THE FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION
How are we to understand the fall of the Soviet Union in general and, in particular, the role played in it by Alexander Solzhenitsyn?
Here are two possible theses:
1) Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in February 1974, shortly after publication of the Russian language version of the Gulag Archipelago. In 1974, the USA, leader of the Free World, was in the last throes of its humiliating defeat in Vietnam and also of the upsets in its moral view of itself brought about by the Civil Rights movement, Black Power and the ideal of unlimited freedom proposed by the 'hippies'. To Solzhenitsyn it would all have been eerily reminiscent of the condition of the Russian Empire in February 1917. He set about, in conjunction with cold war warriors such as Jesse Helms and Henry Jackson, stiffening the USA's moral backbone. The backbone was stiffened and by the end of the decade Zbigniew Brzezinski was arming conservative Muslim tribesmen in Afghanistan. The Helms/Jackson tendency triumphed with the election of Ronald Reagan and we had the introduction into diplomatic language of the (possibly Solzhenitsyn-influenced) term 'evil empire', the mining of the ports of Nicaragua, the invasion of Panama and the threat to develop military technology to a degree far beyond the capacity of the Soviet Union to compete ('Star Wars'). The Soviet leadership responded by trying to outmanoeuvre the Americans politically with a policy of at least apparent openness and compromise which its rigid, sclerotic structure (described so well by Solzhenitsyn) could not sustain.
2) The ruling class in the Soviet Union, partly because of increased exposure to the West, was realising that its already comfortable lifestyle could become much more comfortable and opulent if only it could rid itself of the ridiculous pretense that it existed to serve the interests of the working class. By convincingly demonstrating the moral rottenness of the foundations of the Soviet system, Solzhenitsyn relieved the apparatchiks of the moral obligation to provide work, education, health services and housing for the great mass of the population, thereby freeing them to devote themselves with even greater assiduity to feathering their own nests. The well-appointed flat could become an ostentatiously luxurious penthouse. With a clear conscience.
Either way it is by no means certain that Solzhenitsyn could derive unmixed pleasure from the success of his efforts. His book The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones is due to be published in English at the end of this year, but it has been available in French since the 1990s. The two millstones are the Soviet Union and the USA, or more generally 'the West'. They are admittedly millstones of unequal weight. His complaints against the USA are largely to do with problems over copyright and royalties which - though we can understand that they are of great interest to him - are of little interest to the innocent reader. But there is nonetheless an increasing awareness that his campaign against Communism was being used by people who were not exactly friends of a hypothetical non-Communist Russia, people whose main concern was the projection of US power through the world. Solzhenitsyn had been brought up on a diet of Soviet anti-US propaganda so he was inclined to see the USA in a favourable light. In the 1970s, his main complaint was that it wasn't tough enough in asserting what he believed were its own values. In the 1980s he largely retired from public view to concentrate on what he regarded - rightly in my view - as his most important work, The Red Wheel. In the 1990s, as the Soviet Union collapsed, he launched into a final battle against precisely the policies that were being adopted under American influence.
His major response to the end of the Soviet Union was published in Russian and French (as La Russie sous l'avalanche) in 1998. It appeared in English (as Russia in Collapse) in an edition published by the American conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2006. It seems to be already out of print.
Here are some interesting extracts (I am using my own translation from the French edition):
'I would never compare [Yegor] Gaidar to Lenin - a question of scale. But they have all the same one thing in common. Both of them behaved like the fanatic who, blinded by his preconceived idea, seizes his scalpel and without the least hesitation begins to cut and cut again into the body of Russia. Six years further on the expression of smug self satisfaction on the face of this politician shows not the slightest shadow of embarrassment, though he has thrown into poverty tens of millions of his compatriots, wrecking their savings and thereby reducing to nothing the foundations of this famous "middle class" which he swore he would create ...
'Privatisation was enacted throughout the country with the same blind madness, the same destructive haste, as the nationalisation of 1917-18, and the collectivisation of 1930 ...
'The industrial complexes of the Soviet era were often so enormous that no-one could think of putting them into the hands of a single owner. All the same, [Anatoly] Chubais's team cut them into twenty or thirty pieces with, as a consequence, the breaking up of unified technological cycles and the paralysis of each, now isolated, part (certain military industries knew the same fate. Paralysed by this process of being dismantled they found themselves partially linked to foreign firms, which had their own considerable interest in the matter, by means of 'joint ventures'. It isn't difficult to see the consequences that will produce for our national defence) ...
'the American people's reputation for generosity - entirely deserved - was extended with no justification to the government at Washington, selfish and calculating as all governments are, and, after the collapse of its Soviet rival, more and more drawn by ambitions of hegemony to control the whole planet ...
'It is the New Russia which has contributed to this transformation of the universal mind according to which, from now on, the military intervention of a great power in no matter what part of the world, is no longer described as an 'aggression' but as an 'effort to restore stability' ...
'In dragging us into the world of international finance, they [the IMF - PB] are dragging us - we who are in such a fragile state - into financial crises that have nothing to do with us and which we could have avoided ...'