Johnson's Russia List
#5377
2 August 2001
[log in to unmask]

[Note from David Johnson:
  1. AP: Russia to Use First Post-Soviet Census.
  2. strana.ru: Graham Allison: U.S. scanty investment in Russia is
anomaly. Now is the best time for investment in Russia.
  3. Luba Schwartzman: ORT Review.
  4. THE JAMESTOWN FOUNDATION Prism: Aleksandr Buzgalin, TEN YEARS
WITHOUT THE SOVIET UNION: LOST ILLUSIONS.
  5. The New Yorker: David Remnick, Deep in the Woods. Solzhenitsyn,
a new book, and the new Russia.]


#5
The New Yorker
August 6, 2001
[for personal use only]
LETTER FROM MOSCOW
DEEP IN THE WOODS
Solzhenitsyn, a new book, and the new Russia.
by DAVID REMNICK

Not long ago, during the White Nights, I took a walk from the gates of the
Kremlin, past the underground shopping mall on Manezh Square, and up
Tverskaya Street, the ground zero of Russian neo-capitalism. There was a
time when it was no simple matter to get, say, a bowl of borscht on this
street. Now it's entirely possible to order (as one strolls at random) a
macchiato at Coffee Bean, a calzone at Sbarro, a Cadillac sedan, a
ten-thousand-dollar ball gown, VCRs, DVDs, and, should you still desire it,
a bowl of borscht. Every year brings a new accretion of commercialism to
Tverskaya-more stores, more restaurants, more hotels. Depending on the
state of things, there are even some Muscovites who can buy as well as look.

Suddenly, there was a thunderclap and a flash summer storm. Rain fell in
cool sheets. I ducked into the Young Guard bookstore. It was crowded but
not unpleasantly so; it was clean and air-conditioned, a helpful sales
staff roamed the floor, and the shelves were filled with the collected
works of authors who, little more than a decade ago, were banned by Soviet
censors. As I was riffling through a memoir by an actor I'd met-a film star
who once gave a public performance of Joseph Brodsky's poems when that was
something dangerous and delicious-the store manager came on the
loudspeaker, and, in the beguiling voice of unembarrassed salesmanship,
more K mart than commissar, she said, "Respected shoppers! Please note that
today we are featuring a new title, which can be found near the cashier's
desk. It's a volume by the Nobel Prize-winning author of 'The Gulag
Archipelago,' Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. The book is called 'Two
Hundred Years Together,' a history of Russian-Jewish relations."

No one stopped, no one seemed in the least surprised. In fact, in the next
half hour, hardly anyone dropped by to check out this curious new book. In
contemporary Russia, history has been ruthless in its speed, and the
public's memory is fickle. Solzhenitsyn is eighty-two. For younger people,
especially, his name marks just another event in a half-remembered Soviet
past: the Revolution, the agreement at Brest-Litovsk, the defeat of the
Whites, the camps, Stalingrad, Yuri Gagarin . . . Solzhenitsyn. When
Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in May of 1994, after twenty years of
forced exile, he was welcomed by a mixture of celebration, derision, and
indifference. Some younger writers seemed determined to carve out a place
for themselves by declaring the old man a reactionary egomaniac, a bore,
passé. These harsh greetings, along with a generally negative critical
reception to his cycle of historical novels, "The Red Wheel," left
Solzhenitsyn resentful at times, though he was loath to admit it.

Browsing the shelves, I picked up a volume of Solzhenitsyn's short stories
published last year. The second half of the book is taken up with the tales
he's written since coming home: "Ego," "On the Extremes," "Apricot Jam."
The first half is made up of those early, classic stories that reordered
the politics and the literature of the Soviet Union in the early sixties:
notably, "An Incident at Krechetovka Station" and "One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich." As one reads "Matryona's House," there comes a chill, a
foreshadowing of the author's exiles and returns:

During the summer of the year 1956, I came back at random from the hot,
dusty desertlands-simply to Russia. No one was waiting for me or had
invited me anywhere, because I had been detained from returning for a
little stretch of ten years. I simply wanted to get back into the heart of
the country-out of the heat, into woodlands with rustling leaves. I wanted
to cut myself loose and get lost in the innermost heart of Russia-if there
were any such thing-and live there.

Solzhenitsyn, like the narrator of his story and like millions of others,
made his way back west after "a little stretch" in the camps-the myriad
islands of the gulag archipelago-and in internal exile. He returned and for
twenty years wrote, mainly in secret, the story of Soviet tyranny. When
"The Gulag Archipelago" was published abroad, in 1974, the Soviet
leadership arrested Solzhenitsyn, put him onto a plane, and sent him to the
West. In exile, he not only dreamed of his return, he was confident of
it-just as he was confident of the regime's collapse. On May 26, 1994, he
and his wife, Natalia, flew from their home in Vermont to Magadan, on the
Sea of Okhotsk, which had been one of the principal centers of the gulag
system. For the next two months, he and his family travelled by train
toward Moscow, stopping in Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk,
Novosibirsk-seventeen stops in all. It was a return not without a sense of
occasion and ego (the BBC made a documentary and paid for special railway
cars). Solzhenitsyn hardly "lost" himself in innermost Russia this time.
Crowds came to hear him speak at every stop, he signed books, he was on
local television; it was the grandest author tour in history. But there was
also a great poignancy in the journey. Solzhenitsyn had done as much as any
man to bring an end to seven decades of oppression in Russia, and it was
unlikely that he would ever travel that extensively in his own country
again. This was at once a return, a welcome, and a farewell.

When the convoy finally arrived in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, who had become
the first President of a post-Communist Russia, tried to win over
Solzhenitsyn, just as he had tried to win over Andrei Sakharov, in the late
eighties. Vyacheslav Kostikov, Yeltsin's former press secretary, wrote in a
memoir, "His aides sought to put him in an overbearing frame of mind. He
was told: 'Who is this Solzhenitsyn? After all, he is not a classic, not a
Leo Tolstoy. And what's more, everyone is tired of him. Well, he suffered
under totalitarianism, and, yes, he is an expert on history, but there are
thousands more like him! While you, Boris Nikolayevich, are one of a kind.'
Yeltsin, however, chose a different tone. The conversation proceeded easily
and very frankly, without any attempts to paper over the political
differences. They talked for four hours and even had a little vodka."

The meeting may have been friendly, but Solzhenitsyn's critique of Yeltsin,
on television and in two short books of political writing-"The Russian
Question at the End of the Twentieth Century" (1994) and "Russia in
Collapse" (1998)-only intensified. Solzhenitsyn blamed Yeltsin for breaking
up the old Union without regard for the interests of the twenty-five
million Russians who now found themselves abroad in the former Soviet
republics; for economic reforms that "impoverished" the nation; for
behaving "like slaves" to the West and selling out Russia's interests to
the International Monetary Fund and NATO; for promoting corruption; for
failing to establish any real democratic institutions on the grass-roots
level. Solzhenitsyn declared that in Russian history there had been three
smuty, or "times of troubles": the political upheaval in the seventeenth
century that established the Romanov dynasty; the revolutionary year of
1917; and now. Solzhenitsyn was no longer saying the unsayable-most of his
opinions were common fare and none were forbidden-but his tone was no less
fierce than it had been in "Gulag." By declaring the present, but not, say,
the nineteen-thirties, a time of troubles, he seemed to relegate Yeltsin to
a ring of Inferno even lower than Stalin's.

In 1998, on Solzhenitsyn's eightieth birthday, Yeltsin still seemed eager
to please the writer and awarded him the highest of all state honors, the
Order of St. Andrew. Solzhenitsyn turned it down. "In today's conditions,
when people are starving and striking just to get their wages, I cannot
accept this award," he said. "Maybe in many years' time, when Russia
overcomes its insurmountable problems, my sons may be able to accept this
award." When Yeltsin left office, on the eve of 2000, Solzhenitsyn was
furious that the new President, Vladimir Putin, had granted his predecessor
immunity from prosecution. Solzhenitsyn declared that Yeltsin "along with
another one or two hundred people must be brought to book."

By now, Solzhenitsyn had managed to alienate almost everyone. The
Communists despised him, of course, and the hard-line Russian nationalists,
who had once hoped he would be their standard-bearer, found him too
liberal. The liberals, who looked west for their models, could not take
seriously Solzhenitsyn's derisory view of the West as a trove of useless
materialism and a wasteland of spiritual emptiness. Nor could they abide
conservative positions such as his support for the reinstatement of the
death penalty.

When Solzhenitsyn first arrived in Moscow, his name was invoked as a
possible successor to Yeltsin. This was always a fantasy, but it did
indicate his enormous prestige. And yet with time, and with Solzhenitsyn's
weekly exposure on television, the majority of the public soured on him or
grew indifferent. His television appearances were cancelled. He fell in the
political ratings and then disappeared from them. He began to appear less
and less in public. But still he continued to write. I was able to obtain,
through his sons Ignat, a concert pianist and conductor in Philadelphia,
and Stephan, an urban-planning and environmental consultant in Boston, an
advance copy of the first volume of "Two Hundred Years Together" and made
plans to pay him a visit on the outer edge of the capital.

As it happened, I arrived in Moscow just after George W. Bush had met with
Putin in Slovenia. Bush had come into office vowing that he would not be
seduced by a Russian leader the way he thought Bill Clinton had been by
Yeltsin. And so it was a matter of hilarity among the former Russian
dissidents I saw that Bush, after one short day in Putin's presence,
declared that he had "looked the man in the eye" and found him to be "very
straightforward and trustworthy." "I was able to get a sense of his soul,"
Bush said. It appeared to mean little to Bush that Putin had rebuffed him
on missile defense, or that Russia was still waging war on the Chechens, in
the south, and on the media in Moscow, or that Putin was making
increasingly friendly overtures to Iran and Iraq. In the absence of
knowledge and preparation, Bush relied on metaphysical self-confidence.
What he found in the soul of a career K.G.B. officer was "a remarkable
leader." It reminded a friend of mine of the moment in "Annie Hall" when
Alvy Singer describes how he was thrown out of college for cheating on his
metaphysics final; he had looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to him.

The vast majority of Russians were apparently every bit as enamored of
Vladimir Putin. Putin's approval ratings, after a year and a half in
office, were around seventy per cent. People admire Putin because he
appears not to suffer from the sins of Yeltsin. Where Yeltsin was bombastic
and unpredictable, Putin is steady, purposefully dull. Where Yeltsin was a
tsar, Putin is chief bureaucrat. He has wisely tamed his own language-he
once vowed to kill the Chechens even "in their outhouses"-and now he wants
to "put an end to the resistance by illegal armed formations." At least in
imagery, he has delivered on a promise of stability. It seems for the
moment not to matter that this stability has less to do with Putin's
sobriety than with the high price of oil. The country's economic comeback
after its August, 1998, crash resembles the stability of the Brezhnev era:
Russia still does not produce much that the world wants except natural
resources.

Putin's opposition is easy to define-an ageing cadre of followers of the
Communist Party and some liberals, like Grigory Yavlinsky, of the Yabloko
Party-but, for the moment, they pose no great threat to him. What's more,
there is little nostalgia for the old battles. So many of the warriors of
the late eighties and the nineties have scattered, died, or been
discredited. And some of the contemporary figures who put themselves
forward as avatars of democracy were hardly heroic. Until Putin brought low
the NTV network-the only independent, privately owned national television
outlet in the country-and replaced its leadership, its most prominent
broadcaster was Yevgeny Kiselyov, who hosted a Sunday-night news-magazine
show called "Itogi." Kiselyov's reputation was based on a showy
fearlessness; and yet he seemed to have no ear at all for the ordinary
Russian or for the poor. One night, he went on the air and coyly revealed,
by way of humanizing himself, that he had a terrible weakness for clarets
of exceptional vintages. To prove it, he took viewers on a tour of his
considerable wine cellar. This was not exactly Andrei Sakharov with his net
shopping bag and shabby suit.

One afternoon, I dropped by the House of Journalists, on the Boulevard Ring
Road, where a group of human-rights activists was holding a conference.
During a break, I met for coffee with Aleksandr Podrabinek, an old friend
who, since 1987, had been publishing an independent newspaper called
Ekspress-Khronika, which reported news that the bigger papers and the
networks ignored. Podrabinek is a small, almost impish man in his late
forties. From 1978 to 1983, he was forced to live in eastern Siberia in
both labor camps and internal exile, for the sin of having written a book,
"Punitive Medicine," about the Soviet regime's use of psychiatric hospitals
to deal with political dissent. He had no illusions about Yeltsin, and
remains a fierce opponent of the war in Chechnya, but for all Yeltsin's
mistakes, he said, the country was leaving a relatively "golden" era and
moving somewhere darker. "The idea of democracy has failed to capture the
popular imagination to any great degree," he said. "Yeltsin was a man of
broader views and vision than Putin. Now we have someone who has the
intellect of an Army sergeant. He gives people simple orders and he obeys
simple orders. He has no great vision except the creation of a vertical
construct of power."

Putin spent most of his adult life as a K.G.B. officer, but his résumé
gives off a different, more varied, resonance in Russia than it does
abroad, Podrabinek said. Even Sakharov once said that, despite the K.G.B.'s
role in the terror of the Communist regime, it was also a bastion of
competency, of people who understood what was really going on behind the
official façade. "It doesn't really matter to most people that Putin was a
K.G.B. officer," Podrabinek said. "The idea of reputation is not a major
one here. People elect bandits as governors knowing they are bandits-in the
Far East, for example. Or they elect a K.G.B. officer or a hard-line
Communist. They vote for those people whose names are most in front of
them. Russia's mentality is too easy to shape, as has been shown over and
over."

As the human-rights movement in Russia has shifted to the margins, its
newspapers and conferences are often funded either by Western foundations
or not at all. Ekspress-Khronika, with a peak circulation of sixty-five
thousand, used to run on the largesse of the National Endowment for
Democracy; now the sense of urgency is gone, and so is much of the
movement's financial support. Podrabinek has not been able to publish the
paper for a year. When I asked him about this, he just laughed. "Soon it
will be like the old days-just a few dissidents and some kindly Westerners
bringing in money secretly in their belts and shoes. But, remember, it is
possible to slide backward a long way, especially if the West does not
bother to pay much attention. . . . What we really need, I think, is a new
generation of politicians who are willing to say that Russia, just like
everyone else, needs a normal democratic system. Until that, maybe we will
wander in the desert for forty years."

A few hours later, I met with one of Podrabinek's colleagues at the
conference, Ludmilla Alexeyeva, who is the chairman of the Moscow-Helsinki
group. Alexeyeva is in her seventies. She lives just off the Old Arbat, the
pedestrian mall, which has long featured vendors selling T-shirts of high
post-Soviet irony; a favorite, advertising "McLenin's," juxtaposes Vladimir
Ilyich in profile and the Golden Arches. Alexeyeva immigrated to the United
States in 1977 and then came back to live in Moscow in 1992.

"The biggest problem we have is the problem of law, the judicial system,"
she said. "The constitution was rewritten in 1993, so there are new laws,
but no one knows these laws, no one follows them. The judges are corrupt,
ignorant, or they are old enough so that all their legal 'thinking' and
habits were formed in Soviet times. Nearly all of these judges take the
Soviet view that the goal of the court is, above all, to protect the
interest of the state. There is little or no thought to the individual."

When I suggested that the fall of the Communist state, the popularity of
Putin, and a general decline in politics as a Russian obsession had led to
the marginalization of the human-rights movement, Alexeyeva disagreed, and
gave an indulgent smile.

"Not marginalized," she said. "Changed."

In the old days, the movement was composed of extremely small groups of
urban intellectuals gathering secret petitions, furtively meeting with
Western visitors, and risking jail at every turn. Nowadays, it has taken
the shape of a loosely knit national Legal Aid Society. In the cities and
the provinces, young lawyers with a firm grasp of modern juridical practice
and ethics have set up shop in offices and courts.

"There are thousands of such people," Alexeyeva said. "That's not
marginalization. That's a real step forward."

One cloudy afternoon, I drove out of Moscow to the pretty village of
Peredelkino. During the Soviet period, the government encouraged the
Writers' Union to allocate dachas in Peredelkino to writers, especially to
writers who were ideologically reliable, but also to true artists like
Pasternak and Rostropovich. (At one point in the sixties, Solzhenitsyn
lived with friends here.) Some of the Peredelkino dachas have been bought
up by young businessmen-there's a lot of high-end construction going on
behind the old green gates-but there are still a great many writers around.
I'd come out to see Lev Timofeyev, an economist who had been sent to a
prison camp in the Urals under Gorbachev, in 1985, for having written and
distributed a book on the illegal, or shadow, economy. Along with dozens of
other political prisoners, Timofeyev was freed in 1987 and became an active
figure in the pro-democracy movement. In the nineties, he regained his
bearings as a scholar, publishing a series of books on the illegal economy
and narco-business. He also writes shorter pieces for Izvestia and the
Moscow News and teaches at the Russian State University for the Humanities.
He looked younger than he did ten years ago.

"Well," he said sheepishly as we greeted each other at the gate to his
dacha. "I divorced and married a young wife. It happens."

We went inside to a screened porch and a table laden with peaches, grapes,
wild strawberries, and a bowl of cherries.

"The last time we saw each other, you know when it was?" Timofeyev said.
"It was inside the White House on the last night of the putsch." That was
August 21, 1991, the night the K.G.B.-led coup collapsed and, with it, the
Communist regime. By Christmas night, Gorbachev had transferred power to
Yeltsin and the Soviet Union was dissolved.

Timofeyev was in agreement with his colleagues in the human-rights movement
on Chechnya and the assault on the press, but he was far more sanguine than
many of the others I met. Timofeyev's view of the economy is far different
from the standard analysis: that Russia is suffering from the rise of a
small number of ruthless oligarchs who came to control major industries
through their political connections.

"Not one person in Russia lives outside the reality of a shadow Russia," he
said. "As soon as you leave your house or apartment in the morning, you
find yourself in a world of bribes, contraband, unregistered activity,
'black cash,' and the rest." Outside, it began to thunder-one clap was so
loud I jumped from my chair-then came rain. A cool mist drifted through the
screen. "This is not something to do with the oligarchs," Timofeyev went
on, "nothing to do with the big businessmen you read about in the papers,
but everyone-peasants, teachers, workers in a factory, everyone. And, in
this sense, nothing really changed between the Soviet period and now. It
changed only in quantity, which became infinitely greater. The shadow
economy is a normal market of buying and selling. After all, there used to
be prices for everything before: positions in the Communist Party were the
assets then, and they were worth something and you paid for them. Now the
fruits of the market are different, but there are no laws or structures to
give meaning to a true market economy. The examples are everywhere. My
neighbor here just went to get a driver's license, but it soon became clear
that the only way to get this was to pay two hundred dollars to the guy who
gives the exam. He gives fifteen or twenty of these exams a day. He can't
keep all the money-he has to distribute it around a little-but it's a
living. . . . This system works, but it is not productive like an open
economy. It only maintains daily life, it's a kind of holding pattern.

"I am an economist, so what interests me most about Putin is that. In
Russia, it will be impossible to have democratic change that is serious
without a developed market economy. And, in that regard, I think Putin and
his team have done more in a year than Yeltsin and his team did in ten
years. Yeltsin, of course, laid the groundwork, and he probably needed that
time. But Putin has done well. Most important, there is finally a flat
income tax of thirteen per cent. Before, hardly anyone paid taxes at all.
This is a major advance. There is now a law on land for non-agricultural
use, legislation on trial by jury. And there is an over-all tendency to
avoid any reactionary economic thinking. Considering what some people were
expecting, I can't ask for much more."

In 1989, I had gone with Timofeyev to a theatrical production of "One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." When I mentioned that I was going to visit
Solzhenitsyn the next day, Timofeyev reacted like the other former
prisoners and dissidents I had met in the past. He thought that
Solzhenitsyn's achievements, especially "One Day" and "Gulag," were so
great and his independence and integrity were so beyond judgement that to
criticize him, even to engage his ideas critically, was wrong.

"I have a great many disagreements with Aleksandr Isayevich, but I have no
wish to argue with him," Timofeyev said. "There is probably no life in the
entire twentieth century that has so many plusses next to it. No one in
this century, at least no one in Russia, except Sakharov, is on his level.
So he can say what he wants, it's his right." Timofeyev paused, and then he
went on, saying, "But, at the same time, his influence has diminished.
When, many years ago, he wrote his essay 'Zhit' ne po lzhi!' "-"Live Not by
Lies!"-"our reaction was the same as your reaction to that thunderclap a
little while ago. The effect was that startling. But when I heard him on
television I have to admit that it was clear to me that he is a fact of
literary life still, but not really a crucial actor in political or social
life."

Had Solzhenitsyn lost his moral authority since coming home? I asked.

"In the modern world, moral authorities are proof of a society's inability
to live a decent life," Timofeyev said. "To have to rely so much on someone
like Solzhenitsyn or Sakharov is a sure sign that something is wrong.
Nowadays, I can express myself not by quietly identifying myself with a
figure like that but by writing, reading, voting, doing business, whatever
it is. This is a good thing. Society needs a Solzhenitsyn in a time of
emergency, far less so now."

The next afternoon, Natalia Solzhenitsyn picked me up at my hotel in a grey
Volvo. She is a highly intelligent and energetic woman in her early
sixties, and she has helped her husband in every way possible: while
Solzhenitsyn wrote, often staying in his study for days at a time, she ran
the household, raised their three sons (a son from her previous marriage,
Dmitri, died in 1994), carried out research, typed and retyped manuscripts,
edited a series of volumes on Russian history, administered a fund for camp
veterans using the proceeds from "The Gulag Archipelago," organized the
family archives, and planned their move home. In Vermont, Natalia was
Solzhenitsyn's liaison with the world; she retains that function here,
dealing with publishers, reporters, readers, harassers. I doubt if
Aleksandr Isayevich has picked up a ringing telephone in decades. Natalia
grew up in Moscow, and knows every street and alley, but her husband is not
a real Muscovite; he is from a provincial city, Rostov, and in his work
celebrates, even romanticizes at times, the verities of village life. Their
house is in Troitse-Lykovo, a verdant pocket along the Moscow River, a
place that only now, with urban sprawl, can be called part of the capital.

"At first," she was saying in the car, "when we returned home, Aleksandr
Isayevich would come downtown for various things a couple of times a month.
Then it became once a month."

"And now?" I asked.

"And now almost never. Aleksandr Isayevich doesn't really live in Moscow.
He lives in the woods."

The traffic in Moscow has grown horrendous in recent years. It took us
three-quarters of an hour to drive the ten miles west to Troitse-Lykovo.
Finally, Natalia turned off the main road and onto a narrow, pitted lane.
We passed some small cottages and then pulled up to a tall gate painted
forest green.

"We don't have automatic openers in Russia yet," Natalia said as she
cheerfully hopped out of the car. She unlocked the gate and pushed it open.
The effect was incredible: we were suddenly looking into a pristine wood.
She got back in the car and slowly rumbled past a small house where her
eldest son, Yermolai, and his wife were living and then pulled up to the
main house, which is shaped like a wide-open "V." The place, which they'd
had built for them, was modern, airy, elegant-not something you see very
often in Moscow, even now. If Natalia had told me that she had airlifted
the house in from Aspen or Telluride, I might have believed her. Members of
the old Politburo, including the notorious secret police chief Lavrenti
Beria, used to live in the area. Natalia mentioned that Putin's prime
minister was living a few doors down the road but was soon to move.

As we were walking toward the house, we saw Natalia's mother waving from a
window. She is the same age as Solzhenitsyn, but her health, Natalia said,
is better than her husband's. In recent years, Solzhenitsyn has had two
heart attacks and suffers from intense back pain. Since coming home, he has
continued working-short stories, prose poems, essays on other writers,
political writing, as well as "Two Hundred Years Together"-but his energy,
his urgency, is nothing like it had been. When he was writing "The Gulag
Archipelago," he would make two writing days out of one: he would get up at
1 A.M. and work until nine; take a break and then work again until six, eat
dinner, go to bed at 7 P.M., sleep till one, and then start again-all while
expecting a knock on the door. He slept with a pitchfork near his bed.

Natalia led us to a library, and Solzhenitsyn met us there. He looked much
as he had when I first met him, in 1994-the same nineteenth-century beard
and furrowed brow, the same safari jacket. But now he walked quite slowly
and used a cane; he was more subdued in conversation, more likely to fall
back on familiar nostrums. When I asked if he ever thought his work would
be finished, he said, "This all depends on my health. If I'm still alive
but bedridden, then I'll have to stop working, of course. But as long as I
can move, even with the help of a cane, I'll go on working."

Every Soviet and Russian leader since Khrushchev has had a Solzhenitsyn
strategy. For decades, it was repression; now it is seduction. Putin and
his wife, Lyudmila, came calling last year, flowers in hand. Not long after
that visit, I met Putin in New York and asked him about his time with
Solzhenitsyn. "Oh, he had quite a lot of interesting ideas," he said blandly.

Now Solzhenitsyn was saying, "The meetings with Yeltsin and Putin were
relatively brief and just once each, so it would be a mistake to make too
much of my personal impressions. I watched Yeltsin, though, for ten years
from afar, so I can judge him as a historical figure. I feel that Yeltsin
permitted an enormous devastation of Russia. One might have imagined that
things could not have got worse than the point to which Communism had
brought us. It seemed that any effort at all would bring something better.
On the contrary. Yeltsin managed to bring Russia even lower. He supported
thieves. Our national riches and resources were privatized nearly for free,
and even the new mobsters are not asked to pay any rent. The state has
become a pauper.

"As for freedom of speech, that's the great achievement of Gorbachev and
his policy of glasnost. Yeltsin just did not interfere in this process. As
for the attack on the Communist Party, this also began before Yeltsin. From
the end of the eighties, many Party functionaries fled their Party
positions to join commercial concerns. They fled like cockroaches. So when
Yeltsin came to power, the Communist Party no longer existed as a monolith.
Yeltsin in his clash with the Supreme Soviet allowed state power to weaken,
and then"-in October, 1993-"he rushed to another extreme, firing with tanks
on the White House. The rest of the world did not call out loudly enough or
reprimand him enough. He was considered a great champion of democracy even
while he did this. And then Yeltsin established an autocratic regime.
Democracy has not been established in Russia. Democracy has had no time to
establish itself."

As for the current President, Solzhenitsyn said, "The first thing to ask
is, Who put Putin into power? Yeltsin did it, with the help of [the
notorious oligarch Boris] Berezovsky. To analyze this phenomenon of a
K.G.B. man in power, you have to analyze how he came into power. If he had
come into power as the result of a K.G.B. coup, it would have been one
thing, but we had something else. I met Putin only once, and since then
I've had no contacts. I got the impression of a businesslike person. . . .
During our meeting, I made several suggestions, but he has followed none of
them."

Nearly thirty years ago, it became clear that Solzhenitsyn had a distinctly
different opinion of the West than many other dissident thinkers. In
speeches at Harvard and in front of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Solzhenitsyn railed
against the weakness and the naïveté of the West, attacked those who
criticized the war in Vietnam, warned of godlessness and junk culture.
Nothing that has happened since-not even the collapse of the Communist
regime-has changed his mind about this.

"When the Iron Curtain was still standing, the cheapest fashions still made
their way here: tawdry fashions, rock and roll, drugs, popsa-everything
cheap, the cheapest possible things. When the Iron Curtain came down, the
situation became even more complicated. It wasn't only the manure that came
through. There were many Western influences that came in, different
qualities, different types of things, and I wouldn't say all of them were
negative. But my fellow-countrymen welcomed all of it with an open soul,
everything! We thought a period of universal happiness would begin.
Gorbachev, for example, and then Yeltsin withdrew our troops from Europe
without any conditions. I'm now reading a memoir about how Gorbachev told
the West, 'Are you sure you won't expand NATO to the east?' And they
answered, 'Oh no, no no.' It never occurred to Gorbachev to get a written
document guaranteeing this. He just believed in their word and that was it.
That was how we greeted the West. That's how things started, in that
spirit. Then we became extraordinarily disillusioned when we began to
understand the arrogance, the real policies, of the Western powers." In the
seventies, Solzhenitsyn charged the West with weakness before the Soviet
Union; now the West is too aggressive with Russia.

Solzhenitsyn's new book is a peculiar one. For many years, he has had to
face accusations of anti-Semitism. The reasons are complicated. His view of
the world, shaped by an intense devotion to Russian patriotism, Russian
suffering, and Russian Orthodoxy, is alien to many former dissidents, who
have been quick to call him a hard-line nationalist, a tsarist, a
Slavophile. What's more, an intellectual like the mathematician Igor
Shafarevich, who had once been allied with Solzhenitsyn, is, inarguably,
anti-Semitic. In the seventies, some third-rate critics seemed to encounter
his books with an accountant's pencil, tallying "positive" and "negative"
portraits of Jews, and sometimes found him wanting. Solzhenitsyn, in fact,
is not anti-Semitic; his books are not anti-Semitic, and he is not, in his
personal relations, anti-Jewish; Natalia's mother is Jewish, and not a few
of his friends are, too. It is true, however, that, as a Russian patriot,
Solzhenitsyn has written of "the incomparable sufferings of our people,"
and, as such, clearly does not believe in the uniqueness of Jewish
suffering in the past two centuries or in the idea of the Jews as a symbol
of persecution. Much of the new book is taken up with putting Jewish
suffering into a wider context of Russian suffering; there is an insistent
effort made to point out that the vast majority of the population,
especially the serfs and then the peasantry, were deprived of their rights
just like the Jews. Solzhenitsyn does not deny the persecution of Jews-the
pogroms, the restrictions on university admissions, the general
prejudice-but there is also a tendency to highlight any exaggeration of
tsarist oppression or to measure Jewish suffering against the sorry state
of nearly all Russians. In his text, Solzhenitsyn often seems irritated
that there is a "taboo" against discussing "the Jewish question," that one
must either endorse certain notions of Jewish history and suffering or risk
being branded a bigot. And yet, even as he describes and condemns the large
number of Jews who took part in the revolutionary movement against the
tsar, he is quick to disavow "conspiracies" and blames Russians and Russian
failures-from the "arrogance of the nobility" to the "abandonment" of the
peasantry-for the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. "The highest circles of St.
Petersburg nonetheless succumbed to the seductively simple explanation that
Russia was in no way organically diseased, and that the whole Revolution
was nothing but a vicious Jewish plot, part and parcel of the world-wide
Judeo-Masonic conspiracy. There was one explanation for it all: the Jews!"
he writes in "Two Hundred Years Together," and goes on to say that, in
fact, "it was our own Russian weaknesses that determined our sorry
history's downward vector."

This is a serious subject with a gigantic literature, but it is puzzling
that, at this point in his life, Solzhenitsyn decided to take on a
two-volume history. Beyond his classics-"One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich" and the three volumes of "Gulag"-there are books in
Solzhenitsyn's oeuvre that are arguably dull or minor but never tangential.
"The Red Wheel" is marred by long, wooden passages and artificial-sounding
dialogue, yet there is no doubt about its intent and ambition; Solzhenitsyn
set out to write a cycle that would encompass nearly everything that led to
the Russian Revolution. "Two Hundred Years Together" seems anomalous, not
at all essential. He considers it a scholarly work and is quite proud that
there are hundreds of footnotes. In fact, he ignores most contemporary
scholarship. Could it possibly be that, at his age, he wanted to write this
to rebuff the old attacks?

"For fifty-four years, I was working on 'The Red Wheel,' from 1936 to
1990," Solzhenitsyn said. "And during that time I came across many facts
and points of view about Russian history beginning in the nineteenth
century until now. There were various themes I came across which were
subsidiary to 'The Red Wheel.' One of them, not the only one, was the theme
of the common life of Russians and Jews. This theme would emerge now and
then and become a topic of discussion in earlier years, so from decade to
decade this theme has accompanied my work on 'The Red Wheel.' I felt it
should be treated in its way, but if I had included it in 'The Red Wheel'
it would have created a wrong accent. It would have looked like an attempt
to explain the Revolution because of the interference of the Jews." He
dismissed the idea that he was responding to "criticism."

"Criticism is a balanced judgement, and this wasn't that. In this case,
there were just groundless, fantastical attacks, and I could only answer
with surprise. Why was 'Ivan Denisovich' accused of being anti-Semitic?
Well, it's because one of the characters, Tsezar Markovich, worked in an
office instead of laying bricks. The prototype of Tsezar Markovich, Lev
Grossman, was a lifelong friend of mine. There was a lot of this rubbish."

Officially sanctioned anti-Semitism in Russia, for all its historical
resonance-especially for the children and grandchildren of Russian-Jewish
immigrants-has virtually disappeared. In his book and in conversation,
Solzhenitsyn readily acknowledged the presence and persistence of
anti-Semitism among many Russians, but he also was quick to add that he had
felt the sting of anti-Russian prejudice. "There is a lot of it. Radio
programs on Radio Liberty, where you would hear the most contemptible and
denigrating programs-these were often Russian Jews, and Russians were
spoken of as Untermenschen."

After a while, Solzhenitsyn seemed tired, and I turned the subject to
perhaps the most painful one. I asked him if he thought that the new order
of things in Russia had diminished his moral authority, and whether that
might even be a good thing, as Lev Timofeyev had suggested.

Solzhenitsyn looked down at the table and thought this over awhile. Then he
said, "I know from the many personal letters I still get that for many
people I am a source of trust and moral authority. But I cannot really say
if I am a moral authority or not. I do feel that for humanity-not society
but for humanity-moral authority is a necessity. The course of world
history and world culture shows us that there are, and should be, moral
authorities. They constitute a kind of spiritual hierarchy which is
absolutely necessary for every individual. In the twentieth century, the
universal tendency, not only in the West but everywhere, was to destroy any
hierarchies so that everyone could act just as he or she wants without
regarding any moral authority. This has already been reflected in, and has
influenced, the whole of world culture, and the level of world culture has
been lowered as a result."

Solzhenitsyn let me know that my visit was drawing to a close.

"I'm not working with the old speed," he said. "My workday is different,
because once or twice a day I stop to take a rest. I never used to do that.
And in the evening I feel tired and go to bed fairly early. In the morning,
I feel strong, but this strength doesn't last as long as it used to. It's
hard to walk, even to stand. I have to use that cane over there. I have
some problems with my spine, so even sitting is a problem now." One of the
prose poems he has written since his return to Moscow is called "Growing Old":

How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death, when
advancing years guide us softly to our end. Ageing thus is in no sense a
punishment from on high, but brings its own blessings and a warmth of
colors all its own. . . . There is even warmth to be drawn from the waning
of your own strength compared with the past-just to think how sturdy I once
used to be! You can no longer get through a whole day's work at a stretch,
but how good it is to slip into the brief oblivion of sleep, and what a
gift to wake once more to the clarity of your second or third morning of
the day. And your spirit can find delight in limiting your intake of food,
in abandoning the pursuit of novel flavors. You are still of this life, yet
you are rising above the material plane. . . . Growing old serenely is not
a downhill path but an ascent.

When he was a younger man, always under assault from the authorities,
Solzhenitsyn used to take breaks and pace, like an infantryman, back and
forth, in the woods. He viewed his writing life as a war waged against
tyranny, and he viewed himself, he always said, as a soldier. And so I
asked him now if he still saw himself that way, as a soldier in writer's
clothing. Solzhenitsyn smiled, something he does not do very often or
easily with visitors.

"No," he said. "It doesn't feel like that any longer." Then we said our
good-byes, and he slowly got out of his chair, took up his cane, and went
to another room to lie down.

******
-------
David Johnson
home phone: 301-942-9281
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