Solzhenitsyn's Return

Stripped of his citizenship and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 for his sprawling, multivolume Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) became a symbol of artistic and political dissidence in the last years of the Cold War. After two decades of exile, he announced his intention to return to Russia in early 1994. He did not, however, reveal the date of his arrival or his route, preferring to keep everyone in suspense. The tactic worked. On 20 May, rumors flared that the Nobel laureate was about to land at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. Reporters descended on an incoming flight, but found no Solzhenitsyn. His arrival came a week later and five thousand miles east, in Vladivostok via Magadan, the hub of the Far East Gulag system, where the author stopped to kiss the earth and mourn his fellow victims.

From Vladivostok, Solzhenitsyn set off by train to Moscow, turning down VIP treatment along the way—including prestigious hotel suites and a set of luxury train cars sent from the capital—in favor of humbler accommodations. His two-month journey westward—“one of the most remarkable storylines in contemporary public relations,” according to Literaturnaia gazeta—would not only symbolically recuperate his own trip to the prison camps, but also afford several opportunities to speak with, and to, the people. He listened to widespread grievances about economic instability and gave lectures throughout the country on “How We Must Rebuild Russia,” the title of his 1990 pamphlet, which advocated a return to strong central rule with decision-making devolved onto local administrations in the form of resurrected pre-revolutionary administrative units called zemstva.

Solzhenitsyn’s conservative, monarchist—even archaist—rhetoric was out of step with the times. But the Yeltsin administration welcomed him with open arms, despite his insistence that Russia’s fledgling democracy was illusory, a game of political showmanship played at the people’s expense. When he was invited to address the State Duma in October, Solzhenitsyn did not spare Yeltsin or anyone else, for that matter. His increasingly xenophobic vision for Russia included a resurrection not only of zemstvo, but also the “Zemskie sobory [that] saved Russia in the seventeenth century, during the Time of Troubles[,] by organizing militias and expelling foreigners, cleansing Moscow and founding a strong state.”

The Duma address was, in historian Ben McVicker’s words, an “unmitigated disaster” for Solzhenitsyn. It did more to undermine his moral authority and damage his reputation among the Russian intelligentsia—and the Russian people more broadly—than anything the KGB had been able to cook up over the previous twenty years. “We awaited the great writer’s words,” wrote Alla Gerber, deputy from the People’s Choice Party, but “I felt like crying after his speech.” She continued, “We felt hurt, ashamed, sad,” and “bade farewell to our Solzhenitsyn.”

Undeterred by the widespread condemnation, Solzhenitsyn still felt his vision for Russia had to be shared. He convinced ORT, Boris Berezovsky’s television network, to give him a prime-time spot for his pessimistic “Meetings with Solzhenitsyn,” in which interviews were little more than occasions for the author to harangue his guests and audience about the moral decay of Russia in the 1990s. “Solzhenitsyn came here with the clear intention of playing the role of a moralist,” wrote Yuri Afanasiev, then rector of The Russian State University for the Humanities. “But with each passing day, his greatness is melting.”

The author’s authoritarian rhetoric, however, would find new favor in the next decade, when he struck up an unlikely friendship with the new president. Solzhenitsyn’s rapprochement with Putin’s Russia culminated in 2006, when his semi-autobiographical novel In the First Circle (1968) was adapted into a lavishly advertised mini-series, aired commercial-free on the government-controlled channel Rossiia. The same year, he accepted the State Prize of the Russian Federation personally from Putin, though he had refused similar prizes from his two predecessors. The spectacle of the icon of Gulag suffering decorated by a former KGB officer fully alienated Solzhenitsyn from the liberal intelligentsia that had once been the basis of his support. It also helped legitimize Putin’s ascent to power.