A tremendous experience
There is no eulogy in the English language more radiant than the one that the journalist Bernard Levin wrote in 1976 for the Russian writer Alexander Solghenitsin after meeting him during a BBC interview. And until yesterday, Levin’s passionate and obviously sincere account of the great writer was the main reason I had to admire the man.
As a historian, I feel that I know quite enough of the monsters who polluted the twentieth century. I tend to avoid eyewitness accounts of the crimes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and less famous fiends such as King Leopold II (whose hideous rule in the Congo may well surpass Hitler and Stalin’s worst excesses, and for far meaner motives) or Plutarco Calles of Mexico. When I read statistics that speak of millions of dead, or describe a permanent shortage of males in the Russian population through fifty years of Soviet governance, I do not feel the need to recreate the experience of those victims. I already know what to think; and at any rate, I have seen and read enough not to want to see or read any more.
Therefore, until yesterday, I had not read any of Solghenitsin’s more famous writings, in spite of my admiration for the man. I only read his account of Lenin’s life before the revolution, which did not look as though it would involve horrors - but which is also widely regarded as not his best work. I knew that his most famous books were accounts of Communist horrors, whether in fictional form (A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich) or as genuine historical investigation with all the forms of a piece of research (The GuLag Archipelago) - and I felt that, whatever their literary quality, I would not enjoy reading them.
I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong.
Yesterday, in the course of writing an essay on Russia (which will appear in this blog in the next week or two), I had to check a reference, and was sent to pages 410-416 of The GuLag Archipelago - Solghenitsin’s astonishing work of history, an investigation of the scale and history of Communist crimes in Russia written while Solghenitsin was still living in the country and had a past as a camp prisoner himself weighing him down. I was, of course, conscious of this tremendous piece of historical research, and duly impressed with the unflinching courage, historical intelligence, and sheer bloody-minded hard work, that had managed to accumulate so much evidence for the crimes of a regime (227 interviews and mountains of documents) while the regime was still in power and utterly merciless. It was as though the documentation of the Nuremberg Trials had been published, by a German, in Germany, while Hitler and Himmler were still in power. Purely as a feat of historical research, it is impressive; factor in the difficulty of getting people to talk about the crimes of their rulers, and the courage it must have taken to start and continue in the first place, and it becomes awe-inspiring - the sort of thing one ought to salute. This much I knew. But I had never read it.
Pages 410-416 contain Solghenitsin’s account of one of the most famous of Stalin’s crimes: his destruction of the Bolshevik old guard - Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin, Trotsky. This episode - a horrible and intricate series of treacheries and counter-treacheries, perjuries that would make a Mafioso blush in shame, show trials of the most obscene description, prisoners who denounced themselves with the most hideous crimes in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and even begged to be shot - is familiar enough, alas, to anyone with an interest in twentieth-century history; indeed, even if you paid no attention to Stalin’s other crimes, you have to notice this one, because it also represents a significant moment in history - a change in the make-up, and partly in the direction, of the Soviet ruling class. It has also produced a great deal of first-rate historical work by people such as Robert Conquest, and some superb works of literature, by Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone among others.
What makes Solghenitsin’s account special, even among the many great writers and historians who tackled the issue, is this. Imagine that a corporation has just gone bust with every evidence of malpractice and fraud, and that, as often happens, its flamboyant bosses, so recently the darlings of the media, have been found to be swindlers and thieves on a colossal scale, criminals who ruined millions. There is an inquest. Witness after witness take the stand and give a raging, injured account of what they saw happen and what the crimes of the CEO and the Board mean to them. Then a forensic accountant stands up and takes the oath. His voice is calm, though expressive. He gives a detailed, elaborate, penetrating account of just exactly what these men and women did; how they were unwilling to face the consequences of their mistaken choices; how, instead of accepting that they had miscalculated and moving on, they kept gambling and gambling further in a desperate attempt to pretend they were not bankrupt - behaviour that sprang not from determined criminality, but from cowardice. He knows his subject; he has followed all the money trails; he is familiar with the personalities involved and can show what each person did, and showing that the what and how of what they did inevitably leads to the why they did it. Until that moment, we looked on the criminals involved as enigmas of nature, men and women born strangely without either the heart or the self-respect of an ordinary human being; the moral and mental clarity of this investigator solves the enigma for us - without lessening by one jot the criminality of the accused, in fact deepening our awareness and understanding of it.
This is how Solghenitsin’s account of the fate of the old Bolsheviks differs from anyone else’s. It has a calm and towering moral clarity that differs from everyone else’s angry astonishment in the same way as the competent description of a crime by an expert differs from the furious, yet uncomprehending descriptions by victims and witnesses. To everyone else, the complications of horror and abject shame, of lie piled on lie and perjury piled on perjury, by men who had recently ruled hundreds of millions and meant to change the future of the human race, were a ghastly mystery. People could hardly understand how men could so disgrace themselves in public, crawling before their torturer, with not even as much self-respect as would have kept them silent when death was at any rate certain and expected. But to Solghenitsin, there is no mystery; and that not because he in any way cheapens or diminishes the atrocity of what happened, but because he can read into the hearts of those men. His account is actually quite short, only seven out of hundreds of pages of his masterpiece; but it is nothing short of magisterial. He reads the personality of these men and their persecutors, their acts and their motives, in such a way that we are immediately convinced that this is the best explanation; that it answers human nature, the nature of the protagonists, the facts, and above all the moral consistency (or rather, its lack) shown by every one of these men in earlier days as well as now. He points out that the men whose abominable self-surrender fills our pages were actually not the only ones to be exterminated in those years of blood; that they had colleagues with the same background who did indeed do what an ordinary man would expect, and fall silent rather than collaborate with their butchers. He points out that these men, in spite of a few years of internal and external exile each, had never really suffered torture and vicious examination in their days as militants; that, in a sense, they had been revolutionaries on the cheap, because there was no comparison between the Tsar’s regime’s methods, however violent, and those of a revolutionary police whose goal had always and from the beginning been to break the conscience and the will of any person designated as a “counter-revolutionary element” - because the goal of the revolution was to reshape the very conscience and consciousness of man. Faced with the thing they had helped unleash on their own people, most of them broke.
The account of the moral personalities of the old Bolsheviks is devastating, and more than devastating, because there is no vindictive fury about it. It is just that this man manages what no other writer I have read has managed, to give a clear, judicious and well-grounded account of the moral status of these people - especially of the central figure of Bukharin. A certain amount of contempt does seep through in his description of him; if nothing else, because Bukharin had so many opportunities to escape, like Trotsky and Münzenberg. He insisted on staying, because, unlike those two formidable adventurers, he had no independent existence outside the Party. He begged to be allowed to stay a member; even his secret last document for posterity was nothing more than a desperate and undignified plea to be readmitted. At the very moment when it was clear to the very blind that Stalin was moving to ruin him, Bukharin allowed himself to be used to write the figleaf-Constitution of 1937, which pretended that a country that was drowning in blood was a fully formed democracy under a thorough rule of law. He must have known, as he crafted its pretty and elaborate legal system, that it had no application whatever to Soviet reality, that it existed only in Cloud-cuckooland, that he was giving a coat of legal and democratic whitewash to an edifice built in blood and ordered as absolute tyranny; and last but not least, he must have suspected that it would be his last contribution to the tower of lies his Party had raised. Yet he did it.
(Mind you, Stalin eventually managed to murder both Trotsky and Münzenberg, as well as a number of other exiles such as the ex-spy Krivitsky and several White Russian opponents; so one wonders whether escape and revolt would have done Bukharin much good. But they would have shown that he had the makings of a man, however corrupted, rather than of a terrified twitching rat or of an ant in an anthill.)
But Solghenitsin does not only manage a magisterial account of what had escaped so many other fine minds; he does something even greater. On the face of it, such an account of moral putridity, of men, both victims and executioners, so base and abject that words (except his) barely manage to describe them, can be nothing but depressing. But it isn’t! I went away from it with my heart lighter, with a genuine sense of freedom and breadth. The last thing you would call such an account of evil is an exhilarating experience; but it is. It is inspiring reading. And the reason why, the reason why the heart sings as these terrible events are described, is that the judgment is delivered from a position of calm and wise moral authority. Solghenitsin knows what these people have gone through, because he understands good and evil clearly and can measure each of them. Reading those pages, one comes to understand Bernard Levin’s blazing praise:
“The greatest man now living… the familiar and inexplicable feeling of exhilaration that comes from talking to those who know what it is to live in hell, and who, although they can say only
I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet, And the sea rises higher
nevertheless radiate a kind of invulnerable optimism that comes from within, and is the mark of those who are eternally secure in the knowledge that their tormentors are not only wrong but doomed…. I remember this feeling very vividly from my only visit to South Africa; all the misery and cruelty and despair I could see around me, which were in themselves almost unendurable, were transmuted into a kind of joyous hope by the indomitability of those I talked to who were resisting evil with a serene gaiety and a courage that it is fortunately beyond our necessity to measure... I have experienced that uplift of the spirit whenever I have met any of those, from Valentin Prussakov to Viktor Fainberg, who have managed to get out, and I also felt it intensely the night before I met Solzhenitsyn, when I met Garfield Todd. The gentle Rhodesian and the Russian Titan could scarcely be more different, in the experiences they have undergone, the situations in which they find themselves, or the nature of their lifework; yet the same current of delight ran through me as I met them, and the same lightness of heart accompanied me as I left. Good, brave men, it seems, are the same the world over, and their goodness and bravery can no more be hidden than they can be counterfeited.”
People testify to this white, luminous, radiant impact of a personality, when they speak of Nelson Mandela or of the late Pope; and I have to admit that until I read those few pages of Solghenitsin, I had not really felt it myself. The white Afrikaaner rugby player Pienaar felt it when Mandela, then President of South Africa, cam down to shake the players’ hands before the final of the Rugby World Cup in, I believe, 1995, wearing a green South Africa team shirt. It was no more than the kind of pleasant occasion which any head of state does a dozen times a month - smiles, handshakes; yet the impact of Mandela’s personality on a man who was not, by background or personality, particularly geared to agree with him, was such that, as Pienaar said after the game, “I went in there ready to get my spine broken for him”. Which, from a rugby player, is no joke - the game affords sufficient opportunities to break your spine for real. And it is a fact that the South Africans won that world cup by playing to their absolute maximum. Pope Woytila had the same impact: people became converts to Catholicism after only meeting him. And all these men, Solghenitsin, Woytila, Mandela, have in common - as Levin pointed out - that they have confronted evil vicious, evil rampant, evil in complete control, and come out of it not only victorious but clarified, rooted in a moral truth so intense and so deeply experienced that they become practically mirrors for it to shine out to everyone they meet. Or, as in Solghenitsin’s case, to someone who, like me, did nothing more than read a few of his pages.
As a historian, I feel that I know quite enough of the monsters who polluted the twentieth century. I tend to avoid eyewitness accounts of the crimes of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and less famous fiends such as King Leopold II (whose hideous rule in the Congo may well surpass Hitler and Stalin’s worst excesses, and for far meaner motives) or Plutarco Calles of Mexico. When I read statistics that speak of millions of dead, or describe a permanent shortage of males in the Russian population through fifty years of Soviet governance, I do not feel the need to recreate the experience of those victims. I already know what to think; and at any rate, I have seen and read enough not to want to see or read any more.
Therefore, until yesterday, I had not read any of Solghenitsin’s more famous writings, in spite of my admiration for the man. I only read his account of Lenin’s life before the revolution, which did not look as though it would involve horrors - but which is also widely regarded as not his best work. I knew that his most famous books were accounts of Communist horrors, whether in fictional form (A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich) or as genuine historical investigation with all the forms of a piece of research (The GuLag Archipelago) - and I felt that, whatever their literary quality, I would not enjoy reading them.
I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong.
Yesterday, in the course of writing an essay on Russia (which will appear in this blog in the next week or two), I had to check a reference, and was sent to pages 410-416 of The GuLag Archipelago - Solghenitsin’s astonishing work of history, an investigation of the scale and history of Communist crimes in Russia written while Solghenitsin was still living in the country and had a past as a camp prisoner himself weighing him down. I was, of course, conscious of this tremendous piece of historical research, and duly impressed with the unflinching courage, historical intelligence, and sheer bloody-minded hard work, that had managed to accumulate so much evidence for the crimes of a regime (227 interviews and mountains of documents) while the regime was still in power and utterly merciless. It was as though the documentation of the Nuremberg Trials had been published, by a German, in Germany, while Hitler and Himmler were still in power. Purely as a feat of historical research, it is impressive; factor in the difficulty of getting people to talk about the crimes of their rulers, and the courage it must have taken to start and continue in the first place, and it becomes awe-inspiring - the sort of thing one ought to salute. This much I knew. But I had never read it.
Pages 410-416 contain Solghenitsin’s account of one of the most famous of Stalin’s crimes: his destruction of the Bolshevik old guard - Kamenev, Zinoviev, Radek, Bukharin, Trotsky. This episode - a horrible and intricate series of treacheries and counter-treacheries, perjuries that would make a Mafioso blush in shame, show trials of the most obscene description, prisoners who denounced themselves with the most hideous crimes in the face of all evidence to the contrary, and even begged to be shot - is familiar enough, alas, to anyone with an interest in twentieth-century history; indeed, even if you paid no attention to Stalin’s other crimes, you have to notice this one, because it also represents a significant moment in history - a change in the make-up, and partly in the direction, of the Soviet ruling class. It has also produced a great deal of first-rate historical work by people such as Robert Conquest, and some superb works of literature, by Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone among others.
What makes Solghenitsin’s account special, even among the many great writers and historians who tackled the issue, is this. Imagine that a corporation has just gone bust with every evidence of malpractice and fraud, and that, as often happens, its flamboyant bosses, so recently the darlings of the media, have been found to be swindlers and thieves on a colossal scale, criminals who ruined millions. There is an inquest. Witness after witness take the stand and give a raging, injured account of what they saw happen and what the crimes of the CEO and the Board mean to them. Then a forensic accountant stands up and takes the oath. His voice is calm, though expressive. He gives a detailed, elaborate, penetrating account of just exactly what these men and women did; how they were unwilling to face the consequences of their mistaken choices; how, instead of accepting that they had miscalculated and moving on, they kept gambling and gambling further in a desperate attempt to pretend they were not bankrupt - behaviour that sprang not from determined criminality, but from cowardice. He knows his subject; he has followed all the money trails; he is familiar with the personalities involved and can show what each person did, and showing that the what and how of what they did inevitably leads to the why they did it. Until that moment, we looked on the criminals involved as enigmas of nature, men and women born strangely without either the heart or the self-respect of an ordinary human being; the moral and mental clarity of this investigator solves the enigma for us - without lessening by one jot the criminality of the accused, in fact deepening our awareness and understanding of it.
This is how Solghenitsin’s account of the fate of the old Bolsheviks differs from anyone else’s. It has a calm and towering moral clarity that differs from everyone else’s angry astonishment in the same way as the competent description of a crime by an expert differs from the furious, yet uncomprehending descriptions by victims and witnesses. To everyone else, the complications of horror and abject shame, of lie piled on lie and perjury piled on perjury, by men who had recently ruled hundreds of millions and meant to change the future of the human race, were a ghastly mystery. People could hardly understand how men could so disgrace themselves in public, crawling before their torturer, with not even as much self-respect as would have kept them silent when death was at any rate certain and expected. But to Solghenitsin, there is no mystery; and that not because he in any way cheapens or diminishes the atrocity of what happened, but because he can read into the hearts of those men. His account is actually quite short, only seven out of hundreds of pages of his masterpiece; but it is nothing short of magisterial. He reads the personality of these men and their persecutors, their acts and their motives, in such a way that we are immediately convinced that this is the best explanation; that it answers human nature, the nature of the protagonists, the facts, and above all the moral consistency (or rather, its lack) shown by every one of these men in earlier days as well as now. He points out that the men whose abominable self-surrender fills our pages were actually not the only ones to be exterminated in those years of blood; that they had colleagues with the same background who did indeed do what an ordinary man would expect, and fall silent rather than collaborate with their butchers. He points out that these men, in spite of a few years of internal and external exile each, had never really suffered torture and vicious examination in their days as militants; that, in a sense, they had been revolutionaries on the cheap, because there was no comparison between the Tsar’s regime’s methods, however violent, and those of a revolutionary police whose goal had always and from the beginning been to break the conscience and the will of any person designated as a “counter-revolutionary element” - because the goal of the revolution was to reshape the very conscience and consciousness of man. Faced with the thing they had helped unleash on their own people, most of them broke.
The account of the moral personalities of the old Bolsheviks is devastating, and more than devastating, because there is no vindictive fury about it. It is just that this man manages what no other writer I have read has managed, to give a clear, judicious and well-grounded account of the moral status of these people - especially of the central figure of Bukharin. A certain amount of contempt does seep through in his description of him; if nothing else, because Bukharin had so many opportunities to escape, like Trotsky and Münzenberg. He insisted on staying, because, unlike those two formidable adventurers, he had no independent existence outside the Party. He begged to be allowed to stay a member; even his secret last document for posterity was nothing more than a desperate and undignified plea to be readmitted. At the very moment when it was clear to the very blind that Stalin was moving to ruin him, Bukharin allowed himself to be used to write the figleaf-Constitution of 1937, which pretended that a country that was drowning in blood was a fully formed democracy under a thorough rule of law. He must have known, as he crafted its pretty and elaborate legal system, that it had no application whatever to Soviet reality, that it existed only in Cloud-cuckooland, that he was giving a coat of legal and democratic whitewash to an edifice built in blood and ordered as absolute tyranny; and last but not least, he must have suspected that it would be his last contribution to the tower of lies his Party had raised. Yet he did it.
(Mind you, Stalin eventually managed to murder both Trotsky and Münzenberg, as well as a number of other exiles such as the ex-spy Krivitsky and several White Russian opponents; so one wonders whether escape and revolt would have done Bukharin much good. But they would have shown that he had the makings of a man, however corrupted, rather than of a terrified twitching rat or of an ant in an anthill.)
But Solghenitsin does not only manage a magisterial account of what had escaped so many other fine minds; he does something even greater. On the face of it, such an account of moral putridity, of men, both victims and executioners, so base and abject that words (except his) barely manage to describe them, can be nothing but depressing. But it isn’t! I went away from it with my heart lighter, with a genuine sense of freedom and breadth. The last thing you would call such an account of evil is an exhilarating experience; but it is. It is inspiring reading. And the reason why, the reason why the heart sings as these terrible events are described, is that the judgment is delivered from a position of calm and wise moral authority. Solghenitsin knows what these people have gone through, because he understands good and evil clearly and can measure each of them. Reading those pages, one comes to understand Bernard Levin’s blazing praise:
“The greatest man now living… the familiar and inexplicable feeling of exhilaration that comes from talking to those who know what it is to live in hell, and who, although they can say only
I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet, And the sea rises higher
nevertheless radiate a kind of invulnerable optimism that comes from within, and is the mark of those who are eternally secure in the knowledge that their tormentors are not only wrong but doomed…. I remember this feeling very vividly from my only visit to South Africa; all the misery and cruelty and despair I could see around me, which were in themselves almost unendurable, were transmuted into a kind of joyous hope by the indomitability of those I talked to who were resisting evil with a serene gaiety and a courage that it is fortunately beyond our necessity to measure... I have experienced that uplift of the spirit whenever I have met any of those, from Valentin Prussakov to Viktor Fainberg, who have managed to get out, and I also felt it intensely the night before I met Solzhenitsyn, when I met Garfield Todd. The gentle Rhodesian and the Russian Titan could scarcely be more different, in the experiences they have undergone, the situations in which they find themselves, or the nature of their lifework; yet the same current of delight ran through me as I met them, and the same lightness of heart accompanied me as I left. Good, brave men, it seems, are the same the world over, and their goodness and bravery can no more be hidden than they can be counterfeited.”
People testify to this white, luminous, radiant impact of a personality, when they speak of Nelson Mandela or of the late Pope; and I have to admit that until I read those few pages of Solghenitsin, I had not really felt it myself. The white Afrikaaner rugby player Pienaar felt it when Mandela, then President of South Africa, cam down to shake the players’ hands before the final of the Rugby World Cup in, I believe, 1995, wearing a green South Africa team shirt. It was no more than the kind of pleasant occasion which any head of state does a dozen times a month - smiles, handshakes; yet the impact of Mandela’s personality on a man who was not, by background or personality, particularly geared to agree with him, was such that, as Pienaar said after the game, “I went in there ready to get my spine broken for him”. Which, from a rugby player, is no joke - the game affords sufficient opportunities to break your spine for real. And it is a fact that the South Africans won that world cup by playing to their absolute maximum. Pope Woytila had the same impact: people became converts to Catholicism after only meeting him. And all these men, Solghenitsin, Woytila, Mandela, have in common - as Levin pointed out - that they have confronted evil vicious, evil rampant, evil in complete control, and come out of it not only victorious but clarified, rooted in a moral truth so intense and so deeply experienced that they become practically mirrors for it to shine out to everyone they meet. Or, as in Solghenitsin’s case, to someone who, like me, did nothing more than read a few of his pages.