One Man Against the State

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's removal from television couldn't have come at a more signal time. For it coincides with the U.S. publication of a book that charts, in official documents, the dimensions of his extraordinary one-man battle against the state -- and by extension the laziness, collective amnesia and moral cowardice of a country that not only continues to do him less than honor, but also now has the nerve to dismiss him as just another failed talk-show host.


The book is "The Solzhenitsyn Files: Secret Soviet Documents Reveal One Man's Fight Against the Monolith," and it's been put together by Michael Scammell, who wrote the definitive 1984 biography. The book contains in translation the most important papers from the huge file kept by the authorities on the ex-prisoner and provincial school-teacher since the early '60s. And it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the man's awesome bravery, his prescience and his dogged belief that a single individual, by cleaving unshakably to his beliefs, could stick like a burr in the throats of the bureaucrats and rock the foundations of the state itself.


He is not by our standards, perhaps, a nice man, Solzhenitsyn. But then the word nice is an irrelevance; and our standards, by his lights, are in any case far, far too low -- those of loafers and trimmers: tourists in our own lives. He is not, as we are, one of Nature's compromisers. Instead, he's like an old-fashioned lighthouse blinding us -- as we travel on automatic pilot and sleep away the voyage -- with unwanted moral light. He's a badgerer, an Ancient Mariner and not much wanted at our feast.


But then, even in his much-derided talk shows, he often spoke no more than the uncomfortable, undecorated truth. I remember him talking, for example, about a "people's socialism," in which workers would hold genuine shares in the companies they worked for. "There can be no social independence," he said, "without economic independence. And so-called privatization hasn't got anywhere near it. It's been robbery like nowhere else! All these press conferences they give -- about the stabilization of the economy and how it's all getting better! It's simply being stolen and nobody is speaking up about it." I couldn't have put it much better myself.


And listen to this: "This is a government without prospects. They have no conveyor belts connecting them to ideology, or the masses, or the economy, or foreign policy, or to the world communist movement -- nothing. The levers to all the conveyor belts have broken down and don't function. They can decide all they want sitting at their desks. Yet it's clear at once that it's not working. You see? Honestly, I have that impression. They're paralyzed."


That remark comes from the wiretap of a conversation almost exactly 30 years ago, when Soviet power seemed to be at its height: a conversation in which he spoke not only about the "serpent" Lenin, "a man totally without principles," but also about the necessary break-up of the empire. "I'm amazed that liberal Russians don't understand that we have to separate from the republics. I tell them it's all over for the Ukraine, it has to go ... But how could there be any question about the Caucasus, the Baltics? On the very first day if you want -- whoever wants to leave, for God's sake, do so!" This from the man who's now vilified as a furious nationalist, a pan-Slav, at a time when all of these notions were almost dementedly, to say the least, before their times.


What can you say of the man revealed by the file? He endured every possible cruelty and indignity, including the subornation against him of his own first wife. He took on the Writers' Union ("my Borodino"), the bureaucrats, the Politburo, the KGB. And yet there's no doubt that he not only puzzled them all; he -- one man! -- made them afraid. There's no nobler document in this collection than the letter he wrote to KGB chairman Yury Andropov in 1971 after a search of his dacha. It begins: "For many years I have borne in silence the lawlessness of your employees," and then thunders through every instance of this in full. It ends with a one-sentence paragraph as reverberant and threatening as any of Luther's: "But after the raid yesterday, I will no longer be silent."


In the words of the poet W.H. Auden: "Let us praise now while we can/ The vertical man/ Though we value none/ But the horizontal one." For if we do not, then when Solzhenitsyn dies we shall be party to the mammoth hypocrisy that will be deployed in Russia to celebrate both him and his works -- by precisely those people who harried him in the past and are today encouraging us to forget him to death instead.