Solzhenitsyn’s Russia on the Edge of Revolt

It came as a surprise and a disappointment: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn didn’t like us very much. During those two decades he spent in exile in snowy Vermont (never able to leave Russia in his mind), he saw our weaknesses but was blind to our strengths. Perhaps willfully so. He viewed the Soviet regime as a positive evil and believed that it could, and should, be overcome only by positive good--courage, “spiritual strength and purity.” Not by blue jeans and rock ‘n’ roll, fax machines and the Internet. Not by a capitalist system capable of spending the post-Stalin empire into obsolescence almost as an afterthought.

And then, in “August 1914,” the first “knot” in Solzhenitsyn’s tetralogy “The Red Wheel,” came another surprise: his quarrel with Tolstoy. The Russian generals who led their troops to disaster at Tannenberg are described as being contaminated by Tolstoy’s view, in “War and Peace,” that the fighting spirit of the Russian army, not weapons or tactics, had defeated Napoleon. So they didn’t bother to keep up with German military technology. Solzhenitsyn makes quite a point of knocking the old guy off his pedestal. Yet, of all 20th century writers, isn’t he Tolstoy’s truest heir, especially now that he has returned home?

Clearly his ambition is as grand. If “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” “The First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” are long-suppressed cries of pain from the patient, the Russian people, the three volumes of “The Gulag Archipelago” are a history and anatomy of the illness, and “The Red Wheel” is an epidemiological study of how it all began.

In the second volume of “The Red Wheel,” “November 1916,” Solzhenitsyn describes “relatively few events of historical importance” but says this period “encapsulates the stagnant and oppressive atmosphere of the months immediately preceding the Revolution.” Stagnation would seem an unlikely premise for a 1,000-page novel, but its real subject is this: Could the Bolshevik takeover have been prevented, even at that late date, if someone had divined that the catastrophe of World War I (Russia mobilized 12 million soldiers, of whom 9 million were killed in battle or by disease, wounded, captured or missing) was only a foretaste of the horrors to come? What could a tough, clear-sighted army officer--say, Col. Georgi Vorotyntsev, banished to the Rumanian front after his outburst over the high command’s blunders at Tannenberg--do to save his country?

Vorotyntsev is convinced that Russia needs to get out of the war immediately, Western allies be hanged. He is also beginning to think that, to accomplish this, Czar Nicholas II may have to be deposed. After two years at the front, watching his men die, Vorotyntsev abruptly takes leave, visits his wife in Moscow, then goes to army headquarters and the salons of St. Petersburg, seeking kindred spirits among the Kadets, the moderate liberal party that would form the short-lived Provisional Government in 1917.

Meanwhile, city dwellers face food shortages, farmers struggle with government price controls, officials exhort rebellious workers to build better guns for the army, the Duma wrangles and (in chapters that Solzhenitsyn published separately in 1975 as “Lenin in Zurich”) the Bolshevik leader plots his dizzying ascent to power.

On the northern front, Lt. Sanya Lazhenitsyn, a disciple of Tolstoy’s, is still wrestling with the sin of having to kill Germans. An Orthodox priest, clearly speaking for Solzhenitsyn, argues that Tolstoy was “not a Christian at all”; that his radical pacifism had undermined church and state and left nothing in their place; that war, an inevitable byproduct of organized society, “is not the greatest of evils.” Lazhenitsyn reluctantly agrees.

Vorotyntsev is soon disillusioned, then exasperated, by the Kadets, allowing Solzhenitsyn to deplore Russian liberalism’s failure to be an “honest broker,” its constant caving in to the left--a characteristic, he says, of “all the forms of democratic liberalism on earth.” American liberals of the 1960s and ‘70s must have sounded the same to him. No wonder--strange as it seemed to us then--he felt more at ease with Jesse Helms.

Vorotyntsev talks to Alexander Guchkov, soon to become minister of war, who wants to arrange the kidnapping of the czar and force him to abdicate. He talks to right-wing generals who think all the country needs is a little vigorous repression. But the prospective co-conspirators he finds are working at cross purposes. None has Lenin’s fanatical single-mindedness--and neither, it turns out, has Vorotyntsev himself. A funny thing happens on the way to his date with destiny: He falls in love, at one of those Petersburg salons, with Olda Andozerskaya, a history professor and fervent monarchist.

Their talks (between bouts of passion) confirm what we might have figured out from the beginning, but didn’t: Solzhenitsyn is a believer in the “Russian idea” of a mystical union between ruler and ruled. He rejects the clash of interests that for us is nothing more or less than politics itself. Reading Solzhenitsyn’s early works, we felt sure that anyone who hated totalitarianism so fiercely had to be a democrat. But in his view, it seems, the real evil of the Soviet Union wasn’t that it betrayed the ideals of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson: It offended God by stealing the Russian people’s souls.

And this, perhaps, is the key to his dispute with Tolstoy. Blaming the sage of Yasnaya Polyana more than superficially for the revolution is nonsense. But Solzhenitsyn is also nursing an artistic grievance. “November 1916,” for all its authority--would that we had as clear and comprehensive a picture of Russia today--is inferior to “War and Peace,” and he knows why: “The recent history of our country is so little known, or taught in such a distorted fashion, that I have felt compelled to include more historical matter in this Second Knot than might be expected in a work of literature.” It bogs the story down--all the talk, all the explanations in fine print. Solzhenitsyn fails to achieve--not that anybody else has managed it, either--the sublime equilibrium in which Tolstoy weighed war and peace, history and private lives. None of his characters is as memorable as Natasha, Prince Andrey, Pierre.

Is a simple deficiency in talent to blame? Solzhenitsyn would point to the times he had to write about. History--civil war, famine, mass terror, World War II--wrecked private life in Russia, crushed millions of people, corrupted millions of others, left even the survivors, such as himself, in spiky, tortured shapes, like pieces of slag. If Tolstoy had anything to do with leaving such a bleak terrain for his literary successors, why not criticize him?

Vorotyntsev’s love affair with Andozerskaya is a turning point. He tries to maintain his gloom about Russia’s future, but he can’t; he’s filled with giddy delight. Unlike Lenin, he’s human--and Tolstoyan: He’s like Prince Andrey lying wounded at Austerlitz, gazing up at the sky and rejecting what he had thought to be his destiny--becoming another Napoleon. Later, in Moscow with his wife, Vorotyntsev, the would-be savior of his country, is just another guilty husband, trying to do right by both women and making the usual hash of it, but the writing is moving and insightful.

History is gathering, it will engulf Russia any day, but the last scenes of “November 1916”--also very powerful--are purely of private life. Zinaida, ex-student and lover of the journalist Kovynev, has had a child by another man. She has left her baby behind to visit Kovynev, only to find he has other women; meanwhile, the baby has taken sick and died. Devastated, she goes to church and confesses. The priest’s words surprise her. They are the final words of the novel; they reverberate, and lead us into the last two “knots” of “The Red Wheel” as proof that Solzhenitsyn, that stern old man who has surprised us before, hasn’t lost the capacity to do it again.