Cultural Cohesion (31 page)

Because Solzhenitsyn deals with modern events over which there is not merely dispute as to their interpretation, but doubt as to whether they even happened, he is obliged to expend a great deal of effort in saying what things were like. The task is compounded in difficulty by the consideration that what they were like is almost unimaginable. To recover the feeling of such things is an immense creative achievement. In Coleridge's sense, it takes imagination to see things as they are, and Solzhenitsyn possesses that imagination to such a degree that one can be excused for thinking of him as a freak. He is a witness for the population of twentieth-century shadows, the anonymous dead: all the riders on what Mandelstam in his poem called the Lilac Sleigh. Solzhenitsyn can imagine what pain is like when it happens to strangers. Even more remarkably, he is not disabled by imagining what pain is like when it happens to a
million
strangers—he can think about individuals even when the subject is the obliteration of masses, which makes his the exact reverse of the ideological mentality, which can think only about masses even when the subject is the obliteration of individuals. Camus said it was a peculiarity of our age that the innocent are called upon to justify themselves. Nowhere has this been more true than in Soviet Russia, where the best the condemned innocent have been able to hope for is rehabilitation. But Solzhenitsyn has already managed, at least in part, to bring them back in their rightful role—as prosecutors.

Of the ideological mentality Solzhenitsyn is the complete enemy, dedicated and implacable. Here, perhaps, lies the chief reason for the growing uneasiness about the general drift of his work. Nobody in the left intelligentsia, not even the Marxists, much minds him suggesting that in the Soviet Union the Revolution went sour. But almost everybody, and not always covertly, seems to mind his insistence that the Revolution should never have happened, and that Russia was better off under the Romanovs. In
Dr. Zhivago
Pasternak showed himself awed by the magnitude of historical forces: reviewers sympathized, since being awed by historical forces is a way of saying that what happened should have happened, even though the cost was frightful. Nobody wants to think of horror as sheer waste. Solzhenitsyn says that the Soviet horror was, from the very beginning, sheer waste. Politically this attitude is something of a gift to the Right, since it practically aligns Solzhenitsyn with Winston Churchill. It is no great surprise, then, that on the liberal Left admiration is gradually becoming tinctured with the suspicion that so absolute a fellow might be a bit of a crank.

In
The Great Terror
Robert Conquest valuably widened the field of attention from the purges of 1937–38 to include the trials of the late 1920s—a reorientation which meant that the age of destruction overlapped the golden era of the Soviet Union instead of merely succeeding it, and also meant that while Stalin still got the blame for the Terror, Lenin got the blame for Stalin. But in
The Gulag Archipelago
Solzhenitsyn does a more thorough job even than Conquest of tracing the Terror back to the Revolution itself: he says that the whole court procedure of the typical Soviet show trial was already in existence in 1922, and that the activities of the Cheka from the very beginning provided a comprehensive model for everything the “organs,” under their various acronyms, were to perpetrate in the decades to come. He has no respect for the Revolution even in its most pristine state—in fact he says it never was in a pristine state, since pre-Revolutionary Russia was totally unsuited for any form of socialism whatsoever and no organization which attempted to impose it could escape pollution. It is the overwhelming tendency of Solzhenitsyn's work to suggest that the Russian Revolution should never have happened. He can summon respect for ordinary people who were swept up by their belief in it, but for the revolutionary intelligentsia in all its departments his contempt is absolute. The hopeful young artists of the golden era (see the paragraph beginning “Oh ye bards of the twenties,”
The Gulag Archipelago
I, 9) were, in his view, as culpable as the detested Gorky: Solzhenitsyn's critique of the Soviet Union is a radical critique, not a revisionist one. In condemning him as a class enemy, the regime is scarcely obliged to lie.

(Nevertheless it lies anyway—or perhaps the citizens invent the lies all by themselves. Not much is known of these matters inside the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn is generally just a name. One sometimes forgets that
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
is the only book of his which has ever been published there. A friend of mine just back from Russia tells me that he got into an argument with the director of a metalworkers' sanatorium on the Black Sea. This man was in his early fifties and had fought in World War II. He declared that Solzhenitsyn not only
is
a traitor, but
was
a traitor during the war—that he had been a Vlasov man. Now Solzhenitsyn's understanding of Vlasov is an important element of
The Gulag Archipelago
. But Solzhenitsyn was a Red Army artillery officer who fought
against
Germany, not with it. In view of how this elementary truth can be turned on its head, it's probably wise of Solzhenitsyn to harbour as he does the doubt that the facts, once rediscovered, will spread, like certain brands of margarine, straight from the fridge. There is nothing automatic about the propagation of the truth. As he often points out, not even experience can teach it. The prison camps and execution cells were full of people who were convinced that their own innocence didn't stop all these others being guilty.)

Solzhenitsyn finds it no mystery that the Old Bolsheviks condemned themselves. He resolves the apparent conflict between Koestler's famous thesis in
Darkness at Noon
(Koestler said they cooperated because the Party required their deaths and they had no spiritual resources for disobeying the Party) and Khrushchev's much later but equally famous insistence that they were tortured until they gave up (“Beat, beat, beat . . .”). According to Solzhenitsyn, the Old Bolsheviks were devoid of individuality in the first place, and simply had no private convictions to cling to: certainly they weren't made of the same moral stuff as the engineers they had connived at destroying ten years before, many of whom had preferred to be tortured to death rather than implicate the innocent. In the second place, the Old Bolsheviks had never been as marinated in suffering as they liked to pretend. Koestler was wrong in supposing that torture alone could not have cracked them, and Khrushchev was apparently also wrong in supposing that they needed to be tortured all that hard. Czarist imprisonment was the only kind the Old Bolsheviks had ever known and it was a picnic compared to the kind they themselves had become accustomed to dishing out. Solzhenitsyn sees no tragedy in the Old Bolsheviks. He doesn't talk of them with the unbridled hatred he reserves for the prosecutors Krylenko and Vyshinsky, but there is still no trace of sympathy in his regard. Here again is an example of his disturbing absolutism. He shows inexhaustible understanding of how ordinary people could be terrified into compliance. But for the ideologues trapped in their own system his standards are unwavering—they ought to have chosen death rather than dishonour themselves and their country further. He pays tribute to the Old Bolsheviks who suicided before they could be arrested (Skrypnik, Tomsky, Gamarnik) and to the half dozen who died (“silently but at least not shamefully”—
The Gulag Archipelago
I, 10) under interrogation. He condemns the rest for having wanted to live. They should have been beyond that.

Solzhenitsyn takes a lot upon himself when he says that it was shameful for men not to die. Yet one doesn't feel that his confidence is presumptuous—although if one could, he would be less frightening. I remember that when I first read
The First Circle
the portrait of Stalin seemed inadequate, a caricature. My dissatisfaction, I have since decided—and Solzhenitsyn's writings have helped me decide—was a hangover from the romantic conviction that large events have large men at the centre of them. Tolstoy really did sell Napoleon short in
War and Peace
: Napoleon was a lot more interesting than that. But Stalin in
The First Circle
must surely be close to the reality. The only thing about Stalin on the grand scale was his pettiness—his mediocrity was infinite. Solzhenitsyn convinces us of the truth of this picture by reporting his own travels through Stalin's mind: the Archipelago is the expression of Stalin's personality, endlessly vindictive, murderously boring. Time and again in his major books, Solzhenitsyn makes a sudden investigative jab at Stalin, seemingly still hopeful of finding a flicker of nobility in that homicidal dullard. It never happens. That it could produce Stalin is apparently sufficient reason in itself for condemning the Revolution.

With Solzhenitsyn judgement is not in abeyance. He doesn't say that all of this happened in aid of some inscrutable purpose. He says it happened to no purpose. There is little solace to be taken and not much uplift to be had in the occasional story of noble defiance. First of all, the defiant usually died in darkness, in the way that Philip II denied Holland its martyrs by drowning them in secret. And when Solzhenitsyn somehow manages to find out who they were, he doesn't expect their example to light any torches. There are no eternal acts of faith or undying loves. (The typical love in Solzhenitsyn is between the Love Girl and the Innocent, or that unsatisfactory non-affair at the end of
Cancer Ward
—just a brushing of dazed minds, two strangers sliding past each other. No parts there for Omar Sharif and Julie Christie.) Everything is changed: there is no connection with the way things were.

It should be an elementary point that Solzhenitsyn is a critic of the Soviet Union, not of Russia. Yet even intelligent people seemed to think that there may have been “something in” his expulsion—that he had it coming. (It was edifying to notice how the construction “kicked out” came to be used even by those nominally on his side.) This sentiment has, I think, been intensified by Solzhenitsyn's argument with Sakharov. It has become increasingly common to hint that Solzhenitsyn has perhaps got above himself, that in telling the world's largest country what it ought to do next he is suffering from delusions of grandeur. Yet it seems to me perfectly in order for Solzhenitsyn to feel morally superior to the whole of the Soviet political machine. Its human integrity is not just compromised but fantastic, and he has lived the proof. He has good cause to believe himself Russia personified, and I am more surprised by his humility in this role than by his pride. To the suggestion that he is a mediocre artist with great subject matter, the answer should be: to see that such stuff
is
your subject matter, and then to go on and prove yourself adequate to its treatment—these are in themselves sufficient qualifications for greatness. Solzhenitsyn's forthcoming books (apparently there are to be at least two more volumes of
The Gulag Archipelago
) will, I am convinced, eventually put the matter beyond doubt. But for the present we should be careful not to understand the man too quickly. Above all we need to guard against that belittling tone which wants to call him a reactionary because he has lost faith in dreams.

The New Review
, October 1974; later included in

At the Pillars of Hercules
, 1979

POSTSCRIPT

For its time, the embattled tone of the above piece was not completely inappropriate. Though Stalinism had never got much of a grip on the British intelligentsia, there was still a widespread refusal on the Left to believe that Lenin was a prototypical Stalinist in all but name. Later on the refusal modulated to a mere reluctance, but it is not yet a readiness even now; and thirty years ago you could still buy a fight by wondering aloud if the Cheka had really made a contribution to human progress. I can well remember the young Christopher Hitchens defending the Bolshevik takeover's necessary historical role, while the no longer young Robert Conquest quietly (very quietly: he had a maddening tendency to whisper even then) pointed out that there was nothing historically necessary about a hijack.

In those days I had the luxury of hearing both of them at the same lunch table every week, although they spent more time entertaining the assembled
convivio
than going for each other's throats. Once again, London's sense of community between writers forbade the worst excesses of ideological conviction. But even in the atmosphere of amused tolerance, there was a reputation for frivolity to be earned by anyone daring to suggest that the great social experiments in the East had been lethal from their inception. I'm pleased to say that I earned it. Nowadays, I would like to think, the frivolity looks like simple realism. But here again, London is lucky. In Paris, the battles within the cultivated world left even New York looking like Arcadia. In the works of François Furet and Jean-François Revel, especially of the latter, we can see how hard the few liberal intellectuals had to fight if they were not to be shouted down by the many diehards.
The Gulag Archipelago
consists almost entirely of verifiable facts. In France it was reviewed by the
gauchiste
press as if it were a work of fiction, like
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. When
Le Livre Noir du Communisme
came out in 1997, it received similar treatment. Three decades have made little difference, and bad blood makes it hard for the intellectuals to sit down together. To a lesser but still marked extent, the same applies in New York.

In London, ideology has never mattered that much. It could be said that this is only because ideas have never mattered much at all, but it would not be quite true. The truth, and the saving grace, is that nobody thinks them glamorous. You can't be a star for what you say, only for the way you say it. Far from being driven apart by differing opinions, Hitchens and Conquest were drawn together by their common love of language. The long consequence of their encounters in those years can be enjoyed in the opening pages of Hitchens's little book
Orwell's Victory
(2002), where its author is to be found conceding that Conquest might have had a point about the Bolsheviks all along. But those who never doubted that he did can't expect credit for having been right. What we can expect is to be dismissed for having been
on
the Right. To be a liberal democrat was considered reactionary then, and to have been so then is to be considered reactionary now. People who have abandoned erroneous opinions would be giving up too much if they ceased to regard people who never held them as naive. As Revel pointed out, the Left demands a monopoly of rectification.