A Voice in the Wilderness

By John Kohan/Moscow

One by one, they came up to the microphone and addressed the bearded man sitting onstage with his wife and two sons.

! "How do you see the future of our culture?" asked a teacher from the local Railroad Institute. "Is there a danger of extreme nationalism?"

"Thank you for deciding to return to us at the most difficult moment in our history," said a journalist. "If you meet Boris Yeltsin, let him know he should do more to build up Russia."

"They don't know what is going on in Russia," complained a lawyer. "The bureaucracy is tainted by the mafia. If something is not done, Russia will perish."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel-prizewinning novelist and freshly returned exile to Russia, sat in the Musical Comedy Theater of the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk and carefully jotted down their comments in a black notebook. He had chosen to return to Moscow via a long cross-country train trip lasting several weeks, stopping in towns along the way to greet the locals and listen to their complaints. When he arrived later at Blagoveshchensk, he was surprised to see 200 well-wishers. "I didn't expect there would be so many people," Solzhenitsyn said. "I say this everywhere, and I want to repeat it to you: The future is in our hands."

But what kind of future? In a country where the idols and ideals of the past have been shattered, Solzhenitsyn, at 75, remains a moral authority for millions of Russians: one man who stood up against the totalitarian state and survived. During nearly two decades in a sylvan Vermont retreat, he has been preparing for the end of communism and nurturing his own vision of a new Russia.

So it was perhaps only appropriate that Solzhenitsyn spent his first days traveling through the very land where millions of victims of Stalin's purges perished in the Soviet Union's system of forced-labor camps. In Khabarovsk he visited a large, privately maintained cemetery. At the entrance to the graveyard, he paid his respects at a small chapel built to commemorate those who had perished in the totalitarianism whirlwind of the '30s. Two young priests were reading the Orthodox "Eternal Memory" service from a prayer book. It was one of many symbolic moments on an odyssey that has become a kind of traveling metaphor: himself a survivor of eight years in the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn is recognized as the person most responsible for bringing the crimes of that era to light. Obviously moved, he crossed his chest repeatedly, solemnly noting the plaque on the chapel's side that dedicates the site to the "memory of the innocent victims of lawlessness and tyranny."

! Solzhenitsyn's message to Russians can be summed up in one word: Repent! He believes deeply that Russia cannot move into the future until it has exorcised its communist past. "In this country, there are murderers and victims, the persecutors and the persecuted," he says. "The murderers and the persecutors must personally repent for what they have done." But when a handful of Russians told him they regretted not speaking up for him and asked for his forgiveness, Solzhenitsyn said he "responded with a laugh that this was the smallest possible reason for them to come up with for repentance." Russians, he said "should be repenting far more major things." He seemed to call for some grand legal absolution like the 1946 war-crimes trials at Nuremberg: "We saw this in Germany when the Nazis were tried. Their crimes were condemned not only by process of law but in the public arena. All 250 million people ((from the former Soviet Union)) in Russia can't do this, but the process must begin."

Although Solzhenitsyn has continually asserted, "I am not going into politics, will not run for any office, will not accept any position," the temptation will be great to take sides in the cold civil war between Western- oriented reformers and nationalist-hard-line communists. The reformers have misgivings about Solzhenitsyn's nationalist views, but they have cautiously welcomed his return. Hard-liners see Solzhenitsyn as a rival for the hearts and minds of Russian "patriots," and question his motives; he has already called ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky "an evil caricature of a Russian patriot." The weekly Zavtra, which speaks for hard-line nationalists, bitingly denounced his return: "Ayatollah Khomeini has landed in Vladivostok."

Solzhenitsyn must pull off a careful balancing act if he intends to influence the course of politics. Should he decide to intervene in the partisan mudslinging, he risks compromising his high moral standing. But if his solution to Russia's woes amounts to nothing more than pious platitudes, he is in danger of becoming irrelevant, reduced to the status of an eccentric who has exchanged geographical exile in the West for spiritual exile in Russia.

So far, Solzhenitsyn has been a voice quite literally crying in the wilderness. His call for Russians to set their sights on higher things has been welcomed by enthusiastic crowds in the hinterlands, but he faces a much tougher audience in Moscow. Few urban sophisticates have time anymore for the kitchen conversations about the Russian soul that were a staple of intellectual life when Solzhenitsyn first lived in the country. A savage commentary in the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta proposed what to do with this troubling revivalist preacher: "Give him mothballs! And more mothballs! And put him to rest!"

But whatever critics may think, he is certainly not afraid to get his hands dirty or his feet wet in his quest to discover modern Russia. One day he braved floodwaters to visit the small farming community of Bichyovka, plagued by heavy rains. An old babushka, who obviously did not know the identity of the visitor, shrilly confronted Solzhenitsyn with a timeless, rural Russian lament: "The roads are full of water. Why can't you do something about it?" Said Solzhenitsyn: "I'm not an official. I can't do anything." It was a humble admission from a literary giant, proving the biblical dictum that prophets have no honor in their own countries.

With reporting by David Aikman/Khabarovsk