Between Two Millstones, Book 2
Editor's Note: RealClearBooks is delighted to publish Daniel J. Mahoney's "Foreword" to Between Two Millstones: Book 2, Exile in America, 1978-1994, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's compelling account of his final sixteen years of exile in the United States. The book is newly available in paperback. In its pages, the Russian Nobel Laureate chronicles his continuing struggle with the voracious "Soviet Dragon" even as he encounters many in the West who defame traditional Russian culture, history, and religion rather than taking aim at the root of the tragedy: Communist ideology. As Mahoney shows, in this volume we witness a thinker and artist of the first rank who bravely stood up to the totalitarian Lie even as new forms of coercive political correctness began to assert themselves throughout the Western world.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did not voluntarily depart for the West in February 1974. He was expelled from the Soviet Union for unleashing that great torrent of truth that was The Gulag Archipelago. That book, one of unparalleled historical and “literary investigation,” did more than any other work in the twentieth century to expose the truth about Communism and to undermine the moral and political legitimacy of one of the most vile regimes in human history. If Solzhenitsyn did not welcome exile, if he felt torn, as always, between the two millstones of the Soviet “Dragon”—as repressive and mendacious as ever—and an uncomprehending and increasingly hostile West, he nonetheless found solitude and happy refuge in his eighteen years in Cavendish, Vermont. It was there that he worked on, and eventually finished, his other great work of historical and literary investigation, The Red Wheel, a momentous ten-volume novel and work of dramatized history, an almost superhuman effort to recover the truth about 1917 and Russia’s descent into the totalitarian quagmire.
After the speeches and political interventions chronicled in Book 1 of Between Two Millstones, culminating in the Harvard Address in June 1978, Solzhenitsyn gradually settled down to the life of a writer-historian, dedicating himself to the peaceful solitude of the literary arts. In Vermont, he found a happiness in free and uninterrupted work—conditions he could only dream of during the years of repression and harassment in the Soviet Union chronicled in The Oak and the Calf, perhaps the greatest of his literary memoirs (and all of them are of the highest quality and interest).
Above all, he found a place to work. He was aided by the remarkable resources of the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California, which provided him with an ample supply of newspapers from St. Petersburg’s revolutionary days, and crucial memoirs and testimonies of old survivors from Russia’s “First Wave” of emigration, those who fled the homeland after the October Revolution of 1917 and the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War. With these abundant resources, the crucial centerpiece of The Red Wheel, the four books of Node III: March 1917, began to take shape. Solzhenitsyn also found a serene and welcome home for his family. His account of his role in the education of his sons, the impressive development of their characters and intellectual talents, their blossoming as young men, is both touching and informative. We see Yermolai’s precocious interest in politics, Ignat’s striking musical gifts, and Stepan’s intense intellectual curiosity. Those traits are evident to this day, together with a deep fidelity to their father’s life, thought, and literary legacy.
The Solzhenitsyn home also had some of the character of a veritable publishing house or literary magazine. Natalia Solzhenitsyn (“Alya” throughout the manuscript) was in every sense her husband’s intellectual partner— his editor, sounding board, research assistant, and wise confidante—even as she reared a family. She loved Russia with the same passion as did her husband. The Solzhenitsyn boys also helped with typesetting and other literary and publishing tasks. Natalia and the young sons truly lived in Vermont, interacting with the broader community. The boys were as American as they were Russian. Natalia Solzhenitsyn was the author’s conduit to the Russian underground, to publishing houses, to the national media, to the political class, and to the local Cavendish and broader Vermont communities. Her strength, energy, talents, and fierce protectiveness were almost preternatural, as described in this and other writings of Solzhenitsyn.
The Solzhenitsyns lived in a community that was both rural and conservative, but increasingly marked by a post-1960s progressivism. Solzhenitsyn amusingly describes educators in New England, like the headmaster Dick (note his ostentatious informality) at East Hill, who was a largely benign figure but totally ignorant of the truth about the Soviet Union (Dick counted Lenin, and even Stalin, among his “progressive” heroes!).
Solzhenitsyn’s serenity was marred by his constant appreciation of “Russian Pain” (the title of chapter 6 of Between Two Millstones). He worried about those administrators (Alik Ginzburg and Sergei Khodorovich) of the Russian Social Fund (which provided vital help to former zeks and their families) who were jailed, harassed, and persecuted by the Soviet authorities. The Solzhenitsyns did everything humanly possible to rally Western governments and public opinion to their defense. Solzhenitsyn also worried about other prisoners of conscience, like Igor Ogurtsov, who languished in prison and exile.
But Solzhenitsyn also saw signs of hope, from the patriotic and Christian historical and spiritual reflections of Dmitri Likhachyov (who’d spent time in the 1920s as a zek on the Solovetsky Islands) to the “village prose” writers who had broken through the suffocating fog of wooden language and ideological clichés to reclaim the spirit of a forgotten Russia, one that had been under systematic assault since 1917. Solzhenitsyn also appreciated, at least initially, Vladimir Maximov’s editorial efforts with Kontinent, an important Russian literary, cultural, and political journal based in Germany that aimed to raise Russian literature—and political and social reflection— from its ailing state. During these more relaxed years of exile, Solzhenitsyn came to reconsider the achievement of Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor of Novy Mir and the publisher, in the fall of 1962, of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He had loved Tvardovsky, as every reader of The Oak and the Calf knows, but lamented his equivocations and saw him, at the end of the day, as too much of a Soviet man. But with growing lucidity and clarity, Solzhenitsyn was coming to appreciate just how much the great man had done to recover authentic Russian literature. His fundamental stance toward Tvardovsky was now decisively one of gratitude.
In his new situation of comparative leisure, Solzhenitsyn continued to turn down most invitations. Completing The Red Wheel was his first priority. But an intelligent and sympathetic journalist at the BBC Russian Service, Janis Sapiets, whom we already met in Book 1 of Between Two Millstones, offered the Russian writer an opportunity to speak directly to the Russian people. That interview, broadcast in February 1979, on the fifth anniversary of Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion, provides a perfect summary of Solzhenitsyn’s principal concerns about the Russian past, present, and future. He was severely critical of newly minted Russian émigrés (from the “Third Wave” of emigration) who never failed to blame Russia, historic Russia, Orthodox Russia, for the terrible crimes of the Bolsheviks (this view would become dominant in the West, too). Solzhenitsyn shared with his Russian listeners his concern for a misconstrued admiration of the reckless “February fever” of February–March 1917, which could destroy, or at least deeply undermine, Russia’s path to an ordered and civilized liberty. Émigré intellectuals, such as Andrei Sinyavsky, Efim Etkind, and Aleksandr Yanov, busied themselves with mendacious efforts to link Solzhenitsyn to fascism, anti-Semitism, and new forms of tyranny. Etkind even called Solzhenitsyn a “Russian Ayatollah,” fantastically identifying him with the clericalist violence and despotism in revolutionary Iran (this is one of the few calumnies to which Solzhenitsyn responded almost immediately: see “The Persian Ruse,” Jerusalem Post, 20 December 1979, 8). The author of The Gulag Archipelago was said to want new camps, new prisons, and a new despotism. These were lies worthy of the Bolsheviks themselves and, alas, had their effect on elite opinion in the United States.
In the interview with Sapiets, as in chapter 6 of Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn would lay out a firm but moderate and manly patriotism that rejected Russian self-hatred and self-abnegation, as well as the fascist, neo-pagan, and neo-Bolshevik temptations. All three of the latter positions falsely identified love of Russia with an immoral accommodation with those who had destroyed her liberty, her intellectual and spiritual life, her property- owning peasantry, and her historic Christian faith. Solzhenitsyn would never make an accommodation with those who systematically tyrannized the bodies and souls of men. As always, Solzhenitsyn’s was a principled via media, opting for what he suggestively calls “a healing, salutary, moderate patriotism.” Alas, he did not find much of it in émigré or homegrown Russian intellectual circles. Facile cosmopolitanism, and hatred of the nation, or an anti-Christian nationalism, were increasingly the order of the day. Many who should have known better confused Solzhenitsyn’s proud, principled, moderate, and self-limiting patriotism with fascism and imperialism. Some of these men had come to hate historic Russia: Sinyavsky shamelessly called Russia, still suffering from the ravages of Communism, a “bitch.” Many of those who defamed Solzhenitsyn were barely concealed Soviet men who shared Communism’s utter disdain for truth, country, and the spiritual dimensions of human existence.
As always, Solzhenitsyn faced the malevolence of two menacing millstones. The expanded edition of August 1914, with its praise of the magnanimous and moderate Pyotr Stolypin and his “middle path” of Russian social development, came under bitter attack even before the book appeared in English. One issue was Solzhenitsyn’s description of Stolypin’s assassin, Dmitri Bogrov, a double agent of the tsarist secret police and leftist armed revolutionaries. Even though Solzhenitsyn drew scrupulously on the account given by Bogrov’s brother (in a book published in Berlin in 1930) of Bogrov’s motives in assassinating Stolypin (motives linked to the continuing humiliation of Russia’s Jewish population), Solzhenitsyn was unfairly and inaccurately accused of demonizing Jews. There was a purge at Munich-based Radio Liberty, where significant excerpts from the book had been read to an audience in the USSR, and the US Senate conducted an ignorant and embarrassing investigation fueled by the calumnies of Solzhenitsyn’s cultured despisers in the Third Wave of emigration. By 1985, Solzhenitsyn was under systematic assault of a new wave of ideological lies, this time put forward by self-described “pluralists” and secularists, some nostalgic for the original purity of the October Revolution. But decent men such as Richard Grenier (in the New York Times) and Norman Podhoretz (in Commentary) came to the defense of Solzhenitsyn and the truth—and the controversy eventually died down. When the augmented edition of August 1914 was finally published by the New York publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1989, there was no discussion of the frenzied and false accusations of just four years before. Two millstones, indeed . . .
Throughout all these accusations and assaults, Solzhenitsyn kept his eye on the prize. He would tell the truth about the Revolutions of 1917, and warn his compatriots about the twin temptations of “February fever” and a turn toward a malevolent, pagan nationalism. And he continued to fight the insinuation that historic Russia, and not Bolshevik ideology, was responsible for the system of violence and lies that characterized the Soviet tragedy. Thus, for Solzhenitsyn, a “no” to the fascists, a “no” to the National Bolsheviks, a “no” to Leninism in all its forms, and a “no” to those who decried Orthodoxy and authentic Russian national consciousness. Following Sergei Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn knew that a great people could not sustain its life on “the national principle alone.” But he refused to conflate Orthodoxy with a soft ecumenism that was “indifferent to their own people’s national identity.”
As in Book 1 of Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn continues his dialogue with the other great opponent of the Soviet regime, the physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. Solzhenitsyn continues to admire Sakharov’s courage and his increasing lucidity about the evils of the ideological regime in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn never doubts Academician Sakharov’s fundamental decency, even though Sakharov had played his own role in spreading misconceptions about Solzhenitsyn’s views on patriotism, Orthodoxy, and the Russian future at the time of the controversy over 1974’s Letter to the Soviet Leaders. Solzhenitsyn could not and did not share Sakharov’s unalloyed faith in technology and “technical progress,” or his misplaced confidence in “supranational world government,” an invitation, in Solzhenitsyn’s view, to new forms of despotism and an accompanying erosion of the national and spiritual traditions and principles that inform a truly self-respecting and self-governing people. Sakharov, for all his courage, decency, and contempt for totalitarian tyranny, had little or no concept of Russia as a nation to which one could be dedicated in the moderate, and salutary, ways Solzhenitsyn proposed.
Solzhenitsyn believed human rights, precious as they were, had to be accompanied always by a commensurate respect for perennial human obligations. For his part, Sakharov treated “human rights” as an end in itself, and privileged the “right to emigrate” above all. He loved freedom and human dignity but, in Solzhenitsyn’s view, did not truly “feel Russian pain.” The two men, Solzhenitsyn writes, were of the same age, fought the same evil system, and were vilified by the same baying propaganda machine. They both preferred peaceful political change to armed revolution. For all their differences—and they were very significant, indeed—they respected, even admired each other. But what divided them, in the end, was Russia itself.
Unfortunately, Solzhenitsyn’s principal biographer in the English-speaking world belonged spiritually to Sakharov’s sphere: Michael Scammell. He was a liberal anti-Communist who could see no limitations in Enlightenment principles (or the whole edifice of “Progress”). He was hostile to almost every word of Solzhenitsyn’s after his arrival in the West in 1974, and approached the beautiful meditations and reflections in From Under the Rubble —a noble and deeply thoughtful, Christian, anti-totalitarian set of essays edited by Solzhenitsyn—with suspicion and scorn. Scammell was tone-deaf to nearly everything Solzhenitsyn had to say except for, importantly, their shared opposition to Communist totalitarianism. In his hands, a friend of the West became an uncritical enemy of the West (which Scammell identified rather dogmatically with Western secularist liberalism). To be sure, Scammell’s book brought together a great deal of biographical information unavailable to non- Russian readers at the time it was published. For that it remains valuable. But this contentious biographer unfortunately set the tone, for a decade and a half or more, for the American and British reception of Solzhenitsyn’s work. And Scammell’s biography, not without its merits, was falsely praised by many reviewers for a “balance” that was in fact sorely lacking.
But there are good men to be noted: Harry T. Willetts, the slow but meticulously faithful translator of Solzhenitsyn’s books; Ed Ericson, who worked with Solzhenitsyn to abridge the Archipelago (his visit to Cavendish in 1983 is charmingly related in this work); Claude Durand and Georges Nivat in France, the first an outstanding publisher of Solzhenitsyn’s work, the second a thoughtful and judicious interpreter of his writings; trusted and talented Slavists and interpreters of Solzhenitsyn’s work, such as Alexis Klimoff and Michael Nicholson; journalistic admirers of Solzhenitsyn’s life and work, such as Bernard Levin and Malcolm Muggeridge, who conducted insightful interviews with Solzhenitsyn when he came to London to receive the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. (The lecture on that occasion is Solzhenitsyn’s most thoughtful, comprehensive, and measured account of his religious and spiritual convictions, showing that, after his years in prison and the camps, Solzhenitsyn became—and remained—a philosophically minded Christian who freely affirmed Divine Providence, human free will, the age-old drama of good and evil in the human soul, and the powerful workings of the natural moral conscience on everyone who is open to the spiritual resources inherent in the human heart.)
I particularly recommend that readers ponder the superb chapter on “Around Three Islands” where Solzhenitsyn recounts his visits to Japan (which had, admirably, turned from war and tyranny to national self-limitation), and where Solzhenitsyn experiences an old and dignified, if rather alien, culture; and to Taiwan, or Free China, whose courage and resistance to Communist despotism won Solzhenitsyn’s approbation. Last but not least, there is an account of his visit to the United Kingdom, where he met Prince Philip (who shared his broad views on the world) and Prince Charles and his young bride Diana (Solzhenitsyn was charmed by both); was interviewed by Levin and Muggeridge (interviews still well worth reading today); and had a cordial and welcome meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This chapter is both a literary tour de force and an important chronicle of the dénouement of the Cold War.
Eventually, Solzhenitsyn would be published in a Soviet Union undergoing glasnost and perestroika. As the enemy of Sovietism par excellence, he was the last major anti-Communist writer to appear in print at home when, finally, The Gulag Archipelago and the Nobel Lecture saw the light of day in 1990. This was a famous victory, followed by an even more remarkable one: the tearing down of the statue of Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, at Lubyanka Square. Solzhenitsyn waited eagerly for the liberation of his country from Communist lies and tyranny even as a new “Time of Troubles” emerged, marked by an unrepentant Communist oligarchy, mass corruption, the impoverishment of old pensioners, unprecedented levels of bureaucratization, and an intellectual elite that, as a whole, sneered at Orthodoxy and self-limitation and flirted with the worst nihilistic currents of Western culture. In the fall of 1993, Solzhenitsyn bid farewell to friends in Europe, denouncing ideological revolution in the French Vendée; repeating and renewing the themes of the Harvard Address—in a softer, more hopeful tone—at the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein; and meeting, on 15 October 1993, Pope John Paul II, his great spiritual ally in defending the essential connection between Truth and liberty, and assailing the totalitarian Lie. Solzhenitsyn’s account of that visit with the pope is brief and poignant.
In America, Solzhenitsyn had a more troubled farewell. There, he had never truly succeeded in persuading elites that Russia was the first and principal victim of Bolshevism, an anti-human ideology that targeted the whole of humanity. Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes fame hounded him with the same old, tired, mendacious clichés (are you a fascist? a monarchist? an anti-Semite?). But Paul Klebnikov at Forbes, the business journal, conducted an informed, intelligent, and sympathetic interview with Solzhenitsyn that redeemed Wallace’s lamentable display. Klebnikov was writing a thesis on the great Stolypin and shared Solzhenitsyn’s vision for a strong, free, decent, and self-limiting Russia. In that interview, Solzhenitsyn thus was able to say a proper farewell and to speak his mind openly, without the usual distortions and misunderstandings.
In May 1994, Solzhenitsyn returned to post-Communist Russia. This was a time of new burdens and challenges, to be conveyed in the next set of memoirs: Another Time, Another Burden. The story, fraught with significance, continues . . .
Daniel J. Mahoney
Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship
Assumption College
Worcester, MA 2 April 2020
Daniel J. Mahoney is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus at Assumption University. He has written widely on French politics and political thought and has also written extensively on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the moral grounds of opposition to totalitarianism. His latest books are The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation and Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul: Essays on Pierre Manent and Roger Scruton.
