In Russia, writers are more than just writers. Russians look to their literary heroes not simply for beauty and entertainment, but for a philosophy of life. Writers do more than simply tell the truth to the temporal power — they are Russia’s spiritual legislators. The stern old God of Orthodoxy provides an immutable baseline of good and evil. But it is in the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Pushkin and Chekhov that Russians find their universal truths, the nuts and bolts of people wrestling with freedom and oppression.
Russians look to their writers not just to think but to live more deeply than ordinary mortals; the best ones end up crucified on crosses of their own weakness, or of the state’s disapproval. This was certainly true of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Not only did he, in the pungent Russian phrase, experience the horrors of the Russian century ‘on his own hide’, but he was possessed with an overwhelming moral imperative to record what he saw and felt. The impulse was so strong that while he was in the Gulag he memorised thousands of lines of his own poetry and prose when there was no paper to write on; the rest he scribbled on pieces of cement and scrounged scraps of paper.
When Solzhenitsyn died, Vladimir Putin came to pay his respects at his lying-in-state at the Academy of Sciences, and President Dmitry Medvedev bowed to his grave at the Donstkoi monastery. Thousands of people — many of them older members of the intelligentsia, in shabby clothes and thick glasses — had queued in pouring summer rain to see his body and lay flowers. But though Russia’s new masters had bowed their heads to Russia’s greatest dissident, in truth Solzhenitsyn was largely ignored in the new Russia when he was alive. Television has, as is now customary, taken its lead from the Kremlin’s respectful line, and Russia’s newspapers are written by the intelligentsia who respected Solzhenitsyn the most. But dig a little deeper into the hinterland of Russia’s internet and there is a deep and ugly groundswell of vitriol. On mail.ru, Russia’s most popular free email site, users posted 233 comments below a wire story about Solzhenitsyn’s death; almost every one was viciously critical. ‘Good riddance: He shouldn’t have worked for the West,’ wrote DimaM; ‘He wasn’t a writer, he was a traitor,’ wrote Vlad; ‘Glory to Stalin, Glory to the Soviet Union,’ wrote KlanZh.
Why do the users of mail.ru hate Solzhenitsyn so much? Simple: they associate him, rightly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, even Mikhail Gorbachev said that his writing ‘showed the truth of the regime to the world’, and ‘helped make our country freer and more democratic’. Solzhenitsyn’s classics on life in the Gulag showed Russians the truth of the Soviet Union’s greatest crimes — a system of state repression which was to kill nearly 60 million Soviet citizens in man-made famines, deportations, forced labour and executions. Solzhenitsyn’s prose was briefly published in Russia under Khrushchev, personally approved by the General Secretary because the editor of the Novy Mir literary journal, Alexander Tvardovsky, persuaded him that it would help his attack on Stalin’s cult of personality. But the regime was never able to limit the damage to just Stalin’s legacy; for millions of Soviet citizens who first glimpsed the world of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn’s fictional Gulag inmate, the legitimacy of communism itself was demolished.
The truth Solzhenitsyn told helped make Russia free — or so the two generations of dissidents and passionate anti-communists in Russia and abroad believed. But Vladimir Putin spoke for the vast majority of ordinary Russians when he called the collapse of the Soviet Union ‘the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century’. For that majority, Solzhenitsyn will always be reviled for his association with the liberals who brought the evils of democracy and capitalism down on their heads; as former prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin put it, the free market had trampled and burned most Russians’ lives ‘like [the Tatar] Khan Mamai’. Solzhenitsyn’s legacy is no less great because he attracts the hatred of the ignorant — but it tells us something about Russian patriotism that so many of his countrymen consider him a traitor for contributing to their country’s humiliation.
It’s a profound irony that Solzhenitsyn himself also hated the new Russia which emerged from the old. ‘I know I am coming back to a worn-out, discouraged, shell-shocked Russia which has changed beyond recognition and is wandering about in search of itself,’ he told crowds in Vladivostok on his return to his homeland in 1994 after two decades in exile. Solzhenitsyn hated the crimes of the Soviet regime, but he despised the chaos of freedom almost as much. He embraced Russian Orthodoxy and authoritarianism. He praised Putin and brushed aside his KGB past, saying that ‘every country must have an intelligence service’. In many respects, modern Russia has followed the ideals of Solzhenitsyn’s confused and mystical later writings. Russia is staunchly nationalist, ruled by a new Tsar supported by the Orthodox Church which has become almost an appendage of the state; it is respected (but mostly feared) by its neighbours. The anarchic party system of Yeltsin’s Russia which Solzhenitsyn so hated is gone, replaced by something very close to the old system of non-partisan indirect democracy which Solzhenitsyn — and Tolstoy before him — claimed was deeply rooted in the traditions of the Russian village and advocated as the only way Russia could be run.
But ultimately the delusions of his old age don’t detract from Solzhenitsyn’s towering achievement: he revealed not just the horror but the perverse logic behind authoritarianism. He caught the true, dark genius behind Stalinism — not simply to put two strangers into a room, one a victim, one an executioner, and convince the one to kill the other, but to convince both that this murder served some higher purpose. It is easier to imagine that such acts are committed by monsters, men whose minds had been brutalised and rendered different from our own by the horrors of war and collectivisation. But the fact is that ordinary, decent men and women, full of humanistic ideals and worthy principles, were ready to justify and even participate in the massacre of their fellows. ‘To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good,’ wrote Solzhenitsyn in his epic ‘literary investigation’ of the Great Terror of the 1930s. ‘Or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.’ This can happen only when a man becomes a political commodity, a unit in a cold calculation.
The questions Solzhenitsyn raised were devastating and unanswerable: Who were the executioners? ‘Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own people?’ he asked. ‘They were not aliens, not foreigners, but men, Russian men, made of the same tissue and fed by the same blood.... Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is ours.’
Anna Akhmatova, the great poetess who also suffered unimaginably under Stalin, described Solzhenitsyn as ‘a bearer of light’ and said his story should be read by ‘every one of the 200 million citizens of the Soviet Union’. She was right, because she shared Solzhenitsyn’s fundamental belief that a society must learn from its history. ‘It’s not just the West that doesn’t know our history; we ourselves have lost it,’ he told the BBC in 1974, jus t after being bundled on to a plane and forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union. ‘Events have been wiped out. The documents have been burnt, the witnesses killed. So I have been working to reconstruct the truth, all the truth about my own country and this is what I have done primarily for our own people’s benefit.’ In today’s Russia, where schoolbooks are being rewritten — with the Kremlin’s blessing — to gloss over Stalin’s legacy, Russia has never needed its literary prophet more.
Owen Matthews is the author of Stalin’s Children, published by Bloomsbury.