Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Between Two Millstones. Book Two: Exile in America, 1978-1994. Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020.

 

In Between Two Millstones Solzhenitsyn blends several literary genres—autobiography, essay, and a touch of diary.  Volume I consists of his memories from his first years of exile, following his departure from the Soviet Union in 1974, years in which he lived for a time in Western Europe before settling in Vermont. There, as Daniel J. Mahoney observes in his excellent Forward to this volume, “above all, he found a place to work” and “a serene and welcome home for his family.” [1] His main work consisted of researching and writing The Red Wheel, a vast historical novel tracing the origins of first the Russian and then the Bolshevik Revolutions, beginning in 1914. [2] His subsidiary work consisted of fending off both the blandishments and irritations of life in the great Western democracy, from speaking invitations to polemics to lawsuits—all swirling around him like mosquitoes in a Siberian summer. Whether great or petty, all of these activities centered on a central theme of his life: What will Russia be? What moral, spiritual, and political regime will replace the sordid rule of the Communists, by now in welcome but dangerous decline? These are the ruling questions of Volume II, which consists of Millstones parts two, three, and four.

Perhaps the most important spokesman for the alternative anti-Communist regime to the one that Solzhenitsyn prayed for, dedicated his life’s work to preparing, was the courageous dissident Russian physicist, Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov was the quintessential ‘modern.’ Impatient with what he took to be the dead hand of the past, he wanted a rapid, revolutionary change in Russia, a regime change countering the malign revolution of the Bolsheviks, but just as dramatic. He thought this both possible and desirable because he expected the new, ‘democratic’ regime to be democratic in the modern sense: a regime in which progressive-minded secular elites would lead the people to life modeled on the ideas of Enlightenment rationalism—technocratic, urban, internationalist. As Solzhenitsyn observes, Sakharov represented the democratic socialism that lost, violently, to the dictators of the proletariat in 1917, individuals who detested tyranny but also despised Russia —the Russia of Orthodox Christianity and farming villages, priests and peasants.

Such a revolution would not only bring violent conflict, Solzhenitsyn warned. It would also fail because its organizers did not understand what a regime is, and therefore would prove inept in founding one. A regime is more than a set of purposes, however ‘enlightened’ they may be. A regime is more than a set of institutions, however intricately designed. A regime is a way of life. What kind of democracy can ignore the way of life of a country’s people, those persons who wield sovereignty in any democratic regime worthy of the name? Without the patient cultivation of a way of life conducive to popular self-government, a regime change in the name of democracy must either dissolve into anarchy or lead the way to a new oligarchy—or both, in a fatal circle of self-destruction.

Solzhenitsyn completed the first volume of Between Two Millstones in 1978. [3] Volume Two consists of three such chronological sections, covering the periods 1978-1982, 1982-1987, and 1987-1994, the year when he and his family returned to Russia. He wrote each segment during the last year of each period of time, giving his memoir a ‘diaristic’ or contemporaneous quality, wherein he sets down his thoughts soon after the events he recounts, providing a sort of step-by-step assessment of his years in exile. Readers encounter a great-souled Russian and Christian man in medias res, as he thinks, feels, lives his way through the years of separation from his beloved homeland.

He launches his numerous and sharp criticisms of America from an underlying platform of gratitude. Where else was he, where else could he have been, so productive? In Vermont he lived in the “happy solitude” a writer needs, “and I never ceased to be surprised and grateful,” as “the Lord had indeed put me in the best situation a writer could dream of, and the best of the dismal fates that could have arisen, given [Russia’s] blighted history and the oppression of our country for the last sixty years.” Under the American regime he “was no longer compelled to write in code, hide things, distribute pieces of writing among my friends.” [4] He could conduct research freely. “I did not have to rush from pillar to post to survive,” having royalties from the worldwide sales of his books protected by copyright law and the right to the keep his earnings. With this “total independence”—broader “in scope and more effective than freedom alone”—the busy life of commercial republicanism “has flowed past me, having no effect on the rhythm of my work.” 

Unlike the Communists, Americans never attempted to separate him from his family. His wife and sons united with him; “the very spirit of our family and the unceasing, impassion work Alya and I were doing together also had its effect on our sons, ” as “they grew up friends, with a sense of family unity and teamwork.” “The alien environment,” too, “bound them together,” with “a consciousness of our unusual burden” as exiles, but exiles with a profound and noble mission: “to fill in the Russian history that’s been lost” for the sake of the Russians who would someday find themselves liberated from Communist tyranny. This purpose “communicated itself to all three of them.” “When you are immersed in a once-in-a-lifetime piece of work, you don’t notice, aren’t aware of other tasks.” “If the truth about the past were to rise from the ashes in our homeland today, and minds were honed on that truth, then strong characters would emerge, whole ranks of doers, people taking an active part—and my books would come in useful too,” restoring not only a true sense of the past but the moral compass that can only point ‘due North’ if magnetized for that.

By “happy solitude,” then, Solzhenitsyn means anything but being alone, or even being alone with God. He shows the reader how he and his wife could become the most intimate of collaborators in the work. “I have never in my life met anyone with such an acute lexical feel for the specific word needed, for the hidden rhythm of a prose sentence, with such taste in matters of design, as my wife, sent to me—and now irreplaceable—in my insular seclusion, where the brain of one author with his unvarying perceptions is not enough.” The Red Wheel‘s Russian steppes-like vastness required a second set of eyes, a mind with an unerring sense of direction, to prevent Solzhenitsyn from wandering off track, circling around to unintended repetition, losing himself in unclarity. “Living in isolation, it would have been impossible to manage such a massive job adequately. Alya didn’t allow me to lose my faculty of self-criticism,” “subject[ing] every phrase to scrutiny, as I did myself.” It was America, and Vermont in particular, that enabled the Solzhenitsyns to live the way of life they needed to live to continue and above all to continue their spiritual, moral, and political calling, and to complete the work they were called to.

Few Russian émigrés could join them, although there were some million and a half of them living in the West. “Clearly, we are not able to hold out when dispersed—it’s a defect in the Russian spirit: we become weak when not close together, in serried masses (and being told what to do).” The pull of the democratic republican regimes wrenched the Russianness out of almost all his countrymen, as they became “absorbed into alien soil, bringing up an alien generation.” “Russia’s salvation” can “only come from whatever Russia itself does within its borders,” too often by means of “a powerful hand to bring us together” and not from carefully cultivated self-government, which remained Solzhenitsyn’s preference from beginning to end. At this point, in 1982, he could only place his hopes in the “village prose” writers, the best-known of whom was Valentin Rasputin, men who faithfully sketched life in the countryside, among Russian country folk. The émigré writers, by contrast, too often aped their Western counterparts, wasting their time at ‘literary conferences,’ and at their best only rising to the level of Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliant but shallow avant-gardism or Andrei Sinyavksy’s satire. It was Sinyavksy, along with the ex-Communist dissident writer Lev Kopelov and the Paris-based novelist and translator Olga Carlisle, who built a cage around Solzhenitsyn’s reputation in the West, calumniating him as “a monarchist, a totalitarian, and anti-Semite, an heir to Stalin’s way of thinking, and a theocrat”—never mind the incommensurability of the items on the list.

In this, they reinforced American, and Western, confusion of the Soviet regime with the Russian nation. This helps to account for “the malice toward Russia” Solzhenitsyn often saw in his exile. “What brutes, they say, those Russians, not able to resist Communism while we [the West] managed to hold out.” The dogged secularism of the Russian exiles finds its enthusiastic echo among “the hostile pseudo-intellectuals” of the West. Despite his independence in America, Solzhenitsyn, and despite his freedom from house searches and interference with his writing, “I am not genuinely free” here, as writing is one thing but publishing another, and he was having trouble publishing his current writings in the United States. Between the United States and Russia under Soviet Communism, “the world is big, but there’s nowhere to go,” caught as he was between “two millstones.”

Despite venomous claims to the contrary, as a Christian Solzhenitsyn eschewed Russian nationalism, especially in the increasingly coarse and inept forms it took in the years just prior to the 1917 revolutions. At that time, “Russian nationalists emerged, of the kind who rushed to renounce Christianity” as well as socialist internationalism. Nationalists of this type “call on us to renounce our historical memory, to adopt a new paganism, or else be ready to adopt any faith you like from Asia.” In their more malignant forms, they do indeed incline to fascism. Not Solzhenitsyn. 

It was the repulsiveness of such a nationalism and the degradation of “the Bolsheviks’ murderous steamroller” that the “generous, educated ‘pan-humanism'” of Sakharov resisted. He was brought up in “that very milieu”; as a result, “he considers even the idea of nationhood, any appeal to the nation rather than the individual, a philosophical error.” “In nothing that he’d ever said or written was there any whiff of a recollection that our history was over a thousand years old. Sakharov does not breathe that air.” His genius at physics has only accentuated his intellectual and spiritual abstraction from the concrete nature of his own country. He looks at the Russian bear, with its ferocity, its love of its own, its determination, its restlessness—all of its characteristics, good and bad—as if it were a set of molecules in motion, not much different in that way from any other creature in the forest. His hopes for Russia were indistinguishable from the hopes of secular intellectuals in the West: “infinite scientific progress; universal (in other words not national) education for all; the need to overstep the bounds of national sovereignty, a single world legislation; a supranational world government; and economic development that mustn’t remain within the purview of the nation,” which must not “be in charge of its own way of life.” “What must such a worldview inevitably come down to? Nothing but ‘human rights,’ of course”—specifically a “human-rights ideology,” or “rights elevated”—some might say degraded—to “the rank of an ideology.” But ideas unmoored to the realities of life in a specific community can only derange any community they attempt to rule, and fail to rule; they amount to “our old friend anarchism.” But as the pre-revolutionary statesman Pyotr Stolypin understood, alone among his generation of Russian politicians, “civil society cannot be created before citizens are, and it is not the freeing up of rights that can cure an organism comprising a sick state and a sick people but, before that, medical treatment of the whole organism.”  Sakharov averred that true “homeland is freedom,” offering a ‘modern’ parallel to the apolitical Roman-Epicurean mot, “Where I am happy, there is my homeland.” “But if homeland is nothing more than freedom” (or nothing more than happiness), “why the different word?” 

“So much unites Sakharov and me: we were the same age, in the same country; we both rose up at the same time, uncompromising against the prevailing system, fought our battles at the same time and were vilified at the same time by a baying press; and we both called not for revolution but for reforms.” All this notwithstanding, “What divided us was—Russia.” Russia as distinct from the West, as distinct as Orthodox Christianity is from Roman Catholicism and the Protestantism of Wittenberg and Geneva, and as distinct as all forms of Christianity are from the ideology of modern scientism. 

Against the ethos of the modern West, in Europe, in America, and among ‘modernized’ Russians, Solzhenitsyn did not retreat but rather advanced into his own thinking and writing—advanced by returning to the men and women of the revolutionary time. The most important dimension of his exile in the United States is also the hardest to convey to readers, namely, the experience of writing The Red Wheel. The historical figures who peopled his novel preoccupied not only his waking thoughts but his dreams. He had vivid dreams of Czar Nikolai II, dreams in which he discussed Russian foreign policy and the royal succession (“he shook his head sadly that no, [his son] Aleksei could not rule as czar”). He dreamt of generals and agitators, monarchists and Bolsheviks. There was nothing mystical in this: “Surely this was bound to happen when I was spending hours looking at pictures of them, pondering them, thinking myself into their characters.” “For me, they had become the most contemporary of contemporaries and I lived with them day in, day out for weeks and months at a time, an many I quite simply loved as I wrote their chapters. How could it be otherwise?” At the same time, every character must be inserted, as in life, into “the framework of events” as they actually occurred. “If an author sets himself no such objective, all he can do is surrender to an irresponsible play of the imagination.” Irresponsibility was never Solzhenitsyn’s moral métier, it may be safely said.

Given his capacious yet intense, precisely focused spiritual and intellectual task, all the more dispiriting was the response of American literati and journalists to the translations of Solzhenitsyn’s previous work, much of it now appearing in English for the first time. While the new edition of The Oak and the Calf, his memoir of his years struggling against Communism while living in Russia, evoked “dead, dogmatic formulas” of condemnation from the Soviet press, this “mechanical” critique suggested “no personal animosity towards me,” only the reflexive defense of a nearly played-out regime, an empty ritual. But “I was not inveighed against with such bile, such personal, passionate hate, as I was now by America’s pseudo-intellectual elite.” Solzhenitsyn challenged their unimpeachable moralistic amoralism, their moral relativism. How, they demanded indignantly, “could I be so certain I was right”? Does Solzhenitsyn not know that “no one is in possession of the truth, indeed the truth cannot exist in nature, all ideas have equal rights”? “And since I do have that certainty, I must imagine myself a messiah.” “Here is the cavernous rift between the Western Enlightenment’s sense of the world and the Christian one.”

How to respond? Ignore it, as much as possible. “I easily resisted the temptation in the West to become a mere exhibit, a tub-thumper,” a ‘public intellectual.’ “I buried myself in my work, I didn’t bother anyone.” That didn’t stop the noise from “the irrepressible gutter press,” by which Solzhenitsyn doesn’t mean the gossip mags (which, thankfully, mostly passed him over for the more profitable targets, the celebrity entertainers and politicians) but the “creeping host,” the popular press—such publications as Paris-Match, France-Soir, and Stern, their reporters (as it were) annoying him with their “petty scurrying”—with their “tiny sorties on so many little legs,” a “creeping horde” of untiring writer-ants. “In any corner of the earth, any degenerate reporter can write any lies whatsoever about me—this is what their sacred freedom consists of! their sacred democracy! How am I to live here?” Worse, the lies in the Western press were more likely to be believed than those of the notoriously propagandistic Soviet press. To this were added frivolous but draining lawsuits by persons eager to tap into those newly-available publications royalties. 

True, it was not the Gulag. “What was this compared to the fact that others of my fellow-countrymen were being oppressed every day?” Yet no real writer can fail to understand. “The insignificance of the conflict compared to the work in hand was the killer. Indeed, that’s what they mean by it’s not the sea that drowns you but the puddle. It was the Western puddle now.” And that “puddle” might grow into a sea, “deluging not just me but the whole of Russia in waves of calumny, setting the all-too-ready West against her.” Or, shifting metaphors, “convincing the West that Russia and Communism had the same relationship as a sick man and his disease was clearly not in my power.” The “policy-makers” in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin “actually understand [this] very well; they just won’t say it out loud,” for fear of offending the professional ginners-up of public opinion, ever aiming at flattering their readers’ sense of superiority to those benighted Russians. “The only efforts it’s sensible to make are very moderate: to create, in whatever way possible, a more benign attitude to the real Russia.” With the election of Ronald Reagan to the U. S. presidency in 1980, a man who well understood the difference between Russia and its current regime, a man who understood the regime to be transient, the nation long-lasting, Solzhenitsyn hoped for a step forward in this task. Unfortunately, one of Reagan’s principal foreign-policy advisers, Richard Pipes, had made his academic bones by propounding the thesis that Russia produced Russian Communism, that the regime followed logically from the state. Pipes delayed and eventually helped to block a proposed meeting between Solzhenitsyn and the president.

In Part Three Solzhenitsyn chronicles the core years of the Reagan Administration, 1982-1987. He began them with visits to Japan and Taiwan, rimland bulwarks against the Communist regimes in Moscow and Peking. “In Japan, I discovered that you cannot fall in love with a country if its food is incompatible with you.” He also found Japanese religiosity perplexing. “The Japanese use Shintoism for all their happy occasions—but Buddhism for anything sad, and for funerals. All Japan’s cemeteries are Buddhist; there is no other kind.” He asks, “Is this an encouraging sign for the future of humanity, or a recognition that both religions are inadequate?” Both exemplify “divine worship,” and “undoubtedly” so. But in visiting the shrines he experienced “a pervasive sense of extreme otherness, an abyss between us.” “What is God’s intent” in separating the human race by religion? He remarks the presence of Orthodox believers, finding it “touching to see Japanese people in an Orthodox church and to hear our hymns in Japanese.” Many Western readers will be equally moved, as they do not know that Solzhenitsyn was a ‘liberal’ when it came to religious toleration, though scarcely a relativist.

Still, the foreignness of Japan struck him. “I traveled to Japan hoping to make sense of the Japanese character; its self-restraint, industriousness, and capacity for small-scale but intensive work. But, oddly, I experienced there an insurmountable alienation. Just you try and understand them.” He satisfied himself with attempting to convince them that Communist China wasn’t a land of peace, debating former Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Shinsaku Högen, who claimed that “China was a kindred country to Japan, and Communism there was not all that dangerous” because the Chinese “are a very intelligent people,” one “moving in the direction of progress.” For his part, Solzhenitsyn “sought passionately to prove that it was just the same kind of Communism as in the Soviet Union, that Communism was the same the world over.” From the vantage point of nearly forty years later, one can see that the Chinese Communists were indeed more intelligent than the Russian ones, but their notion of progress consists in keeping the Chinese Communist Party firmly in power, and in expanding that power assiduously, by no means neglecting military power.

In Taiwan, the food was better and so was the reception, his hosts having had every reason to share Solzhenitsyn’s revulsion at Chinese Communism. No Shintoism there—only Buddhism, whose “pursuit of immensity and quantity is hard to understand; I cannot grasp how it is connected to the transience of existence, which they preach.” And of course Confucianism, which reminded Solzhenitsyn a bit of Tolstoy. Although the Taiwanese responded to his anti-Communist message with enthusiasm, the president was too cautious to meet with him, fearful of needlessly offending Peking or Moscow. “The Taiwan government would like to achieve success without taking any risks.” In his speech he hinted that the United States might someday abandon Taiwan (Americans were still optimistic about relations with ‘the Mainland’), and it would be a bold thing to deny that possibility, even as Americans have awakened themselves to the malignity of the regime there.

Completing his journey to three geostrategic island nations, Solzhenitsyn went to Great Britain, meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She set him straight on the preponderance of nuclear forces favoring the Soviets, saying that a rapid buildup by the West would solve that problem; by 1987, as he wrote this section, he saw that “with Reagan’s help, she turned out to be right.” He wanted to criticize her for defending the minor British colony on the Falkland Islands against seizure by the current Argentine despot, thinking that “this insignificant bit of land” could hardly be worth the bloodshed on both sides. But as always his capacity for imagining himself ‘into’ the person in front of him prevailed: “Thatcher had such an awful cold and such a hoarse voice that I couldn’t launch that debate.” He chalks up her policy to “personal pride” and a desire for “success for her party” in the impending parliamentary elections.” “I left feeling a bitter sympathy for her,” but determining to “abandon all hope of ever urging any politician to make ethical decisions.” He was right not to engage her, but it isn’t hard to see Thatcher’s defense, indeed on moral grounds. If the Conservative Party government was leading to British economic revival and to successful resistance to Soviet plans for Europe (as it was), and a Conservative Party electoral victory was indispensable to the continuation of her government (as it was), and if what Solzhenitsyn calls a “fine and noble” relinquishment of the Falklands was likely to hurt her party’s chances (as she evidently thought), then why was the Falklands War not an important act in fighting the Soviet regime Solzhenitsyn deplored? 

“On the way back from England, Alya and I came to a firm agreement: now, finally, I would draw inward to work.” No more traveling, no more interviews. “Not a peep!” “Falling silent was also right for another reason: who was I to judge the West? I’d neither devoted my full attention to studying it nor observed it much at first hand.” [5] Far from the self-righteous ‘messiah’-figure his enemies depicted, Solzhenitsyn came away from his experience of foreign countries, East and West, with a deepened Christian humility. “I’ve fallen silent since 1983—towards both sides” in the Cold War. “In actual fact, the problems of the twentieth century cannot all be laid at the door of current politics,” anyway; “they’re a legacy of the three preceding centuries.” Only in the welcome, “boundless silence” of his home in exile, in the Vermont woods, could he read, write, deepen and refine his thoughts, work with his wife (“my soulmate”), consider his boys as they grew up in America but with an eye toward returning to their native country. “I still have my full strength—it must have been given me for a reason.”

Although Solzhenitsyn intended to withdraw from contemporary controversies, his enemies had other ideas, preferring to drag him in. He describes this aspect of his struggle with the apt phrase, “ordeal by tawdriness.” “Tawdriness is the preferred weapon of baseness, when outright violence is unavailable.” The Soviet rulers assassinated characters when they could not assassinate persons, a technique Lenin taught them, one he had learned from reading Marx. It was hardly unknown in the West, as seen in the work of Solzhenitsyn’s American biographer, Michael Scammel. “Uniformly lacking in elevated emotional and intellectual understanding,” taking “a low view of lofty subjects,” Scammel proceeded by two methods: first “to reduce my actions, movement, feelings, and intentions to the mediocre”—motives “that make most sense to the biographer himself”; second, to side with Solzhenitsyn’s detractors on all key issues, “probably not out of malice towards me but because, by his reckoning, it’s the best way to secure” the ‘sane and balanced,’ ‘even-handed’ stance of objectivity. In other words, Scammel was a journalist. So, for example, in Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to meet the celebrated Jean-Paul Sartre, a shameless apologist for a then-quirky brand of Marxism-cum-Heideggerianism which has now come into its own in the European and North American universities, Solzhenitsyn ‘must’ have been motivated by “a combination of pride and timidity.” “He doesn’t allow that I might have simply despised Sartre.”

From the ‘Left,’ the ubiquitous Sinyavsky never let up, calling Solzhenitsyn “a cancer on Russian culture” and insinuating that he was a warmongering anti-Semitic religious fanatic. This sort of thing even reached the floor of the United States Congress, where the solons reasoned along these lines: Solzhenitsyn has defended Stolypin; Stolypin was assassinated by Dmitri Bogrov, who was Jewish; Solzhenitsyn has condemned Bogrov; ergo, Solzhenitsyn must be anti-Semitic. The syllogism isn’t air-tight, but America’s Radio Liberty, which broadcast into the Soviet Union, was reprimanded for reading portions of August 1914 on air, thus presenting the work of an author who (in the locution of one Congressman) could be perceived as anti-Semitic.

Meanwhile, from the ‘Right,’ a much less prominent writer, Lev Navrozov, whose main journalistic outlet was the widely-unread New York City Tribune, managed to mount a conspiracy theory according to which Solzhenitsyn was really a Soviet Fifth Columnist, a KGB plant sent out to deceive the West. “Right-leaning America was rattled, became alarmed—and began to distance itself from that Solzhenitsyn.” I rather think Solzhenitsyn exaggerates Navrozov’s influence, but this is understandable. First, the firmly anti-communist Tribune may have had many New York City Russian émigrés in its readership. More important, “Alya suffered from this constant assault on us—suffered acutely,” as he, “unlike me,” “felt she really lived in this country” as the one who packed the children off to school in what was for them “their only country,” and where they heard questions and perhaps taunts from their classmates. Despite their agreement in 1982, by 1986 “Alya wanted me now to start actively defending myself.”

It was the Soviet regime that came to the rescue, unintentionally and sooner than expected. Even timely. A massive effort such as The Red Wheel may be easy to start, but it is damnably hard to finish—not only in the sheer volume of work involved, but in knowing when to stop the narrative. In a sense, he might have taken it to August 1918, a full four years after the ‘guns of August’ precipitated the events leading to revolution. But no: “By May 1917,” five months before the Bolsheviks took control, “the liberal ‘February fever'”—the euphoric intoxication of the people after the overthrow of czarism and the apparent triumph of democracy—was “utterly supine, sickly, doomed—anyone could come along and seize power, and the Bolsheviks did.” He could finish the novel with April 1917. Clearly, this would mean finishing the book with stern warning against precipitous democratization when Communism in Russia would join its czarist enemy in the proverbial dustbin of history. 

By the middle of 1986 the Solzhenitsyns were hearing reports of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s apparent preparations for as yet unspecified changes in the country. He seemed to be attempting to gather support from writers (Communist Party loyalists, to be sure) for reform. “What on earth was going on?” “A new way of life,” Alya ventured to say. He released Sakharov, although it was true that the physicist had announced his opposition to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. ‘Star Wars,’ as his adversary Senator Edward Kennedy called it, adroitly making a defensive weapons program sound like a preparation for warfare waged from outer space. Nonetheless, Solzhenitsyn sensed “the internally driven collapse of Communism,” which he had long predicted—death from premature decrepitude, because its earthly ‘religion’ has proved short on spiritual endurance; “the pool of willing sacrifices for the sake of a radiant future has run out and, resting on their laurels, both bosses and foremen have turned swinelike.” And the economy had failed. Indeed, Gorbachev’s “only success has been his cult in the West,” a cult that has maintained itself in the subsequent decades.

“Will God allow us to return to our homeland, allow us to serve? And will it be at a time of its new collapse, or of a sublime reordering?” With this dyad (we can now see) Solzhenitsyn was too ‘apocalyptic.’ Neither utter collapse nor sublimity awaited; reordering did, but it has proven unsublime. Having served as “a sword of division” (as a Christian often will do) for so many years, Solzhenitsyn hoped now “to bring together everyone” his heart could reach, “to act as a hoop binding Russian together.” “That, after all, is the real task.”

In the final section of his book, Solzhenitsyn recounts the event of 1987-1994, the year of his family’s return to Russia. But before departing from Part Three, two additional insights Solzhenitsyn came to during those years demand attention—one spiritual, the other moral. While preparing a speech in response to receiving the Templeton Prize (established “to call attention to a variety of persons who have found new ways to increase man’s love of God or man’s understanding of God,” according to the brochure he received), he determined to use the occasion to deepen his own “understanding [of] earthly life as a stage in the development of eternal life,” aiming at ending one’s earthly life “on a morally higher level than that dictated by one’s innate qualities.” In this, “a fellow countryman came to my aid,” Igor Sigorsky, the aircraft designer, “who also happened to be interested in the philosophy of creation.” Sharing Solzhenitsyn’s mathematical and scientific background, Sikorsky suggested a train of thought that led Solzhenitsyn to “grasp why suicide is such a great sin: it is the voluntary interruption of growth”—of the spiritual growth attained by facing our suffering squarely and opening our soul to God—the “pushing away of God’s hand,” the hand that would injure us for our own good, then guide us toward seeing that suffering prepares mind and heart for God, for precisely that task of moral heightening, of overcoming the sins that beset every human soul.  

On a major moral issue that came under heightened scrutiny during the Reagan years, Solzhenitsyn considers nuclear weapons. The West, America particularly, “had immorally introduced the atom bomb to the world—when they were already victorious!—and dropped it on a civilian population.” As so often with Solzhenitsyn, however, he brings an important nuance to this often-heard criticism. In his Templeton address “I came out against” U.S. “nuclear achievements” and indeed against “the whole idea of a nuclear umbrella.” At the same time, and unlike the ‘nuclear freeze’ advocates in the United States and the anti-nuclear protestors in Western Europe (the latter obviously “being fueled by the Soviets”), he argued that that “the moment it reached for the diabolical gift of the nuclear bomb, the West went out of its mind” in the sense that such “fine men of the West” as Bertrand Russell, George Kennan, Averell Harriman, and dozens of others” started to urge “their compatriots to make more, more, and still more concessions to Communism, anything to ensure there was no nuclear war.” “I never believed there would be: it would obliterate the Creator’s plan for humanity.” But it might lead to the moral and political collapse of Western resistance to the Soviet empire.

Instead, however, it was that empire which collapsed, an empire ruled by the charming but inept Mikhail Gorbachev. (“He had nothing—just the inertia of Communist Party succession.”) “Gorbachev was giving speeches laden with promises, but clinging on frantically to Party power and the banner of Lenin.” It should have been obvious to anyone with an acquaintance with the history of the Soviet Union that Gorbachev’s so-called economic liberalization was nothing more than a dusted-off version of Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s—window-dressing gestures toward capitalism intended to draw in Western investors, who alone could prop up a failing socialism. And this went on with more than a hint of Stalinism lurking in the wings, if needed: Gorbachev “had entrusted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the head torturer of the Georgian KGB.” The centerpieces of Gorbachev’s propaganda campaign were “Perestroika” (“restructuring”) and “Glasnost” (“openness”). “No one, it seemed, even in the Soviet Union, understood what, exactly, [perestroika] consisted of.” Local cooperatives and small village enterprises were envisioned, implemented, but almost immediately dissolved. Meanwhile, in the bureaucracy, “all the old nomenklatura” remained in place, “us[ing] the nation’s wealth to line their own pockets.” Swinelike they may have been, but Gadarenian they were not; they had no intention of throwing themselves off a cliff. “Glasnost” was more promising; Solzhenitsyn had called for it, some twenty years before. And Russians did talk freely. “Yes, they talked, oh how they talked—but was anyone doing anything?” Well, no. “Everything that was being done (apart from Glasnost getting under way) was so insubstantial, shortsighted, or even damaging that it was clear they were beginning to thrash about: they had no idea where to go next”—un-Gadarenian, indeed.

“In the meantime, all over the West, Soviet Perestroika and Glasnost were giving rise to unabated jubilation.” Solzhenitsyn’s silence perplexed the pundits. But it simply registered a discreet refusal to be bamboozled. His own books remained on the proscribed list, a fact that made “openness” look rather less wide-bordered than the Kremlin wanted it to seem. The excuse, as usual, was that Solzhenitsyn was too dangerous to read. As usual, Sinyavsky chimed in, complaining that Solzhenitsyn was “against” Perestroika, although Solzhenitsyn had neither said nor written anything about it. “With renewed vigor the essayist threw himself into an international tour to oppose me, and neglected no opportunity.” Sinyavsky updated his usual tropes: “Solzhenitsyn is the standard-bearer of Russian nationalism!” “He’ll return in triumph and take the lead in a clerical fascist movement!” He “is a racist and monarchist, and in five years he’ll be running Russia!”

For his part, Sakharov attempted more constructive activity, standing for a seat in the new national Congress, where Gorbachev quite literally silenced him on one memorable occasion simply by turning off his microphone. The move backfired. “During the course of the Congress, Sakharov won for himself the role of de facto leader of the opposition,” winning the role of the “persecuted defender” of the Russian people. “Thus the year 1989 marked the finest hour of Sakharov’s life.” Unfortunately, his actual proposals for Russian regime change were ill-conceived. He wanted to replace the over-centralized pseudo-federalism of the Soviet Union with what would have amounted to a loose system of sovereign states, each with its own citizenship, monetary system, armed forces, and police agencies, each “independent of central government” but, tellingly, “subject to the laws of a World Government” and thus not genuinely sovereign at all. As in all ‘act locally, think globally’ formula, this one deprecated the middle ground, the nation-state. “Russia would have been fatally splintered and weakened” by Sakharov’s plan, lacking as it did “even a scintilla of consciousness of Russia’s history and its spiritual experience?” Sakharov died soon afterwards. “In his Christian smile and his sad eyes, something fatal, unavoidable, had always been reflected.”

The Communist regime “had allowed the whole body of our country, its whole population, to become rotten.” In turmoil under these conditions, it isn’t the cream that rises to the top but the “scum.” Preoccupied with his great novel, “I had not rendered any useful assistance against the tumult and confusion of minds in the Soviet Union, either in untangling the mess of ideas or giving practical advice.” Although “the collapse of the Soviet Union was irreversible,” and a good thing, too, “how could we prevent historical Russia also being destroyed in its wake?” Solzhenitsyn’s pithy Rebuilding Russia, which he now wrote, recommended “moral cleansing,” “self-limitation,” and, institutionally, a real not phony reconstruction of local institutions of self-government. [6] Gorbachev condemned the book as, somehow, monarchist, knowing that he could rely on the reputations Solzhenitsyn’s enemies had already constructed both Solzhenitsyn himself and for Gorbachev himself. “I was not too late,” Solzhenitsyn remarks; “I was too early.” Time would indeed tell, whether Gorbachev’s scam would endure.

It didn’t, and Boris Yeltsin ousted Gorbachev. “But Yeltsin could not discern any overarching sense of history, or any of the splendid prospects opened up by this successful coup; it seemed that the only significance he saw in it was his victory over the man he hated, Gorbachev.” Under his less-than-vigilant eye, the rulers of the several ‘republics’ of the ‘federation,’ formerly “Communist masters,” now “turned into fervent nationalists and, one after the other, proclaimed ‘sovereignty and separation'”—reaffirming borders drawn not by the several nations but by Lenin and Stalin, who had deliberately mixed existing nations in order to keep them from launching any successful rebellion against the Soviet Union. 

Of all this, Western journalists remained unknowing. They simply wanted to know if Solzhenitsyn favored what they supposed was “Russia’s move to a market economy.” “Americans are genuinely unaware of the existence of Russia, even before the great October Revolution”—not literally, of course, but in the sense of “the whole mass of Russian history and Russian problems since the end of the nineteenth century,” upon which Solzhenitsyn had spent his life considering. “To Americans, did there exist, apart from the Market, any other characteristic, any trait, any aspect of a nation’s life?” Admittedly knowing America little more than Americans knew Russia, Solzhenitsyn would have found the answer to that question in President Washington’s Farewell Address, had he studied it. There, he would have seen that Americans very often want commercial, not political relations with foreign countries. But this doesn’t prevent them from defending their own political union, which, as Washington shows, consists of much more than a free-trade zone, though it does consist of that.

“In 1992, the gigantic, historic Russian Catastrophe began to unfurl: the nation’s life, morality, and social awareness unraveled, unstoppable; in culture and science rational activity ceased; school education and childcare descended into a fatal state of disorder.” He had “feared this,” but had he foreseen it? “Not this particular form of collapse—no. But I did see that the situation could go astray and become another February [1917]—that had for a long time been my greatest fear.” Together, the rivals Gorbachev and Yeltsin and precipitated and then accelerated the collapse. 

“But just where in Russia were the Russian patriots? Alas!—the patriotic movement these days had become hopelessly entangled with Communism.” This, because initially Stalin had linked the survival of the Communist regime against Hitler’s onslaught to a rhetorical appeal to the defense of the ‘Russian homeland,” a strategy that Communist scoundrels in the several ‘republics,’ including Russia proper, had lately resorted to, giving the world yet another instance of the old riposte about patriotism and scoundrels. For his part, Yeltsin managed to triple the size of the already “ponderous apparatus of the Soviet state,” making it look “like either a monster or a joke.”

In December 1993, at the age of 75, Solzhenitsyn learned that he could return to Russia. But there was one more blow, the worst yet. In March 1918 his oldest son died suddenly, leaving his wife and infant daughter. “We buried him in the Orthodox corner of the ever-green Claremont cemetery” in Vermont. “And so we left a tomb in America. Such was our farewell.”

“I had to get to Russia in time to die there.” And not only to die. “I’m thirsting to get involved in Russian events—I have the energy to get things done.” And he will return to political allies his enemies do not have. “I count as friends the vastnesses of Russia. The Russian provinces. The small and medium-sized towns.” “And if people come to understand Russia’s interests rightly, my books could also be needed much later, when there has been a more profound analysis of the historical process,” an analysis illuminated by the God who will not fail.
 

 

 

Notes

1. Mahoney is the author of the best introduction to Solzhenitsyn’s thought in English: The Other Solzhenitsyn: Telling the Truth About a Misunderstood Writer and Thinker (Notre Dame: St. Augustine’s Press, 2014).
2. On this website, see “Solzhenitsyn on the Russian Revolution,” a discussion of his March 1917: The Red Wheel, Node III, Book I.
3. For discussion see “The Temptation of the West: Solzhenitsyn in America,” on this website.
4. In his own day, V.I. Lenin denounced “the accursed Aesopian language” he had undertaken when writing his anti-czarist polemics in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution; see his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Preface. Such a response to ‘logographic necessity’ is one of the very few commonalities between the Marxist Lenin and the Christian Solzhenitsyn. 
5. This wise self-admonition, like many such, didn’t prove easy to uphold. Some pages later, balking at applying for U.S. citizenship, Solzhenitsyn asks, rhetorically, “Really, what sort of country is America? Naïve (although supposedly so enlightened and democratic): through a clutch of its professional politicians, it blithely betrays itself on a daily basis, yet will fly into a sudden brief fury—but an utterly blind one—and destroy whatever is in its path.” He is thinking especially of such phenomena as vigilante actions by Americans against Russian churches and families in response to Soviet outrages overseas, as when a Russian Orthodox church was vandalized in response to the Soviet destruction of a Korean airliner. “Russian soil may not be accessible to me for a long time to come, perhaps until death, but I cannot sense American soil as my own.”
6. On this website see “Solzhenitsyn on Russian Reconstruction” for discussion of Rebuilding Russia and The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century.

 

Toshio Nishi: Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, 1944-1952. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1982.

 

Japan’s defeat in World War II resulted not merely in surrender, but unconditional surrender to the United States and its allies. The United States had imposed unconditional surrender on a regime enemy before—in 1865, in defeating the Confederate States of America. Both the Confederacy and the Empire of Japan suffered physical devastation during those wars. Both the Confederacy and the Empire of Japan were also required to change their regimes from oligarchy to republicanism, or to what Nishi calls “unconditional democracy,” requiring years of political ‘reconstruction.’ Once its political structure was reintegrated into the United States, the Southern states backslid, as local political elites allied with working-class whites to reinstitute social and political subordination of the freed slaves. In Japan, however, ‘regime change’ or political revolution proved far more successful. Nishi, a Hoover Institution research fellow and teacher at the Institute of Moralogy in Kahiwa, Japan, shows how the Americans brought that off.

He begins with a brief, useful overview of modern Japanese political history. From 1604 to 1867, the Tokugawa Shoguns ruled the country, maintaining an oligarch-‘feudal’ hierarchy within Japanese society. For most of that period, they kept Japan in a situation of splendid isolation from the West. By 1844, King William II of the Netherlands, that eminently commercial country, urged the Japanese to open their country to foreign trade, to avoid having it opened by force. In the 1840, British, French, and American naval commanders issued the same warning. Underestimating the military power now at the disposal of the Western countries, power afforded them by the technological advances made possible by modern-scientific experimental methods, the Shogunate refused to comply. In July 1853 U. S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry, President Millard Fillmore’s special envoy, arrived with an imposing naval squadron. The Japanese regime temporized, but by the following year Perry could return home with a Treaty of Peace and Amity in hand. With American English, Russian, and Dutch access to a limited number of ports, “the treaty introduced the concept of extraterritoriality to the Japanese people”; now not only present on Japanese soil but “immune from Japanese laws,” the foreigners soon provoked “bitter resentment among the Japanese” at what they took to be a form of colonization. 

The lower-ranking Samurai rebelled, calling for a new imperial regime. Worried at the prospect of a military coup, the regime changed policy, now intending, as the rulers said, to “clear the barbarians out of the country.” A marriage between the presiding Shogun and a princess of the Imperial House “confirmed for the Japanese people the ultimate legitimacy of imperial governance.” But to make the expulsion of foreigners certain, the rebels waged civil war against the Shogunate, installing a new regime in 1868. “The new regime was named ‘Meiji’ or Enlightened Reign.” To the existing hierarchic “class structure based upon Confucian ethics,” the Meiji added modernization, understood as industrialization based on “adopting Western technological skills.” “The imperial government constructed new industrial plants and sold them to a few private merchants. Government protection, no competition, and great opportunities for expansions enabled those merchants to develop their firms into huge conglomerates, commonly called zaibatsu (literally, ‘financial cliques,’), that dominated the market through oligopoly.” Surely, the modern West must have “some vital secrets that were responsible for its superior technology.” “Various missions and many bright students were sent abroad to search them out.” Today’s readers will recognize the identical strategy in post-Maoist China. Upon returning to Japan, the young scholars brought back not only scientific knowledge but an ideological mishmash of Rousseau, British liberalism, Prussian statism, the various and contradictory economic notions of Malthus, Smith, Mill, and List, and the philosophic doctrines of modern historicism found in Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The regime frowned upon much of this, especially Western political thought. 

“Enrich the Nation! Strengthen Its Arms!” “The regime neither question nor resisted the imperialistic propensity that was inherent” in these slogans, instead “dreaming of a civilized and mighty utopia,” somehow blending Western technology with Eastern spirituality. Japan’s first prime minister, Ito Hirobumi, proclaimed bushido, the “warrior’s code,” based on what he described as “an education which aspired to the attainment of Stoic heroism, a rustic simplicity and a self-sacrificing spirit unsurpassed in Sparta, and the aesthetic culture and intellectual refinement of Athens”—none of which produced modern technology because none possessed the spirit of modern science, founded on the aspiration to conquer nature, a project imbued with neither heroism, nor rustic simplicity, nor self-sacrifice, nor aesthetic culture, nor classical philosophy. Sure enough, the Education Act of 1872, with its emphasis on vocational training and “success in life,” in many respects replaced the Confucian Analects with Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, a tract famed for its aphorism, “Heaven helps those who help themselves.” Regime control over the academic world successfully bridled those whose ‘Western learning’ had gone in politically distasteful directions.

Ideational incoherence notwithstanding, the policy worked, for a while. In 1895, Imperial Japan defeated China; ten years later, it defeated Russia. It chose the winning side in World War I. “Because of its xenophobic fascination with the West,” Imperial Japan “was extraordinarily sensitive to the military and political movements of the Western powers,” even as the Chinese regime has become, today. “This sensitivity found expression in a fervent and uncompromising nationalism; the Japanese oligarchs of the late nineteenth century had ‘rectified’ the nation’s indulgent dependence upon the West and restored the ‘real Japan,'” as militarism “began to pervade Japanese domestic and foreign policies.” After the war, the multiplying apprehensions of the Western regimes led them to sit down with the Japanese at the 1921-22 Washington Naval Conference, resulting in a naval arms limitation treaty preserving American and British superiority. This, coupled with “racist treatment of Japanese immigrants” in the United States (whose Progressive intellectuals were still under the sway of ‘race-science’ illusions), “left a lasting bitterness in the minds of the Japanese people.” “Ironically, the American treatment of Japanese immigrants matched the Japanese treatment of Koreans and Chinese people in Japan was well as in their native countries,” now dominated by Japanese military power. 

The year 1931 saw the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. Stung by the League of Nations’ condemnation of the invasion, Japan withdrew from the league, the regime feeling “that they were humiliated every time they succeeded in the very game that the West had introduced to Asia.” The military and industrial oligarchy “collectively interpreted the civility of one nation toward another as a clear sign of weakness,” and convinced themselves that “foreign policy was not a matter of diplomacy but of conspiracy.” By 1937, nearly 69 percent of the Japanese gross national product was going to military expenditures. By then, the regime had abrogated the Washington Naval Agreement. The Ministry of the Army began its statement of policy with a principle drawn not from Confucius but from Heraclitus: “War is the father of creation and the mother of culture.” Since war requires the proverbial sinews of war, “the Japanese emphasis on material wealth was an ideological necessity for nation building,” and material wealth in modernity required “a literate and skillful labor force.” Nonetheless, by the aftermath of the Great War Japan saw riots sparked by inflation in rice prices caused by crop failure and hoarding. 

Presiding over this regime was the Emperor, who “filled an important symbolic role for the new and insecure regime.” “At once the most personal and the most transcendent institution” in the country, the Emperor “became the ultimate political instrument that the imperial oligarchy used to solidify and legitimize its power” both at home and in its empire. The 1889 Imperial Constitution described the imperial line s one “unbroken for ages eternal” and the Emperor himself as “sacred and inviolable.” The three ruling bodies of the regime—the ministers of state, the military forces, and the Emperor’s Privy Council (the latter an extraconstitutional body) framed “the crucial policies of imperial Japan,” with the imperial legislature set to one side as “a vigorous debating society.” The Constitution “affirmed itself as ‘an immutable fundamental law,” and did indeed remain unchanged until its abrogation by the Allied occupiers in 1946. 

Every regime needs its myths, and Imperial Japan nourished its share. Shinto, “the Way of the Gods,” valorized deceased emperors and empresses as gods, as “the regime instituted a cult of antiquity” to go along with its cult of modernity. The gods themselves endorsed imperial rule and Japanese nationalism in a regime in which “dissent was treason” and indeed sacrilege. “Suppression of civil liberties grew so habitual that the Government stopped justifying its actions. It interpreted the public fear, silence, and acquiescense as public tranquility.” Then as now, much nonsense was thought about economic growth somehow leading to civic freedom. On the contrary, “internal solidarity had been engineered at the expense of freedom of thought and action—freedoms that might have grown, as Japanese intellectuals of both left and right had once thought, to be inherent by products of modernization and industrialization.” “Every aspect of Japanese life was now dominated by war,” under the approving gaze of the sacred Emperor.

The big war that came next ended in disaster for the Meiji regime. The political outcome proved much less disastrous than it did for Germany because, although at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference the American president, Harry Truman, gave Stalin’s Russia control over the Kurile islands, rule over the rest of the country remained in American hands, specifically those of General Douglas MacArthur. Although the Japanese rulers who stipulated provisions for freedom of speech, religion, and thought and other “fundamental human rights” may not have “fully comprehended nor accepted these provisions,” MacArthur understood them quite clearly, and set about implementing the new ruling institutions that would secure them for the Japanese people. And of course this occurred after the United States firebombed Tokyo and dropped nuclear devices on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By early September, the Emperor ordered his people “to lay down their arms and faithfully to carry out all the provisions of instrument of surrender and the general orders issued by the Japanese government,” as he in turn had been ordered to do by the United States. For their part, General MacArthur and his occupation forces would introduce “radical policies aimed at destroying everything that was even suggestive of Japanese loyalty to the ancient regime.” 

Advised by President Truman that “our relations with Japan do not rest on a contractual basis, but on an unconditional surrender,” that “your authority is supreme,” and that “you will not entertain any question on the part of the Japanese as to its scope,” MacArthur additionally, and quite sensibly, opposed any sharing of power in Japan with the Soviet regime, which had already massed troops on the 38th Parallel in Korea. Efforts to establish civilian control, or at least limitations, upon the general by the State Department proved feeble, as MacArthur’s executive powers, exercised ‘on the ground’ in Japan and not in Washington, D.C., trumped all others. When U.S. officials (quickly) saw that the Soviets were no friends of the United States, the Cold War began and MacArthur’s authority stood unchallenged. He used it to change the Japanese regime.

Immediately after the surrender documents were signed, MacArthur recalled that “Commodore Perry, ninety-two years ago,” had intended “to bring to Japan an era of enlightenment and progress by lifting the veil of isolation to the friendship, trade, and commerce of the world. But alas the knowledge thereby gained of Western science was forged into an instrument of oppression and human enslavement.” Now that “freedom is on the offensive, democracy on the march,” Japan would be turned toward “a simple philosophy embodying principles of right and justice and decency,” away from its odd regime combining feudalism (by which he meant oligarchy and civil religion) with modern science and a form of nationalism that despised human rights. Under this regime, the Japanese had become “not only politically illiterate but politically indifferent,” having had no serious opportunity for civic life. Under American occupation, Japan had now “become the world’s great laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of a people from totalitarian military rule and for the liberalization of government from within.” 

The experiment was daunting, as most republican regimes had arisen only after a long apprenticeship of limited self-government—typically, some form of constitutional monarchy. MacArthur had no such luxury. On the other hand, the collapse of the Meiji regime presented a novel situation: what MacArthur called a “collapse of a faith” which “left a complete vacuum morally, mentally, and physically.” But “the plight of the Japanese, MacArthur bluntly told the Japanese, was their own fault.” His fifteen-point policy aimed at filling that vacuum. “First destroy the military power. Punish war criminals. Build the structure of representative government. Modernize the constitution. Hold free elections. Enfranchise the women. Release political prisoners. Liberate the farmers. Establish a free labor movement. Encourage a free economy. Abolish police oppression. Develop a free and responsible press. Liberalize education. decentralize the political power. Separate church from state.” He also called for Christian missionaries to establish themselves in Japan. Some 10 million Bibles were distributed, as MacArthur hoped Christianity’s “spiritual repugnance of war” would take hold among the people. Conversion rates were unimpressive, however. More effective was his use of athletics to teach rules of fairness and to redirect the strong Japanese sense of honor to a peaceful form of competition. 

These types of civil-social forms of rule were indispensable supplements to the institutional revolution. The Japanese needed to assimilate republican forms of government, learn to use them, habituate themselves to them. First among these efforts was demilitarization. He purged the government of its military men and proclaimed former prime minister and army general Tojo Hideki “Japan’s first war criminal.” Tojo gave MacArthur unwitting assistance by failing at his suicide attempt, intensifying his dishonor by using a pistol instead of the traditional samurai sword. By October 1946, after a process of screening by the Japanese government, MacArthur had removed 186,000 employees from the national government; all military personnel were barred from holding public office. He also ordered a national election for a new, and newly-empowered House of Representatives. Crucially, Japanese voters avoided candidates from the far left and the far right. By April of the following year, old-regime elements had also been purged from the local governments in time for the country’s first election of provincial and municipal executives and assemblymen. In May, Japan had its first prime minister elected by the people, the democratic socialist Katayama Tetsu. 

On the religious front, “Japanese conservatives worried that without Shinto and imperial sovereignty japan would never be strong again.” To counter this sentiment, MacArthur redoubled his efforts to sever all connection between Temple and State. “One conspicuous reason for the ferocity of GHQ’s attack on the former state religion was that the origins of the imperial system and of Shinto were virtually indistinguishable,” the emperor being “the object and primary practitioner of Shinto rituals,” combining the functions of High Priest and principal deity. MacArthur and his team described this as nothing short of “ideological tyranny so insidious and all-pervasive as to reduce to impotence all opposition, whether of individual or of ideas.” 

The first step to economic reform was equally draconian. The U.S. government initially reduced the Japanese to “a subsistence economy” in order to “accelerate the disintegration of the Japanese Empire and guarantee the future paralysis of any potential Japanese war machines” while effectively destroy socioeconomic hierarchies which supported the old regime. Consequently, “MacArthur swiftly began dissolving zaibatsu, those family-centered financial conglomerates that had played such a part in the development of Japanese business and commerce” as modern versions of feudal fiefs. To avert mass starvation, MacArthur distributed food to the Japanese; hunger took much of the remaining ‘fight’ out of them. But the Americans saw that a subsistence economy could and should not be maintained for long, concluding “that the risk of a strong, capitalistic Japan becoming a future military threat to the United States was less than that of an economically feeble Japan becoming a prey to international communist encroachment.” The newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency understood that the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek was on the brink of defeat in China, with Mao Zedong’s Communist Party poised to take over rule of the mainland. For their part, Japanese civilian leaders “understood that the United States needed Japan as much as they themselves wanted American money and security.” The two sides began to bargain.

A substantial spur to Japanese economic recovery was MacArthur’s land reform; from the American “standpoint of making every Japanese laborer a good capitalist, his land reform was brilliant policy.” Landlords were forced to turn their lands over to “those farmers who actually cultivated it.” Unlike Russia and China, Japan saw no inroads by the communists in the countryside. Since communist organizers had used peasants in other countries as a crucial element in their revolutions, this reform contributed substantially to ruining communist hopes for a ‘people’s revolution’ directed by Stalinists. 

Despite MacArthur’s efforts to present himself as a mere guide to the Japanese on “the road to democracy,” they “knew he was over and above even the emperor.” This meant that MacArthur’s long-term presence in the country could not be justified, if Japan was truly to adapt its way of life to a republican regime. For a few years, however, the militarist ethos the Meiji regime had instilled in the people worked in the Americans’ favor; the fact that MacArthur and the Americans had won and their leaders had lost valorized the Americans and dishonored the Japanese militarists. As far as many Japanese were concerned, there was no objection to starting the war, but losing it was a disgrace. It would take another generation to substitute that ethos for a commercial-republican one.

Accordingly, press freedom in postwar Japan most immediately meant freedom from old-regime propaganda, and emphatically not “destructive criticism of the Allied Powers” or “the Allied forces of occupation.” MacArthur did abrogate prewar laws and ordinances “that subjugated the press” to the Japanese government, an important move in the long run. On balance, “American democracy, no matter how one interprets it, offered far more intellectual freedom and political liberties to the Japanese people than they had ever experienced before 1945.” 

Nishi describes MacArthur’s dismissal of “the possibility of a spontaneous development of Japanese democracy” as self-righteous. It was hardly that, but rather a matter of common sense. “The Japanese leaders were more comfortable with the familiar tyranny of the oligarchic cliques than with the tyranny of the ignorant masses, which was what they imagined popular sovereignty to be.” As MacArthur therefore saw, “We could not simply encourage the growth of democracy. We had to make sure that it grew.” There was no time for Burkeanism. Accordingly, MacArthur set the Japanese to writing a new, republican constitution. When the first draft came back looking rather like a Japanese version of the Southern ‘Redeemers’ policies in post-Reconstruction America, the general rejected it. “Their skill in fashioning facades involving no structural remodeling” of the old regime institutions “was notable,” the general remarked, tartly and accurately. The Japanese wanted to continue the emperor’s anointment as a “supreme and inviolable” being. The last Meiji prime minister stated that the surrendering regime accepted the Potsdam Declaration with the proviso that the Emperor’s prerogatives would be infringed in no way, but by New Year’s Day 1946 the Emperor himself “denied his divinity.”

That was an indispensable beginning, but regime change requires the right institutional framework, not just declarations. MacArthur ordered his staff to write a constitution consistent with the regime America wanted. When “the Japanese Government finally realized that MacArthur had no interest in compromising his version of what the United States wanted—or what Japan in future should want,” the government split into supporters of the new Constitution and its enemies. The supporters prevailed, partly because MacArthur at least granted the emperor status as “the symbol of the State,” whereas other American proposals would have deprived him of even that. After Emperor Hirohito proclaimed it law, MacArthur could call it “the most important accomplishment of the Occupation,” and so it has proved to be. Aside from the desacralization of the emperor, the main features of the new constitution were elimination of kolutai, the imperial national policy; the guarantees of civil and political liberties; and Article 9, the “no-war clause.” 

Why did it work? Nishi remarks that one must not assume “that the Japanese [were] so rooted in tradition that they could hardly change their political orientation or preferences.” After all, the Meiji regime itself dated back only to 1868, less than a century before the Americans arrived, and the aspiration to modernize had gripped Japanese elites a couple of decades before that. Indeed, “the celebrated Meiji Constitution of 1889 itself was an idealized version of Prussian constitutional absolutism”—that is, an importation from the West. Moreover, “Japanese reality during the 1940s was a nightmare, the end of which encouraged a mood of idealism and risk taking in conqueror and conquered alike.” In the event, whereas “Japanese conservatives attempted to preserve the structure of imperial sovereignty” by “inject[ing] some democratic practices into it to placate domestic and foreign suspicions,” MacArthur “did the reverse,” abolishing imperial sovereignty and “inject[ing] undemocratic practices for the sake of achieving democratic ends.” MacArthur prevailed because the Japanese people had had enough of the regime of imperialist oligarchs. “The vast majority of the people welcomed the substance of the new Constitution.” 

Like all serious political founders, MacArthur understood he who rules the education system rules the country. In his own generation, American Progressives had done just that. Having framed a new constitution for Japan, “MacArthur had to teach the Japanese people how to use it in their daily lives.” Accordingly, “education in occupied Japan was fiercely political; to the U.S. government, it was the best instrument for achieving basic ideological change,” as it had been for American Progressives and indeed for the American Founders. Ergo, “no nationalism, no militarism, and no communism in Japanese education.” The need for this was urgent, because the Meiji regime had done such a thorough job of promoting its own ruling principles that “the word ‘intellectual’ in Japanese society automatically connoted ‘political.'” 

Because the Meiji had promoted what amounted to a ‘success’-based ideology, its failure prepared the Japanese to respect “the invincible Americans.” General MacArthur made no effort to dissuade them of that sentiment. He used his absolute authority “not only to improve but actually to revolutionize the Japanese way of thinking about self-government,” to “constitutionally prevent the Japanese from fighting another war in the future” by “disarm[ing] the Japanese mind.” By October 1945, military training in the schools was abolished, military officers on school staffs were removed, and plans for reeducating teachers were formed. But that was not enough, as the Japanese Minister of Education dragged his feet. “The Americas understood [his] covert intention: to keep imperial sovereignty alive” in the minds of Japanese youth. To counter his efforts, MacArthur commanded that the Japanese government “revise the content of all educational instruction ‘in harmony with representative government, international peace, the dignity of the individual, and such fundamental human rights as the freedom of assembly, speech, and religion.'” More, the educational system would become a sort of permanent ‘truth and justice commission,’ informing students, teachers and the public about “the part played by  militaristic leaders, their active collaborators, and those who by passive acquiescence committed the nation to war with the inevitable result of defeat, distress, and the present deplorable state of the Japanese people,” as one directive put it. Since “the identification of the individual with the state was one of the primary themes” in Japanese education, “serv[ing] as a powerful reinforcement for the doctrine of state supremacy,” MacArthur’s education emphasized individualism based on human rights inherent in the human person as such. As for modern science, already esteemed by the old regime, MacArthur’s educational system taught that, contrary to the militarists, “a scientific attitude…was a peaceful attitude,” one rightly regarding “Japanese mythology, folklore, and even a sense of historical continuity [to be] something shameful and tainted with defeat.”

Reforms extended to the Japanese language itself. The Japanese people had used a combination of three forms of writing: Katakana, the simplest form; hiragana, a “slightly more complex” form; and kanji, a “visibly more complicated” form. Robert King Hall, chief of the Education Section of the Planning Staff for the Occupation of Japan at  the Civil Affairs Staging Area, strongly recommended the use of the simplest form of written language in the educational system—in obvious contradiction to the spirit of aristocratic/oligarchic education embodied in kanji. After struggling to master the complexities of kanji, Hall argued, Japanese students “may lack the linguistic abilities essential to democratic citizenship,” such as reading “daily newspapers and popular magazine.” Nishi objects that Germany and Italy, Japan’s allies, had had vernacular languages for a long time, and turned to fascism anyway, this misses Hall’s point. German and Italian fascism were mass movements, ‘democratic’ and indeed demagogic. Further, to say that a vernacular or ‘democratized’ language does not necessarily result in a regime of democratic republicanism does not require one to deny that a highly complex language inclines the educated classes toward attitudes that fit an aristocratic civil society.

The Americans introduced a final, structural reform to Japanese education. Since “the interests of individual human beings were not to be subordinated to those of the state,” control of education needed to be devolved from the central government to local school boards. Americans and Japanese alike “understood well that America-initiated school boards would take away power and prestige from the central government in Tokyo.” Problems arose because many Japanese didn’t understand the process, having never governed themselves at the local level. 

By May 1946, the Japanese Ministry of Education effectively surrendered. In their Guide to New Education in Japan, they identified five defects of “Japanese outlook and character,” all deriving from the “general defects” of the “body politic and especially “in the wrong way of thinking of the people themselves.” First, they understood that “Japan is not sufficiently modernized,” by which they meant that the Japanese had “learned how to use steam engines and electrical apparatus” without “adequately learn[ing] the scientific spirt which had built these things.” Teachers must “make better use of our abilities to embrace and assimilate and take in the fundamental principles of Western Civilization, digest these principles and be able to use them as our own.” Second, “The Japanese Nation does not sufficiently respect Humanity, Character, nor Individuality”; since human beings have “free will,” each one has “a nature peculiar only to that particular person.” Education should proceed on this assumption. Related to this point and thirdly, “The Japanese lack critical spirit and are prone to obey authority blindly.” They must learn to reject “the idea that officials are better than civilians.” Fourth, “the Japanese people are scientifically backward and have a poor sense of logic.” Those who “are inclined to obey authority blindly” are also those who “did not have the ability to think logically.” To think logically, to be capable of analyzing policy proposals rationally, was the sine qua non of democratic self-government. Finally, “the democratic people are self-satisfied and narrow-minded,” taking “an arrogant and egoistic attitude toward those below them who are blindly obedient to their superiors.” Japanese racism and religious prejudice result from this unwarranted self-conceit. The May 1947 Fundamental Law on Education reinforced these policy changes, which were also regime changes.

As the Japanese people began to grow “restless with the Occupation” (“Would it never end?” they wondered), the American government recommended that MacArthur negotiate a permanent peace treaty for the Cold War era. MacArthur initially demurred, but when the Korean War began in June 1950, and the purge of communists intensified, he inched toward such a settlement, completed in 1951. The occupation itself ended the following year.

Nishi concludes that although “the Japanese people had to swallow many alien ideas and practices,” “much to their surprise…the people found these ideas and practices far from unpalatable.” “The Japanese people discovered democracy to be a pleasant, efficient, and even commercially profitable way of life.” The one remaining shadow over the new regime—which has endured nearly as long as the Meiji regime—”is best described as a craving for the aesthetic simplicity of vertical loyalty,” exploited by MacArthur, “unintentionally perpetuated” by him, and persisting as “a powerful undercurrent of indigenous emotion that runs against the tide of democracy.”

 

 

 

 

 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Between Two Millstones: Book I: Sketches of Exile, 1974-1978. Peter Constantine translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 56, Number 6, November/December 2019. 

 

We know Solzhenitsyn the anti-Soviet dissident, Solzhenitsyn the chronicler of Leninist-Stalinist mass-murder and mass-incarceration, Solzhenitsyn the prophet of Western decline, Solzhenitsyn the Russian patriot and Christian witness. Here we meet Solzhenitsyn the writer, a man searching for a quiet place to gather his thoughts, refine them, and put them on paper. Between the ruthless tyranny of the East and the clamorous democracy of the West, he will not relinquish his vocations as dissident, prophet, witness, and patriot, but he needs to find a place where he can pursue these vocations in his way, the way of an heir to the legacies of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, legacies deformed by two generations of partisan hacks. “I do not fit in with either system”; Christians seldom do, entirely, with any, and surely not with the modern ‘project,’ East or West.

The exile he sketches began with his 1974 expulsion from the Soviet Union, the first and heaviest “millstone.” Solzhenitsyn published his sketches of his life there in The Oak and the Calf, which appeared a year later. The Communist-Party oligarchs (“a pack of horned devils flitting through the early dawn before the matin bell rings”) finally chose to persecute him from afar, having vainly tried imprisonment, poisoning, blandishments, and blackmail in Russia during the previous three decades. Hosted initially by the German Nobel Prize winner and recent president of PEN, Heinrich Böll, he immediately confronted an alien species of ‘writers,’ the Western journalists, whose “persistent tracking by photo and film crews, documenting my every step and move,” amounted to “the flip side of the relentless, but secret shadowing to which I was subjected at home” by the KGB. Although their “penchant for sensationalism” “saved me” by making it too costly for the Soviet regime to silence him, fundamentally any writer needs simple peace and quiet. By refusing most interviews (“Were they to ensnare me with glory?”), Solzhenitsyn meant no offense; nonetheless, what he intended only as “a literary defense mechanism” provoked media indignation. Under regimes of doctrinaire social egalitarianism, ‘celebrity’ bestowed by the princes of mass media takes the place of grace granted by God, its refusal anathematized as similarly sinful. He couldn’t avoid the censures, but at least he avoided “the danger of becoming a blatherer,” the temptation to issue statements on every passing ‘issue’ journalists through at him. “Political passion is embedded deep within me, and yet it comes after literature, it ranks lower.” To put it in language even ‘we moderns’ understand, Solzhenitsyn was playing the long game—knowing that what ‘the media’ giveth ‘the media’ can take away.

Looking back on the situation from the vantage point of 1978, when he wrote Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn remained grateful to the Russian novelist and fellow émigré Anatoli Kuznetsov, who likened a writer coming to the free West from the tyrannical East to a diver suffering from the bends, “coming from a high to a low pressure zone where one ran the risk of bursting.” “How right he was!” Above all, he knew, he must “continue working steeped in silence, not allowing the flame of writing to expire, not letting myself be torn to pieces, but to remain myself.” A writer’s discipline, but also a man’s, and a citizen’s: “It was so difficult to get used to the full freedom of life and to learn the golden rule of all freedom: to use it as little as possible.”

Offered a quiet home in Norway, he and his wife reconnoitered, only to see that Soviet military forces would likely invade there first, if a European war broke out. Zurich made more sense; Lenin had lived there, before being smuggled back to Russia by the Germans as a knife aimed at the all-too-soft underbelly of the czarist regime during the Great War. Solzhenitsyn was writing his vast historical novel, The Red Wheel, early chapters of which would appear in his 1976 title, Lenin in Zurich. Residence in Switzerland would prove indispensable not only for the necessary historical research but for what every novelist needs: a sense of the place, its physical and moral atmosphere. Finally, however, he saw he could not stay. After a press conference presenting From Under the Rubble, a collection of essays critical of the Soviet regime written by himself and some fellow dissidents, the Swiss authorities notified Solzhenitsyn that in future he must request authorization to hold such a meeting from the Zurich police. He now understood why so many Soviet exiles had left Europe for America. Europe had lost it sense of civic freedom. “We had to move on.”

But not before visiting a Swiss canton during the election of its chief magistrate, the Landammann. The winning candidate gave a fine, sober speech on the need never to surrender “to the folly of total freedom” while also never “making the state almighty.” In the face of the recent abandonment of the South Vietnamese people to the Communist North, raising the question of “whether America will remain loyal to its alliance with Europe,” Europeans must remember to associate their “individual freedoms” with “our obligations and self-defense”—a suggestion that the Swiss regime of self-defense by an armed and vigilant citizenry might deter Soviet-bloc aggression more effectively than the NATO alliance. More, the Landammann continued, “There cannot be a rational functioning state without a dash of aristocratic and even monarchic elements”—without a modern version of what Aristotle calls a ‘mixed’ regime, with its balance of popular representation, administrative expertise, and executive vigor: The Swiss Confederation, “now the oldest democracy in the world,” “did not spring from the ideas of the Enlightenment” but from experience, from “the ancient forms of communal life.” “This is the kind of democracy we [Russians] could do with,” Solzhenitsyn thought—a democracy resembling their own medieval town assemblies. Self-government in political communities small enough for personal knowledge of fellow-citizens: This was the best feature of Switzerland, of old Russia, and even, he would find, some parts of modern America. It is likely that Solzhenitsyn recalled the early Christian communes, as well.

Before leaving Europe, Solzhenitsyn found himself embroiled in political controversies with Russian writers who were far from being journalists, each of whom understood democracy, and politics generally, in ways that diverged sharply from his own moral sensibilities. The first was the renowned physicist Andre Sakharov, who, very much like a man accustomed to thinking in abstractions, in formulae, criticized Solzhenitsyn for having advocated a transition period, frankly described as “authoritarian,” between the Soviet regime and a popularly-based ‘mixed’ regime. Sakharov wanted an immediate regime change from Communist oligarchy to parliamentary democracy, with no intermediate steps. For Solzhenitsyn, “the collapse of Russia in 1917 was like a fiery image before my eyes, the insane attempt at transforming our country to democracy in a single leap,” a leap into “instant chaos” that issued not in democracy but in the triumph of Lenin’s tyranny. “This thirst for ‘instant’ democracy was the impulse of the big-city desk-dwellers, who had no notion whatsoever of real people’s lives.” “In my view, democracy means the genuine self-government of the people, from the bottom up,” whereas social-democratic, scientistic and literary political commentators alike “see it as being the rule of the educated classes” who undertake to lead the people. Solzhenitsyn’s stance, however sensible, could only further irritate the journalists, who now pegged him as “a reactionary and a nationalist.” He was a sort of Christian Aristotelian, not only in his esteem for the ‘mixed regime,’ the regime Aristotle esteemed as the best practicable regime, but also in his insistence on the importance of fitting regime institutions to a given people’s way of life, its “spirit” (as Montesquieu termed it), it “culture.” A ‘liberal’ like Sakharov “was in fact related to the socialist wing…by way of the fathers of the Enlightenment.” “Russia’s moral development” couldn’t advance on abstractions generated by such unreasonable rationalism.

A writer who should have understood the importance of culture was the émigré novelist Andrei Sinyavsky, a satirist who wrote under the pen name of Abram Tertz. Sinyavksy lived in Paris, where he edited the dissident journal Syntaxas. In its inaugural issue he wrote an article blaming Russia’s agony on Russia itself. “Even the lowest criminals—men who in their mindset are practically animals—revere their mothers,” Solzhenitsyn riposted. “But not Abram Tertz.” The two men remained sharply at odds for the remainder of Sinyavsky’s life, with Sinyavsky going so far as to assert that Solzhenitsyn’s exile was a KGB ruse. Solzhenitsyn was gentler in his critique of the celebrated émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov, who in a sense made the same error of “turning his back on Russia,” but not with contempt; Nabokov took a purely literary/esthetic stance, ignoring history for the cultivation of stylistic elegance. Although both a trained scientist and an accomplished novelist, Solzhenitsyn steered away from the pleasurable simplisms of both scientistic and literary politics—really anti- or a-political thought—by using political history as his intellectual ballast, keeping his mind on an even keel, provisioning himself to practice what Aristotle considered the preeminent political virtue, prudence.

It transpired that his sudden, secret departure from Switzerland foiled yet another KGB plot to murder him—forgiving and forgetting never having served as leading characteristics of the Soviet regime-ethos. Moving his family first to Canada—that “timid giant pushed aside in the onrush of the daring and the ruthless,” “immersed in a slumber of oblivion”—he finally chose residence in the United States. After visiting Alaska (“too much of a national park steeped in the nineteenth century”), the family next stopped in northern California, where an “Old Believers” Russian Orthodox community would not allow them to worship with them in the church or to eat at the same table with the adults. But his most important ‘stop’ turned out to be a two-month stay at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he delved into the vast collection of materials on the February Revolution of 1917, which preceded the Bolshevik Revolution, a year later.

Alone in the archives, “My eyes opened as to what had really taken place.” Having studied the 1917-1918 ferment for some forty years, in preparation for composing the Red Wheel, he now made crucial discoveries that “caused a shift in my thinking that I did not expect.” Previously, Solzhenitsyn had “clung to the universally accepted view that Russia in February 1917 had achieved the freedom that generations had striven for, and that all of Russia rejoiced and nurtured this freedom, but alas, alas, only for eight months, as the Bolshevik fiends drowned that freedom in blood, steering the nation to ruin.” But as he perused the documents in the Hoover collection, he say “that Russia was inescapably lost… from the very first days of March,” as a powerless Provisional Government took direction from “a narrow, closed committee in Petrograd, itself “hiding behind the many thousands of noisy members of the larger Soviet.” “A beguiling pink cloud” of leftish opinion continues to shroud what really happened, to this day. Readers of the latest volume of the Red Wheel to be published in English, March 1917, will see how Solzhenitsyn integrated these new insights into his narrative.

Although Solzhenitsyn frequently called for the institution of the rule of law in Russia, he never could accustom himself to its actual operation in the United States and in the West, generally. Facing important questions concerning translations and re-translations of his books, copyright tangles, and all the attendant difficulties, he found “the world of the Western law courts” to be “alien to me,” often because litigation was driven by calculations respecting the mass market of modern commercial democracy. Tocqueville would have understood the jarring effect of democratic egalitarianism on an aristocratic sensibility. For Tocqueville Christianity sharpens this conflict, having been revealed under aristocratic, hierarchic conditions amenable to truths delivered from ‘on high’ but being itself a teaching of equality, a revelation of the universal responsibility of all men “created equal” before God. One senses this tension in Solzhenitsyn’s soul, his life and work.

For his part, when it came to the rule of law, Solzhenitsyn would come to laud the much smaller, local law courts of medieval Russia, where litigation remained on a human scale. The “megacities” of America could offer no such justice. In the hands of a writer like Sinyavsky, all of this would be the stuff of comedy, but for Solzhenitsyn, for whom writing remained a matter of life and death—physical and spiritual—the Western legal process was a torment, reanimating in him the Christian impatience with what men like Luther and Calvin (somewhat unfairly) regarded as Old-Testament legalism. “Legal battles are a profanation of the soul, an ulceration,” Solzhenitsyn thunders. “As the world has entered a legal era, gradually replacing man’s conscience with law, the spiritual level of the world has sunk.” In the courts as in politics, “I was torn by the never-ending conflict within me: to write or to do battle?” In modest defense of Western legalism, it must be said that these battles eventually turned out well for him, as his works have appeared in good translations, with profits now going where he intended them to go—often to persecuted Soviet writers and their families. He even found a big-city lawyer he respected, the Washington insider William Bennett Williams, who assisted in the liberation of Russian dissident Aleksandr Ginzburg from a Soviet prison.

A friend found him a suitable property in rural Cavendish, Vermont, where he built a house for his family. His new home proved his refuge from modernity’s pressures, a place where he could think and write. Initially, his new neighbors took offense at the fence he built around his property, but he followed the smart suggestion of Governor Richard Snelling, who advised him to explain himself at the next town meeting. He not only explained his family’s unique security needs, but he took the opportunity to explain the difference between the words ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet,’ the former being to the latter “as ‘man’ is to ‘disease.'” “Immediately, the tension in the town eased, and a staunch neighborliness was established,” reaffirming Solzhenitsyn’s esteem for the personal touch of small-town life. He nonetheless continued to long for return to his own country, rightly anticipating that it would happen someday.

After making peace with his neighbors in early 1977, Solzhenitsyn’s life settled into a sort of routine. He spent most of his time gratefully at work on the Red Wheel, a work that “encompasses all of Russia—Russia in flux.” It was crucially important to write it all down, to look back, to understand and assess a time when “many people could not see what was coming upon them, not even a day ahead.” If Russians were to have even a slight chance of fostering a decent life for themselves in the future, they needed a reliable account of the errors of the past, the malice of those who exploited those errors, and the rare heroes who saw clearly and acted with acumen and justice. They needed a civic education to prepare their souls for the practice of self-government. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn also needed to tend to his reputation among Russians, not for reasons of petty vanity but because he needed to be trusted as a reliable witness and researcher, a truth-teller—precisely because he had indispensable moral-political and spiritual truths to tell them.

Unfortunately, many of his fellow exiles and dissidents distrusted him. They didn’t know him personally, but there was more: “In truth we had sprung from different roots, expressed different aspirations, and had almost nothing in common but the time and place of action.” Most of Solzhenitsyn’s cohorts were secularized, urban intellectuals who “remained unresponsive to the plight of the Russian countryside and especially to the renewed persecution of the Orthodox Church.” While many of the dissidents “took advantage of every person’s natural right to leave a place they do not want to live” (emphasis added), they turned their backs on the Russians, and the Russia, they left behind. They eschewed Russia as a place for Christians, and for the Orthodox Christianity that Solzhenitsyn never ceased considering the highest form of Christianity, even if his was a ‘genial orthodoxy,’ esteeming all decent forms of worship as bulwarks against atheism. Not for the new generation of exiles was the prayer Solzhenitsyn composed and recited with his sons in Vermont: “Grant us, O Lord, to live in health and strength, our minds bright, until the day when you will open our path home to Russia, to labor and to sacrifice ourselves so that she may recover and flourish.”

The dissident exiles found a sympathetic audience among the similarly secularized intellectuals in the West, who welcomed them, “offered financial support, and heaped [them] with praise.” Solzhenitsyn, however, offended American secularists with his Harvard commencement address in 1978. “For thirty years in the USSR, and for four years now in the West, I kept slashing and hacking away at Communism, but in these last years I had also seen much in the West that was alarmingly dangerous, and here I preferred to talk about that.” At Harvard he publicized his dissatisfaction with Western legalism, a standard “far lower than the true moral yardstick”; he criticized the mis-definition of freedom as “unbridled passion” and its consequence, the weakening of “a sense of responsibility before God and society.” It is well to speak of human rights, he observed, but more urgent to speak of human obligations; few in the West of 1978 were. He judged the likely consequences to be harsh. “The reigning ideology, that prosperity and the accumulation of material riches are to be valued above all else, is leading to a weakening of character in the West, and also to a massive decline in courage and the will to defend itself, as was clearly seen in the Vietnam War, not to mention a perplexity in the face of terror”—that is, the increasing acts of terrorism committed by Muslim militants against Western people. Most deeply, and perhaps most gratingly to his critics, Solzhenitsyn traced all of this to Enlightenment “rationalist humanism,” the “notion that man is the center of all that exists, and that there is no Higher Power above him.” In this “irreligious humanism” the democratic West and the oligarchic East join hands. “The moral poverty of the twentieth century comes from too much having been invested in sociopolitical changes, with the loss of the Whole and the High.” To lose the Whole and the High is to divest oneself of riches greater than those won by capitalists or promised by socialists.

It is almost needless to say that such criticisms found few sympathetic echoes. “It turns out that democracy expects to be flattered. When I called out ‘live not by lies!’ in the Soviet Union, that was fair enough, but when I called out ‘live not by lies!’ in the United States, I was told to go take a hike.” All the more reason to write, “When I return home to Russia one day, I am certain that everything will fall back into place; it is for that moment that I live and write.”

This first volume of Between Two Millstones ends with Solzhenitsyn’s account of his struggle to vindicate his reputation against KGB slanderers, one a former friend from childhood. Physical and spiritual exile from Soviet Russia and spiritual exile from the West were the exactions Providence inflicted on the writer who took up the task of prophetic witness against the world of his time.

In this book above all others, perhaps, Solzhenitsyn shows how he subtly shifted the emphasis of Russian Orthodox Christianity toward a path of greater sobriety. Just as Roman Catholic Christianity brings Aristotelian philosophy in as a supplement to Christian spirituality, thereby fulfilling the Christian command to strive for the prudence of serpents along with the innocence of doves, Orthodox Christianity brings in Platonic philosophy. Rightly understood, Platonic philosophy equally commends prudential reasoning on moral and political matters. (Hence the term political philosophy.) But Orthodox Christians thinkers too often avail themselves not so much of Platonism but of Neoplatonism, with its impatience for undertaking a spiritual and intellectual ascent beyond the conventions, the traditions, of the Christian’s immediate ‘worldly’ surroundings. It’s a bit too easy to be a saint in a desert; the Apostles set out to talk with their fellow-subjects in Imperial Rome, seeking to persuade them, not to leave them behind. In lauding and, more tellingly, practicing the life of moderation or self-limitation, strict justice, unshakable courage, and practical wisdom, in partnering with his wife to hold their family together, and in looking to the founding of a ‘mixed’ and balanced regime that respects long-settled ways of life  including local self-government and work on the land, and in always intending to return to his own people, his own beloved country, Solzhenitsyn faithfully upheld his very Aristotelian and Christian agapic witness “between two millstones.” He hoped that someday Russians themselves would uphold that witness, take up its sacrificial burdens but also its true honor.