Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals. Alexis Klimoff translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1991.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century. Yermolai Solzhenitsyn translation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

Born a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, Orthodox-Christian Russian patriot Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn lived to see the much-welcomed demise of that tyranny. By 1990, when he published this Rebuilding Russia in his own beloved language, he saw that “Time has run out for communism,” although “its concrete edifice has not yet crumbled.” Russians therefore “must take care not to be crushed beneath its rubble instead of gaining liberty.” The tyrants had used human blood as mortar; “we have lost a full third of our population” in “labored pursuit of a purblind and malignant Marxist-Leninist utopia,” a body count including those killed in “the ineptly, almost suicidally waged ‘Patriotic War'” against Nazi invaders. With this physical devastation, a moral-political crisis has ensued; “a helplessless bred of the absence of rights permeates the entire country,” as “we cling to only one thing: that we not be deprived of unlimited drunkenness.”

Not quite one, only, however: “Human beings are so constituted that we can put up with such ruination and madness even when they last a lifetime, but God forbid that anyone should dare to offend or slight our nationality!” “Such is man: nothing has the capacity to convince us that our hunger, our poverty, our early deaths, the degeneration of our children—that any of these misfortunes can take precedence over national pride.” To begin reconstruction of Russia under a new and better regime, Russians need less to feel their nationhood than to think about it, to make it (as Marxists would say) conscious, thoughtful. Far from the dogmatic nationalist his enemies have called him, Solzhenitsyn wanted Russians to deliberate with him about what it means to be Russian.

“What is Russia?” The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics “will break up whatever we do.” Much of it has consisted of non-Russian peoples gathered under that regime, an ideological rather than a national construct. Russians should declare “loudly, clearly, and without delay” the independence of eleven of the Soviet ‘republics’: Moldavia (“if it feels drawn to Romania”) along with those in the Baltic area, in Transcaucasia, and in Central Asia (except Kazakhstan, which has a substantial Russian population). Without these peoples, who long for self-government according to the ethoi of their own nationalities, there would remain “an entity that might be called Rus,” consisting of “Little Russians” (Ukrainians), “Great Russians,” and Belorussians. Since those Russian peoples live in areas home to dozens of other nationalities and ethnic groups, “a fruitful commonwealth of nations,” a “Russian Union,” will require Russians to “marshal all the resources of our hearts and minds to the task,” in part by “affirming the integrity of each culture and the preservation of each language.” In his own way, Solzhenitsyn is a ‘multiculturalist.’

The American regime initially founded its ‘multicultural’ regime on natural rights; the Bolsheviks founded their regime on Marxism-Leninism. What does Solzhenitsyn offer as the foundation of a new Russian regime?

He addresses each Russian group in turn. To his fellow ‘Great Russians,’ he warns that “we don’t have the strength,” economic or moral, to sustain the existing, collapsing empire, “and it is just as well.” Unfortunately, “the awakening Russian national self-awareness,” no longer narcotized by Communist ideology, “has to a large extent been unable to free itself of great-power thinking and of imperial delusions,” continuing to take pride in a ‘superpower’ status that it is losing. Against this, Solzhenitsyn appeals to the example of Russia’s rival in the war that began to reveal the decline of the Czarist regime—Japan, which found “a way to be reconciled with its situation, renouncing its sense of international mission and the pursuit of tempting political ventures,” gaining prosperity in return. As Solzhenitsyn must know, Japan did this with the aid of a powerful American ‘prompting’ in the person of the American general, Douglas MacArthur, backed up by his occupying troops. Russians haven’t been conquered; they will need to write their own new constitution, then live by it. To do this, Solzhenitsyn would redirect Russian pride away from imperialism and toward the preservation and enhancement of Russianness, “clarity of what remains of our spirit,” a “precious inner development” that alone can reverse Russians’ harrowing demographic decline. “‘Taking pride’ is not what we need to do, nor should we be attempting to impose ourselves on the lives of others. We must rather, grasp the reality of the acute and debilitating illnesses that is affecting our people, and pray to God that He grant us recovery, along with the wisdom to achieve it.” Christianity in the form of Russian Orthodoxy would then replace atheism in the form of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.

To Ukrainians and Belorussians, he recalls that “our people came to be divided into three branches by the terrible calamity of the Mongol invasion, and by Polish colonization,” but originally “we all sprang from precious Kiev,” where “we received the light of Christianity.” It should be noted that the Russians originated in Scandinavia—probably from Viking stock, which would explain a certain battle-readiness as well as the incidence of red hair in the population (not unlike the Irish). It is also noteworthy that Kievan Rus didn’t extend very far east, not even to the Volga River. Nonetheless, “the Muscovite state” was “created by the same people who made up Kievan Rus,” and the Rus people who eventually fell under Polish and Lithuanian rule to the west “resisted Polonization and conversion to Catholicism.” That is, they maintained not only their ethnic but their spiritual identity.

This notwithstanding, Solzhenitsyn acknowledges that many Ukrainians or ‘Little Russians’ no longer feel any strong allegiance to their ‘Great-Russian’ brethren. What to do? Invite them to join the Russian Union, but do not force them in. Each locality within Ukraine should be allowed to vote themselves in or out. For himself, Solzhenitsyn exhorts them to come in: “Brothers! We have no need of this cruel partition. The very idea comes from the darkening of minds brought on by the communist years. Together, we have borne the suffering of the Soviet period, together we have tumbled into this pit, and together, too, we shall find our way out.” Insofar as Ukrainian Russians and Belorussians have indeed developed “cultures” distinct from that of ‘Great Russians,’ those cultures should enjoy “free manifestation,” “not only on their two territories but among the Great Russians as well.” Parallel schools should be established, with children attending in accordance with “the parents’ choice.” As for the dozens of smaller nationalities and ethnic groups, to grant sovereignty to each would lead to chaos, but they could find political representation in a Council of Nationalities in the Russian Union—”a forum in which event the smallest of national groups can have its voice heard.”

Once paths to separation of most major nations in the Soviet empire and the consensual union of Russians have been established, Russians must begin their inner reconstitution as a well-ordered nation. Materially, “a patriot and a true statesman” will eliminate such unnecessary expenses as aid to “the tyrannical regimes we have implanted the world over,” the manufacture of offensive weapons, the ‘space race,’ subsidies to Eastern European countries, and the Communist party and state bureaucracies. Above all, “our people must urgently be made aware of the meaning of work, after half a century when no one could see any advantage to putting forth an effort,” while recognizing that “Nature, disdained so ungratefully by us, is taking its revenge” by the pollution of Russian earth, water, and air by radioactive and other poisonous materials. “On top of all this,” Russians “must now prepare to resettle those compatriots who are losing their places of residence” in lands that will free themselves of the imperial grip.

Morally, “a public admission by the Party of its guilt, its crimes, and its helplessness would at least be the first step toward alleviating the oppressiveness of our moral atmosphere.” The political corollary to this moral statement would be the dismantling of the KGB. But political reform must be preceded by social reform. “There can be no independent citizen without private property”; lands now ‘owned’ by the Communist state must be leased or sold to individual Russians or Russian families (not to corporations and not to foreigners). Such privately-owned lands will easily feed the country, as indeed the few private plots permitted under the Communist regime had done. Small businesses, anti-monopoly and anti-usury laws, environmental laws, regulated foreign investment, and stable prices all will underwrite a decentralized governmental system, featuring “perhaps forty centers of vitality and illumination throughout the breadth of the land.” “The road back to health must begin at the grassroots”; Solzhenitsyn’s stays in Switzerland and rural Vermont, with their responsible local governing authorities, reminded him of Russia’s own practice of village self-government dating back to the Middle Ages. These governments and the small-scale economic structures that enable them to flourish, will require revival of “normal families,” which “have virtually ceased to exist in our country” because women were forced into the workplace and men lacked salaries sufficient to support a household. Further, underpaid local schoolteachers were required to teach “ideological gibberish” to the children. “All changes and all efforts to salvage true knowledge must begin with revamping the curricula at the teachers’ colleges.” As for the overall culture, the Soviet regime “gave our country superb protection against all the positive features of the West,” such as civil liberties, respect for the individual, and civil-social organizing, but it “permitted the continuous seepage of liquid manure,” that is, “the self-indulgent and squalid ‘popular mass culture” “mindlessly ape[d]” by Russian youth.

If Russians address these crucial matters in a measured and prudent way, they can avoid “repeat[ing] the chaos” of February 1917, which led to the ruinous Bolshevik Revolution in October. “A decisive change in regime calls for thoughtfulness and a sense of responsibility”—exactly what Russian intellectuals and politicians generally lacked during and in the years preceding the Great War. “There is no guarantee whatever that the new leaders now coming to the fore will immediately prove to be far-sighted and sober-minded.” Nonetheless—and this is the monumental risk Solzhenitsyn judges Russians must take to avoid such chaos and resultant tyranny, this time—Russians will need a “strong central authority” to undertake the transition to a genuinely federal and republican Russia at some time in the future. An immediate democratic-republican revolution will not work under current conditions of economic impoverishment, spiritual desolation, and political inexperience. “Beyond upholding its rights, mankind must defend its soul, freeing it for reflection and feeling.” Mankind cannot do that collectively, but only nation-by-nation and indeed village-by-village, family-by-family. “If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development: a tree with a rotten core cannot stand.” “That is why the destruction of our souls over three-quarters of a century is the most terrifying thing of all,” a destruction planned, carried out, and perpetuated by “the corrupt ruling class,” shamelessly hanging on to positions of power in government, business, and the universities. “West Germany was suffused with the feeling of repentance before the coming of their economic boom. But in our country no one has even begun to repent” Even the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy partakes in the corruption, unable thus far event to reform itself, let alone to undertake the moral reformation of Russians. Russians can only look to themselves, under God, in a spirit of “conscious self-limitation,” making a virtue out of material and political necessity.

As a writer, Solzhenitsyn can assist in one area to which he can indeed limit himself, in adherence to his own advice. “Before the [Bolshevik] Revolution, the bulk of our people had no experience with political concepts, and the ideas that were pounded into our heads by propaganda in the subsequent seventy years served only to cloud our minds. But not what our country has begun moving in the direction of real political life, and when the forms of the government-to-be are already being discussed, it is useful to focus on the precise meaning of some terms in order to prevent possible mistakes.” A writer can attend to his nation’s language, and Solzhenitsyn does that.

To talk sensibly of regimes, of governmental forms, he recurs first to Spengler and to Montesquieu, both of whom emphasized the need to fit the regime to the physical size of the country, its topography, history, traditions, and ethos. “The task is to set in place a structure that will lead to a flourishing of this people rather than to its decline and degeneration” (and not to worry so much about the flourishing of ‘that‘ people somewhere else, which has a very different territory, history, tradition, and ethos, and thus quite likely a different regime or variation of the same kind of regime suited to Russia). Solzhenitsyn cites Aristotle’s tripartite regime classification (rule of the one, the few, the many), noting that each type can have a good or bad version, and that the type chosen will survive only if prudent statesmen choose carefully. “Many new countries have in recent years suffered a fiasco just after introducing democracy; yet, despite such evidence, this same period has seen an elevation of democracy from a particular state structure into a sort of universal principle of human existence, almost a cult.” But democracy, whether defined politically as popular sovereignty or civil-socially (as by Tocqueville) to mean social egalitarianism, does not guarantee liberty. To be just, democracy needs individual freedom and a government of laws, what one of the 1917 Constitutional Democrats called “a certain level of political discipline among the populace,” “precisely what we lacked in 1917,” and what “one fears that there is even less of,” in the Russia of 1990.

Therefore, if republicanism is to be introduced gradually to Russia, to Russians as they are, statesmen must institute well-defined electoral procedures—procedures that do not merely express the popular will in direct elections (“in a country as huge as ours,” direct election of representatives can only means that voters won’t know the people they vote for), but also (as Madison famously wrote) refine and enlarge the public views. Once lost, self-government is hard to recover. “European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force,” increasingly replaced by “the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests.” Unlike such Central European thinkers as Adam Michnik and Vacláv Havel, Solzhenitsyn doesn’t hope or expect that either elections or the political parties competing in them aim at “the search for truth.” More, even in democratic regimes the parties tend toward oligarchy, whether of party leaders or of administrative agencies with no enforceable responsibility to the people they rule. Political parties and other civil associations should “exist freely, propounding ay views and issuing publications at their own expense,” as long as their records are “open to public inspection,” are “registered”—as lobbyists are, in the United States— and make their “programs” public. No political parties could legally interfere in the workplace, in the service sector, or in the schools. Elected party candidates would be required to suspend their party membership for the duration of their term in office.

In many ways the zemstvo—a territory organized for self-government—serves as the centerpiece of Solzhenitsyn’s institutional structure. A zemstvo would exist on several levels of government, measured by size: a local unit (consisting of a mid-sized municipality, a district in a big city, or a group of villages); a large city; a region; and finally an all-Russian body, the All-Zemstvo Assembly. Western readers will recognize in such a system the embodiment of the principle of subsidiarity. “For us who have completely lost touch with genuine self-government, the task will be to assimilate this sequence step by step, starting from the bottom,” a sequence “useful for many in the population to acquire political skills.” Candidates for seats in the local zemstvo “normally will be well known to the voters,” and elections campaigns would consist only of the candidates’ programs, biographies, and “views.” Election to a larger zemstvo would be determined by a vote by the zemstvos within its territory. Bureaucracies would be curbed, although Solzhenitsyn gives no details on how to do it; he seems to envision a zemstvo veto on bureaucratic regulations. Meanwhile, a powerful head of state would be elected directly by national vote from a list of nominees provided by the All-Zemstvo Assembly. There would also be a second house of the legislature, its 200-250 members consisting of representatives of various “estates’ (soslovia)—persons with a common occupation, elected by members of each designated estate. This body could veto presidential candidates proposed by the All-Zemstvo Assembly and to interdict laws and actions proposed by a government institution or agency, but this would need to be a unanimous decision by the members. This means that the estates assembly would at most exercise a certain moral authority, inasmuch as it is nearly inconceivable that a 200-member body would deliver a unanimous vote on any matter.

Solzhenitsyn deliberately leaves his proposals incomplete, acknowledging that he has said nothing about the military or the courts. He wants Russians to act for themselves. “Building a rational and just state is a task of surpassing difficulty, and the goal can only be approached slowly by means of successive approximations and small, cautious steps.” Caution makes sense, as Solzhenitsyn shows in another brief and readable book, The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century, which amounts to a short history of Russia since the beginning of the Romanov Dynasty. That history illustrates “the numerous blunders in our past” from which “our plight today in many ways stems.” If initially Russians must work with the handicap of unfamiliarity with civic life, a history can at least give them some vicarious experience of what ruling entails—from the viewpoint of rulers, not only of the ruled (a viewpoint with which they are much too familiar).

The very young aristocrat Mikhail Romanov ascended to the Russian throne in 1613, elected by the Zemsky Sobor during the first of three ‘Times of Troubles’ identified by Solzhenitsyn—the others being the collapse of the czarist and Communist regimes in 1917 and 1991, respectively. An assembly organized around three social groups—aristocrats and top bureaucrats; Orthodox clergy; commoners (of course excluding the vast peasantry)—the Zemsky Sobor had been founded some three generations earlier, in 1549, by Ivan IV, a couple of years after his marriage to a Romanov. When Tsaritsa Anastasia died under suspicious circumstances in 1560, Ivan went on a rampage against the aristocrats, whom he supposed had poisoned her (hence “Ivan the Terrible”). When Ivan’s dynastic line ended with a childless czar, in 1598 the Zemsky Sobor elected Boris Godunov, the last Rurikid czar’s brother-in-law, he moved to ruin the Romanovs, who had contested his election. This succession crisis occurred during the desperate Polish-Muscovite War; as in 1917, foreign and domestic crises intersected, although ‘intersected’ is a painfully abstract term for describing such a crisis of blood and honor.

Solzhenitsyn takes a political lesson from this crisis, beyond an account of dynastic struggle over the monarchy. Citing historian Andrei Platonov, he writes that “the tortuous and enervative Time of Troubles brought also a beneficent change to the political outlook of the Russian people; even with no Tsar, with Russian no longer his ‘estate’ and its people no longer his ‘servants’ and ‘serfs,’ the State must not collapse, but must be salvaged and shaped by the people themselves.” Local authorities prospered and took charge of their own communities, linking themselves with one another to form a “council of the all the land.” “This testimony to the Russian people’s organizational abilities provides instructive examples for us, the descendants.” “Thus arose the zemstzo.” Solzhenitsyn adds, heuristically and patriotically, that “this entire system of State was not created under any Western influence, and by no means amounted to an imitative structure.”

It didn’t last. Mikhail Romanov’s son, Alexei, began to replace the zemstvo rule with bureaucracy. Although he won his war against Poland, recovering lands lost in the previous generation, Czar Alexei contracted the notion that Russia would need to modernize or Westernize the country, which project included a thus-far critical weakening of the Orthodox Church. After his son by his second marriage, Peter, won his own dynastic fight in 1682, Russia embarked on a thoroughgoing effort to ‘modernize.’ “Peter I was a man of mediocre, if not savage, mind. He could not grasp that one cannot transfer specific results of Western culture and civilization without the psychological atmosphere in which these results had ripened.” Russia did indeed require Western science and technology for survival in the modern world, Solzhenitsyn concedes, “but not at the cost of stamping out (in quite a Bolshevik fashion and with many excesses) her sense of history, her people’s beliefs, soul, and customs, for the sake of accelerated industrial development and military might.” And not only for technological prowess: Peter ‘the Great’ greatly centralized the Russian state, making it into a modern state with himself, an ‘absolute’ monarch, at its head, in the process destroying the Zemsky Sobor because it stood as a barrier to both the administrative structure of statism and the regime power of absolute monarchy. He also finished the task his father had begun, “bridl[ing] the Orthodox Church, [breaking] its spine.” And in a 1714 decree, he established gentry primogeniture and “turned the peasants into the direct property of landowners,” who in turn were firmly subordinated to himself, having been deprived of the assembly in which they had exerted some governing influence in Russia as a whole. Peter thus made himself not a reformer but a revolutionary, one who built up the state with these policies straight out of Machiavelli, adding to them the equally Machiavellian policy of attempting to unite the nation by embroiling it in foreign wars.

“Pausing at the end of the eighteenth century, one cannot but marvel at the string of errors committed by our rulers, at their concentration on matters superfluous to the life of the people.” A policy of offensive war and territorial expansion—imperialism—replaced the only right kind of war against the Western powers, defensive war. “Unfortunately for us, this mindset persisted long into the nineteenth century,” as Alexander I needlessly provoked Napoleon’s invasion, then, after devastating sacrifices, won that war only to return to ‘The Great Game’ of imperial meddling. At home, even the liberation of the serfs in 1861 granted only personal freedom, not the right to own land and the fruits of the peasant’s work on that land—the kind of liberty that makes personal freedom sustainable. As in the 1990s, the people were thrown into a market economy without the material resources or (above all) the moral and mental preparation for the rigors of market competition. Then as now (that is, the 1990s), usurers and speculators took charge. Solzhenitsyn cites the novelist and short story writer Gleb Uspensky, who understood that peasant “rule of the land” was indispensable to giving “our people patience, humility, strength, and youth; take it away and there is no people, no national world view, only a spiritual void” because “rule of the land held the peasant in obedience, developed in him a strong family and social discipline, kept him from pernicious heresies; the despotic rule of the earth-mother went together with her ‘love’ for the peasant, thus easing his labor and making it the prevalent task of life,” protecting him from the personal and exploitive rule of oligarchs. Because land is impersonal, its “rule” caused no resentment; the land is what it is, and those who live on it learn to work it or starve—a point not unfamiliar to readers of the New Testament.

One might add that the modern West, especially in Europe, garnered its power precisely from the fact that its philosophers, beginning with Machiavelli, but going along through Bacon, Descartes, and their followers, resented and rebelled against the personal but beneficent rule of the Creator-God and the impersonal ‘despotism’ of nature. For these forms of rule they substituted the human rule of the scientists, absolute monarchs in control of nationalized churches, and both aristocrats and smart commoners who made themselves into financial and industrial oligarchs. The American Founders may be said to have countered or at least moderated this project by the political revolution of federal republicanism founded upon nature—natural rights—and religious liberty. Although Solzhenitsyn sees that Russia cannot and indeed should not imitate America, he seeks a similar result. But on Russian terms, and in the (perhaps very) long run.

Oligarchs’ rule of Russian peasants, who unlike American yeoman farmers didn’t rule their own land, economically or politically, “flowed organically into a revolutionary mindset and rebellion” by the beginning of the twentieth century, as did the monarchy’s continued imperial, ‘great-power’ ambitions. (“Even Dostoevsky, despite his incomparable acumen, failed to resist this subjugating influence: the dream of Constantinople, ‘the East will bring salvation to the West.'”) One of the few Romanov czars Solzhenitsyn praises, Alexander III, did understand “the ruinous effect of both Russia’s service to the interests of others and her pursuit of new conquests,” rightly preferring to focus his rule “on the inner health of the nation.” But even he “failed to detect the worrisome deadening of the Orthodox Church,” the one institution that might have reset the nation’s moral compass. His successors went back to the same policies of imperial expansion and ill-judged foreign alliances that set the nation on the course for ruin in the second ‘Time of Troubles’ in 1917.

Solzhenitsyn needs to show that the people could and did do better than the czars, and not only in the distant past. He finds this demonstration (somewhat paradoxically) in one great effort of Russian expansion, the settlement of Siberia. There, the Russian people enjoyed “complete freedom for private economic activity,” as well as “freedom to select both occupation and place of residence.” And in Russia generally, the bureaucracy was opened to commoners of proven ability, an “independent and open courts system” was established, and the revived zemstvos provided “free, high-quality medical care to the population.” Briefly, between 1906 and the Great War, Russia even had “a true parliament and multi-party system (for both of which we pine today as a novel achievement).”

For reasons detailed in his novel, March 1917, the misjudgments of Czar Nicholas II, the follies of liberal politicians, and the pressures of the war enabled “the defeat of Russia by the Bolsheviks.” (In a rare display of injustice, Solzhenitsyn cynically remarks that this revolution “was quite advantageous for the Allies,” as “they would not have to share with Russia the spoils of victory.”) As for the new regime itself, its mass-murderous rage at its ‘class enemies,’ its initial relinquishment of territories inhabited by Russians, its subsequent return to an imperialism even more hubristic than that of the czars, its gross mismanagement of the national economy all need little description, as by the mid-1990s they were acknowledged by all but the most benighted Leftist ideologues. Far from joining in the chorus of accolades for the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, Solzhenitsyn dismisses him as an example of the “usual Bolshevik stupidity,” a bungling craftsmen of the oxymoronic “socialist market,” the “perestroika” or “restructuring” that merely replicated the old Leninist ploy of token liberalization, and the “glasnost” or “opening” of free speech by which “he was flinging the doors wide open for all the fierce nationalisms” of the components of the tottering Soviet empire. That empire “was not only unnecessary for us, but ruinous.”

At the time of Solzhenitsyn’s writing, “Russia has truly fallen into a torn state: 25 million have found themselves ‘abroad’ [in Ukraine and elsewhere] without moving anywhere, by staying on the lands of their fathers and grandfathers,” now relinquished by Moscow. To reverse this, Solzhenitsyn recommends three policies: evacuation of Russians who wish to leave the Transcaucasian and Central Asian countries, with resettlement in Russia; a call to the Baltic states to fully comply with “all-European standards of national minority rights”; and some degree of reunification with areas of Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan with Russian-majority populations. (He never advocates forceful reunification, however; in this, President Putin has quite outdone him.) He very sensibly warns Western politicians not to keen over Russian weakness, as “circumstances will arise… when all of Europe and the United States will be in dire need of Russia as an ally.”

As for Russian regime politics, Solzhenitsyn derogates the parliament-and-party system of democracy because it attempts to impose democracy undemocratically, “from above, from the central parliament,” “with the party deciding who shall represent a particular electoral district.” “Our ingrained and wretched Russian tradition” refuses “to learn how to organize from below,” leaving Russians “inclined to wait for instructions from a monarch, a leader, a spiritual or political authority.” In the mid-1990s, “such are nowhere to be seen, while small-fry bustle at the heights.” Economic ‘shock therapy’ in the form of abrupt introduction of free-market principles meanwhile has resulted in “the triumph of the frisky sharks of non-producing commercialism”; instead of following the example of postwar Japan, which “entered world civilization without losing her distinctiveness,” Russia has only aped the West. But “national consciousness must always and everywhere be respected”; for Solzhenitsyn, nationalism never means ‘blood and soil,’ but “a person’s”—and then a people’s—”orientation of preferences.” And this consciousness or orientation is never above criticism: “”Patriotism means unqualified and unwavering love for the nation, which implies not uncritical eagerness to serve, not support for unjust claims, but frank assessment of its vices and sins.”

Therefore, the three ‘Times of Troubles’ that have brought catastrophe down upon Russia “could not have just been accidents. Some fundamental flaws of State and spirit must be to blame.” The main purpose of Solzhenitsyn’s historical account of Russia since the founding of the Romanov dynasty is precisely to identify those flaws, just as the main purpose of Rebuilding Russia was to suggest some pathways toward mending them.