فصل 24

CHAPTER 24

BLACK SEPTEMBER

What is written with a pen cannot be hacked away even by an ax.

—RUSSIAN PROVERB

In the morning twilight, the village priest opened his front gate and headed for the train platform a half mile away. It was Sunday, and Father Aleksandr Men always caught the 6:50 train from the village of Semkhoz near Zagorsk to his parish church in Novaya Derevnya, a small town thirty miles outside Moscow. He had a full day ahead of him: confessions to hear, baptisms, a lecture in the evening.

Father Aleksandr, a robust man of fifty-five with a thick beard of black and gray, was an emerging spiritual leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. Some of his followers compared him to Sakharov, “a spiritual Sakharov.” Unlike countless other priests and church leaders, Men had kept his independence through the Brezhnev years. He refused to cooperate with the KGB. He taught underground Bible classes and published his theological works abroad under a pseudonym. He endured the harassment, sat through long searches of his home and interrogations, came home to open his mail and read death threats, threats against his wife and two children. All because he was an honest priest and served his flock honestly. But he had survived. Now, he told his brother, Pavel, he felt like “an arrow finally sprung from the bow.” In the old days, Father Aleksandr’s meetings with intellectuals like Solzhenitsyn, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Aleksandr Galich were more or less a secret. Now he had become, in spite of himself, a central figure in the rebirth of a degraded church. In the past couple of years, he’d been able to preach and lecture in churches and auditoriums, even on radio and television, all without fear. Just the night before, Men had given a lecture in Moscow and spoken of the spiritual quest as an endless ascent: “We climb breathlessly. Truth is not given easily. We look back down and know there is a great climb ahead. I remember the words of Tenzing, who climbed Mount Everest with the British. He said that you can only approach a mountain with respect. The same is true with God. Truth is closed to those who approach it without respect.” Father Aleksandr never seemed to tire, and he was intent now on getting an early start on Sunday. He kept walking along the asphalt path through the Semkhoz woods toward the train. The narrow macadam path had proved dangerous at times. There had been rapes, a few beatings. Drunks in town sometimes took their bottles into the woods and harassed the passersby. Not long ago, the local authorities had cleared away some of the trees to make the path to the train platform less forbidding. Still, a couple of weeks before, Men asked his young assistant, Andrei Yeryemin, to help find him a place to stay in the city on nights when he was teaching or lecturing late. He said it was getting dangerous to walk too late at night. “I was amazed to hear him say it after all the things he’d been through in 1981 and 1982 when he could have been hauled off at any time,” Yeryemin said. But it wasn’t just that. Lately, the priest had betrayed a tone of fatalism in his voice. He told one friend that he hadn’t much time to live. He gave no explanation.

Suddenly, from behind a tree, someone leaped out and swung an ax at Aleksandr Men. An ax: the traditional Russian symbol of revolt, Raskolnikov’s weapon in Crime and Punishment, one of the symbols of the neofascist group Pamyat. The ax hit Men on the back of the skull. The killer, police said later, grabbed the priest’s briefcase and disappeared into the woods. Father Aleksandr, bleeding terribly, stumbled toward home, walking a full three hundred yards to his front gate at 3A Parkovaya Street. Along the way, two women asked if he needed help. He said no and continued on. From her window, Natasha Men saw a figure slumped near the gate, pressing the buzzer. She could not quite make out who it was in the half-light. Then she did. “Gospodi!” Good Lord! She called an ambulance. Within minutes, her husband was dead.

The murder of Aleksandr Men on September 9, 1990, was an ominous, almost supernatural portent of a time of troubles, and it had come just when political expectations seemed once more on the rise.

All summer it appeared as if Gorbachev was preparing to accelerate the pace of reform, if only to keep up with the events around him. As one republic after another, including Russia, took its cue from the Baltic states and declared itself sovereign, Gorbachev made the dramatic step of joining with Yeltsin to draw up a radical economic program that would encourage the creation of a market and, even more important, redistribute power from “the center” to the republics. In a government dacha outside the city, a witty old economist named Stanislav Shatalin and a plump wizard of market principles named Grigori Yavlinsky plotted, in civil tones and bureaucratic language, the dismantling of the System. On the face of it, the “500 Days” plan was an ambitious and amazingly facile prescription to begin the cure of a ruined economy. Few had any illusions about the 500 Days part. It would certainly be more than a year and a half before the empty lots of Moscow were transformed into shopping malls of plenty. When I asked Shatalin how long it would be until the Soviet Union had what passed for a modern economy, he said, “My optimistic scenario?” Yes. Be optimistic, I said. “Generations,” he said. No, it would be a good while before there was a Silicon Valley in the Urals and the people of eastern Siberia were cruising the supermarket aisles choosing among Tide, Ajax, and Solo. It was the set of principles behind the 500 Days that made it so revolutionary, so immediate. Realization of the plan would mean the shutdown or conversion of hundreds of defense plants, the rise of private property, radical cuts in the budgets of the army, the police, and the KGB. What could that mean for the lords of the System? It was very simple. It meant the end.

When Gorbachev returned from his annual summer holiday on the Black Sea he told the legislature he was “inclined” to support the plan. That was all the hard-liners had to hear. The fight for their political life, a war that would rage for the next eleven months, had begun. The KGB chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, piled dozens of reports on Gorbachev’s desk insisting that the 500 Days plan was nothing more than an attempt, supported by the West, to crush socialism, destroy the Party, and weaken the country. At various meetings, leaders of the Party and the military-industrial complex threatened to revolt against Gorbachev if he gave his final support to the plan. A creeping coup was under way, but Gorbachev was so vain, so sure of his ability to master both the machinations of the System and the passions of the people, that he thought he could control it all, finesse it as easily as he had the Nina Andreyeva affair in 1988.

One Politburo document, dated March 12, 1990, revealed the dark sense of foreboding in the Communist Party leadership and the attempt to exaggerate the situation in order to encourage emergency tactics. “The popular consciousness is being radicalized,” the memo said. “Distrust in official structures and administrative structures grows. The criticism of the ‘partocracy’ and the local and central apparatus is more acute.… The opposition forces are attempting to exploit the situation. In fact, plans are being made to seize power by clearly antidemocratic means—through pressure, rallies, and the ‘roundtable’ tactic, which is completely antidemocratic.” The “healthy forces in society,” the memo added, want “decisive measures based on the law.… Use all means of propoganda to stop the discrediting of the army, the KGB, and the police.… Disarm the [opposition] ideologically and undermine them in the eyes of society.” For thousands of believers and nonbelievers in the city of Moscow, the first portent of the grim year ahead came with the swing of an ax in the village of Semkhoz. When I first heard about the murder of Aleksandr Men, I did not understand the importance of the event or of the man himself. He was a village priest whose church was an hour’s drive from Moscow. And yet within days of the murder, I heard over and over how much he had meant.

In theory, at least, perestroika liberated the realm of the spirit as much as it did political and economic life. After seven decades of dogmatic atheism, the regime ended the persecution of religious believers and the institutions of worship. Suddenly, the word bogoiskatelstvo—“the search for God”—was the vogue. There were plenty of frauds around like Anatoly Kashpirovsky, but there were good signs as well. The churches were no longer the domain only of ancient women with childhood memories of a czarist world. Religious classes were no longer dissident activities. Gorbachev returned to the Russian Orthodox Church its ruined monasteries and cathedrals. Synagogues and mosques reopened. But just as the attempt at political reform slammed into one wall of resistance after another, the revival of spiritual life could not, in an instant, transcend a history of political repression. The nomenklatura of the Russian Orthodox Church, put in place by the ideologists and intelligence operatives of the Party, was at least as strong as the nomenklatura of the Party.

The history of the spirit’s subservience to state authority goes back centuries before the first Bolshevik. As opposed to the Catholic Church, which developed its independent structures after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Church was always dependent on the state. The Byzantine emperors presided over all the synods of the church and were considered “God on earth.” In a sign of things to come, the great dukes of the early Moscow period urged the clergy to reveal the mystery of confession, especially if state security was at issue. Ivan the Terrible tortured priests and jailed one metropolitan for life. The word “czar” is a Slavic form of the word “Caesar,” but Iosif Volotsky, a great religious philosopher, wrote that the czar was simply the highest of all priests. When Napoleon met Aleksandr I in East Prussia, Napoleon said, “I see that you are an emperor and a pope at the same time. How useful.” The Bolsheviks despised the Russian Orthodox Church as an embodiment of old Russia. Lenin planned a soulless utopia. But when the Revolution needed to mobilize millions of illiterate people, it couldn’t preach Marx to them. As the spiritual inheritor of Russian statehood, the Party needed to co-opt, not destroy, the church, bring it to its knees but not cut off its head. Stalin knew well how deeply the appeal of the church echoed in the Russian soul. To gain the allegiance of the population during the war, he appealed not so much to Communist ideology as to a mystical sense of Russianness, to Holy Russia and its warriors Nevsky, Suvorov, and Kutuzov. In his radio addresses to rally the country, Stalin would put aside the language of atheism. He returned some priests from prison camps and gave them decent positions and salaries. He was their emperor and pope. How useful. And when the war on Germany ended, the war on religion resumed. The dynamiting of churches, the imprisonment of priests, rabbis, and muftis, the prosecution of believers as “enemies of the state”—it all resumed.

Aleksandr Men was born a Jew. His father was a nonbeliever, and his mother converted to Russian Orthodoxy. In a country where Jewish religion and culture had been assaulted even more severely than the church, many families of the intelligentsia gravitated to Russian Orthodoxy, if only because they were able to feel their Russian identity more closely than their Jewishness. Men’s mother, Yelena, saw the church as a place apart, a refuge. “In our family there was a personal religious search,” said Men’s brother, Pavel, a computer programmer. “Like so many people disgusted here by the life around them, our family tried to look within themselves for a religious way out.” Yelena Men took her sons to pray under the guidance of an honest priest named Serafim who evaded the authorities by moving from apartment to apartment. The “catacomb church,” they called it. Most of the parishioners were believers who had been in the prison camps, people who had lost relatives and friends for their faith.

“And so Aleksandr saw around him a kind of elevated moral life, God’s people,” Pavel Men said. “He made a decision when he was just twelve to study for the priesthood. He went to the local priest and asked what he would have to do to get into the seminary one. day. The priest said Aleksandr was not ‘one of ours.’ Meaning he was Jewish. But Aleksandr set out to overcome that kind of thinking.” As a boy and young man, Men found religious books in ramshackle country stores, “there among the nails and the guinea pigs.” He began reading the great religious philosophers of the early part of the century, such writers as Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov, and Nikolai Berdyaev, who wrote in spiritual opposition to the Bolsheviks. Such reading, Men once said, “inoculated me against the cult of Stalin. I trembled as I read them.” As a young man, Men went off to study biology at an institute in Irkutsk, a Siberian city on the shore of Lake Baikal. His closest friend there was another Orthodox believer, a temperamental redheaded student named Gleb Yakunin. Men and Yakunin lived together in a tiny wooden house. Men brought with him huge trunkloads of books and kept Yakunin up nights at their rickety kitchen table talking about issues forbidden or, at least, discouraged by Soviet law. They talked about the sham that Soviet biology had become, about questions of Christian ethics and the way they contradicted the rules they lived under. “The Russian character, as you may have noticed, can be very lazy and unambitious,” Yakunin told me, “but Aleksandr knew just what he wanted to do. He was interested in all subjects, and he had a purpose. Unlike me, he always knew he was meant to serve God, no matter the consequences.” One day the two city boys wandered into a village church looking, as Yakunin said, “like a couple of white elephants.” Someone told the local KGB about these strange creatures. For making their religious faith so public, the two men risked their academic careers. The institute director barred Yakunin from finishing his studies and wanted to throw Men out, too. But the students, feeling the first flush of the post-Stalin “thaw,” went out on strike in support of Men, refusing to go to lectures or classes. Men completed his degree.

Yakunin and Men returned to Moscow to follow their varying paths. Yakunin became Father Gleb, a priest and an unabashed political dissident who wrote letters to the Kremlin and the church hierarchy calling for religious reforms. For that he got nine years in prison camps and internal exile. Under Gorbachev, Yakunin returned home from exile and in 1990 was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic.

Men became a spiritual dissident, a less dangerous path than Yakunin’s, but still perilous. “Each man has his own talent, his own way, and I moved toward the politics of religion,” Yakunin said. “Aleksandr had another kind of gift. In a church that suffered from inaccessibility, he had the ability to explain, to make the teachings of the church available to people.” Men’s form of dissidence meant being an honest, uncompromising priest; it meant providing the means for internal, spiritual rebellion in individuals. While his friend Yakunin organized political groups to defend the rights of believers, Men tried to instill a kind of spiritual dissidence in his parishioners, an independence of soul. He was a man of faith, but his own man, and God’s. Especially for urban intellectuals, Men became a link to turn-of-the-century religious thinkers and philosophers such as Bulgakov and Solovyov who stood apart from this tragic tradition of subservience and obscurantism. Even in the darkest moments under Brezhnev, Moscow intellectuals made Sunday pilgrimages to the village of Pushkino to hear Aleksandr Men. The crowds only increased with the gradual erosion of fear under Gorbachev.

“In general, I think politics is a transitory thing and I wanted to work in a less transitory way,” Men told the newspaper Moskovski Komsomolets just before he was killed. “I consider myself a useful person in society, which like any society needs spiritual and moral foundations.” Men once said, “Dissent is the individual’s way of protecting his right to perceive reality in his own way, not to yield to the views of the mass. When an individual calls such views into question, he shows his natural independence, his freedom. It is only when such a personal appraisal is lacking that the law of the mob prevails and an individual turns into a particle of a mass which can easily be manipulated.” After such a long period when he was called in for interrogations by the KGB, Men suddenly found himself a very public theologian in the Gorbachev era. He gave lectures in meeting halls and spoke on the radio. He taught courses on religion at the Historical Archives Institute, Yuri Afanasyev’s outpost for nonconformist academics in Moscow. Young people who attended his lectures taped them and then circulated the tapes throughout the country. Just days before the murder, officials at the Russian Republic’s new television station were discussing ways to give Men airtime at least once a week to speak on religious topics.

“This was a man who could speak to all of us, from Sakharov to the simplest person,” said the writer Yelena Chukovskaya. The literary critic Natalya Ivanova said, “In a country where the regime managed to eliminate, in a sort of grotesque genetic engineering, its best minds, its most honest souls, Men survived to teach, to be an example.” All that was cut off in the woods of Semkhoz. Andrei Bessmertni, a young filmmaker and “spiritual child” of Father Aleksandr, said Men “could have reached millions of young people.” Men, he said, saw how at a time when faith in the “bright future of Communism” had faded away, young people had begun a spiritual quest. To overcome their profound cynicism, their sense that history had provided them nothing to rely on or believe in, younger people had turned inward, more in search of themselves than the next political sensation. “These times are not just about getting blue jeans and a McDonald’s hamburger,” Bessmertni said. “Some people actually want meaning in their lives, spiritual food.” On the day of the funeral, thousands of people, including religious leaders from the West, crowded the grounds of the village church in Novaya Derevnya. In Men’s hand was placed a small Bible and a golden cross. People wept, and some sank to their knees in prayer. Several of the Orthodox priests who did their best to ignore or suppress Aleksandr Men in his lifetime made sure to speak his praises in eulogy. “My stomach turned as I listened to it all,” Yeryemin said.

The eulogy that seemed to speak most eloquently for Men’s followers and admirers was published a week later in Ogonyok. The article, written by a young journalist named Aleksandr Minkin, revealed that Men, as an honest, charismatic, and, not least, Jewish-born priest, had scores of enemies: the anti-Semites of Pamyat, the conservative zealots in the Russian Orthodox Church establishment, the police, the KGB. Minkin was convinced that the murder was not simply a random disaster, a mugging that went too far, the grotesque folly of an angry drunk. He was sure that this was an assassination intended to scare anyone else who would dare to challenge the System. A thief, Minkin wrote, “goes after a woman wearing jewels on the street or a well-dressed man with a fat wallet. But rich people don’t go to work at 6:00 A.M. on a Sunday morning. The rich don’t live in Semkhoz.… Humanization and democratization are one side of our system. The other is murder. We have been freeing ourselves from fear, but the ax is an instrument to remind us of our fear. They are reminding us that we are defenseless.” Minkin compared Men’s murder with the Polish secret police’s assassination of the pro-Solidarity priest Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984—“an event that once and for all set the people against the forces of power in Poland.” But in the Soviet Union, Minkin wrote, “people are standing in lines talking about other things. They have fallen lower into the muck than our brothers in the ‘socialist camp’ in Eastern Europe. So much the worse for us. We have not revolted, we have not become indignant.… This is a turning point in our history and we do not realize it yet. When we do become aware, what will we do?” On the fortieth day after the murder, the day in the Orthodox faith on which the soul of the deceased either ascends to heaven or descends to hell, I drove out to the church in Novaya Derevnya. Even now, weeks after the funeral, people walked down the muddy road to the church to stop awhile at the grave, to lay down fresh flowers. The rotting flowers smelled like old wine, fruity and sour. I met a woman, eighty-six years old, named Maria Tepnina near the grave. She had known Aleksandr Men since he was a child; she knew the whole family. She stared a while at the grave and her face darkened with grief and confusion. After we stood there a while in silence, a light rain slowly soaking us, Tepnina invited me to her house. She lived just up the road from Father Aleksandr’s church. Half the floor was covered with just-harvested potatoes, the walls were covered with family pictures and small icons.

For many years, Tepnina said, she helped Men with his secretarial work. “He’d get threatening letters all the time. He just threw them all away, never paid any attention. They accused him of everything from insulting the church, to being a ‘rotten kike,’ to serving the powers that be. Awful things, and they meant nothing to him.” From 1946 to 1954, Tepnina was in a prison camp near the Siberian city of Kemerovo and then in exile in Krasnoyarsk. In the camps, she met priests and believers, “real holy men.” She saw people baptized secretly in their cells, priests shot muttering their thanks to God. But, she said, she had never met anyone with Men’s gift for sympathy. And so she made sure, in her old age, to live near his church. Now, she was trying to make sense of the murder. “I think he was a genuine apostle, and all apostles end their lives as martyrs,” she said. “So maybe there is a certain justice in this. All his life, Father Aleksandr prepared himself for this, daring to speak from his soul.” Another of Men’s parishioners, Tatyana Sagaleyeva, came in and sat down with us. She had just moved from the nearby village of Abramtsevo to Tepnina’s house. She also came to be closer to Men’s church and to care for her aging friend. And now she was crying, and angry. “The murder of Father Aleksandr is a mystical event, not just a simple killing, an accident,” she said. “God has taken this man from us, a spiritual leader who was at the prime of his life. His appearance was a miracle, a man who could, despite it all, despite an aggressive atheistic state, penetrate the sufferings of a great writer like Solzhenitsyn or of a simple woman like me. And suddenly he disappears. How to understand it? Why did God take him from us? Why now?” The day after the murder of Aleksandr Men, a convoy of paratroopers from the Ryazan Airborne Division headed north for Moscow, 125 miles away. It was 3:00 A.M. Hours later, three dozen military transport planes carrying two regiments in full battle gear landed at airstrips in Ryazan. The KGB’s elite Dzerzhinsky Division was also put on full battle alert.

For days after the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda broke the story, there were rumors that the military had staged a rehearsal for a coup d’état. Yeltsin appeared before the Russian parliament and said, “They are trying to prove to us that these are peaceful maneuvers connected with the November 7 Revolution Day parade. But there are strong doubts about this.” A spokesman for the military, of course, declared the maneuvers were not maneuvers at all. The soldiers were merely helping out in the fields collecting the potato harvest. Which led Komsomolskaya Pravda to ask why soldiers gathering potatoes required the use of AK-47 machine guns and bulletproof vests.

By now, I had spent many nights in Moscow listening to the dark forecasts of one Russian friend or another. Every unpromising development, every hint of difficulty, was somehow part of a larger pattern, a murderous conspiracy. For a long while, I felt like Earl Warren at an unending convention of Kennedy-assassination theorists. What it took me a long time to realize was that in Moscow, being paranoid doesn’t mean doom is not on the way. To live in a totalitarian world and not be paranoid—or at least pessimistic—was itself lunacy. When had events ever been benign in this twisted Oz?

As we would soon find out in the coming months, first in Vilnius and Riga, then in Moscow, there was indeed a conspiracy under way, and it was the most open, unguarded conspiracy imaginable. The hard-liners’ struggle for power started with pressure, fleeting signs, random moments of psychological terror. Perhaps we would never know who had killed Aleksandr Men … but we could guess. We would never know what the troops were doing in Ryazan … but we could guess.

What was so strange about the times we were living in was that the press was free to guess, too. Political talk was no longer a dark parlor game among trusted friends. The week after the Ryazan “rehearsal,” a well-known writer, Andrei Nuikin, published a piece in Moscow News called “Military Overthrow.” Nuikin quoted a leader of the radical servicemen’s group “Shield,” who told him that “the leadership of the armed forces already had a clear plan to take control of the situation in the country.” Nuikin said the plan was to start the coup, perhaps in the far east, with the seizure of television stations and newspapers and with the “neutralization” of foreign journalists and their ability to get information out of the country. The Shield supporter said the military would justify the coup not by campaigning directly against Gorbachev’s reforms, but by claiming that ethnic tensions had gotten out of control, the economy was collapsing, and socialism was endangered and that the situation required emergency measures. Nuikin wrote that he had no evidence that the military actually had plans for such a coup but he added that the liberals had “grounds to consider means of responding.” The third omen of September arrived on the 18th with the morning mail. Komsomolskaya Pravda contained a special insert: a sixteen-thousand-word essay called “How Can We Revitalize Russia.” The author was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the essay marked the first time in three decades that he had been able to publish a new work in a Soviet journal.

The article seemed like notes from the dead, as if Herzen or Dostoevsky had suddenly published from the Great Beyond a manifesto on the current state of things. Solzhenitsyn was being published everywhere now, but they were works from the sixties and seventies, historical works about twentieth-century tragedy written in an eighteenth-century language. Some readers were interested; some were bored with later works, especially the “Red Wheel” cycle of historical novels. But in either case, Solzhenitsyn himself was a gigantic absence, a legend living a ghostly life in a place that might as well have been a mountain palace in Brunei. And that mattered. In Russia, the presence of the writer was almost as important as the presence of the work. One writer after another—Vasily Aksyonov, Sasha Sokolov, Yuz Aleshkovsky, Vladimir Voinovich—came back, at least for long visits, to make contact with the audience and the language they had lost. Even in emigration they had always written for “home.” But Solzhenitsyn was secluded and mum. He was a legend. Russian intellectuals, especially, were alternately fascinated and repelled by the odd life the writer led in the woods of Cavendish, Vermont. Each new detail intrigued them. Solzhenitsyn lived in a good, but not indecently opulent, house, and he put up a chain-link fence to keep away unwanted visitors and snowmobiles. But in Moscow, I often heard people talk of Solzhenitsyn’s “castle” and the “great wall” that surrounded it. When he first moved to Vermont, he spoke for twenty minutes at a town meeting and apologized to the people of Cavendish for the fence. He told them that when he lived without it, scores of uninvited visitors “arrived without invitations and without warning.… And so for hundreds of hours I talked to hundreds of people, and my work was ruined.” That Solzhenitsyn would insist on such a monkish life seemed incredible, especially in America, where publicity was the coin of the realm. Solemn, imperious, even righteous beyond measure, Solzhenitsyn had the nerve to make much of the contemporary literary scene look vaguely frivolous. He wrote gigantically (if not always well), as if from another age. He lacked the modernist leveler of irony. Instead, his rare public pronouncements were chillingly sarcastic. In political argument, disdain was his most common thread. He thundered against the “cowardice” of the West and the “liquid manure” of pop culture in the fierce voice of another era. Jeremiah was heroic, no doubt, but hard to love. He made no apologies. “The writer’s ultimate task is to restore the memory of his murdered people. Is that not enough for a single writer?” Solzhenitsyn told his biographer, Michael Scammell. “They murdered my people and destroyed its memory. And I’m dragging it into the light of day all on my own. Of course, there are hundreds like me back there who could drag it out, too. Well, it didn’t fall to them; it fell to me. And I’m doing the work of a hundred men, and that’s all there is to it.” To me, Solzhenitsyn had a perfectly accurate sense of his mission and place in the world. No matter how dull some of the later work on the Revolution might be, The Gulag Archipelago would never fade from the history of Russian literature or the history of Russia. No single work, including Orwell’s novels, did as much to shatter the illusions of the West; no book did more to educate the Soviet people and undermine the regime. So who cared if he had a fence? Who cared if some of his books were beside the point? But the price Solzhenitsyn paid for his sense of mission and its immodest expression was mockery. Both in America and in the Soviet Union, there were jokes about Solzhenitsyn’s “gulag complex,” speculations that he craved the isolation of prisons and prisons-of-his-own-making. He was a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a paranoiac. Voinovich wrote a satirical novel, Moscow 2042, that featured a Solzhenitsyn-like character who seemed a cross between a fundamentalist imam and a West Virginia hermit. Solzhenitsyn felt wounded. “They lie about me as they would about a dead man,” he once said.

Aleksandr Isayevich, for his part, kept to his schedule. He worked twelve to fourteen hours a day at his desk filling notebooks with the tiny handwriting he learned while trying to conceal his drafts in prison. He also worked on assembling archives on the Revolution and the development of a fund to help the survivors of the gulag. In August 1990, he got back his citizenship. The Russian prime minister, Ivan Silayev, practically begged Solzhenitsyn to return home “in the interests of the state and its future destiny.… Your return to Russia is, in my view, one of those moves that our homeland needs as much as air.” It seemed strange that Solzhenitsyn still had nothing to say about what was going on in the Soviet Union. When he caved in and granted an interview to Time magazine, he set down firm conditions: no questions about Gorbachev or politics, only literature.

“How to Revitalize Russia” came as a shock. After such long silence, Solzhenitsyn worked all summer on his essay and then published it in a paper with a circulation of between twenty-five and thirty million readers. (The next day it also ran in the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, which went out to another four million.) The text began in prophetic voice:

The clock of communism has tolled its final hour.

But the concrete structure has not completely collapsed.

Instead of being liberated, we may be crushed beneath the rubble.

That opening, and the essay as a whole, had much the same rhythm as his “Letter to the Soviet Leaders,” which he sent to the Kremlin the year before his exile. “Your dearest wish,” he had written to Brezhnev, “is for our state structure and our ideological system never to change, to remain as they are for centuries. But history is not like that. Every system either finds a way to develop or else collapses.” He was now addressing a country that was doing both at once, though the collapse was ruthless and the development erratic. After a ringing restatement of the “blind and malignant” Bolshevik disaster—the murder of tens of millions of people, the destruction of the peasantry, the poisoning of the environment, the moral and spiritual degradation of the country—he provided what he called a “tentative proposal” but what sounded more like the vatic prescription of a convinced prophet: “This is how I see it: We should immediately proclaim loudly and clearly: The three Baltic republics [Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania], the three Transcaucasian republics [Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan], the four Central Asian republics [Kirgizia, Uzbekistan, Turkmenia, and Tajikistan], and also Moldavia, if it is drawn more to Romania, these eleven—indeed!—definitely must be separated for good.… “We do not have the energy to deal with the periphery, either economically or spiritually. We do not have the energy to run an Empire! And we do not need it, let us shrug it off: It is crushing us, it is draining us, and it is accelerating our demise.…” The essay did not mention Gorbachev by name and gave him credit for nothing. Instead, the criticism, resounding and heavy with sarcasm, began in the third word of the title: obustroit’ was a play on the word “perestroika.” Gorbachev and the Communist Party used “perestroika” to mean the “rebuilding” or cleansing of socialism after Stalin’s “deformation” of Leninism. Solzhenitsyn’s verb, obustroit’, could be translated as to reconstitute, fix, fix up, make comfortable, organize, or, more loosely, revitalize. The ironic echo of “perestroika” and the use of “Russia” instead of “Soviet Union” made it clear from the start that Solzhenitsyn’s program had little to do with Gorbachev’s idea of a “humane democratic socialism” or the maintenance of the “multiethnic state.” Indeed, Solzhenitsyn showed little else but disdain for Gorbachev’s efforts. The events of five years were reduced almost to nothing: “What have five or six years of the much-celebrated ‘perestroika’ brought us? Pathetic reshuffling in the Central Committee. Slapping together of an ugly, artificial electoral system, with a view solely to the Communist Party’s clinging to power. Slipshod, confused, and indecisive laws.…” Immediately after publication, there were varied complaints about the essay. The language, so full of archaic words, felt artificial, dusty. The Kazakhs were furious that Solzhenitsyn felt the northern part of the republic was, essentially, Russian. Ukrainians, especially, made it clear that independence, not a Slavic union, was their goal. Then there was the cranky side of Solzhenitsyn, the prig worrying that Russia would mindlessly pursue the road to Gomorrah because it couldn’t find the off switch on the TV set: “Our young people, whom families and schools have overlooked, are growing in the direction of mindless, barbaric emulation of anything enticing coming from alien parts, if not in the direction of crime. The historic Iron Curtain protected the country superbly from everything good that exists in the West.… However, this Curtain did not reach all the way down, and this is where the liquid manure of debased, degraded ‘mass pop-culture,’ most vulgar fashions and excessive public displays seeped through. It was this waste that our impoverished, unfairly deprived young people swallowed greedily.” This old-mannish side of Solzhenitsyn seemed to me as marginal as Tolstoy’s retrograde views on women and sex in The Kreutzer Sonata. But more important was that the right-wing fanatics, the monarchists and black-shirted nationalists, the anti-Semites of Pamyat, were deeply disappointed by the essay. They were looking for an endorsement of authoritarian rule, and what they got was a peculiar, but distinct, support of democracy and private property. What they got was a call for the breakup of the empire they worshiped.

There were serious mistakes and misjudgments in the essay. Solzhenitsyn did not recognize just how deeply Ukrainians, for example, had come to believe in their own distinctiveness, how much they wanted a capital in Kiev, not Moscow. And, as always, Solzhenitsyn created problems for himself with the pitch of his voice, its hyped-up grandeur. Somehow, the strength of his own hopes for a Slavic state drowned out the admission that he also makes: that, yes, of course, it must be the Ukrainians themselves who decide if they want to join Russia.

Solzhenitsyn’s most curious critic turned out to be Gorbachev himself. A few days after the publication of “How to Revitalize Russia,” a member of the Supreme Soviet asked the president to comment. (The idea of it! The general secretary responds in parliament to Solzhenitsyn!) To a hushed chamber, Gorbachev said he felt “contradictory” emotions after reading the essay twice through. Solzhenitsyn’s views “on the future of the state,” he said, “are far from reality and are being constructed out of the context of our country’s development and bear a destructive character. But nonetheless there are interesting thoughts in the article of this undoubtedly great person.” A splendid backhanded compliment. But then Gorbachev felt the need to distort Solzhenitsyn, to exploit the recurring stereotype of his views. Solzhenitsyn, Gorbachev said, “is all in the past, the Russia of old, the czarist monarchy. This is not acceptable to me.” It was self-serving, a moment of demagoguery designed to present himself as the singular modern democrat.

On October 15, Gorbachev received the Nobel Prize for Peace.

On October 16, after the leaders of the KGB, the police, the army, and the defense industry made it quite clear that they would not tolerate a radical reordering of political and economic power, Gorbachev withdrew his support for the 500 Days plan. Gorbachev had caved in to the people who had everything to lose from the reform of the country. When he did that it was clear to everyone in the Soviet Union that Gorbachev had begun listing to the right. Soon he would reject all the reformers in his team, he would begin to speak, with a sneer, of the “so-called democrats.” He would ignore one grab for power after another, ever confident that he was serving the cause of reform. The counterrevolution, which began with the swing of an assassin’s ax, was now ascendant.

“When Mikhail Sergeyevich rejected the 500 Days program he was rejecting the last chance for a civilized transition to a new order,” Aleksandr Yakovlev told me. “It was probably his worst, most dangerous mistake, because what followed was nothing less than a war.”