Revisiting Solzhenitsyn.

• Author: Teichmann, Max
• Pages: 51(5)

This article is based upon a book entitled A World Split Apart, which was originally an address given at Harvard University in 1978. Within a few years most of many books, lectures and pamphlets by Solzhenitsyn have ended up hidden in libraries and archives, and to such effect, that most people are unaware of the existence of many of them. Solzhenitsyn has been virtually silenced and isolated in the new mafia-style Russia, as he was silenced and locked up under the Communists. Our Western cognoscenti welcomed him with rapture, then came to damn him with faint praise, and finally spoke as though he were dead. He is 84. But the messages in his later writings are as mordant and as farsighted as anything else on offer.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn followed an intellectual path very similar to that of many Russian thinkers--even to this present day. Living under regimes ranging from the intrusive and censorious, to bloody despotisms of which those of Lenin and Stalin were the most lethal and destructive, they dreamed of freedom, and of a society more like those in the West.

Some wished to retain the best parts of Russian society--others saw the most desirable future as a wholehearted immersion in Europe, and its liberal democratic and, if necessary, capitalist values and organisations. But whatever their preferences, they had no choice while living under absolutists and dictators. So, many made their way to the West, seeking a different life, the chance to breathe; others, like Solzhenitsyn, were driven out of Russia.

But, time and time again, the exiles were to become disillusioned, even shocked, as they began to separate idealisation and wishful thinking from reality--some finding the new liberalism in the West more like nihilism--a stage through which Russian intellectuals had passed much earlier and the democracy to be really plutocracy or corporatism; and freedom of thought in the West was discovered to be circumscribed by money, fashion and political correctness. The Western intelligentsia, as well as Western politicians, had become careerists and materialists, alienated from their own roots, denying or devaluing their own origins, and the achievements of their forbears.

So Solzhenitsyn, for one, redirected his gaze to Russia, and planned for a new society, which would combine the best of East and West. He returned to Russia, only to be disappointed yet again. His critiques of post-communist Russia have been biting and unacceptable to the newly...