Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978

ADVANCE PRAISE

for

Between Two Millstones, Book 1

Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978

"The publication of Between Two Millstones, Book 1 is most welcome and occurs at just the right moment, when relations between Russia and the West are in a sorry state. This volume introduces readers to the worldview of a formidable writer after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974. A Russian patriot and an honest and unrelenting champion of the oppressed, Solzhenitsyn disappointed those pundits and public figures who expected him to lavish only praise on the West. His memoirs are continually absorbing and contain fascinating insights and observations, where his literary brilliance is on full display."

—David L. Tubbs, The King’s College, New York City

The popular image of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is that of a dour prophet, waging a war of words against international Communism—he won. However, Solzhenitsyn is primarily an author with an exceptional knack for making characters come alive off the printed page. In this personal memoir recounting the years after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn himself emerges from behind the shadows of his public persona. Instead of the ‘slightly balmy nineteenth-century Russian mystic’ that President Jimmy Carter styled him, we see a thoughtful, witty, ironic, sensitive man struggling to learn the ways of new cultures, new friends, and new languages. He documents his search for a place to live where his family will thrive, safe from the threat posed by the KGB. He is always torn between the weight of fame (legions of people want to admire, damn, or at the least meet him) and the longing for the unencumbered existence of a writer. For readers interested in one of the pivotal figures in the demise of twentieth-century totalitarianism, this book is a treasure.

—James F. Pontuso, Charles Patterson Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs, Hampden-Sydney College, author of Assault on Ideology: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Political Thought

For those wishing to know more about the literary genius and political giant who was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, this autobiographical account of his years of exile in the West is a wish come true. Up until now, we have only had Solzhenitsyn’s account of his years as a dissident in the Soviet Union, prior to his expulsion from his homeland. As for the years from 1974 to 1994, we have had to content ourselves with mere scraps and fragments. Now, at long last, we are being served the feast for which we have hungered.

—Joseph Pearce, author of Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile

"Between Two Millstones describes the years when Solzhenitsyn, banished but unbowed, defied Western decadence as eloquently as he had Soviet brutality."

—Christopher Caldwell, The Weekly Standard

Solzhenitsyn’s account of his early years of exile is informed by a refusal to be swept along by the swift-moving currents of modernity and an ever-increasing awareness of the West’s loss of a moral compass. It should be high on the reading list of every thinking American.

—Lee Congdon, author of Solzhenitsyn: The Historical-Spiritual Destinies of Russia and the West

Like the man himself, the translated memoir of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is an indispensable part of history. Solzhenitsyn’s words, now accessible to English readers for the first time, are a lasting testimony to his unbending moral courage, his persistence, and his persuasiveness—all of which helped bring down Communism.

—Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense (1975–1977, 2001–2006)

"These ‘sketches of exile’ were written during the events described and are informed with the same energy and vivid powers of description that characterized Solzhenitsyn’s acclaimed memoir The Oak and the Calf. Between Two Millstones has appeared in Russian, French, German, Italian, and Romanian, but not in the country where Solzhenitsyn spent eighteen years of his Western exile. It is one of the great memoirs of our time and a distinguished work of art in its own right."

—Daniel J. Mahoney, Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship, Assumption College

"As a former political prisoner fresh out of the USSR, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was consumed with the desire of making the West see the dangers of Communism. But an increasing number of Western commentators found his views too harsh in this respect, as well as ‘insufficiently liberal’ in general. Controversies concerning Solzhenitsyn began erupting with ever greater frequency, reaching a crescendo of sorts after the Harvard speech. In Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn revisits these polemical battles with gusto and in fascinating detail."

—Alexis Klimoff, emeritus, Vassar College

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn took to Vermont, and Vermonters took to him. I felt it a privilege to have met with him in his new Vermont setting, and I know that our state’s forested beauty reminded him of home. We are proud that he believed that his homeland, and the world, could learn from the local self-government that is embodied in Town Meeting Day in towns and hamlets across the Green Mountain State.

—Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)

BETWEEN

TWO

MILLSTONES

BOOK 1

The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series

The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series showcases the contributions and continuing inspiration of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), the Nobel Prize–winning novelist and historian. The series makes available works of Solzhenitsyn, including previously untranslated works, and aims to provide the leading platform for exploring the many facets of his enduring legacy. In his novels, essays, memoirs, and speeches, Solzhenitsyn revealed the devastating core of totalitarianism and warned against political, economic, and cultural dangers to the human spirit. In addition to publishing his work, this new series features thoughtful writers and commentators who draw inspiration from Solzhenitsyn’s abiding care for Christianity and the West, and for the best of the Russian tradition. Through contributions in politics, literature, philosophy, and the arts, these writers follow Solzhenitsyn’s trail in a world filled with new pitfalls and new possibilities for human freedom and human dignity.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

BETWEEN

TWO

MILLSTONES

BOOK 1

Sketches of Exile

1974–1978

Translated from the Russian by

PETER CONSTANTINE

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

NOTRE DAME, INDIANA

Published by the University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

English Language Edition copyright © 2018 by University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Printed in Canada by Friesens Corporation

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 1918–2008, author. | Constantine, Peter, 1963– translator. | Mahoney, Daniel J., 1960– writer of foreword.

Title: Between two millstones, book 1: sketches of exile, 1974–1978 / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ; translated from the Russian edition by Peter Constantine ; foreword by Daniel J. Mahoney.

Other titles: Ugodilo zyornyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov. English Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2018] | Series: Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn series | This is the first publication in English of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs of his years in the West, Ugodilo zyornyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov: Ocherki izgnaniya. They are being published here as two books: The present first book contains Part One. The forthcoming second book, under the title Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, contains Parts Two, Three, and Four—Publisher’s note. | Includes bibliographic references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021919 (print) | LCCN 2018041531 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268105037 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268105044 (epub) | ISBN 9780268105013 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268105014 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich, 1918–2008. | Authors, Russian—20th century—Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC PG3488.O4 (ebook) | LCC PG3488.O4 Z4613 2018 (print) | DDC 891.78/4403 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021919

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note

Foreword

PART ONE (1974–1978)

CHAPTER 1   Untethered

CHAPTER 2   Predators and Dupes

CHAPTER 3   Another Year Adrift

CHAPTER 4   At Five Brooks

CHAPTER 5   Through the Fumes

APPENDICES

List of Appendices

Appendices (1–24)

Notes to the English Translation

Index of Selected Names

General Index

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is the first publication in English of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs of his years in the West, Угодило зëрнышко промеж двух жерновов: Oчерки изгнания [Ugodilo zyornyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov: Ocherki izgnaniya]. They are being published here as two books: The present first book contains Part One. The forthcoming second book, under the title Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–⁠⁠1994, contains Parts Two, Three, and Four.

The reader is reminded that the overall sequence of Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs, as they appear in English, is therefore as follows:

The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union

Invisible Allies [=Fifth Supplement to The Oak and the Calf]

Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile, 1974–⁠1978

Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–⁠1994

The original Russian text of chapter 5, Skvoz chad (Through the Fumes), was published separately at YMCA-Press in 1979. Then the full text of the book appeared over seven installments in the journal Novy Mir (chap. 1: no. 9, 1998; chaps. 2–3: no. 11, 1998; chaps. 4–5: no. 2, 1999; chaps. 6–8: no. 9, 2000; chaps. 9–10: no. 12, 2000; chaps. 11–13, no. 4, 2001; and chaps. 14–16: no. 11, 2003). In preparation for eventual book publication, the author twice made revisions to his text, in 2004 and again in 2008. The first complete Russian edition in book form is scheduled to be released by Vremya in late 2018 or 2019 as volume 29 of their ongoing publication of a thirty-volume collected works of Solzhenitsyn. It is that final, definitive text that is presented here in English translation.

The author wrote Between Two Millstones in Vermont during four discrete periods:

Part One—Autumn 1978

Part Two—Spring 1982

Part Three—Spring 1987

Part Four—Spring 1994

The author’s footnotes written during those periods are printed without dates, while his later footnotes are dated according to the year added.

Footnotes appearing at the bottom of a page are the author’s. By contrast, notes that have been added to this English translation are not the author’s, and appear as endnotes at the end of the book.

The text contains numbers in square brackets, for example, [17], which refer to the corresponding appendix at the end of the book. The appendices are part of the author’s original text. Some notes to the appendices have been added for this edition, and those notes can be found at the end of the book in the Notes to the English Translation.

Russian names are not Westernized with the exception of certain well-known public figures or published authors, who may already be familiar to readers in such a form.

This English translation of Between Two Millstones was made possible in part by Drew Guff and the Solzhenitsyn Initiative at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute.  This support is gratefully acknowledged.

FOREWORD

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a quintessentially Russian writer and thinker whose life and work nonetheless have universal significance. He spent twenty years of his life in Western exile, eighteen of them in the United States. Out of that experience, a new set of sketches emerged, ones that are as compel­l­ing as The Oak and the Calf, his earlier account of his underground struggle against what he did not hesitate to call the Soviet Dragon. Readers of that literary memoir thrilled to Solzhenitsyn’s capacity again and again to outmaneuver a totalitarian state and ideology that had killed millions, muzzled the soul, and subjugated the best traditions of Russia for over six grinding de­cades. Yet on 13 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn found himself forcibly exiled to the West as a result of the publication abroad of The Gulag Archipelago, a monumental work that would do more than any other to expose the violence and mendacity at the heart of the Soviet regime.

For a time, Solzhenitsyn was the most famous man in the world. Yet he found himself adrift in the West, hounded by journalists and reporters and trying to find his bearings in a completely new situation. This book describes all of this in fascinating detail. He could now speak freely, but he wanted to marshall his words, make sense of his new surroundings, and remain as much as possible within the bounds of literature rather than political activism. The Western press saw only prickliness and ingratitude and a failure to be frank with a Western public that had the right to know. Solzhenitsyn was indeed caught between two millstones: a totalitarian regime in the East that posed a grave and immediate threat to humanity, and the often frivolous forces of Western freedom that had lost a sense of dignity and high purpose. He had a new tension-ridden mission: to write with force, clarity, and artfulness about the Russian twentieth century while doing his best to warn the West about the pitfalls of a free society caught up in the cult of comfort and increasingly unwilling to defend itself against the march of evil. However much he wished to subordinate politics to literature, in the first few years of exile he felt compelled to speak to a sometimes uncomprehending West. From his first base in Zurich, he traveled to the Scandinavian countries, France, England, and Spain, imploring his listeners to defend their best traditions and to find the civic courage necessary to defend freedom worthy of the name.

As these pages make abundantly clear, Solzhenitsyn was never anti-Western (as superficial critics repeatedly charged) but rather a tempered friend of the West who felt obliged to convey the Soviet tragedy to all who would listen so that historical catastrophes would not be unnecessarily repeated. His accounts of his travels and meetings are charming and instructive, and show the openness and curiosity of a man who previously only knew the rest of Europe through his reading (Dickens, for example, allowed him to make immediate sense of what he saw in England). He developed an affection with and proximity to the French that would continue to the end of his life. The French were the most open to the lessons of The Gulag Archipelago in no small part because French intellectuals had gone further in succumbing to the totalitarian temptation than their neighboring counterparts. That great book was received by the French as a liberating tonic, allowing the entire nation, or almost all of it, to see clearly for the first time in a generation or two. And Solzhenitsyn adored the sights and sounds, the old towns and churches, that covered the French landscape, and that gave it character, spiri­tual depth, and charm. He would travel to France again before returning to post-Communist Russia, delivering some of his most important messages there. In some ways it became a second home.

In June and July of 1975, Solzhenitsyn came to the United States for the first time, addressing meetings of the AFL-CIO in Washington and New York, respectively. On those occasions, he displayed great passion and conviction, thrusting a spear into the jaws and ribs of his nemesis, the Soviet Dragon. Yet he began to have doubts that his warnings to the West were succeeding in conveying the full truth about Communist totalitarianism (and Western complicity in its spread) to a West weighted by materialism and an excessive engrossment in everyday life. In his own word, he had become disillusioned. He no longer felt the same confidence he had expressed in his Nobel Lecture that literature (and even Sol­zhenitsyn’s public essays and addresses of that period were works of literary art) could convey the bitter experience of one people to another. He feared that the West would have to endure the long path of errors and suffering alone. Yet despite these forebodings, he continued to speak to the West, as evidenced by his speeches and addresses in England and Spain in 1975 and 1976. Still torn between literature and politics, he also felt a duty of friendship to the Western world that he never confused with flattery or an unwillingness to share difficult truths.

This was the source of even more misunderstandings in the West in the years after 1974. Journalists in particular misconstrued almost everything Solzhenitsyn had to say. A caricature of Solzhenitsyn had developed, and clichés bearing little or no resemblance to anything he thought or wrote took the place of patient efforts to understand his thought. This failure of effort on the part of journalists (and some academic commentators) persists to this day, as even a cursory examination of writing about Solzhenitsyn attests. Solzhenitsyn did not become embittered. Rather, he strove to connect to those healthy elements in Western and American society that were still open to the old verities and to the truth about the human soul.

One of Aleksandr and Natalia Solzhenitsyn’s great initiatives during the early years of their Western exile was to create the Russian Social Fund. Derived wholly from international royalties from The Gulag Archipelago (the book sold over thirty million copies around the world), the fund set up by the Solzhenitsyns aimed to provide resources for the families of prisoners and the persecuted in the USSR, to aid in the resuscitation of Russian publishing and culture, and to restore authentic Russia in any way they could. The fund was ably and courageously administered by the Jewish dissident Aleksandr Ginzburg, who was eventually jailed for his noble work. The Sol­zhenitsyns fought for his freedom and were deeply grateful for all his efforts. Today, the Solzhenitsyn Fund continues the work begun by the Rus­sian Social Fund, supporting the Solzhenitsyn Literature Prize and recently providing support for the building of an impressive monument in the heart of Mos­cow to the victims of Communist repression. It was dedicated with the full support of the Solzhenitsyn family on 30 October 2017.

One of the most memorable sections of Between Two Millstones is Sol­zhenitsyn’s beautifully crafted account of witnessing elections in the Swiss Catholic canton of Appenzell before his departure to the United States in 1976. He also spoke about this experience in 1990’s Rebuilding Russia. The episode is important for understanding his political reflection and his ongoing support for the democracy of small spaces. The citizens of tiny Appenzell practiced a sturdy form of republican self-government, one that Solzhenitsyn greatly admired. Their Landammann, the cantonal leader, spoke about the rights and responsibilities that accompanied individual freedoms and the need to avoid both moral anarchy and the inhumanity of an al­mighty state. The citizens of Appenzell unanimously reelected their Landammann while proceeding to turn down his three most important legislative proposals! This exercise in citizen democracy impressed and moved Solzhenitsyn. This was in his view a conservative, dignified, and morally serious democracy that ought to provide lessons and inspiration for a free Rus­sia. Solzhenitsyn astutely observed that the Helvetic Confederacy dates from 1291, that it owes nothing to the Enlightenment per se but rather arose out of the ancient forms of communal life. Perhaps an emerging Russian democracy could take its inspiration, although not its exact forms, from Russia’s medieval town assemblies or veche—and from the zemvstvo, the self-governing provincial assemblies of the second half of the nineteenth century. He believed Russia could learn from the local self-government practiced in Switzerland (and New England) even as it renewed and modernized those elements of self-government found within its own traditions. Solzhenitsyn appreciated that self-government was learned in small spaces and could not be imposed from the top down without grave distortions of social and political life.

Solzhenitsyn, one must be reminded, did not freely choose a life in exile. This rather was his fate, one that he accepted with grace and some sadness, but never bitterness. But his family eventually settled down on a lovely property in Cavendish, Vermont, a property marked by five brooks, and a climate and atmosphere reminiscent of Russia. They made a gracious home for themselves. As Solzhenitsyn cut back on his frenetic pace of public addresses and speeches, he began to make considerable progress on The Red Wheel, his other masterwork, a massive literary-historical project that sought to come to terms with the causes, effects, and legacy of Red October. The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel can be understood as the most impressive and significant literary diptych of the twentieth century, the first describing Communist totalitarianism and all its works, the second using the resources of art and historical exploration to explain Russia’s initial descent into the ideological abyss.

Solzhenitsyn writes of the dramatic importance of the two months he spent in 1976 examining the enormously rich document collections at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California, bearing on the events in the Rus­sia of 1917. For the first time, he discovered the full truth about the February revolution of 1917: rather than being a liberating outburst of freedom as he and so many other historians had supposed, he came to see nothing but baseness, meanness, hypocrisy, plebeian uniformity, and suppression of people with other points of view that took place. The first February revolution of 1917 destroyed any prospect for ordered liberty in Russia. The Provisional Government was worse than hapless and could not govern for two hours, not to mention two days. There was not a single week in 1917 of which the nation could be proud. February made October and Communist totalitarianism all but inevitable. Solzhenitsyn now felt compelled to rework the early parts of The Red Wheel to explain the stupidity and ideological rigidity of Russia’s liberals and socialists, the chronic inability of the tsar to act, and the valiant but unavailing efforts of the great Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister of Russia from 1906 to 1911, to defeat revolution through meaningful reform while building the pediments of a rule-of-law state.

Solzhenitsyn now understood that he would need to squeeze all this new material into the work and to shift focus from Red October to the initial disas­ter that was February 1917. All this would affect Solzhenitsyn’s later judgment about the proper path for Russia to follow as she descended from the icy cliffs of Communist totalitarianism. The chaos and lawlessness of 1917 must be avoided at all costs. The ideocratic state must go—but a re­gime of self-government must be built gradually and on sturdy moral foundations. Above all, the new Russia must be moral, or not at all. Needless to say, Russia after 1991 did not follow the principled but prudent path that Solzhen­i­tsyn limned. Putin and Putinism did not come out of a vacuum. It was a response to the degenerate pseudo-democracy of the 1990s, a criminal klep­tocracy that was falsely acclaimed as a true democracy and a true market economy by too many in the West.

In Between Two Millstones, we witness Solzhenitsyn’s troubled relations with so many members of the Third Wave of Soviet émigrés. Many had been privileged members of the Soviet elite, demi-educated intellectuals who hated Russia as much as they disdained Soviet tyranny. Solzhenitsyn now had a new mission: to fight to the death against Communism even as he defended the integrity of the true Russia, which he adamantly refused to identify with eternal despotism. The true Russia was not just the prison of nations but rather had immense cultural and spiritual resources upon which a proud and free nation could draw (while learning, as it must, from the civic cultures of the Western world). Solzhenitsyn insisted that things Russian and Soviet be clearly demarcated and that an enslaved people not be confused with their oppressors. But he was beginning to fear that many Soviet émigrés, and far too many in the West, did not wish to see a rebirth of Rus­sian national consciousness. For his humane and self-critical patriotism, Sol­zhenitsyn was attacked as a totalitarian and theocrat by the likes of Andrei Sinyavsky from the seat of his Parisian exile. Others played the Persian card, arguing that the author of The Gulag Archipelago was an aspiring Rus­sian Ayatollah (this about a man who fought courageously for freedom and who respected all the world’s great religions).

And when Solzhenitsyn reminded Americans at Harvard in June 1978 that freedom demands voluntary self-limitation, that it requires civic cour­age and lucidity about the totalitarian threat, when he dared to criticize the superficiality and irresponsibility of the free press, he was once again denounced against all evidence as a fanatic, a fierce dogmatic, a mind split apart. Solzhenitsyn thought Americans welcomed criticism but soon discerned that intellectual elites only welcomed criticism that came from the Left. Yet he received many encouraging letters from the American heartland, from ordinary Americans who had not forgotten the indispensable moral foundations of democracy. So once again, Solzhenitsyn held on to a glimmer of hope that the truth could win out over the cultured despisers of the rich reserves of mercy and sacrifice that defined both Russia and the West at their very best.

Readers of Between Two Millstones will see Solzhenitsyn struggling against those who have botched the Western publications of his books and against massive KGB disinformation efforts to besmirch his name. One sees Sol­zheni­tsyn’s unrelenting fidelity to truth, to defending it against lies great and small. Solzhenitsyn responds to the KGB’s lies by simply setting the record straight. The fight to the death against the Soviet Dragon proceeds apace even as Solzhenitsyn struggles with new and more perplexing adversaries in the West. He is saddened to discover that many enemies of Communism in the West also fear and even hate Russia, too. But he never gives up his hope to go home to help his beloved homeland come out from under the rubble of a soul-destroying ideological despotism. He poignantly notes that he and his young sons prayed for Russia’s deliverance and their eventual return to a free Russia. Solzhenitsyn told his boys that a rock that looked like a resting horse would one day come to life and fly them all back to their beloved homeland. This hope sustained him. This friend and well-wisher to the West, this teller of sometimes bitter truths, never lost the desire to go home. The adventure will continue in Book 2 of Between Two Millstones, culminating in the historic collapse of European Communism a decade after the events described in the first book of this work. Then a new set of challenges begins, another time, another burden. These sketches of exile are a gift for Russians and Americans alike.

DANIEL J. MAHONEY

Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship

Assumption College

Worcester, MA

14 December 2017

To my wife Alya—

the wing that saved me

in life’s whirlwind

Thou distant land,

Land unknown to me,

Not of my own free will have I come to thee,

Nor was it my brave steed that brought me here:

What brought me here was misfortune.

—Russian song

PART

ONE

(1974–1978)

CHAPTER 1

Untethered

In a whirlwind of just a few hours I was transported from Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, and from the whole Great Soviet Prison itself, to Heinrich Böll’s country house near Cologne, into a dense crowd of over a hundred reporters waiting for my thundering pronouncements. But to my own surprise I told them: I said enough in the Soviet Union. I will be silent for now.

Wasn’t that strange? All my life I suffered under the prohibition that barred us from speaking; finally I had broken free—should I not be holding forth, lobbing salvos at our tyrants?

It was strange. But from those very first hours—perhaps because of the astonishing openness here in the West—it was as if something inside me had clammed up.

No sooner had I arrived at Böll’s house than I asked if a long-distance call to Moscow could be arranged. I was certain I wouldn’t be put through, but I was! And it is Alya herself who answers the phone—she is at home! So I manage to assure her with my own voice that I am alive and that I have arrived at Böll’s.

But you? What about you? I ask. (They surely will not have harmed the children, but who knew what might be going on in the apartment.)

Alya answers, her voice is clear, managing to signal through humdrum details that everyone is at home and that the KGB officers have left. Though she cannot say it outright, she adroitly manages to hint that the apartment has not been touched, the door is to be fixed. That means that they have not searched our apartment? I don’t know what to think. I was certain that a search would have been made. All the secret papers and documents lying on the tables!—so they hadn’t taken them?

Even before I arrived, Böll had already received calls from Betta (Liza Markstein) in Vienna and Dr. Fritz Heeb, the lawyer, in Zurich, saying that they were coming to Germany. A call was also put through to Nikita Struve in Paris, who said he would come too. My Three Pillars of Support,¹ all together, how perfect! But I felt that it would all be too much to bear, and so asked Struve to come to Zurich a day later instead.

Suddenly the tension that had kept me going throughout that very long day² ebbed, and I shuffled to my room and collapsed on the bed. But I woke up in the middle of the night. Böll’s house, which lay directly on the village street, was under siege: headlights were flashing from cars that were pulling up and parking; right by the house there was a buzzing crowd of reporters, and through the window, open in the warm European night, came snippets of German, French, and English. The reporters were huddling, waiting to seize their morning bounty of news, finally some statement from me. But what statement? I had already said everything that was important in Moscow.

I had after all won for myself an almost complete freedom of speech in the Soviet Union. A few days earlier I had publicly called the Soviet government and the KGB a pack of horned devils flitting through the early dawn before the matins bell rings; I had denounced the lawlessness that knew no bounds and the genocide of peoples—what else was there for me to add now? These were things that were straightforward enough, and in fact known to all. Or were they? As for the more complex issues, those were hardly for the press. I would have preferred not to make any more statements: in my last days in the Soviet Union I had done so out of necessity, to defend myself, but what need was there to do so here? Here everyone could speak their mind without running the slightest risk.

I was lying there awake, in the knowledge that I had been successfully freed, but I was also caught up in a tangle of branching thoughts: what was I to do now, and how was I to do it? But even the questions refused to rise out of the shadows, and so nothing could be decided.

Betta had arrived that night, and we’d had a warm reunion. I had been intent on not going out to face the crowd of reporters, since I saw little point in parading myself before them like a silent scarecrow, but Betta changed my mind. She convinced me that Heinrich and I should go outside, stroll across the meadow, and let the press take pictures of us, since the reporters could not leave empty-handed. So after breakfast Heinrich and I went outside and were greeted with such a flood of questions that there was no way to respond: surprisingly foolish questions, such as how I felt and if I’d slept well. I don’t quite recall what I said, but I managed to utter a few words. Then Heinrich and I walked some hundred yards and back, a mad crush of photographers and journalists edging backward in front of us over the uneven ground, an older man falling painfully on his back. I felt bad for him, and for the others too—theirs was not a job to be envied.

Betta’s next decision was that my one white KGB shirt would not see me through, and so, with the Deutschmarks that the KGB officers had slipped me on the plane, she went and bought me two shirts she found at the local village store. I didn’t notice it right away, but the shirt I wore for the trip the following day had gray and white vertical stripes—like the stakes of a stockade—almost identical to the prison uniform of the Soviet camps.

Soon after, Dr. Heeb, my sound and even-keeled benefactor, arrived at Böll’s house, a man of strong features and imposing and solid build. While Betta was with us I didn’t have to resort to German, but no serious discussions were required anyway. Meanwhile, the crowd of reporters were badgering me to come outside and be photographed and asked questions.

Having rushed in from all the corners of Europe and from across the ocean—what kind of statement were they expecting from me? I simply couldn’t understand. Was some inane comment all they needed for a headline? That I was feeling extremely tired, or, on the contrary, extremely lively? That I was absolutely delighted to be in the Free World? Or that I really liked the German autobahns? If I said any of this, their long journeys would have been justified. But, having just emerged from a great tumult, I was simply unable to humor them, even had I known how.

My silence turned out to be a great disappointment to them.

And so from the very outset the Western media and I were not to be friends, were not to understand one another.

Then Herr Dingens arrived from Bonn; as a representative of the German Foreign Ministry he had welcomed me on my arrival in the West the day before. We sat at the table in the bright living room, but Annemarie, Heinrich’s wife, following a festive European tradition, also lit a few red candles. Herr Dingens had brought me a temporary German passport without which I could not exist, let alone travel. Officially, in the name of the government, he proposed that I could choose any place of residence I wished in Germany.

For a minute I hesitated. I had not made such plans. But I did like Germany, probably because as a child I had enjoyed studying German and learning German poems by heart, and in the long summer months had read books of German folklore, The Song of the Nibelungs, Schiller, and some Goethe. And during the war? Not for a moment did I connect Hitler with traditional Germany. As for the heated weeks of battle, I had felt only the zeal of pinpointing German batteries faster and with greater precision. It was zeal, not hatred; and I had only felt sympathy at the sight of German prisoners. Was I now to live in Germany? Perhaps that would be the right thing to do. But in the meantime I wanted above all to get to Zurich. That was something I could not even have imagined only two days ago, for my unfinished November 1916³ was lacking in details concerning Lenin’s life in Zurich—after all, imagining a place is one thing, but seeing it with one’s own eyes is another, and now, tomorrow, I was to see it for myself!

I thanked Herr Dingens but turned the offer down, not with finality, but for the time being.

We had barely sat down with the Bölls and gathered our thoughts when we had word from outside that Dmitri Panin had come to see me with his wife (his second wife, with whom he had emigrated, and whom I didn’t know). I was quite taken aback—I had thought he was in Paris! For him to suddenly drop everything and catch a plane, without so much as letting me know! Hadn’t the emotional state I would be in and my being overwhelmed by demands crossed his mind?

But that was Dmitri Panin, my friend from the prison camp, a Knight of the Holy Grail and one of a kind.

Some five years earlier I had read his philosophical manuscript on how to understand and save humanity. I had asked him where one was to start, what he was proposing that we actually do here and now. But as always his main concern was that the edifice of his worldview be complete; putting his system into practice was of little concern to him, some lesser figure could see to that. (He had a hazy sense of reality and its possibilities. Back in 1961 Dmitri had strongly rebuked me for giving One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the magazine Novy Mir (New World), and thus laying open my underground activity; I ought to have remained in the underground.) As for saving our nation from Communism, that was simple enough. It was necessary to convince the West to come together and give the Soviet Union a general ultimatum: Relinquish Communism or else we will destroy you! As simple as that. And the Soviet leaders would undoubtedly capitulate. (I laughed at the idea.) The only flaw in his concept that he was prepared to admit was that the countries of the West were not in accord with one another and would not present a united front, like de Gaulle’s reckless withdrawal from NATO. To unite the nations of the West, he argued, one had to go by way of the Pope (a Crusade!). Two years earlier, Dmitri had decided, so be it, he would tackle the matter himself, hands-on. He would set out to convince the Pope! With this in view he had left the Soviet Union with his new wife, by way of her Israeli visa. The Pope even granted him an audience. But alas, the Pontiff refrained from such a simple and direct course of action. So Dmitri began to lay the groundwork himself, publishing The Notebooks of Sologdin (his name in my book In the First Circle), and traveled throughout Europe on a book tour with posters featuring a small snapshot of us, with my arm resting on his shoulder, that had been enlarged. His presentations were rousing and combative, calling on everyone to rise and unite against Communism without delay; but those foolish Europeans were sluggish in their response.

Some of this I already knew back in the USSR through smuggled letters and newspaper clippings, and the rest he told me now. He and I sat in the front parlor, while his wife, Issa, went to the living room to join the others at the table with the red candles. The plan Dmitri laid out before me was this: to immediately declare before the crowd of journalists outside our alliance and solidarity unto death against Communism. The allocation of responsibilities, which he would also later send me in writing, was that I would be the swift frigate with bright and colorful sails, while he would be the frigate’s cargo hold filled with an arsenal of ideas. Together we would be invincible! My God, how skewed all this was, not only in regard to my having just arrived in the West a few hours earlier and struggling to adapt to my new situation, but to his tenuous grasp of reality and life. How could one achieve anything the way he was proposing? We would end up a laughingstock. But Dmitri did not understand, all my arguments falling on barren ground. My refusal deeply wounded him and he left extremely upset, if not furious.

This was immediately followed by a new challenge: Janis Sapiets of the BBC Russian Service, known to his listeners as Ivan Ivanovich, had arrived, and was asking if I would see him. How could I not? He turned out to be an extremely kind and pleasant man, his voice so familiar to me for many years. He persuaded me to record an interview then and there; this would be important for Soviet listeners, which indeed it was. We did the recording (but I don’t remember what I said).⁴

Now that I had my passport in hand, I could have left and no longer been a burden on Heinrich. (But a burden I was to be, for the whole world had found out that I was at his house, and for the next month there was a flood of telegrams, letters, and books, his secretary struggling to keep records and send everything on to Zurich.) Betta and Heeb, of course, were thinking that we catch a plane. But was I to see nothing of Germany? Might there not be a train we could take? There was—we could board a train in Cologne in the morning and reach Zurich before nightfall. That was ideal.

Early the following morning we took leave of the hospitable Bölls and drove off. A few dozen cars that were still lining the narrow village streets all turned to follow us. We soon reached the train station in Cologne without my having seen much through the window, and hurried to the platform, going up in an elevator of all things, getting there just two minutes before our train was to pull in.

But what two minutes! Right before me, in full view and in all its perfection, was that work of beauty, no, that miracle, the Cologne Cathedral! More than its intricate ornamentation, it was its spiritual depth that struck me, its towers and spires striving up to the heavens. I gasped, and stared with my mouth open, while the reporters, ever alert and already on the platform, took snapshots of me staring. And then the train pulled in and swallowed us up.

The day brightened and we could see out of the window far into the distance. The tracks ran right beside the Rhine, along its left bank, and we went through Koblenz and Mainz. But the Rhine seemed dirty and industrialized, no longer poetic, even near the Lorelei Rock which they pointed out to me. It must have been idyllic before it had been spoiled in this way. But the main beauty of the area, the centuries-old huddling houses and narrow streets, could not be seen from a passing train.

Back in Moscow, as soon as Alya or I would meet up with Betta, there ensued fiery exchanges of clandestine ideas—but now that I was free to discuss whatever I liked, I simply could not gather my thoughts. After a great upheaval passes, you feel it even more.

Word had already spread that I was on this train, and groups of curious onlookers came crowding to the carriage at the stations. They asked me to autograph the German edition of Archipelago, which I did, from the steps of the railcar, and then through the window. I was photographed, and always in that striped convict’s shirt. Many of these snapshots were to be subsequently published in Germany.

Though it was only mid-February, it turned out to be a warm day. We reached Basel shortly after noon, our travel papers checked both on the German side and then on the Swiss. The border guards were already waiting for me, greeted me, and also asked for an autograph. Then we rode through the narrow and cozy Swiss valleys between the mountains.

The station in Zurich was teeming with people, and not just on our platform but on all the others, as well as in the concourse and all the way out onto the square. A whole police force would not have been able to contain the crowd. Without exaggeration, there was a serious danger of people being crushed. It was as if we were trapped in a clamp, and two huge Swiss men, edi­tors from the Scherz Verlag, the publisher of Archipelago in German, who had been sent for our protection, courageously battled to open a way for us to inch forward. It really seemed as if we might not make it through the crowd in one piece. Inch by inch, little by little, we finally got to a waiting car into which I was shoved like a cork into a bottle, and I sat there for a long time, the car surrounded by a crowd of Swiss people all so friendly and—somewhat contrary to their nature, it seems—overcome with enthusiasm, while the others in our party were led through to our car. We set out slowly, the crowd waving, and more people lining the streets. From the first bridge we reached, the first houses and tramways, Zurich struck me as enchanting.

We drove over to Heeb’s apartment. He lived somewhere on the outskirts of the city in one of the new high-rises. No sooner had we arrived than the reporters besieged the place. They insisted I come out and make a statement. I could not. Well, then just a pose or two for the camera. But above all, posing was beyond what I could muster, and I did not come out. (The press was becoming increasingly resentful.)

Then I was informed that the Stadtpräsident of Zurich, in other words the mayor of the city, Dr. Sigmund Widmer, had arrived at Heeb’s apartment to greet me. A tall, intelligent-looking man with a pleasant but solemn face came into the living room. I stood up and walked toward him and he, with much effort and some inaccuracy, uttered a phrase of welcome—in Russian! I answered with two or three German phrases (brain cells carrying old memory, lighting up and linking into chains), and Dr. Widmer beamed. We sat down and conversed, Betta interpreting for us. His nervousness abated, and he proved to be an extremely pleasant person. He was most forthcoming and offered every possible assistance for my settling down. Might I want to rent an apartment? Needless to say I could stay at Heeb’s for a day or two, but what then? Decisions had to be made.

But I could not come to any decision. In the meantime I was flooded with requests, invitations, proposals. I had not been there an hour when Senator Helms called from America, the interpreter on the phone inviting me to come right away to the United States, where I was being eagerly awaited. There followed another call from the States; it was Thomas Whitney, who had translated Archipelago into English and whom until now I had known only by name. Another call: a woman’s deep voice speaking Russian with a light accent, Valentina Holub, whose mother had fled from Vladivostok in 1920 with a Czech man who was with the retreating forces. Valentina and her Czech husband had left Prague, fleeing the Soviet occupation, and now were living in Zurich. There are six thousand of us Czech émigrés here, and all of us worship you and will do anything for you. You can count on us! She offered to help with any day-to-day matters, and that in Russian. I was very grateful to her; after all, we were in no uncertain terms guilty in what we had done to the Czechs in August 1968. They would be true allies. We arranged to meet.

And then what a telegram from Munich! All transmitters of Radio Liberty are at your service. Director F. Ronalds. Who would have thought! To speak to the entire USSR, as much as one likes! It was indeed something that should be done. But couldn’t one at least have a minute to catch one’s breath?

Then I had a visitor—perhaps not that evening but the following one, though I will describe it here. From the lobby, where a police post had been set up (to prevent the apartment from being stormed), we were informed that the writer Anatoli Kuznetsov was asking to see me. None other than the Kuznetsov who had written Babi Yar, and surprised us all when he fled to the West in 1969 (under the pretext of researching Lenin’s time in London—perhaps as I was going to do in Zurich now?); surprising us no less that he was now ashamed of his surname Kuznetsov (at the insistence of the Soviet authorities he had proffered charges against the publisher in the West who had brought out his novel without authorization), and so all his future novels (of which in the past five years there have not been any) were to be simply signed Anatoli. He was conducted through to the apartment. But we had so little time to talk, just the briefest chat, almost on the go. He was a short man, agile, very sincere, with a touch of despair in his voice. Despair, needless to say, at things having turned out so badly for him, but also despair and fear that I might make the same mistakes he had. He warned me of what he likened to the bends, coming from a high to a low pressure zone where one ran the risk of bursting. It was vital at first not to make any statements at all, just to take in one’s new surroundings. (How right he was!) And the poor fellow had come all the way from London just for ten minutes to warn me about something I already knew. I was completely aware of how careful one had to be not to throw oneself into the arms of the press, though I did not know how to take cover from their relentless siege.

So I do not go out to meet the reporters. It is already dark outside, perhaps time to go to bed. Heeb’s wife gives me a sleeping pill, but still I cannot sleep. In the darkness I go out onto the balcony, to breathe in some air in the silence of the night. It is the back of the building, the fourth floor. Suddenly a powerful floodlight switches on, trained on me. I am caught! Photographed yet again. They will not let me breathe. I leave the balcony. More pills.

Nikita Struve, my third pillar of support, had also been caught up in the clamor at the Zurich train station. Zurich was proving to be the ideal place. My lawyer, Heeb, lived here, Betta could easily come from Vienna, Nikita from Paris. From Zurich it would be easier to work at straightening out the business that had been tangled up by all the clandestine operations, and also to prepare a rearguard defense of our invisible allies,⁵ whom the KGB would be targeting.

For me Nikita Struve had been a faraway friend from beyond the Iron Curtain, and here he was now in the flesh! Not particularly tall, wearing glasses, unprepossessing in appearance and even more so in his clothes, which were serviceable enough—a trait to my taste. He had a quick, penetrating glance that did not aim to impress, but to notice and weigh things. Nikita Alekseevich and I understood each other with such ease, as if his whole life abroad did not separate us in the least. In spirit he had always lived in Russia, particularly in Russia’s literary, philosophical, and theological production in exile. In 1963, his book Christians in Contemporary Russia had alerted the West about Khrushchev’s persecution of the Church. He was also extremely erudite in Western culture. He had graduated from the Sorbonne, focusing initially on ancient languages, Arabic, and the philosophies of the ancient and Arab worlds before specializing in Russian language and literature. He was a sensitive man. I wondered that this did not get in the way of his work as a publisher who has to be quite severe at times. It was as if he was worried about coming across as too forceful, and so presented everything in the form of assumptions. I still had to get used to this so as not to miss important things in his offhand comments. What he feared even more was giving in to pathos, and at the slightest sign of doing so he would shrink back.

It had fallen to him after the Archipelago disaster⁶ to prepare in utter secret the explosion onto the scene of the first volume, the main weapon in my battle with the KGB. Its publication came even earlier than I had hoped, before the Russian Christmas and even before the 1974 New Year. Despite the holiday period in the West, his publishing house, the Parisian YMCA-Press,⁷ had been submerged by a flood of phone calls, orders, and inquiries.

He and I now had a great deal on our hands. First and foremost, we had to bring out the second volume of Archipelago, though its immediate publication no longer had the burning urgency it had had in Moscow. It was also time to begin the French translation of The Oak and the Calf⁸ (the microfilm with the photographed manuscript had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union some time earlier). And there was so much more. . . . In fact I wanted to rush every possible publication.

I do not remember anything more—those first two or three days were like a wild merry-go-round. We went up into the mountains with Widmer and his wife Elisabeth (an extremely charming person), along with Betta and Struve, to take a look at the house that Widmer was offering me so I could work undisturbed. The only way we finally managed to escape the rush of press vehicles following us was that Widmer, in his capacity as mayor, had arranged a three-minute traffic ban behind us. I very much liked his cottage, which was at Sternenberg on the ridge of one of the foothills. Here I could do some work!

I needed a large magnifying glass, probably in order to look at the microfilm that had been smuggled out. Betta and I went to the store where I chose a good magnifying glass, but the storekeeper categorically refused to take any money from me; we kept protesting, but I finally had to accept the gift, which was to become such a valued object. We visited Heeb’s impressive law office on Zurich’s main street, the Bahnhofstrasse, where his wife and his son Herbert, a pleasant and intelligent young man, were also working. There was also a young woman; and a great number of folders I had to go through, which I could barely take in, not to mention that I badly needed a pair of glasses, which I ordered next door.

Then it was time for the whole party to have lunch, and I surprised everyone (except Betta) by refusing to go to a restaurant. I found the sedate atmosphere of restaurants, the laborious and sluggish cult of dining, savoring—a waste of time and extremely exhausting. In all my fifty-five years of Soviet life I believe I was in a restaurant only two or three times, and then because I had to go. (Besides, I had always lived on the sidelines and was constantly short of money.) For me to appear in an elegant restaurant now that I was the center of attention filled me with shame. Heeb was clearly taken aback, but I asked if we couldn’t just go to some worker’s cafeteria where we could get a quick bite. Heeb and Betta conferred, and with some difficulty came up with a factory cafeteria some ways off from the center. The workers and other personnel sitting closely packed recognized and greeted me. I somehow don’t remember that there were any reporters there. But on the streets they followed us everywhere, brusquely shoving their long microphones in my face, recording every word I said to my party. We could not touch on anything secret or in fact anything else for fear that it would be transmitted live on the spot. I could not stand it. You are worse than the KGB! I exploded. My relations with the press grew worse and worse.

But what was most important for me was to see Lenin’s house on Spiegelgasse. What a coincidence, what luck! Quite by chance I came upon the vein of gold I needed for my November 1916, in order to proceed with the Lenin chapters! I went there on my very first stroll with Betta, which, however, turned out to be a bad idea, something I had not thought through, as the newspapers then wrote that I had come to pay homage to Lenin! But I was looking forward to how much material on Lenin I could gather in Zurich.

It was on this stroll that Frank Crepeau from the Associated Press caught up with me on the street, a noble and kind man who, during the highpoint of my battle with the KGB, had helped me stand my ground. How could I now deny him an interview as a sign of my gratitude? It was a short interview [1],* but despite its brevity I managed to talk about what was burning inside me: the fate of my archive, without which I could not move forward. At the time I did not know what good luck Alya had had with it, and came upon the naïve idea of threatening the Soviets that if they did not release my archive so I could write about history, I would be forced to go on the attack and write about the present. The crowd of reporters who were following us saw Crepeau approach me on the street and saw how delighted I was to see him, and a few hours later he had already interviewed me. One of the correspondents, perhaps out of envy or to justify his failure, announced that Crepeau had brought from Moscow a secret letter from my wife. (This was definitely not the case.) The next day we read this in all the newspapers. For Crepeau, however, this was a disaster: he would now be denied a Soviet visa, as such actions were prohibited to foreign correspondents! He was depressed. So what could I do but make another statement to the press, and went out in front of Heeb’s apartment building and expressed my indignation at such misinformation. The journalist, in fact the press agency or the newspaper itself, ought to apologize.

I was naïve in thinking that the reporter, his agency, or his newspaper might show any remorse. Their fly-by-night trade, as long as it lasts, is to outdo one another in snooping, conjecturing, and snatching at whatever they can. Every encounter I had with the media in my first days in the West filled me with bewilderment; I was taken aback. An ill-defined feeling of resistance to their cheap tricks arose within me: my book about the perishing of millions had just burst onto the scene, and they were nipping at some puny weeds. Of course it was also ungrateful on my part: was not the Western media, whatever its shortcomings, the force that had offered me a pedestal to the world, rescuing me from persecution? Then again, they did not do this on their own: I was the one who waged the battle. The KGB knew full well that if they threw me in chains even more of my writing would be printed, which would backfire on them. It was, however, through its penchant for sensationalism that the Western media saved me, and fueled by the same penchant it was now demanding I make statements, not realizing my stubbornness.

Did they think I was being silent because my family had not yet been allowed to leave the Soviet Union? But I was certain that the authorities would not dare prevent them from leaving. Or because they might not release my archive? I knew for certain that they would not relinquish even a scrap of paper, and that everything would depend on Alya’s resourcefulness and the help of our well-wishing foreign friends. None of those things determined my silence: It was