Gorbachev Rejects Solzhenitsyn Proposal for an All-Slavic State

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, struggling to hold together the multinational empire seized by Russian revolutionaries from the czars, Tuesday rejected writer Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn’s call that the Soviet Union be dissolved and replaced by a state made up of the three Slavic republics.

As the Soviet legislature debated the preparation of a new Treaty of Union to free the outlying parts of the country from, in many cases, the central government’s centuries-old grip, Gorbachev pronounced himself in favor of a “renewed union” of more independent components but within the framework of a single nation.

The treaty, whose drafting was approved by the legislature, is intended to devolve greater powers on the country’s 15 constituent republics, while leaving Moscow in charge of key areas like defense. It is Gorbachev’s last-ditch attempt to preserve the integrity of a country increasingly sundered by nationalism and ethnic rivalries.

In recent days, a major item for debate among Muscovites has been Solzhenitsyn’s provocative 16,000-word article “How to Revitalize Russia,” published last week by two newspapers with a combined circulation of 26 million.

Exiled in 1974 on a trumped-up charge of treason but exonerated and given back his Soviet citizenship this year, the Nobel Literature laureate, who lives in Cavendish, Vt., said the Baltic states, the four Central Asian republics and Moldavia should secede, leaving behind the Slavic lands of Russia, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and areas settled by their migrants in Kazakhstan.

Put briefly, Solzhenitsyn’s point is that the burdens of being a continent-sized superpower and assisting underdeveloped areas, like Central Asia, are sapping Russia’s strength and riches.

“We must choose,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “between the empire which kills us and the spiritual and material salvation of our nations.”

It was the first topical piece to appear in the Soviet press by the former prison camp inmate who wrote “The Gulag Archipelago” and “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” It virtually required a reply from Gorbachev, such is Solzhenitsyn’s stature as a cultural figure.

In comments quickly broadcast to the world, Gorbachev unequivocally opposed the breakup of the Soviet Union, a process that to some extent has already begun.

Asked by a lawmaker from Kazakhstan to evaluate the Solzhenitsyn article, Gorbachev said he was “overwhelmed with contradictory feelings,” but that the recommendations of “undoubtedly, a great man,” on carving up the country and returning to the territorial divisions of the czarist era are reactionary and dangerous.

“As a politician, I find Solzhenitsyn’s views unacceptable,” he said. “He lives entirely in the past. Czarist Russia, the monarchy, all this is unacceptable for me.”

Lifting the veil on his own life, which he seldom does, the 59-year-old Soviet leader rejected the principle of a purely Slavic state by evoking his boyhood in the rich, grain-growing Stavropol region north of the Caucasus mountains, where his father worked on a collective farm.

“After God had settled various peoples all over the Earth, he flew over the Caucasus and just sort of shook out his bag all over this place,” Gorbachev said, citing a folk legend. “That’s how it came about that in every canyon or crevice there lives a different nationality.

“Thirty-five different peoples! That is the environment I grew up in and where I spent my formative years,” Gorbachev told the raptly listening lawmakers. “And we are all this way, all of us here! That’s how our country is, and has always been throughout the ages.”

Far from worrying only about his fellow Russians and Slavs, Gorbachev said he was a disciple of V. I. Lenin, who forged the multi-ethnic Soviet Union and “fought until his last gasp for the right of every people in this country after the revolution to feel free and face its future with confidence.”