4

COLD WAR PROPHESIES

Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mythological America

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN arrived in America in 1974 after being expelled from the Soviet Union for his anticommunist dissident activity. The plane charged to execute the deportation took him to West Germany where he spent a short time before leaving for Switzerland. Europe impressed him with its institutions and especially the mechanisms of grass-roots democracy, but in the end he opted for the United States as the Tomi of his exile. Like Ovid, who spent his banishment complaining bitterly about the land to which he had been forced to go, Solzhenitsyn frequently expressed his disappointment in America. Yet, while the Roman poet was unhappy to be in a barbarian province that he perceived as inferior to his native empire, Solzhenitsyn had left behind a world of prison camps and food shortages. Many like him, struggling in the Eastern bloc countries, dreamed of reaching American shores. All America offered him, it would seem, was a familiar climate in Vermont and the opportunity to do research for his books in well-equipped libraries at major academic institutions. In 1992, excited to return to post-Soviet Russia, he thanked his Vermont neighbors for giving him peace to pursue his endeavors, in an abrupt and somewhat awkward farewell. He was satisfied: “I have done all that I wanted to do.”¹ Indeed, he had managed to complete his work and lived to see the demise of communism. He might have also hoped that his presence in America had accomplished one more thing: to urge American intellectuals to restore the greatness of their nation—moral, political, and cultural—at a time of ideological crisis and power shifts throughout the world.

Solzhenitsyn had served as a Red Army commander during World War II and was twice decorated for his service. He was the son of a World War I widow and grew up in the provincial town of Rostov. Too poor to go to Moscow to pursue his dream of a literary education at the university, he graduated with a degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Rostov, a specialization that saved him later when he was sent to a work camp where he worked as a mathematician in a so-called sharashia.2 In February 1945, he was arrested on the basis of critical comments about Stalin, which were found by the Soviet censorship in his correspondence and in his literary manuscripts. He was sentenced to eight years in a work camp. Upon completing his sentence, he received another one, “exiled for life.” He was sent to southern Kazakhstan, but the second sentence was lifted in 1956. In his samizdat writing, Solzhenitsyn was an opponent of the entire Soviet system and of Marxism in general. His anticommunist views were well known to the KGB and eventually led to deportation. When he arrived in America, he had witnessed and survived the crimes of a totalitarian regime. Yet the United States did not seem to impress him much even just by comparison. Solzhenitsyn’s negative view of America became the core of all of his public interventions in the United States. It came out more memorably and forcibly than anywhere else in his 1976 Harvard commencement address. The speech reached a wide audience, drew numerous responses from all corners of the political arena, and laid out a position that had major significance for the political order being reshaped as the Cold War was entering the détente phase, defined by efforts at collaboration and appeasement. His position seemed, in some ways, familiar to American audiences because it argued for the strict anti-Soviet containment policy of the early Cold War years. However, Solzhenitsyn’s arguments were radically new because they no longer invoked the crimes committed by the Soviet Union or its violation of human rights, even though the author was famous for exposing those. This time, it was not the Soviet Union at the center of his diatribe but the United States. Solzhenitsyn criticized America and the West more generally for failing to oppose the growing threat of communism. Under his harsh accusations, though, was praise for America as the “land of the free,” his vision of America similar to Arendt’s but with a religious and moral spin. To the real America that was growing tired of Cold War political tensions, he held up the vision of a mythological nation that had once broken off with, only to redefine and dominate, Western civilization.

In the years before he delivered the Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn’s novels documenting the harsh life of the citizens of the Soviet Union had reached Western audiences in French, English, and German translations, producing a splash that prompted an effusion of hyperboles from even the most restrained commentators. Solzhenitsyn’s revelations about the repressive nature of the Soviet regime put a significant burden on leftist intellectuals in the West, who had been criticizing Western capitalism and who had been arguing for the advantages of socialism as a more egalitarian and humanitarian political alternative. The 1973 French publication of The Gulag Archipelago single-handedly marked the “symbolic moment” when Europe’s political master narrative radically changed from a generally progressive and social-democratic to a more socially skeptical and conservative one.3 In America, where the rise of corporatism had gone hand-in-hand with a decrease in social welfare programs and where the McCarthy era had left behind resentment among more than just intellectuals, Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of socialist society as a place of death and horror made it difficult to complain about the alternative, regardless how imperfect it was.

The gruesome details, if not the main message, in Solzhenitsyn’s denouncement of the Soviet Union were long awaited news for American anticommunists, who hailed him as a great hero of gigantic moral and artistic stature. Some of them had harshly criticized their own country for not mounting a stronger opposition to the communist bloc. Yet they probably did not expect Solzhenitsyn, also, to be critical of the United States. His comments on American politics and society echoed their arguments and even resembled their rhetoric, especially the “prophetic dualism” of the Eisenhower-Dulles era that opposed a benevolent America to a malevolent Soviet Union.⁴ Solzhenitsyn, however, brought something new to the discussion. He criticized America as an outsider outraged by the nation’s failure to oppose communism in the name of its ideals of freedom and democracy. Solzhenitsyn did not claim to be impartial, like Arendt, because he saw himself as a victim of America’s indifference to the threats posed by the Soviet Union; his vision of the future, though bleak, was not merely pessimistic like Marcuse’s, but downright apocalyptic. He argued with righteous indignation, trying to remind Americans of their moral responsibility to save the world and to shame them for faltering.

Ceremonial discourse such as a commencement address is a key practice in the rhetoric of citizenship: it implicitly socializes the young men and women to the requirements of a shared polity, by reminding them of what it means to be a good member of the community. Solzhenitsyn’s speech was a hybrid of blame and praise, both identifying from different angles the behaviors and actions he was asking his audience to emulate. The mixing of praise and blame characterizes a uniquely American rhetorical genre, the jeremiad, a political sermon that “casts the rhetor into the role of a prophet, acting as a kind of intermediary between a god-like authoritative message source and the intended audience.”5 Unlike the strictly religious, European jeremiad, which played out as a moral lesson about the corruption of humanity in general, offering no advice and leaving little room for hope, the New World jeremiad was based on the premise that its audience was made of “people chosen not only for heaven but as instruments of a sacred historical design.” The American jeremiad is “the ritual of a culture on an errand.”⁶

Solzhenitsyn addressed Americans as a covenant people chosen by God for special purposes. Working within the conventions of the American genre, he berated but also flattered his audience by reminding them that they had a special responsibility because their nation was different from, and indeed superior to, any other. It was a time when America’s exceptional status was coming into question abroad and at home. The year 1976 marked the height of détente, a period of relative relaxation in U.S.-Soviet Union relations, in stark contrast from previous head-on confrontations that sometimes made the possibility of nuclear war loom as a frightful possibility. Initially conceived by Harry Kissinger as a multileveled doctrine that tried to establish economic, military, and political links between the two countries by way of avoiding a military crisis caused by nuclear armament, détente had a mixed reception in the United States. To those who were tired of the international anxiety and tension imposed by the earlier confrontations between the Soviet Union and the United States, détente offered the promise of peace—all the more appealing as the specter of nuclear war had been constantly the focus of Cold War discourse. To those who had a fundamental mistrust in Russians, or who had been driven by a desire “to revitalize the American spirit through a crusade for Russian freedom,” détente was an illusion (if not a lie) and an abandonment of a key mission.7

On both sides of the Iron Curtain, détente was a period of social fragmentation and protest. In the Soviet Union, détente made publication or circulation of antigovernment and anticommunist opinions in the form of samizdat literature possible. Subsequently, Solzhenitsyn was a key figure among other intellectuals who introduced in the Soviet Union a discourse of dissent. In the United States, the détente years were marked by local protests against domestic problems (such as racial segregation). Americans struggled with domestic problems that were unrelated to the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Yet détente foreign policy, with its emphasis on American-Soviet agreements, became a way of shifting attention away from the local scene. As Jeremy Suri argues, “détente ensured a safer status quo by discrediting domestic . . . challenges.”⁸ Anticommunist and even anti-Soviet sentiment in America waned compared to previous decades because official policy favored cooperation over opposition and because Americans were too worried about domestic problems.

Solzhenitsyn condemned the relaxation of American opposition to the Soviet Union and to communism yet disapproved of the word “anticommunism.” “It is a very stupid word,” he complained,

badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, basic, and fundamental. Therefore it is taken as a point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say the word was poorly selected. . . . The primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says “anticommunism” is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction.⁹

This was not mere stylistic quibbling. In the United States, the meaning of ideological labels like “anticommunism,” “anti-Stalinism,” “Trotskysm,” “leftism,” and “new leftism” tried to capture a diversity of political beliefs, both regarding American political players and institutions, and in response to international affairs. Solzhenitsyn brought back the black-and-white of the earlier Cold War arguments and pressed for a rendition of communism as the ultimate embodiment of evil. To him, communism was not an ideology but an offense against all human beings, and by raising against it, he was seeking to defend humanity, not just the victims of a particular state or political system. He had opposed this devil where it most mattered, in the Soviet Union. None of this, however, changed the fact that he was a Russian. Americans associated communism with Russians, not just with the Soviet Union. In America, Solzhenitsyn would have to reckon with the “widespread American tendency to view Russians as ‘Oriental’ and incapable of changing their national character.”10 In the early part of his stay in America, the balance between his universal prophet persona and his Russianness swayed the reception of his ideas in predictable ways. Those sympathetic to his views tended to ignore his nationality while the critics never forgot that these were the views of a Russian. Yet the Harvard address upset both these categories. American commentators on the left and on the right nearly unanimously rejected Solzhenitsyn’s scathing criticism of the United States as the uninformed and unfounded beliefs of a foreigner who did not know or understand America. The “democratic consensus” in response to the 1976 Harvard address declared Solzhenitsyn wrong.

OUR COUNTRY, OUR CULTURE

During the early postwar years, efforts to reach some sort of political consensus had brought together intellectuals who, despite holding different ideological views, agreed on several issues, especially the need to maintain peace and to protect human rights across any political divide. These early attempts at finding a common ground often ended in conflict, with one side complaining that the other was unpatriotic, in the service of foreign interests, or trying to take control.¹¹ In his memoir, William Phillips discusses the political affiliations of the main representatives of his generation, placing Sidney Hook, Elliot Cohen, Irving Kristol, and others on the “right,” Diana Trilling and Merlyn Pitzele in the “middle” and gradually moving “left,” and Daniel Bell, himself, and Norman Thomas among others decidedly on the “left.” But what did such labels mean? “By ‘right.’” Phillips explains, “I mean mostly the subordination of other issues to that of anti-Communism, the general support of the status-quo, and a hostility to most radical movements. By ‘left’ I mean a sympathy with the values and aims of liberalism (or socialism), as well as anti-Communism, and a critical attitude to all existing governments and institutions.”12

Later, terms like “totalitarianism” or the “Occupied Zone,” used in opposition to “unoccupied” or “the free world,” replaced not only distinctions previously conveyed through labels such as “left” and “right,” but also distinctions among nation-states.¹³ As a confrontation between totalitarianism and freedom, the international world became, as Solzhenitsyn would put it in his Harvard speech, “split” between the West and its enemies. Such a clear-cut distinction shaped a worldview of two well-defined halves of the world, one evil and one good. In Cold War discourse, the evil half was the communist monolith, a term of “political shorthand [that] helped to shape popular and official conceptions of the Soviet Union and its allies, distilling the often messy realities of international relations into a neat, comprehensible formula. Its lesson was that all communists, regardless of their native land or political program, were first and foremost tools of Kremlin.”¹⁴

Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address helped to shape a similar conception regarding the other side of the Iron Curtain. He posited another “monolith,” the Western world as the enemy of communism, solely capable of stopping its international spread. Such reification of the Western world into an anticommunist enclave was no small feat in the ideologically turbulent years of the 1960s and 1970s, when the American intellectual elite was rocked by internal conflict. Debate in those circles concerned how to regard the threat of communism at home and whether it was serious enough to tolerate affiliations with McCarthyism, symbolic or concrete. The 1970s saw a split within the American intelligentsia, which went beyond political affiliation, into intellectual beliefs, attitudes toward Western civilization and America’s relation to it, and perhaps most importantly, an understanding of the role of the United States in the international arena. Immediately after World War II, the United States had become a “liberal hegemonic agency” on the international arena. This hegemony was first of all economic rather than political as “the U.S. achieved investment, trade, and monetary gains based on an international liberal economic system it protected with a political and security order extended across the globe.”15 The cultural influence of America was a different matter: “the crassness of American culture, from films to beverages, and the self-interest and imperialist ambitions behind the American presence in Europe were commonplaces for many Europeans of Left or Right.”¹⁶ Europeans were reluctant to accept American domination. What became known as “the American question” referred to a near rejection of American values as anti-Western and European intellectuals’ resentment of American domination. After the initial shock, American intellectuals’ anxiety over what the Europeans thought diminished. This may have been the result of an increased conviction among Americans that “the world’s cultural, not just geopolitical and economic, leadership had finally become theirs, with New York likely to replace Paris as the new center of cosmopolitanism.”¹⁷

This view that America had become the world cultural center surfaces clearly in the proceedings of a symposium on “Our Country and Our Culture” organized in 1952 by the Partisan Review, which featured Norman Mailer, David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, Lionel Trilling, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The editors, William Phillips and William Rahv, prefaced the discussion with the suggestion that in the postwar era a radical change in the relation between America and Europe had taken place that placed America, for the first time in history, in a position of superiority: “America is no longer the raw and unformed land of promise from which men of superior gifts like James, Santayana, and Eliot departed, seeking in Europe what they found lacking in America. Europe is no longer regarded as a sanctuary. . . . The wheel has come full circle, and now America has become the protector of Western civilization, at least in a military and economic sense.”¹⁸

To Williams and Rahv, this newly acquired power and prestige meant that “politically . . . [here was] a recognition that the kind of democracy which exists in America has an intrinsic and positive value; it is not merely a capitalist myth but a reality which must be defended against Russian totalitarianism.”19 Already during the war, many American intellectuals believed that America was “a repository of Western culture.”²⁰ Ten years later, not all the respondents to the symposium agreed with this self-congratulatory assessment. Mailer, especially, seemed irritated by the self-righteousness and smug tone of the editors, reflected, in his view, in the overall profile of the journal. Riesman was also reluctant to accept the premise of American superiority, albeit his own evaluation of American society was also positive, as was, overall, that of the rest of the commentators. One thing that worried Phillips and Rahv, and which they deemed potentially dangerous for the superiority of America, was the advent of mass culture. One of the questions they addressed to the participants is more than a mere point of discussion as it reveals anxiety over what might be the undoing of the newly gained international domination of America: “Must the American intellectual and writer adapt himself to mass culture? If he must, what forms can this adaptation take? Or do you believe that a democratic society leads to a leveling of culture, to a mass culture which will overrun intellectual and aesthetic values traditional to Western civilization?”²¹

The respondents did not appear to view challenges posed by mass culture to intellectuals as a major concern, but they did acknowledge the issue. In the Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn would blame all the ills of American society on the consequences of mass culture, conformity, and the loss of morality. But in the symposium debate, Schlesinger offered an interesting qualification: to him, mass culture represented the natural consequence of the pluralism that had characterized American democracy from its inception. It was what had so impressed foreign visitors, such as Alexis de Tocque ville. Mass culture could only become a threat, Schlesinger argued, if cultural pluralism got stifled along with political pluralism. “Some have forgotten,” he claimed,

the wisdom of Tocqueville when a century ago he identified the antidote to the new power that democratic equality bestowed upon mass opinion. “Many people in France consider equality of conditions as one evil,” he wrote, “and strive at least to escape from the latter.” But I contend that in order to combat the evils which equality may produce, there is only one effectual remedy—namely political freedom. . . . Tocqueville could not have been more right . . . [as] political freedom is the indispensable preliminary to any effective defense against the leveling of culture.22

What America claimed to have that was superior to the Soviet Union was political freedom. In defining political freedom, especially in ways that could strongly imply that it was absent in the communist bloc, American intellectuals relied on core principles of Western democracy: social pluralism, representative bodies, and the rule of law. In this definition, though, what is a global Western political model becomes distinctly American. For those who saw political freedom iconically represented by American society, its absence in other forms of political order only proved that the American model was synonymous with democracy. To this end, the testimony of dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn, who had firsthand experience of life in a totalitarian regime, was invaluable evidence. It was, however, evidence coming from a sullen foreigner who was reluctant to grant America any merit.

By the mid-1970s, the gap between the American “right” and “left” had widened, especially in the aftermath of the Vietnam and Korean wars and the McCarthy persecutions. By some accounts, “isolated elite politics and widespread disengagement . . . replaced the mass politics and public protests of the 1960s.”²³ The political terrain, however, retained some of its original murkiness with respect to attitudes toward the very idea of American identity and the role that would best suit this identity in the international arena.

The politics of détente made it difficult to achieve a clear understanding of American identity and its international role. In an article published in February 1976 in the right-leaning, Jewish magazine Commentary, Theodore Draper, a former communist sympathizer and historian of socialist movements, complained that the term “détente” was “fluctuating and ambiguous . . . situated somewhere between cold war and rapprochement or even entente.”²⁴ Draper believed that the concept lacked political substance. As such, it could not be used to articulate a new role for the United States in the international arena. Détente seemed to imply that America’s policing over communist expansion was no longer necessary, and many Americans were reluctant to accept that. Critics of détente warned against the risk of a naive assumption that the improvements that had taken place in the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev meant more than a temporary and limited opening of the totalitarian order. In 1972, former U.S. State Secretary George Kennan argued:

The United States would do well not to indulge in unreal hopes for intimacy with either the Soviet regime or the Soviet population. There are deeply rooted traits in Soviet psychology—some of old Russian origin, some of more recent Soviet provenance—that would rule this out. Chief among these . . . are the congenital disregard of truth, the addiction to propagandistic exaggeration, distortion and falsehood, the habitual foulness of mouth in official utterance.25

Kennan’s criticism of détente echoed that of dissidents from within the Soviet Union. Both Solzhenitsyn and Nobel laureate physicist, Andrei Sakharov, insisted on the importance of separating real détente from pseudo-détente, a distinction that caught the attention of anti-Soviet intellectual circles in the United States. With the publication in America of Sakharov’s My Country and the World in 1975, Americans were presented with the image of a relaxation of tension among the two powers as a “cynical political game . . . serving temporary political and economic interests” rather than a genuine opening toward mutual recognition and collaboration. Sakharov, unlike Kennan, blamed Western leaders for trying to build political capital out of appeasing the Soviet regime, and he expressed indignation at the fact that the West, and the United States in particular, was “yielding one concession after another to its partner in détente,” attributing it to “leftist-liberal faddishness.”²⁶

Critics on both sides questioned the sincerity and interests of those involved in implementing détente: the Soviet Union for obtaining economic advantages (such as the most favored nation clause) or the United States for curtailing the spread of communism and “freezing” the Soviet Union out of most Middle Eastern diplomacy?²⁷ More importantly, the détente years fostered a climate of mistrust within each of the superpowers—rather than vis-à-vis each other—as citizens became increasingly more suspicious of their own government’s policies. Solzhenitsyn redirected the mistrust against the other, the foreigner.

A MOST WELCOME VISITOR

Shortly after Solzhenitsyn had been deported from the Soviet Union, Jesse Helms, Republican Senator of North Carolina, introduced a resolution to award him honorary American citizenship, which received broad political support. Helms’s resolution was framed in the same language that had been used in 1963 to confer honorary citizenship on Winston Churchill. Despite being in such flattering company, Solzhenitsyn declined the invitation and invoked the inability to travel to the United States. Another invitation to visit the United States came from George Meany, president of the AFLCIO. Solzhenitsyn declined again. Thus, John Dunlop argues, “Solzhenitsyn did not intrude into the political life of the United States. Rather, he was asked in by influential members of Congress and by the leader of the American trade union movement. . . . How is one to account . . . for this unusual interest in the opinions of an exiled Russian writer?”28

Dunlop believes that the answer lies in the significant political events taking place in America at that time, for example, the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the increased criticism of détente policy. But why would a foreigner be the source of enlightenment in such a time of domestic crisis? One answer could be that Solzhenitsyn was becoming the subject of attempts to manipulate his symbolic standing as a dissident, witness, and survivor. Those eager to greet him on American soil may already have held political convictions that they hoped to be reinforced by Solzhenitsyn’s approval. Another possible, interrelated answer is that Solzhenitsyn’s reputation made him especially credible to an American audience eager to learn more about life behind the Iron Curtain.

But in June 1975, when Solzhenitsyn finally agreed to visit the United States, his imminent visit became a cause of alarm to American officials. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sent a memo to President Gerald Ford, anticipating pressure by Congress or Meany. Kissinger insisted that the president not receive Solzhenitsyn at the White House, because:

Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents. Not only would a meeting with the President off end the Soviets but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn’s views of the United States and its allies. . . . Further, Solzhenitsyn has never before been received by a Chief of State and such a meeting would lend weight to his political views as opposed to literary talent.29

Indeed, the feared meeting did not take place, much to the indignation of some Americans. When the memo was leaked to the press, public sentiment blamed Kissinger’s precautions on the duplicitous, immoral climate of détente. In the Washington Post, George Will wrote sarcastically: “The United States government may have to expel Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the republic, not only as a hands-across-the-barbed-wire gesture of solidarity with its détente partner, the Soviet government, but also to save the president and his attendants from nervous breakdowns.”³⁰

By the time he finally traveled to America, Solzhenitsyn had already established a following in the country through the translators and publishers who introduced his works to American audiences. Unlike his reception in Europe, especially in France and Great Britain, the early American response to his writing was not as enthusiastic as one might expect, especially given previous scandals such as that occasioned by the leaked Kissinger memo. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn’s first account of life in a Soviet prison camp, was published in America in 1962, with a cautionary editorial note: “This is not, of course, a work of art on the scale of Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece, Dr. Zhivago, another Soviet novel to win a major audience in the United States.”³¹ The editors also distinguished the Gulag, about which Solzhenitsyn’s book testified, from the Holocaust, according the latter more gravity and significance. The readers were thus instructed to read against a preconceived scale of values that did not give first rank to Solzhenitsyn or his experiences.

Public reception of the book in Europe was quite different from the cautious Knopf editorial comments. Biographer Michael Scammel describes the British reaction as “an orgy of masochistic euphoria,” and in France, Bernard-Henri Lévy described the reaction to be of such intensity as “to immediately shake [the French] mental landscape and overturn . . . ideological guideposts.”32 France, of course, had long been dominated by a vocal, highly articulate, and prestigious, left-leaning intelligentsia. Intellectuals who were card-carrying members in the Communist Party were much more common than in the United States. Luminaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre had repeatedly declared their admiration for Lenin and Stalin. They had traveled to the Soviet Union and returned convinced that a communist society would be superior to that of capitalist and democratic Europe. In 1974, left-leaning Le Monde dismissed the revelations in The Gulag Archipelago as unreliable in that they came from “a declared enemy of socialism itself.”³³ More moderate leftists, however, were duly impressed by Solzhenitsyn, calling him “triply unimpeachable in that he speaks from the triple depth of the people, the camps, and exile, Solzhenitsyn is the reincarnation of the great intellectual—Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Zola—who denounces the powers to be and shows how they can be resisted.”³⁴

Whether because Solzhenitsyn was too convincing to be easily dismissed or because the French Left was already approaching a crisis that would lead to its rupture, The Gulag Archipelago did force French intellectuals to reconsider the fundamental doctrine at the foundation of socialist state and communist regimes: Marxism. Those who proceeded most energetically to such reconsiderations came to be known as “Solzhenitsyn’s children,” among them, most famously, André Glucksmann, who argued that Marxism, not just Stalin, was directly responsible for the horrors of the Soviet Gulag.³⁵ In 1977, Lévy pronounced Marxism in France a compromised ideology, crediting Solzhenitsyn with its exposure:

All Solzhenitsyn had to do was to speak and we awoke from a dogmatic sleep. All he had to do was to appear, and an all too long history finally came to an end: the history of those Marxists who for thirty years had been tracing the path of decadence in search of their guilty party, moving painfully from the “bureaucratic phenomenon” to the “Stalinist deviation,” from “Stalin’s crimes,” to Lenin’s “mistakes,” finally from Leninism to the blunders of the earliest apostles, going through the Marxian soil one by one, sacrificing a scapegoat at each stage, but always preserving above suspicion the one he dares to denounce for the first time—the founding father in person, Karl Kapital and his holy scriptures.36

In lambasting Marxism and praising Solzhenitsyn as its lucid critic, Lévy creates a debatable equation between the exile of Soviet dissidents and a political awakening among Western intellectuals. In fact, the reception of Solzhenitsyn and other East European dissidents involved, even in Western Europe, a more complicated rapprochement between different agendas and discursive styles. In France, the denouncement of Marxism as the doctrine that led to the creation of the Gulag often became a strategy for promoting capitalism as the only feasible alternative, thus leading to what Pierre Nora calls a “new libertarianism” rather than a genuine reassessment of Marx.³⁷ By contrast, for Solzhenitsyn, repudiating Marxism was a way of questioning the political viability of communism: not to propose capitalism instead, but a nationalist (Russian) and religious (Orthodox) political order. Thus, while the strategy may have been the same, the goals were different.

Whether Solzhenitsyn helped French former communist intellectuals promote their political agenda or they helped him to promote his is hard to decide. What matters is that he came to the U.S. with the reputation of a truth-teller who had shaken the world and poured cold water on the leftist intelligentsia. In the United States, many of Solzhenitsyn’s enthusiastic supporters already had an anticommunist agenda. An interesting example is that of Irving Howe, who published in the socialist magazine Dissent a review of Georg Lukács’s 1971 study of Solzhenitsyn’s literary technique as illustration of an aesthetic of social realism well used. Howe, a socialist who had become somewhat de-radicalized since his early days as a member of the Workers’ Party, was critical of the Soviet Union and of standard Marxism. Lukács, an early member of the Hungarian Communist Party, imprisoned and deported, like Solzhenitsyn, during the Hungarian uprising, had outlined a Marxist theory of the novel, which was influential among many American left-leaning literary critics, including the editors of the Partisan Review. In his review, Howe compared Solzhenitsyn with Lukács to stress the first’s courage and moral superiority. Howe concluded that Lukács had “chosen the role of the (at times) semi-dissident communist, but never an openly oppositionist communist, and certainly not a public opponent of the party-state dictatorship.” Lukács, however, mostly expressed appreciation for Solzhenitsyn’s literary style. To account for this discordance, Howe argued that the praise was just the psychological transference of Lukács’s admiration for Solzhenitsyn as an implicit admission of his own moral inferiority: “At a number of points Lukács writes with approval of Solzhenitsyn’s independence and courage. . . . A man as intelligent as Lukács could hardly have been unaware that he kept praising Solzhenitsyn for precisely the virtue he himself had rarely shown.”38

We could question to what extent Howe’s admiration for Solzhenitsyn’s courage—a courage he deems “overwhelming”—might also be a psychological transference or a pretext for expressing his contempt for Lukacs.³⁹ He saw Lukács as the “semi-dissident” who not only would never become a dissident, but more importantly, would never renounce Marxism. In his endorsement of Solzhenitsyn’s political and literary stance, Howe associates Lukács’s Marxist aesthetic with cowardice and Solzhenitsyn’s bourgeois realism with courage. The association is rather arbitrary and based on a positive assessment of Solzhenitsyn’s literary achievements that can be debated but was then widely shared. Walter Kaufman said of that time, “In the early fifties Sartre and many others in France were arguing about two seemingly unrelated questions; whether it was permissible to admit that there were two camps in the Soviet Union, and whether the novel was dead. At one blow, Solzhenitsyn made these debates ridiculous.”⁴⁰ This link between moral virtue and literary value went a long way toward building Solzhenitsyn’s reputation in America. The equation also illustrates the conjoined work of the moral and stylistic dimensions of Solzhenitsyn’s stranger persona. American critics who admired his literary style, a blend of nineteenth-century realism and journalistic reportage also became impressed with the moral stature of the writer. Or perhaps the reverse was true?

It is no surprise that in the United States, Solzhenitsyn excited especially conservative anticommunists. He fueled their “drive to revitalize the American spirit through a crusade for Russian freedom.”⁴¹ Yet his own vein of conservatism, as one American literary scholar astutely noticed, was different:

Solzhenitsyn’s conservatism, like his moral stature, emerges from the experience of the Gulag. Ours, however, resembles more a failure of nerve. In our need for a moral hero who personifies and hallows a direction we seem anyway to be taking, we tend to overlook the authoritarianism of his stance, the degree to which it is in fact a response to Gulag and therefore in some sense still a part of Gulag. And while there is much appeal (even to non-Christians) in the Christian doctrine of redemption through suffering, the national form to which Solzhenitsyn seems ineluctably to attach that redemption certainly gives pause to a “rootless cosmopolitan” like myself.42

Although not all of them were “rootless cosmopolitans,” American critics were irked by his brand of foreignness, which put them off not even as Americans but as intellectuals. Solzhenitsyn’s often and emphatically expressed national allegiance to Russia not only stressed that he was not European and not American but also not an intellectual. His Slavophilism invoked the image of a cross-wearing, austere, somewhat grim, peasant. The austerity of his lifestyle in the Soviet Union was known to Western reporters who had been in contact with him and with his friends prior to his deportation. Solzhenitsyn liked to dress, eat, and act like a simple man. In his bedroom he kept a peasant pitchfork as a weapon he could use to defend himself against a possible intrusion from KGB agents.⁴³ For a Russian intellectual, this peasant persona was not uncommon or new. The Russian intelligentsia had had a long history of vacillating between a European identity and a non-European one, predicated upon inherently Slavic ideals and values such as unity and harmony in contradistinction to Western values such as individualism and competition. The proponents of a distinctly non-Western Russian identity included famous writers such as Dostoyevsky, but they remained, historically, a minority.⁴⁴

To many Americans, the sullen, peasant-looking Solzhenitsyn was largely an enigma. His American residence in Cavendish, Vermont, magnified his mystique. Much was made about the 400-acre estate upon which Solzhenitsyn built his house, which included a small wooden Russian Orthodox chapel and was surrounded by an eight-foot high barbed wire fence with an electronically monitored entrance. The remoteness of the area, enshrined in an air of secrecy, with its harsh winters and bucolic landscape all seemed to create a Russian more than American setting. Even when he decided to settle in the United States, he did not adopt the culture, and when he returned to Russia after the collapse of the USSR, he seemed more concerned with saying goodbye to the surroundings rather than to his neighbors.45

About Solzhenitsyn’s daily existence in Cavendish, Scammel writes that it had been “organized with a view to getting the maximum amount of work done, but also in such a way that they [were] ready to abandon everything and return to Russia at a moment’s notice.”⁴⁶ In 1976, Bernard Pivot, host of the French talk television show Apostrophes (and later the famous Bouillon de culture), visited Solzhenitsyn in Vermont. In his account that was translated and published in the Boston Globe, Pivot offered a simple, functional image, a “house built around a writer’s literary project.” But each time Pivot waxes poetic about the estate and its owner, he falls upon a Russian stock imagery, such as the tall birch, Solzhenitsyn’s favorite tree, or the “small, pretty chapel filled with bright light at sunrise.”⁴⁷ Pivot presents this conventional, rather inescapable Russianness of Solzhenitsyn as a mark of distinction systematically linked to his moral mission in exile: to chronicle the experiences of those who remained in the Gulag and make them known to the entire world, including people in the Soviet Union. In the America political arena, Solzhenitsyn could never escape his Russianness and did not even want to escape it. His Russianness was also cultivated by those around him at a time when being Russian was inextricably connected with the Cold War mythology of spies, adventurous escapes across barbed wire borders, and awe-inspiring achievements. The 1970s was the heyday of East European dissidents becoming visible in the West, among them famous writers, artists, and scientists from the Soviet Union: Andrei Sakharov, Oleg Bukovski, and Mihail Orlov. By some accounts, “magnified by the spotlight of superpower relations, their dramatic struggle against persecution frequently eclipsed the official rituals of détente.”⁴⁸ The dissident persona of the opponent of the Soviet Union produced less sensation in America than in Europe, probably because Americans, accustomed to democratic regimes with no significant history of violently stifling criticism, had no corresponding tradition of, or respect for, dissidence as the practice of solitary, heroic individuals. Civil disobedience was the closest equivalent, but, while still in the process of emerging as a political process, it was also more centered on groups than individual agents.

What fired up Americans’ imagination more than the persona of the dissident was that of an escapee from the mysterious world behind the Iron Curtain. Developed steadily over several decades from early news stories to Hollywood movies, memoirs, and novels depicting heroic flights from Eastern Europe, and featuring individuals willing to risk their lives rather than live under communism, the escapee emerged as a key entry in the Cold War cast of characters. As double survivor—of the tyranny left behind and of the dangerous trip to the free world, the escapee “anchored rhetorical figurations of a world rend between ‘slave’ and ‘free,’ making a metaphorical ‘curtain’ meaningful.”49

Solzhenitsyn was not the traditional escapee because he had not freely chosen to leave the Soviet Union. But he had risked his life while in the Soviet Union, and his trip to the West was an adventure on its own terms, at least as it had been presented by Western media to their audiences.⁵⁰ Regardless how circumspect and sullen Solzhenitsyn appeared to the excited Western reporters at the Bonn airport, the man they greeted had escaped from behind the Iron Curtain. He and others like him who made the news in the United States were “assigned the task of advertising the desirability of United States citizenship.”⁵¹ Judging by his criticism of America, Solzhenitsyn was not the best candidate for such task. Against popular representations of the East European relieved to be finally in the free world, he performed the role of a reluctant sojourner. He was a survivor indeed but one who did not think his ordeal over and who was unwilling to celebrate the arrival and its location.

THE STRANGER TURNED PROPHET

Regardless of how Solzhenitsyn negotiated between the personae of a Russian dissident and that of escapee, he came to the United States as a survivor and a witness of the horrors committed by a totalitarian regime. This persona played the most significant part in his American reception because it spoke to a sense of wonder about life behind the Iron Curtain, which combined curiosity with fear and skepticism with anxiety. As witness and survivor, Solzhenitsyn’s persona had symbolic value. In his writing, he claimed not to be seeking originality but to tell the story of people who could not do so themselves. He was not one of a kind, but one of many—a stance he strove to maintain throughout his interventions in the West, starting with the Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he spoke on behalf of all of the writers who could not be present at the ceremony. This sense of representativeness is strongly present in Solzhenitsyn’s literary work, especially in The Gulag Archipelago, which spoke, through design and form, with a collective voice, that of the many victims of Soviet communism. Yet his self-effacement may have been a bit disingenuous because his emphasis on the collective experience functions alongside a strong emphasis on Solzhenitsyn’s own story. The Gulag Archipelago illustrates this paradox early on when the author warns: “This is not going to be a volume of memoirs about my own life. Therefore I am not going to recount the truly amusing details of my arrest, which was like no other .”52 What followed, however, was a detailed recounting of his unique story.

This coexistence of an individual’s personal story and the story of many others, which presumably does not allow one to be more important than the others, marks the paradox of the survivor-witness. As a survivor, he is stronger than the others, but as a witness his task is to attest to the experience of the others precisely because they could not. In the United States, the response to Solzhenitsyn’s survivor-witness persona was inflected by the publication of Holocaust survivors’ memoirs. In their case, the paradox of witnessing was defined by the nature of the atrocities they had experienced. As Kelly Oliver points out, the witnesses’ knowledge is both privileged and unreliable, insofar as witnesses of extreme experiences are in an unique, difficult position, both enriched by what they alone have seen and impoverished in their very humanity by the devastating experience in question. The paradox, then, comes down to the fact that, “to bear witness to their dehumanization is to repeat it by telling the world that they were reduced to worthless objects.”⁵³

The Gulag prisoners featured in Solzhenitsyn’s book had been similarly subjected to dehumanizing experiences—humiliated, tortured, and stripped off of dignity and agency. Against that backdrop, Solzhenitsyn introduced elements of heroism throughout the book but heroism through elementary acts of resistance and defiance (such as refusing to squat and defecate at the order of a guard). In his stories, the protagonists retain their humanity because Solzhenitsyn systematically depicts them asserting their control over situations, no matter how trivial these situations were. Solzhenitsyn, then, performed an important moral task because “only by testifying, by witnessing objectification, can [survivors] reinscribe their subjectivity into situations that mutilated it to the point of annihilation.”54

This was Solzhenitsyn’s declared goal in collecting the stories of Gulag survivors and presenting them in his Gulag Archipelago. However, the American editors of Ivan Denisovich emphasized that, unlike Holocaust survivors who were tortured at the hands of a state that explicitly set out to annihilate them, those who escaped the Gulag were the isolated victims of a state acting on behalf of the people. Regardless of the amount of suffering endured by actual individuals, so long as Gulag prisoners were seen as individual cases of dissidence and disobedience, and not as generic exemplars in a politics of terror, Solzhenitsyn’s stranger persona could not be symbolically effective. It was important for the success of his rhetoric of witnessing and survival that these citizens not be perceived primarily as political prisoners but mainly as people whose human rights had been violated. As political prisoners, the Gulag survivors were locked into a dynamic that legitimized violence as a means for authorizing and maintaining a state that was implementing the consensus of the population it represented. Regimes such as the Soviet communist one enjoyed the so-called revolutionary privilege, which made it seem acceptable to use violence for the purposes of social improvement. The acceptability of violence was grounded in the political discourse of the French Revolution: “The revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies . . . under the revolutionary regime the public authority is itself obliged to defend itself against all the factions which attack it. A revolutionary government owes good citizens all the protection of the nation; it owes enemies of the people only death.”⁵⁵

The French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are parallel in many ways, but the use of terror as legitimate is the most significant connection. The revolutionary experience came to be defined by a legitimation of terror exercised against those perceived as obstacles to social reform. Revolutionary privilege was at the center of Western support for communism as illustrated by Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, in his chronicle of his 1927 trip to the Soviet Union: “Repressions in western democracies are violations of professed constitutional liberties, and I condemn them as such. Repressions in Soviet Russia are weapons of struggle in a transition period to socialism.”56

The Moscow show trials struck the first blow to the revolutionary privilege, marking the beginning of concerns vis-à-vis the ferocity of Soviet violence. Yet some Western supporters remained firmly in favor of using any means necessary to maintain the Soviet order. Notably, French existential philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that violence should only be condemned if it was not “authentic”: genuinely subsumed to promoting the cause of communism and not the leadership’s personal gains. This distinction between authentic (good) violence and illegitimate violence came to differentiate Leninism from Stalin’s dictatorship. Still, Western supporters of communism and of the Soviet Union, such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre in France or Dwight McDonald and Michael Harrington in the United States, remained reluctant to indict the Soviet Union—even less so communism—for its violent repressions.

Therefore, Solzhenitsyn’s challenge in depicting the experience of forced labor camps was to present the prisoners as something other than enemies that needed to be crushed or than sacrificial victims. Instead, he insisted on their individuality and humanity by stressing the inhumanity of the regime that was persecuting them. This strategy was embedded in a more general approach, which involved questioning the distinction between Leninism and Stalinism—the first marking the positive pole, the second the negative one—and issuing a blanket accusation against the ideology at the center of the Soviet Union: communism. In his Letters to Soviet Leaders, as well as in his novels, he repeatedly argued for the necessity of repudiating Marxism.⁵⁷ Moreover, he emphasized the non-Russian origin of Marxism, calling it a “whirlwind from the West.”⁵⁸

Solzhenitsyn’s portrayal of violence in the Gulag was especially compelling in the West as the political origin of the Gulag was linked to totalitarianism. Western scholars also linked the punitive system at the core of the Gulag to modernity writ large. In 1975 Michel Foucault published Discipline and Punish, in which he employed the metaphor of a carceral archipelago. In a 1976 interview, Foucault acknowledged the influence of Solzhenitsyn on his theory of power.59 He also insisted that the conceptual foundation of the Gulag was neither Russian nor of Soviet origin but an import from the bourgeois nineteenth-century Western world. Thus, Foucault lent credence to Solzhenitsyn’s claims that the human rights abuses taking place in the Soviet Union were the consequence of an originally Western ideology.

While Western scholars recognized the transnational dimension of totalitarianism and linked it to the emergence of a new form of power in modernity, Solzhenitsyn brought the conversation to a more concrete level and challenged the revolutionary privilege that had been used to justify the Soviet Union’s uses of power. He insisted that violence is the annihilation of a person’s agency and focused on the victim of revolutionary violence as a human being, rather than as a citizen of a particular state. Against the backdrop of an emerging human rights discourse—which was used increasingly more often by U.S. government officials to indict the Soviet Union—this approach was not only effective, but also conducive to a de-nationalization of the conflict.⁶⁰ The Cold War, as depicted by Solzhenitsyn, was no longer between nation-states (the United States against the Soviet Union) but between ideological and moral systems. This shift marked a new strategic phase in the Cold War, making the conflict more abstract than in earlier decades.

In the Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn invoked this abstract moral and ideological conflict but asked for a concrete confrontation between nation-states. If it avoided the confrontation, America would be the main culprit in the détente debacle, not only because the Soviet Union would win the war but because evil itself would prevail. Even at their vaguest, his accusations had a clear target: American citizens and their political complacency that had led to a softening of anti-Soviet policy and a betrayal of humanity.

THE PROPHET AT HARVARD

Solzhenitsyn delivered his Harvard commencement address through an interpreter on a rainy June day in front of a large audience that acted sympathetically throughout and in the end gave a standing ovation.61 The overall reception far exceeded the immediate circumstances as the speech was broadcast live by CBS and reached an estimated 20,000 listeners. The genre of the commencement address falls squarely into the category of epideictic rhetoric, or ceremonial discourse. As such, certain conventions are expected—many of which Solzhenitsyn emphatically violated. Instead of a congratulatory, optimistic message, he offered a vehement criticism of Western society generally, illustrating his points with only American examples interspersed with ominous prophesies about an impending end of the humanity as long as the spread of communism continued. The speech was not only anti-détente but also struck some commentators as anti-Western and anti-American.

Despite the shockwaves sent by the Harvard address in the American media, the ideas presented in it had already been introduced to American audiences by Solzhenitsyn on previous occasions. In June and July 1975, in Washington, D.C., and New York City, at the invitation of the AFL-CIO, he spoke to audiences of labor union organizers, each time excoriating the Western nations for not intervening more forcefully against the Soviet Union. In 1976, he was invited to deliver a speech at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University upon being awarded the American Friendship Medal from the Freedom Foundation of the Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Not only were the ideas presented in this speech identical to those included in the Harvard commencement address but so was the anti-Western rhetoric.⁶² At Harvard, Solzhenitsyn’s rhetoric was more restrained, and the figures and techniques less overstated than on some previous occasions. The message, however, harped on the same issues he had tackled in the past: the West is in a state of moral decay that makes its people unable to face courageously the imminent international danger posed by communism. Among the causes of the fall of the Western world, he listed the lack of spirituality, which he sometimes identified explicitly as secularism and at other times defined in broader terms such as the humanistic worldview that situates human beings in the center of the universe and does not recognize any superior force or entity. He posited that the West is morally and spiritually defunct. He bemoaned the West’s obsession with happiness as shallow, materially derived satisfaction; the faddishness of Western intellectuals; the unlimited power and control exercised by the press in society; and the overall cowardice of Western societies. He concluded that Western civilization was not a viable model for humanity.

The speech consistently targeted the West as an all-encompassing totality. Yet audiences at Harvard and beyond knew beyond any doubt that Solzhenitsyn was speaking about America. After an early, isolated, and vague reference to Europe, the few examples he offered were all about America. His most irritated charge, against the power of the press, applied exclusively to the United States. The master trope of the address is the totum pro parte synecdoche, in this case using the whole to designate a part. This form of the device is seen less commonly than the use of the form wherein the part is named to function as the whole (e.g. fifty sail for fifty ships). Therefore, this peculiar use prompts examination. Why did Solzhenitsyn not identify the target of his criticism, the United States, directly? Practical reasons are not convincing. Regardless how applicable the criticism might have been to other countries (France paramount among them), a complete generalization was not possible. Nor can one hypothesize with any certainty that Solzhenitsyn was trying to avoid lodging direct insult for he had already made painfully explicit anti-American comments in public before.

Synecdoche is an apt trope for a prophetic vision for it reveals an omniscient mind that can penetrate straight to the core of a phenomenon, leaving aside incidental or marginal aspects. In his work on master tropes, Kenneth Burke finds a synecdochic pattern “in all theories of political representation, where some part of the social body . . . is held to be ‘representative’ of the society of the whole.”63 By employing the synecdoche that equates the West with America, Solzhenitsyn implicitly identified one country as representative of the entire civilization. This move has important consequences. For one thing, it challenges the exceptional status of American culture and society. For another, the argument largely shifts to one country the responsibility that would normally befall several, indeed the entire Western civilization. Such a shift would have been meaningless unless accompanied by another move, also implicit in the logic of the synecdoche: the United States is seen as the best exemplar, indeed the model, of the Western world. The argument by model implies that the authority of the model is such as to constitute a guarantee. Solzhenitsyn, in other words, assumed that America would be recognized as the model for the entire Western world.

As I already mentioned, by 1976 America’s ability to look like a model to the rest of the world was starting to come into question. The synecdochic logic of Solzhenitsyn’s argument enforced the idea of a United States as dominating and representing the Western democratic world as leader of the free nations and main participant in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The synecdoche created an iconic representation of a mythical America, carrier of all Western values, and thus responsible for its faith. The deemphasizing of American exceptionalism was replaced by a strong emphasis on America’s hegemonic status. The synecdoche tapped into the rhetorical power of an “American mythology”—a distinct product of homegrown political rhetoric in Cold War America, “a mythical America whose business is the defense of freedom, . . . the last hope for the survival of peace and freedom in the world . . . a nation of destiny.”64

Solzhenitsyn’s arguments in the Harvard speech were original in that they offered an indirect exercise in American mythology, by contrasting and by chastising, not by praising. His complaint that America was not playing out its greatness becomes an implicit urging, and the criticism was as much a call to action as it was a reproach. Solzhenitsyn’s explanation for America’s decline contained a prescribed course for change and an implicit expression of faith in America’s willingness and ability to change. Solzhenitsyn was no Oswald Spengler despite the suggestion made in his title. The moral decay he diagnosed in the West/America was not, for him, the inevitable end of a civilization but instead the consequence, both avoidable and correctable, of a Western worldview that had led to a loss of moral virtues and to ineffective institutions.

The synecdoche of America as the model for the entire West articulated this representation of a decayed society through strategies of defamiliarization used to shame Americans by showing to them how much the West and their own country have become like the evil communist monolith. The defamiliarization works through the way in which Solzhenitsyn interpreted the values and ideas at the very foundation of Western and American thought. He found the cause for the moral decay in the “humanistic consciousness,” which originated, by his account, in the European Renaissance and found its full “political expression” during the Enlightenment. The humanistic consciousness is a source of much evil, in his view, precisely because it “did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man.” Thus, it “started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshipping man and his material needs.” The humanistic consciousness “proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him.”65

Solzhenitsyn made an important amendment to his indictment of the “humanistic consciousness”: he stressed that it did not capture the original American spirit. American democracy, he claimed, was designed on the assumption that human beings are God’s creatures. In his view, “two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West.”⁶⁶

The erosion, one assumes further, eventually also took place in America. Solzhenitsyn acknowledged his audience’s exceptional character only to point out that this exceptionalism was fading away. This was more than a concession or a strategy for allowing hope in an argument with otherwise rather apocalyptic overtones. The difference he pointed out capitalizes on the logic of the jeremiad: once America abandoned its exceptional destiny and simply became more like any Western nation, it also became morally corrupt. The original “superiority” of America was obtained by breaking off with the West and dominating it both from within and without.

The most powerful use of defamiliarization in the Harvard address was to present the United States in its current state as displaying the same features as the Soviet Union, only even worse. He accused the Communist Party and its leaders of frequent violations of the law, and, on this basis, he asserted that Soviet society was lawless. Then he charged that American society respected the law, but was far too dependent on it, and thus legalistic. To him, “legalism” is a worse fault because it marks the disappearance of a moral universe in which individuals can experience guilt and responsibility. Solzhenitsyn maintained that, instead of expecting a judge to decide whether a wrong has been committed, people should have their own moral consciousness to rely on in order to decide what is right. Solzhenitsyn believed that the legalism of Western and American society was evinced by a lack of moral values. In this society, legal sentences were pronounced to compensate for the lack of moral judgment. Solzhenitsyn held that legalism is not only morally vacuous but also politically unproductive: “after a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis; it prevents one from seeing the scale and the meaning of events.” This is the main reason “the West has great difficulty in finding its bearings amid contemporary events.” Without a moral consciousness that knows good from evil, no apt political decisions can be made, Solzhenitsyn insisted ominously—the allusion to the misguided (in his view) policies of the détente all too transparent. The “soulless and smooth plane of legalism” is, for him, equally condemnable as the “abyss of lawlessness.” Legalism appears just as bad, if not worse, than lawlessness because both represent a form of dehumanization: “I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man. A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities.”67

Solzhenitsyn was also very critical of the role played by the press in America. Soviet journalists were powerful because they were political potentates appointed by the state. He was outraged to discover that in the United States the press had just as much power by simply being able to control public opinion and that it had thus become “the greatest power within the Western countries.” While Solzhenitsyn could have criticized, as others have done, the power acquired by media conglomerates in the United States, he attacked it as reflecting a political phenomenon that is at the center of a totalitarian society. Feigning surprise, as “someone coming from the totalitarian East with is rigorously unified press,” he expressed outrage upon discovering “a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole . . . generally accepted patterns of judgment, the sum effect being not competition but unification.”68

Solzhenitsyn knew that his audience would not disagree with him about the lawlessness of the Soviet regime or its abuse of power in the press, but he was asking them to accept that similar phenomena exist in the United States. The opposition between lawful/lawless and legitimate/illegitimate (applied to the power of the press) is respun into an opposition between legal/legalistic, legitimate/illegitimate. The recurrence often ends up creating an overarching category, that of morality, which transcends, in Solzhenitsyn’s view, the law, the state, or the media, and works in opposition to something else: communism. A country without a strong, well-defined, and well-functioning morality is doomed to become communist. Through his stranger eyes, America looked as communist (or at least on its way to becoming as communist) as Soviet Russia.

In Solzhenitsyn’s depiction, America and the West were exclusively secular societies controlled by the press and corporate conglomerates and ruled by a technical legal system rather than shared moral precepts. By ignoring the presence of a strong religiously minded political and intellectual elite in the United States, the Harvard address tries to create a coherent sketch—and inevitably only a sketch—of American society, iconically defined by secularism, legalism, and materialism. Such a depiction is important in the logic of the argument because the features on which it rests also apply to a communist society. Throughout the speech, Solzhenitsyn alluded to this similarity often, finally bluntly stating: “This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.”⁶⁹

Solzhenitsyn talked to his audience about an America that was the very epitome of the West yet he used strategies that enabled him to describe it as increasingly resembling the communist East. If the synecdoche of the West as America served as a strategy for invoking the American mythology of a chosen nation, his specific examples brought to life a people in decline. Through radical reversals of hierarchies of values, such as law-abiding turned into legalistic, or humanist into materialist, he located the cause of the “fall” before he could introduce a solution. The prophet could thus scold his covenant audience for straying away from their mission, which was to create a democratic society, and veering instead toward a totalitarian one. The claim and the reproach, put so bluntly, sounded absurd and dystopian in a Cold War context. They were likely to render a phrase like “a communist America” oxymoronic, both ideologically and historically. Of course, the specter of a communist America was not unheard of in this period, but Solzhenitsyn spoke in messianic terms and employed eschatological imagery. Even when willing to tone down his rhetoric for his young audience of Harvard graduates, he still sounded threatening: “If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.” To rise to such ominous occasion, Solzhenitsyn demanded from his audience “a spiritual blaze . . . a new height of vision . . . a new level of life.”70

Critics detected in this rhetoric of renewal and purification through fire echoes of the early Cold War militaristic rhetoric. Solzhenitsyn’s images of renewal and transformation were suffused with their own revolutionary pathos, which was designed to replace the revolutionary privilege of communism. Was he merely proposing a change of regime in the Soviet Union? If so, by what means? In the context of détente arguments, images of rupture and fire suggested war, and for that reason could seem repellant. Indeed, those most critical of the speech repeatedly condemned his “crusade,” admonishing against the implications of his arguments for intensifying the Cold War and encouraging open hostilities between the United States and the Soviet Union.

On the other hand, the genre of the jeremiad requires the construction of an image of impending disaster, making change appear imperative as a last chance granted to a “people on probation.”⁷¹ Against the meliorist pro-détente arguments, Solzhenitsyn offered the vision of an apocalypse that could be avoided only through violent transformation of the status quo. Although he did not explicitly invoke concrete violent acts, the symbolic violence of his rhetoric showed the wrath of a prophet scolding his sinful audience. Yet his angry rhetoric conflicted with the jeremiad’s expectation of upcoming hope and relief, both of which he underplayed. Historically, the jeremiad has been an apt political intervention when its audience experienced some form of suffering or disaffection that could be described as punishment for their sin. Indeed, the social fragmentation and sociopolitical tensions this created in the years leading up to and during détente can hardly be overstated. Without an external enemy to use as a scapegoat,

many Americans came to regard groups of fellow countrymen as enemies with whom they were engaged in a struggle for the nation’s very soul. Whites versus blacks, liberals versus conservatives (as well as liberals versus radicals), young versus old, men versus women, hawks versus doves, rich versus poor, taxpayers versus welfare recipients, the religious versus the secular, the hip versus the straight, the gay versus the straight—everywhere one looked, new battalions took the field, in a spirit ranging from that of redemptive sacrifice to vengeful defiance.72

If America’s sin was its failure to act as the great chosen nation it was (and thus fight against the communist monolith), then the punishment apparently was the national identity crisis that was consuming them. As a stranger, Solzhenitsyn could take on the prophet persona because he neither shared the sins of his audience nor feared their punishment. As a survivor and witness of extreme suffering, which rendered him wiser and more experienced than anyone else, he was justified in judging the West, Americans, and, indeed, human nature. James Darsey states that, in a jeremiad, the prophetic role is successfully enacted once the audience recognizes the speaker’s “ultimate sacrifice of self to duty or commitment” and requires “willingness to suffer [as] the most compelling evidence of the abandonment of the self.”⁷³ Even the critics readily authorized Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic persona. Most of them acknowledged that at Harvard he “spoke with the authority of a man inspired, and with the even greater authority of a man of supreme intellectual and moral courage.”⁷⁴ His “truly heroic figure” was undeniable because he had been shaped by “the intense moral experience of the gulag.”75 Michael Novak, a religious commentator, spoke for many when he claimed, “out of the long grayness of his own despair, out of the years in which surrender must have seemed attractive and hopelessness realistic, Solzhenitsyn was saved by faith in the power of simple truth.”⁷⁶

In addressing his American audience as a nation that had lost its bearings, Solzhenitsyn was probing an open wound. The success of the speech cannot be measured only by its immediate approbation, though even that was significant, but more by its subsequent impact. Insofar as it succeeded in connecting a domestic sense of disorientation to an international crisis, the speech played a key role in legitimizing interventionist political discourses that were pleading for American involvement in non-American conflicts. In an article published in Foreign Affairs two years later, Solzhenitsyn expressed satisfaction with the general reception of his speech. “The Harvard speech rewarded me with an outpouring of favorable responses from the American public at large (some of these found their way into newspapers). For that reason I was not perturbed by the outburst of reproaches which an angry press rained down upon me.”⁷⁷

However, responses published in the press in the aftermath of the speech tell a different story about its success. If a significant part of Solzhenitsyn’s audience and the most audible rejected the message of his jeremiad, it was less because they disagreed with his depiction of the West/America and more because it came from a source they deemed to be unauthorized: a foreigner. In the Washington Post editorial published the day after the speech, Solzhenitsyn’s views are described as “very Russian,” arising from “particular religious and political strains remote from modern Western experience,” which makes him into “an unreliable witness.”⁷⁸ The National Review, one of the publications that endorsed some of Solzhenitsyn’s comments, blamed the negative reception on misunderstandings produced by the fact that the speech had not been accurately translated. By drawing attention to the speech as a translation, the editors foregrounded the foreignness of the author. No surprise, then, that the article also maintained that, insofar as Solzhenitsyn was right, his arguments were already available to American audiences from American authors: “At his best, he can say with Walt Whitman, ‘I am a man, I suffered, I was there.’”⁷⁹

A common strategy employed by critics was to accept Solzhenitsyn’s arguments but only insofar as they were comparable or even confirmed by the views of American or Western thinkers, especially when such thinkers had already made some of the same arguments. James Reston, a columnist for the New York Times, accepted some of Solzhenitsyn’s points as “good questions” but was quick to point out that such questions had been asked and answered better by Archibald MacLeish and Oswald Spengler.80 George Will, then a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group, placed Solzhenitsyn in a “submerged but continuous tradition” that included Henry Adams, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Peter Viereck, and Alexis de Tocqueville.⁸¹ Critics on both sides of the debate all explicitly identified Solzhenitsyn as not American, which hardly needed to be pointed out. Solzhenitsyn himself reinforced that image, describing himself as an exile in the West to the Western audience he was about to criticize. He invited them to listen to him “as a friend” rather than “enemy.” In response, a Washington Star editorial on June 11 hailed him as “the great Russian prophet in our midst,” thus acknowledging his presence, that of the exiled dissident, only by way of signaling an absence—that of the citizen’s right to make criticism of his community.⁸² Olga Andreyev Carlisle, another exile but also a naturalized citizen, writing for Newsweek, informed American readers that Solzhenitsyn’s “soul is still Russian” and at Harvard “he was really speaking to the Soviet leaders and to the Russian people.”⁸³ Similarly focused on Solzhenitsyn’s commitment to Russia was Mary McGrory, writing for the Washington Star, who argued that the Harvard address should be seen as “the personal statement of a conservative, religious, and terribly homesick Russian.”⁸⁴ Perhaps most emphatic to claim the unreliability of an exile’s assessment was MacLeish, who insisted, “Solzhenitsyn . . . knows little of our American lives or of ourselves. . . . He sees few Americans, speaks little English, and what he knows of the Republic he knows not from human witnesses but from television programs, which present their depressing parody of American life to him as they present it also to us but with this difference—that we know the parody for what it is.”⁸⁵

Whether MacLeish was right about Solzhenitsyn’s knowledge of American society remains debatable.86 To even distinguish between Solzhenitsyn’s direct experience of American life versus indirect knowledge from external sources assumes that community membership, which living among Americans would have afforded Solzhenitsyn, is a precondition for speaking authoritatively about the affairs of that community. As a nonmember, he could not be taken seriously, regardless of how similar his criticisms were to charges issued by actual members.

From prophet to fool, Solzhenitsyn’s fall in the eyes of American audiences was accompanied by an increased emphasis on his foreignness. Commenting on the Harvard address in 1980, after the immediate heated echoes had died out, Hook wrote, “Solzhenitsyn speaks in a foreign tongue,” and stressed Solzhenitsyn’s lack of intelligibility by adding, “[he] uses expressions that remain opaque in translation.”⁸⁷ What the foreigner missed was America’s greatness. As critics suggested which aspects of American society Solzhenitsyn misunderstood, they recreated the synecdochic image of a chosen nation that best represents the Western world and thus the one that carries responsibility for the West’s future. In defending their country, the respondents accepted the terms of the assessment as established by Solzhenitsyn. In other words, they did not offer their own version of America or the West but changed the evaluation of the image proposed by Solzhenitsyn. This contrast between evaluations rather than depictions is illustrated by the New York Times article:

Where Mr. Solzhenitsyn sees only softness and indecision in this country, we see more—tolerance of many ideas, humility before the ultimate truths, a recognition of the responsibilities imposed by own awful power. . . . Perhaps now that he (Solzhenitsyn) is settled in America, he may come to learn that at least some of this nation’s apparent weaknesses are precious and abiding strengths.⁸⁸

Requiring that someone live in America to understand it or to have a positive evaluation of it dooms the stranger to inevitable misunderstanding. At the same time, this reasoning allows an important modification of the strategy used by Solzhenitsyn: the difference between being inside or outside America is converted into a difference between being on the side of the mighty or the weak.

To defend America against the accusations made by Solzhenitsyn was especially important to those smarting from the sting of a particular charge: America is not a model for the victims of communism in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn had used the charge to increase the weight of his criticism. The implication of such a claim, which is that the United States is just as bad as a totalitarian society, echoed his claims about the Western origin of communism. To his critics, such a put-down was a de-mythologizing blow that prompted especially irritated protests. The sarcasm in the Washington Star’s version of the rebuttal is especially telling because it allowed the author to turn the criticism on its head:

The West, says Mr. Solzhenitsyn, is not today an appealing model for the spiritual rebirth of the totalitarian nations. To which the right answer is: Of course it isn’t—and can’t be. Those who are regimented in an evil society and soul-destroying system will not find an alternative model of regimentation by looking west. They will find, however, a system that affords human nature the opportunity to declare itself freely, in all its glory and its sordidness.89

Challenging an approach that presumes any one nation can serve as a model for all others, the Washington Star editors dismissed Solzhenitsyn’s accusations as reflecting a “regimented” mind only to reestablish the image of a model America. In other words, they took at face value and reclaimed the “model” status. James Reston, writing for the New York Times on June 11, 1978, reinforced America’s model-status by reminding readers that Solzhenitsyn even being allowed to criticize America is a measure of American’s superiority: “at least he was allowed to say all these things. On commencement day at Moscow University, if they have one, the ‘spiritual superiority’ of the Soviet Union probably wouldn’t have allowed it.”⁹⁰ Similarly seeing perhaps more the escapee than the exile in Solzhenitsyn, MacLeish accused Solzhenitsyn of not understanding that the value Americans place on freedom is the defining feature of America as well as the measure of its greatness:

if he could talk to us, he would realize that we put our freedom first before our responsibility because we are a free people—because a free people is a people that rules itself—because it must decide for itself what its responsibilities are—because there is no one else to decide this for us—neither the state police nor a state church not anyone. . . . [H]e would have learned that we have not lost our will as a people—that it is precisely our will as a people which makes us true believers in that human spirit for which he means to speak.91

By relying on the potential appeal of the apparent irony of the situation, Reston simultaneously resorts to a more traditional reading of the United States, defined through freedom of speech, available to anyone, including a critic like Solzhenitsyn, in contrast to its absence in the Soviet Union. By focusing on freedom and self-governance as the defining values of the American nation, MacLeish implicitly created an opposition between America and nation-states ruled by other values (singling out religion in response to Solzhenitsyn’s emphasis on the need for religion in a secular West). The Americans envisioned by MacLeish, as mythically “free people,” cannot be criticized by Solzhenitsyn because they are exemplary embodiments of the “human spirit.” A similar strategy of rebuiliding mythical America appears in Schlesinger’s article in which Americans are described as defined by the virtue of humility: “Knowing the crimes committed in the name of a single Truth, Americans prefer to keep their ears open to a multitude of competing lower-case truths. Ours has been a nation of skepticism, experiments, accommodation, self-criticism, piecemeal but constant reform—mixture of traits repugnant to the authoritarian and messianic personality, but perhaps not too bad for all that.”⁹²

The heaviest hit targets in the Harvard address were the legal system and the press. In their defense, Hook questioned—perhaps for the first and only time—the synecdochic representation of America and its institutions as emblematic for the West:

Solzhenitsyn fails to realize that many of the defects in the current American legal process are not rooted in the democratic system. In democratic countries like England and Canada . . . the law is far less egregiously an ass than in so many of our state and federal jurisdictions. This is even more obvious with respect to the press . . . professional standards of media reporting in England are superior to those in the United States, though even there they leave something to be desired.93

Hook’s depiction of American institutions as inferior, but inferior to other Western institutions is an implicit defense of the West. Employing a moral vocabulary that talks about the “evils of a democracy” alongside medical terms like “cure,” Hook not only makes the moral disaster described by Solzhenitsyn seem an exaggeration but also implies that the exaggeration misses an important point: if the West is not a model for the rest of the world through concrete institutions operating at a given moment, it does not mean that its foundations and principles cannot, over time and in perhaps different instantiations, have the value of a model.

Hook’s essay gives clearer expression than other responses to an idea that was, nevertheless, central to all of them: the exemplary nature of American democracy and of its main institutions, including the press. Responding to Solzhenitsyn’s criticism, American intellectuals were compelled to mount a defense of the country and the civilization they saw as under attack. In so doing, they validated the glorified image of America invoked by Solzhenitsyn himself before he proceeded to lament its decay. As in a sort of didactic reverse psychology, the “great Russian prophet”—as many tagged him—lured American intellectuals into accepting through defensive justification a mythological portrait of America as an emblematic illustration of the West at its best, struggling with its own demons, and, in the end, destined to overcome its challenges and be ready to rescue the rest of humanity. They were prompted to accept this mythology by protesting its contestation by a foreigner as well as by taking for granted the vision of a foreigner.

That Americans both listened to and dismissed Solzhenitsyn captures the paradoxical nature of the stranger persona. He was, in his critics’ eyes, both a prophet and an outsider with flawed understanding. In his case, the paradox is explained by the ambivalence of his persona, caught between the transnational pathos of the moral witness and the deeply national, even nationalist image of a Russian peasant. Commentators who had, on different occasions, expressed similar if not harsher criticism of American society now subscribed to a glorification of America that left an important assumption unchallenged: that the United States was responsible for the fate of the entire world. What emerges intact from this confrontation between Solzhenitsyn and his American critics is the Cold War ideograph of America as “world policeman.” Solzhenitsyn cannot be credited with the creation of the concept, which emerged from several directions at once, many entirely homegrown. Yet the exchange caused by the Harvard address was profoundly consequential insofar as it brought together, in their joint effort to defend America, conservatives and liberals, enthusiasts and skeptics.

CONCLUSION: ZHIVAGO’S SON AND SOLZHENITSYN’S AMERICAN CHILDREN

Let me return to the observation I made earlier in this chapter: the Knopf editors’ instructions to American readers to keep in mind that the author of Ivan Denisovich was not as impressive as the author of Doctor Zhivago. What exactly were Americans assumed to have liked in Pasternak’s novel that they would not also find in Solzhenitsyn? Could it have been the tragic tale of a man caught in the social and political chaos unleashed by the Russian Revolution; the intellectual’s disillusionment with the ideals of the Russian Revolution; or simply the tragic love story centered on Yuri, a sensitive idealist in the tradition of the Western-influenced Russian intelligentsia? It may have been all of the above. Most importantly, Pasternak’s story assured American audiences that the political ideals of communism were unsustainable and inhuman. The moral of Solzhenitsyn’s literary work was exactly the same, albeit more bluntly stated. But while the tragic death of Pasternak’s hero reminded American readers that they lived in a world where at least such tragedies do not happen, Solzhenitsyn offered no such assurance. He criticized Americans for their own ills and threatened them with an apocalyptic future.

How, then, could this foreigner play such a key role in American political rhetoric, both liberal and conservative? In the years following Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address, the synecdoche he used turned out to be the lynch-pin of the Cold War political representation of the world. Even after the Cold War ended, whether America should police the world’s trouble spots has remained a hot topic of debate. The assumption on which the question arises, however, has largely remained unquestioned. Why would a particular nation-state carry responsibility for all the other nation-states (as opposed to a transnational alliance, for instance)? The synecdoche manufactured by Solzhenitsyn offered a convenient, because seemingly benign, substitute for the image of a superior dominating Western civilization, which had clearly lost its currency in the postwar, postcolonial era. Where the West had colonized, the United States was merely trying to help. Yet insofar as the West came to mean the “free world” in Cold War discourse, the United States became the center of the free world. Such identifications enabled by the synecdochic logic offered reassurance in an environment loaded with apocalyptic predictions and suffused with the implicit anxiety.

Solzhenitsyn’s synecdochic logic has continued to do its political work. Here is Michael Mandelbaum, a professor of American foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, making “the case for Goliath”:

The biblical Goliath served the Philistines but not the people of Israel. The twenty-first-century United States does both. It is not the lion of the international system, terrorizing and preying on smaller, weaker animals in order to survive itself. It is, rather, the elephant, which supports a wide variety of other creatures—smaller mammals, birds, and insects—by generating nourishment for them as it goes about the business of feeding itself.94

Translating Solzhenitsyn’s Cold War claims into the morally inflected arguments of the war on terror, Max Boot, a fellow in national securities studies at the Council for Foreign Relations, has confidence in mythological America’s moral mission to the point where its imperialism becomes necessary and justified as long as evil exists in the world: “If we want Iraq to avoid becoming a Somalia on steroids, we’d better get used to U.S. troops being deployed there for years, possibly decades, to come. If that raises hackles about American imperialism, so be it. We’re going to be called an empire whatever we do. We might as well be a successful empire.”95

It matters that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a foreign intellectual, was a key participant in the ideological emergence and rhetorical justification of American imperialism. The responses to Solzhenitsyn’s speech reveal that this ideology is more widely shared among American intellectuals than one would suspect and that it crosses political boundaries and comes out as a sui generis form of patriotism, as readiness to subscribe to a national self-image that is indeed so positive (perhaps even narcissistic) that it can easily lead to feelings of universal responsibility.