ROOTS OF RUSSIAN-WESTERN MISTRUST

How historical bias threatens present cooperation.

By Ignat Solzhenitsyn, July 2020

[Below is the full text of my op-ed, an abridged version of which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 24 October 2020.]

“The insane difficulty of the situation is that I can’t ally myself with the Communists, our country’s butchers—but I can’t ally myself with our country’s enemies either. And all this time I have no home ground to support me. The world is big, but there’s nowhere to go.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, through his world-changing Gulag Archipelago and fiery speeches in the West, had earned every ounce of his reputation as Communism’s most implacable foe. Yet, in the midst of the Cold War, at a time when battle lines seemed so clearly drawn, Solzhenitsyn—as is evident in his memoirs now appearing for the first time in English—was already discerning a new, unforeseen peril: that Russian-Western mistrust might endure long past the fall of Communism he believed would soon come.

Fast-forward to 2020. Today’s grievances between Russia and the West have been amply cataloged: arms programs, NATO expansion, Yukos, Kosovo, color revolutions, Ukraine, Crimea, elections. And the list goes on and on.

Yet would mitigating the proximate causes of offense allow for a working relationship to be reforged, simple as that? The unlooked-for Cold Peace (in Yeltsin’s sadly memorable formulation) that has stubbornly prevailed for a quarter-century exposes a deeper cleft and demands an examination of the historical roots of this peculiar and thought-provoking circumstance: that the two major US parties, who could never unite around a principled anti-Communism during the Cold War (notwithstanding today’s self-dealing revisionist fables served up by an American Left finally discomfited by its erstwhile enthusiastic sufferance of totalitarianism), now find themselves intoning from the same hymnal about the crepuscular menace of Russian nationalism rising (it’s forever rising) in the East.

When in the late ’90s I first read these memoirs of Solzhenitsyn’s years in the West, I flitted rather too breezily through passages ruminating on East-West conflict, assuming—ah, how wrongly!—that those questions were becoming moot, consigned to the dustbin of history by the dizzying annus mirabilis of 1989, the Fall of the Wall, and the signing of START I. But in preparing, over the last three years, the first English edition of these volumes (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Between Two Millstones, University of Notre Dame Press, 2018 & 2020), I have come to see how eerily prescient my father was in his dismayed apprehension of a “pivot of accusations towards Russia” herself: that resentful 1970s émigrés were, already then, prodding the West to espy its true enemy not in Communism, but in an irredeemable past and future Russia. Historical Russia had earlier been excoriated by 1920s Western progressives for opposing Bolshevism, but, now that opinion had turned, she was damned anew for being enslaved by it. “How could it have happened?,” Solzhenitsyn asks.

The author, who often seemed able to peer into the future because he so intently studied the past, argues, in a chapter evocatively titled “Russian Pain,” that Russia’s “excessive, senseless military actions in Europe” in the 18th and 19th centuries had set the West on guard, while her ossified governing apparatus failed to grasp Western civic “lessons of openness,” or at least to justify its actions; meanwhile, exiled revolutionaries, in the service of their own fanaticism, were drawing for Europe a grossly distorted picture of Russia and her history (retrograde authoritarian prison of nations)—and even their most brazenly exaggerated accusations took hold in the absence of an articulate counter-narrative. Then, on the cusp of the 20th century, aggressive Russian revolutionary terrorism, abetted by a fawning intelligentsia, began to be met by a rising “coarseness and ineptitude” of a nationalist right wing, which resorted to abuse instead of making the case for the moderate path of social evolution attempted by the great reformist prime minister Stolypin. Later, decades after Lenin’s “Bolshevik steamroller” had crushed all (especially the true Russian patriots who’d sought to defend traditional values within a pluralistic society), the disfigured parody of patriotism that sprung up in the 1960s and ’70s was a pagan “red-brown” nationalism that “wrote ‘god’ without an initial capital and ‘Government’ with.” And before Solzhenitsyn’s “healing, salutary, moderate patriotism”—one freed from imperial ambitions and grounded in a neglected “preservation of the people”—ever had the chance to take root in a renewed, post-Communist Russia, it was tarred by a fallacious, odious conflation with that perverted “national Bolshevism”: again a slander by vengeful émigrés, and again swallowed by the West hook, line, and sinker.

After the fall of Communism, Solzhenitsyn’s call for repentance, for a historical reckoning on the model of Germany’s legendary Vergangenheitsbewältigung, went unheeded, resulting in a further “red-brown” permeation of society, where official government support for memorials of Communist repression and the incorporation of The Gulag Archipelago into the nationwide high-school curriculum paradoxically coexists with a noxious insinuation that Stalin—the chief butcherer of Russians—was a Russian patriot, while Solzhenitsyn—the chief enemy of Russia’s oppressors—was a traitor.

Little wonder—but what a lost opportunity—that the West, in consistently repudiating any legitimate Russian national interest, has itself blurred any meaningful distinction between the totalitarian jackboot of the USSR and the soft authoritarianism of a comparatively free new Russia, and instinctively confused “Russian” and “Soviet,” miscomprehending three centuries of Russian history as well as the uncompromisingly anti-national essence of the Communist project. (“‘Russian’ is to ‘Soviet’ as ‘man’ is to ‘disease,’” writes Solzhenitsyn.) And unintended consequences: the crippling of the fragile beginnings of mainstream political discourse and the manifest spawning of an unprecedented Russian consensus (uniting liberal society and illiberal government who otherwise agree on little else) that “they won’t like us no matter what we do.”

If Western policymakers’ objective remains to bring Russia “into the community of free nations,” they might do well to heed Solzhenitsyn’s plea and engage with Russia equitably, according to the virtues or failings of current policy, rather than judge her reflexively by a fictitious, maleficent historical narrative from which there can be no escape.