet regime showed that a courageous and steadfast individual can make an effective stand against a seemingly all-powerful state machine. It is a tragedy that his courage in opposing the oppressive manifestations of the Soviet regime was not matched by any historical or political understanding of what Stalinism was and how it emerged from within Soviet society.