The New Yorker August 6, 2001 [for personal use only] LETTER FROM MOSCOW DEEP IN THE WOODS Solzhenitsyn, a new book, and the new Russia. by DAVID REMNICK
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When the convoy finally arrived in Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, who had become the first President of a post-Communist Russia, tried to win over Solzhenitsyn, just as he had tried to win over Andrei Sakharov, in the late eighties. Vyacheslav Kostikov, Yeltsin's former press secretary, wrote in a memoir, "His aides sought to put him in an overbearing frame of mind. He was told: 'Who is this Solzhenitsyn? After all, he is not a classic, not a Leo Tolstoy. And what's more, everyone is tired of him. Well, he suffered under totalitarianism, and, yes, he is an expert on history, but there are thousands more like him! While you, Boris Nikolayevich, are one of a kind.' Yeltsin, however, chose a different tone. The conversation proceeded easily and very frankly, without any attempts to paper over the political differences. They talked for four hours and even had a little vodka."
The meeting may have been friendly, but Solzhenitsyn's critique of Yeltsin, on television and in two short books of political writing—"The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century" (1994) and "Russia in Collapse" (1998)—only intensified. Solzhenitsyn blamed Yeltsin for breaking up the old Union without regard for the interests of the twenty-five million Russians who now found themselves abroad in the former Soviet republics; for economic reforms that "impoverished" the nation; for behaving "like slaves" to the West and selling out Russia's interests to the International Monetary Fund and NATO; for promoting corruption; for failing to establish any real democratic institutions on the grass-roots level. Solzhenitsyn declared that in Russian history there had been three smuty, or "times of troubles": the political upheaval in the seventeenth century that established the Romanov dynasty; the revolutionary year of 1917; and now. Solzhenitsyn was no longer saying the unsayable—most of his opinions were common fare and none were forbidden—but his tone was no less fierce than it had been in "Gulag." By declaring the present, but not, say, the nineteen-thirties, a time of troubles, he seemed to relegate Yeltsin to a ring of Inferno even lower than Stalin's.
In 1998, on Solzhenitsyn's eightieth birthday, Yeltsin still seemed eager to please the writer and awarded him the highest of all state honors, the Order of St. Andrew. Solzhenitsyn turned it down. "In today's conditions, when people are starving and striking just to get their wages, I cannot accept this award," he said. "Maybe in many years' time, when Russia overcomes its insurmountable problems, my sons may be able to accept this award." When Yeltsin left office, on the eve of 2000, Solzhenitsyn was furious that the new President, Vladimir Putin, had granted his predecessor immunity from prosecution. Solzhenitsyn declared that Yeltsin "along with another one or two hundred people must be brought to book."
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AS on Yeltsin and Putin:
Now Solzhenitsyn was saying, "The meetings with Yeltsin and Putin were relatively brief and just once each, so it would be a mistake to make too much of my personal impressions. I watched Yeltsin, though, for ten years from afar, so I can judge him as a historical figure. I feel that Yeltsin permitted an enormous devastation of Russia. One might have imagined that things could not have got worse than the point to which Communism had brought us. It seemed that any effort at all would bring something better. On the contrary. Yeltsin managed to bring Russia even lower. He supported thieves. Our national riches and resources were privatized nearly for free, and even the new mobsters are not asked to pay any rent. The state has become a pauper.
"As for freedom of speech, that's the great achievement of Gorbachev and his policy of glasnost. Yeltsin just did not interfere in this process. As for the attack on the Communist Party, this also began before Yeltsin. From the end of the eighties, many Party functionaries fled their Party positions to join commercial concerns. They fled like cockroaches. So when Yeltsin came to power, the Communist Party no longer existed as a monolith. Yeltsin in his clash with the Supreme Soviet allowed state power to weaken, and then"—in October, 1993—"he rushed to another extreme, firing with tanks on the White House. The rest of the world did not call out loudly enough or reprimand him enough. He was considered a great champion of democracy even while he did this. And then Yeltsin established an autocratic regime. Democracy has not been established in Russia. Democracy has had no time to establish itself."
As for the current President, Solzhenitsyn said, "The first thing to ask is, Who put Putin into power? Yeltsin did it, with the help of [the notorious oligarch Boris] Berezovsky. To analyze this phenomenon of a K.G.B. man in power, you have to analyze how he came into power. If he had come into power as the result of a K.G.B. coup, it would have been one thing, but we had something else. I met Putin only once, and since then I've had no contacts. I got the impression of a businesslike person. . . . During our meeting, I made several suggestions, but he has followed none of them."
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Nearly thirty years ago, it became clear that Solzhenitsyn had a distinctly different opinion of the West than many other dissident thinkers. In speeches at Harvard and in front of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Solzhenitsyn railed against the weakness and the naïveté of the West, attacked those who criticized the war in Vietnam, warned of godlessness and junk culture. Nothing that has happened since—not even the collapse of the Communist regime—has changed his mind about this.
"When the Iron Curtain was still standing, the cheapest fashions still made their way here: tawdry fashions, rock and roll, drugs, popsa—everything cheap, the cheapest possible things. When the Iron Curtain came down, the situation became even more complicated. It wasn't only the manure that came through. There were many Western influences that came in, different qualities, different types of things, and I wouldn't say all of them were negative. But my fellow-countrymen welcomed all of it with an open soul, everything! We thought a period of universal happiness would begin. Gorbachev, for example, and then Yeltsin withdrew our troops from Europe without any conditions. I'm now reading a memoir about how Gorbachev told the West, 'Are you sure you won't expand NATO to the east?' And they answered, 'Oh no, no no.' It never occurred to Gorbachev to get a written document guaranteeing this. He just believed in their word and that was it. That was how we greeted the West. That's how things started, in that spirit. Then we became extraordinarily disillusioned when we began to understand the arrogance, the real policies, of the Western powers."
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