A Conversation With Solzhenitsyn

Printed below are two excerpts from a long (30-page) conversation, originally published in 1987 in the German magazine Der Spiegel. Solzhenitsyn’s conversation partner on that occasion was Rudolf Augstein, the founder of that magazine and Solzhenitsyn’s chronological peer. (The two were stationed near each other on the Eastern Front during World War II.)

The first excerpt is a discussion of Peter Stolypin, Russian prime minister from 1905 to 1911. If communism has been a 70-year blind alley in Russian history, to what point in the pre-communist past should contemporary Russia return for a new beginning? Solzhenitsyn proposes the Stolypin era. The second excerpt is a discussion of the overall structure of “The Red Wheel,” the novel cycle of which “August 1914” is the first part.

STOLYPIN LIVES

AUGSTEIN: After the Revolution of 1905 there was an attempt at reform from the top down, headed by Premier Stolypin, whose picture is hanging here above your writing desk.

SOLZHENITSYN: He led an energetic group of technical experts and statesmen; he was the one who wanted to get rid of this system of the corporate responsibility of the mir (agricultural commune). Stolypin was trying to get an agricultural system in the Western sense, with independent peasants.

AUGSTEIN: He lost the tsar’s favor. When he was murdered in 1911, he was already a dead man, politically speaking.

SOLZHENITSYN: That’s not quite true. He carried out his reform. The Duma, on the other hand, our Parliament, tried for three long years to throttle the reform. Who was the liberal here, and who was the reactionary? Stolypin was the liberal! Still, you’re quite right, the extreme right hated him. The extreme left too. Nevertheless, he carried out his reform. His idea was to liberate the peasants from economic dependency, then they would become citizens. First, you’d have to make the citizen, then civic consciousness would be born too.

AUGSTEIN: There was no middle class in Russia.

SOLZHENITSYN: That’s why up to a certain point Stolypin actually did introduce this new system of individual farmsteads after the western model.

AUGSTEIN: Who opposed these reforms, who rescinded them?

SOLZHENITSYN: After the February Revolution of 1917 the Provisional Government rescinded Stolypin’s reform. After October, the Bolsheviks forbade individual farms and finally destroyed them. On this point I want to make it clear why I call so much attention to Stolypin, not only in our conversation but also in my book. He was a real liberal, who tried to set the economy free and to lead people to civic consciousness.

AUGSTEIN: Could Stolypin have prevented the October Revolution? Your book “November 1916” (Editor’s note: The second part of “The Red Wheel”; not yet published in English translation) describes Russia as already ripe for the upheaval.

SOLZHENITSYN: By no means! Let’s go to the next question, which is already closer to “November 1916.” Thanks to the kindness of my German publisher, Piper, I was able to read 40 reviews of my work, “November 1916.” The critical discussions of “August 1914” from 1972 I couldn’t read because Soviet censorship had pocketed them. Now by reading reviews I’ve learned a lot. I’ve seen what today’s Germany knows about Russia back then, and also what it knows, and doesn’t know, about Russia today. In the reviews, for example, there’s a relatively widespread belief that in “November 1916” Solzhenitsyn describes Russia as ripe for the October Revolution. What I describe is, as a matter of fact, the enormous inner tension that prevailed in this state. The tension between the classes, the complete mutual incomprehension, led to the situation’s becoming labile. People didn’t know where they were headed.

AUGSTEIN: And for Russia the war was lost.

SOLZHENITSYN: No, at that time not yet. First, Russia had allies; second, at the beginning of 1917 the troops’ logistics were very good. The artillery, for example, had on the whole everything it needed. Russia’s weakness consisted in the conflict among the social classes, and this tension actually had created an instability. Revolution was not unavoidable, only possible.

AUGSTEIN: But you do have to admit that the autocrats in Russia, in Germany, and in Austria-Hungary were not equal to the problems, which the democracies solved more easily. The tsar couldn’t govern.

SOLZHENITSYN: I’d prefer not to talk about the internal situation in Austria-Hungary. What I can say is this, that the new state apparatus that took over from the tsarist apparatus was considerably worse than what it replaced. To claim that the tsar couldn’t govern wouldn’t be right. It was just that the tsar couldn’t find any common language with the educated classes, and they in turn couldn’t talk to the people. But I don’t want to lose the thread of our discussion. The Revolution might have broken out, or it might not have. But as for the October Revolution, it’s rubbish to say that it was already foreordained as early as 1916 in the pre-revolutionary phase. No, nothing paved the way to it. Lenin himself, in a speech to a public gathering in Switzerland, said: “Our generation will not experience the Revolution,” noting that he had decided to emigrate to the United States.

ABOUT ‘THE RED WHEEL’

AUGSTEIN: Alexander Isayevich, you owe your world reputation to works that you composed in Russia under unbelievable conditions. You would, for example, continually learn whole passages by heart, because anything you wrote would be taken away from you. And now that you’re free to create and write, you’ve undertaken one of the most monumental works known to world history. Two volumes have been done, the third is under way. Evidently, you wish to work up history from 1914 to the completion of Lenin’s dictatorship in 1918 in a new way.

SOLZHENITSYN: I’ve found possibilities for working here in the West that I couldn’t have dreamed of in the Soviet Union. There, even the best Soviet sources were inaccessible to me. I wasn’t allowed to live in Moscow, I was barred from the great libraries, not to mention all the sources that have come out in the West. In addition, here in the West I’ve managed to question personally 300 men and women who were participants in the Revolution. In the Soviet Union, I had no right to search out eyewitnesses from the period, to ask them questions. And scarcely anyone would have answered, out of fear. . . .

AUGSTEIN: How can anyone work under such circumstances?

SOLZHENITSYN: Everyone who gets published in the Soviet Union has to do it, although in the meantime the guidelines have been broadened a bit. But I can relieve or gratify the German reader by saying that I won’t have to write such a gigantic number of “knots” as I thought I had to. For the following reasons:

I have to remember that in our time people read less and I have to show some consideration for my reader’s patience. Furthermore, my age no longer permits me to keep tackling new tasks. And most important; I’m coming to the end of the fourth knot.

The book ends, according to the old Russian calendar, on May 5, 1917. There I see the picture is already lying before me that I was just now describing: Russia ready to be snatched by the Bolsheviks. In a certain sense I’ve completed my task. Of course I would have liked, it would have been very interesting, to go on working: There was the October Revolution and the events of 1918. But it will never get to that point. “August 1914” consists of two volumes, so does “November 1916”; in Germany and France each has been published as a single volume. With two volumes of “March 1917” and one of “April 1917” the German reader is faced with another three volumes to test his patience.

AUGSTEIN: You’re bursting with creative energy, but you have some expectations of your readers too. They have to work along with you and sometimes have to fight off discouragement.

SOLZHENITSYN: Naturally, I always have the Russian reader in mind. For the Western reader I’d have to find the time to write somewhat abbreviated versions. I didn’t have the time before, and I don’t have it now. That’s why I composed the synopsis-chapters. Readers can skip these too. The West doesn’t need the Russian details, but the overall picture is very instructive for the West also.