Solzhenitsyn

20 alzhenitsyn \ ( This is an extract from an article first published in Intercontinental Press in March this year.)

The London Sunday Times of March 3rd published a translation of the full text of a 15,000-word letter from Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn to the leaders of the Soviet government. Dated September 5 L973, less than two months before the publication in the West of Solhenitsyn's ' The Gulag archipelago, the letter ranges over wide areas of Soviet life and gZovernment policy, as the introductory note by the Sunday Times editors indicated: "eee Solzhenitsyn denounces the Cardinal folly of pursuing an expansionist foreign poliey when there is nothing to fear from Europe and America. He calls for an accommodation with China. He deplores the mindless policy of economic growth which has despoiled the beauty of Russia's cities and ruined the beauty of her countryside. He reiterates that the real wealth of Hyssia lies in her own soil. He pours scorn on the dead creed of Marxism. He claims that the Russians drink far too much vodka. He advocates the end of national service and Says promotion should not depend on party membership. He pleads for kindness from Russia's ruiers and peace for its citizens". Solzhenitsyn's letter does in fact range over all these areas and more. Its overall impact import however, can be summarized fairly briefly. In the letter Solzhenitsyn annopnees his rejection of Marxism and proposes to substitute for it a religious, Great Russian nationalism based on a return to 4 POGanticized vision of ninteenth century Russian peasant economy. This reactionary utopian visirn is mixed in 3 contradictory jumble with occasional proposals that in their own right are progressive and deserving of support. REDREAT INTO THE PAs? Addressing the Kremlin, Solzhenitsyn states that the purpose of his letter is " to sugsest to you what is, for the moment at least, still a timely way out of the chief dangers facing our country in the next ten to thirty years.

"These dangers are iwar with China, and our destruction together with Wes*ern civilisation in the crush and stench of a feuled earth".

27 Solzhenitsyn deseribes the Soviet bureaucrats whom he addresses as "total realists", and he therefore presents practical arguments against war with China: "Dont reckon on any triumphant blitzkrieg. You will have against you a country of almost a THOUSAND MILLION people, the like of which has never yet gone to war in the history of the world.... Its army and population will not surrender en masse with Western good sense, even when surrounded and beaten. Every soldier and every civilian will fight to the last bullet, the last breath...

You will not of course, be the the first to use nuclear weapons that would do irreparable damage to your reputation, which you cannot disregard, and anyway froma practical point of view still wouldn't bring you a quick victorye...

TA conventional war, on the other hand, would be the longest and bloodiest of all the wars mankind has ever fought, Like the Vietnam War at the very least (to which it will be similar in many ways) it will certainly last a minimum of ten to fifteen Years« ooo If Russia lost up to one and 4 half million people in. the First World War and (according to Khrushchev's figures) 20 million in the Second, then war with China is bound to cost us 60 million souls at the yery Leastsee.." (Here, and below, emphasis is in the original.)

No defender of the Soviet Union and socialism can take isste with the fact that a war between the two workers states would be a monstrous and criminal folly. It is ironic, however, that Solzhenitsyn bases his argument on “Russian national interest" when it is precisely the two bureaucracies' defense of narrowly interpreted "national interest" = identified with their own caste interests < that has brought them to their present state of mutual hostility.

Solzhenitsyn cites two factors that he considers responsible for the threat of war between the Soviet Union and China. One is the competition between the two bureaucracies to pose as the true defenders of "Marxism-Leninism", The second shows how far the novelist has gone in embracing reactionary notions; he cites " the dynamic pressure of a Chine 1,000 million strong on our as yet unexploited Siberian lands." Solzhenitsyn thus puts himself in the camp of the racists who. attempt to drum up fears of a "yellow peril".

There are elements of Solzhenitsyn's letter besides the warning to avoid a Sino-Soviet war that deserve at least a qualified endorsement. Certainly it is possible to share his disgust with destruction of the environment by carelessly planned industrial projects, even though his explanation of its causes and his proposed remedies are worse than useless.

Solzhenitsyn also calls for an end to Russian control over the workers states of Eastern Europe and over national minorities in the Soviet Union. He urges the Soviet leaders " sooner or later

22 to withdraw our protective surveillance of Hastern Surope. Nor can there be any question of any peripheral nation being foreibly kept within the bounds of our country."

(The March 3 New York Times translated what would appear to be the same passage 4s Foliows:"...our trusteeship from sastern Byrope, th Baltic Republics, Transcaucasia, Central Asia and possibly even from parts of the present Ukraineges«.") However, here too Solzhenitsyn motivates his proposal by a suppoaed Russian national interest that in this case is described as switching attention away from distant continents - and even away from Europe and the South of our country". In order to make Siberia " the centre of national activity and settlement and a focus for the aspirations of young people." Solghenitsyn's proposals are all based on a viewpoint that bears little or no relation to reality. He asserts for example, that neither European nor U.S. imperialism represent any threat to the Soviet Union. In fact, he seems to regard U.S. imperialism ( Solzhenicsyn does not call it that) as a beneficent force: He does not criticize the United States for its agsression in Indochina; but seems to dispararvs the " internal dissension and spiritual waekness" that kept it from winning the Vietnam war ! 4nd he eriticizes past Soviet leadership for having pred Mao Tse-tung in place of a peaceable neighbor such as Chiang Kai-shek".

Solzhenitsyn's proposal to isolate Russia from the rest of the world sets the stage for an impossible retreat into a romanticised past. His proposals that the Russian economy be reconstructed on a primitive acricultural basis: 'The construction of more than halt of our state in 4 fresh new place (Siberia) will enable us to avoid repeating the disastrous errors of the twentieth century ~ industry, Toads and cities for example."

Solzhenitsyn justifies his argument for a "zero growth" economy by combining 4 glorification of peasant backwardness with neo- Malthusian worries about overpopulation. ae eee v.

nS a our progressive publicists were, oth be 2 “ae pevolasucn of yidiculing those eee age were 4 in FR i 2 people wno Ce s ways 3a man of them 10 Russia }: peop+ : fe ot have pity on our past, even sen che On ee aiue forsaizen hamlet with a couple of hovels, even on Rea nn alongside the railway track; who called upon vt fa) eee La norses even after the advent of os ses ret heer ee ts and combines, = ‘ factories for enormous plan : : eo oe i 1 fertilisers, not to mass OY.

manure in favour of chemica ° Ao rotner in jlliocn i ities, not to clamber on bop e miLLLOn rey blocks. Haw they laughed, how they tormented eee eos: ee cnary Icjavophiles' eee They hounded the men wi? oe a ree perfectly feasible for 4 colossus Like Hose tes ie mr spiritual peculiarities and folk traditions; uo *

23 = nld not be that the whole of mankind should follow a single, absolutely identical pattern of development.

PNo, we had to be dragged along the whole of the Western bourgeoisindustrial and Marxist path in order to discover, at the end of the Syentieth century, and again from progressive Western scholars, what many village greyueard in the Ukraine or Russia has had understood Pom time immemorial and could have explained to the progressive sommentators ages ago, had the commentators ever found the time gn that dizzy fever of theirs to consult him: that a dozen maggots Ban't go on gnawing the same apple forever, that if the earth is a finite Gbicct, thenits expanses and resources are finite also, and the mdlass, infinite progress dinned into our heads by the dreamers > the Enlightenment cannot be accomplished on ite...”

ticular path; and that it co

BROM STALIN TO SOLZHENTITSEN, |

Solzhenitsyn's vision of a utopia of peasant hovels and mud roads is mot likely to win much of a following either inside or outside the Boviet Union. Despite the letter's protestations to the contrary, it Beems very improbable that Solzhenitsyn expected the Soviet leaders fo give his suggestions serious consideratione that although political themes are Tt needs to be kept in mind but Smportant in his novels Solzhenitsyn is not a politician Man artist. And while both the Soviet bureaucrats and the Heapitalist press, each for their own reasons, will attempt to portray "him as a representative of the Soviet dissident movement, that movement in fact encompasses a broad range of views from the reactionary nonsense of Salzhenitsyn's letter to demands for a return to the norms of Leninism, advanced by such figures as Pyotr “Grigorenko. The differing views of the various dissident currents do share 2 common origin, however. This is the reaction against the abominations of Stalinist rule. Solzhenitsyn considered himself a Marxist before he was arrested for the "crime" of criticizing Stalin ina letter. His present views were not adpoted under the influ ence of capitalist propaganda: They were taught to him by the ‘Hureaucrats who herded millions of Soviet citizens into eoncentratdon camps, who crush with arms any movment for socialist democracy in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union, who live lives of luxury rivaling that of capitalist plutocrats while mismanaging the Soviet economy. eaactLlonary positions are borrowed bureaucrats themselves. His fied with an appeal to Stalin him- 1 43 the term Solzhenitsyn Some of Solzhenitsyn's most Tr more or less directly from the Sliavophilism, for example, is justi self, as in the following nassage(" ideology uses for Marxism): Mhen war began with Hitler, Stalin, who had omitted and bumgled

24 so much in the way of military preparation, did not neglect that side, the ideological side. And although the ideological grounds fort hat war seemed more indisputable than those that face you now (the war was waged against what appeared on the surface to be a diametrically opposed ideology), from the very first days of the y Stalin refued refused to rely on the putrid, decaying prop of ideology. He wisely discarded it, all but ceased to mention it and unfurled instead the old Russian banner - sometimes indeed, the s ard of Orthodoxy - and we conquered ! ( Only towards the end of tt and after the victory was the Progressive Doctrine taken ont of its mothballs)", There is still another way in which the bureaucrats caste has contributed directly to the develepment of the sort of views expre in Solzhenitsyn's letter. Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov describ this contribution in another context, explaining why many of the dissidents seem unwilling to take stands on events outside the Soviet Union. His explanation, which was translated in the March 5 New York Times, referred to " the Western liberal intelligentsia" that expects the dissident movement to reciprocate its interest in Soviet affairs: " These people lomk to Soviet dissenters for a reciprocal, analogous international position with respect to other countries.

But there are several important circumstances they do not take int account: the lack of information; the fact that a Soviet dissen is not only unable to go to other countries, but is deprived, with his own country, of the majority of sources of information; that t historical experience of our country has weaned us away from exces 'leftism', so that we evaluate many facts differently from the'lef intelligentsia of the West; that we must avoid political pronouncements in the international arena where we are so ignorant (after all we do not engage in political activity even in our own country); that we must avoid getting into the channel of soviet epaganda, which so often deceives us."

The enforced isolation described by Sakharov does more than aaa actual and potential opponents of bureaucratic rule of reliable | information on which to base their political judgments from | being tested in practice. In this artificial atmosphere, reasonabi and irrational ideas can and do exist side by side.

If there were free public discussions of political issues in & soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn's proposals to replace motor transport with horses, andMarxism with religion, could only provoke laughter and little else. The absence of such a competition of ideas grants them a life they would not otherwise have,