The Thinking Reed

It is not difficult to observe that the movement’s positive programme coincides on many points with the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, especially as expressed in his Letter to Soviet Leaders. We find here the same indifference to the political system. They both hate the ideology alone…156

In fact Solzhenitsyn writes, summing up the significance of his Letter to Soviet Leaders — the first manifesto of the New Right to become known world-wide: T put it to them: get rid of the Communist ideology, if only of that for the time being.’157 The quotation is interesting, not because it shows how Solzhenitsyn’s style has degenerated since he has been living as an émigré publicist but because it is indicative politically. If it is only a matter of ‘getting rid of the Communist ideology’, the Soviet system may be fully transformable into an ‘authoritarian order based on love of mankind’.158 Thus Solzhenitsyn actually admits that the Communist ideology does not in the least express the essential nature of the system, but is some sort of extraneous ‘weapon’ it uses in fighting for the sympathy of Western public opinion, and so on. But the most important thing is that Solzhenitsyn’s idea of resorting to the proposal of a dialogue with the statocracy is inherently logical: they have much in common,159 above all — however paradoxical this may be — ideology. Ernest Mandel is quite right when he says that Solzhenitsyn is ‘to a large extent himself a prisoner of the Stalinist ideology’.160 The publication of the Letter to Soviet Leaders and the statements by anti-Marxist dissidents (especially the émigrés) evoked dismay and bewilderment not only among the Lefts but also in Western liberal circles and among Soviet intellectuals faithful to the ideals of 1956. ‘Indeed, Solzhenitsyn appears to distrust the very freedom for which he has so long fought,’ and his views ‘in a curious way reflect the Soviet dogma on which he was raised,’ we read in the American conservative periodical Commentary,161 ‘This is a kind of utopia in which the complex and dynamic problems of society are settled once and for all…’162 Thinking of this sort is typical of dogmatists. He seeks to oppose the Soviet ideology, yet ‘he arms himself with the same weapons, uses similar techniques and adopts a comparable manner,’ writes A. Besançon.163

Anna Akhmatova, too, ‘when asked one day about Solzhenitsyn, uttered the words sovetskii chelovek, a Soviet man.’164 In Besançon’s view, Solzhenitsyn, having been formed in the Stalin school and by the official ideology, turns to nineteenth-century Russia in the hope of overcoming thereby his own ‘Sovietness’ but is capable only of seeing in past history, through an irony of fate, those ideas that are close to Stalin’s.

‘Certain accusations by Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich oddly resemble in tone the ideological campaigns of the period between the thirties and the fifties,’ wrote the Hungarian Marxists Bence and Kis.165 The source, paradoxically, of Solzhenitsyn’s notion is the vulgar Soviet view of 1917 as a milestone of good,’ wrote the Soviet émigrés Solovyov and Klepikova in the American left-wing periodical Dissent.166 ‘Solzhenitsyn wishes to be an inverted Lenin,’ concludes Besançon.167 But the Lenin he imitates is not the real Lenin of history, it is the Lenin of the Stalinist textbooks.

Such quotations could be multiplied, for on this matter people of very different views find themselves in agreement. The real theoretical interest, however, lies not in polemicizing against the New Right and convicting them of repeating official dogmas, but in trying to understand how they ‘came to this way of life’. People change, and their views with them. It is not enough for us merely to record the turn to the Right by many oppositionist intellectuals; it is more interesting to analyse the psychological and ideological mechanisms that have brought this turn about. Furthermore, when we look more closely we perceive that the ‘Solzhenitsyn syndrome’ is a very much more widespread malady among oppositionists than appears at first sight. Many even of those who do not agree with his views are very close to his method of thinking.

Official and Oppositional Dogmatism