Solzhenitsyn And Orthodoxy

I discovered a wide-ranging, multipart esasay by Peter Brooke, Solzhenitsyn in the USA, which can be found on the web but was first published in Church and State No.122, Oct-Dec 2015. His treatment of the subject is multidimensional and something I hadn't previously encountered, but it answers a lot of questions that had been in the back of my mind.

I've read a lot of Solzhenitsyn, including all of The Gulag Archipelago, much of it at least twice. It came out in English in the mid-1970s, subtitled "an experiment in literary investigation", not long after I discovered Milton's prose, to which I think it bears a close if unintentional relation. Solzhenitsyn and Milton were deeply religious men, if highly idiosyncratic in their views, who bent literary genre to their highly idiosyncratic purposes. As a writer, I fell under the influence of both.

Now in the context of the Russo-Ukraine War, there seems to be an emerging if so far inchoate movement to reevaluate Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn as Russian Orthodox writers whose views on Orthodoxy can't encompass or explain a Russian invasion of Ukraine that in its near-genocidal brutality has drawn comparison to the German invasion of 1941, yet has been endorsed without question by the Orthodox authorities in Moscow. This has caused a schism within Orthodoxy, but there are ripples beyund just the Orthodox, because for instance, Anglicans draw prestige as a senior Christian denomination by likening themselves to Orthodox as apostolic and sacramental, but with a separate national identity.

If Orthodoxy fails, so much the more do Anglicans, at least to the extent they haven't failed already. I think Pope Francis sees opportunities here but is treading carefully indeed.

The Peter Brooke essay covers a great deal more than Orthodoxy in its treatment of Solzhenitsyn as a specifically Cold War figure. In one section of the essay, RICHARD PIPES AND 'OLD RUSSIA' he outlines Richard Pipes's position in US intelligence:

In the 1970s, when Solzhenitsyn was in despair over the American defeat in Vietnam (did he have any idea of the means by which America was waging war in Vietnam?) and urging the US to stand firm against Communism, Pipes was running 'Team B', set up by the then head of the CIA, George Bush (Sr), to second guess the conclusions that were being drawn by the American intelligence community that the Soviet Union was in economic difficulties which were having an unfavourable effect on its military capacity. It therefore posed less of a military threat, a conclusion that was naturally unwelcome to the US military establishment and the armaments industry. Team B was set up by the then Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and included among its members a younger Paul Wolfowitz. It was the model for the later 'Office of Special Plans', set up by Wolfowitz in 2002, also under Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defence, to undermine the CIA's assessment that the Iraqi government had little or nothing in the way of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

In the 1970s, then, Pipes and Solzhenitsyn could be described as (to use an old Marxist Leninist term) 'objective' allies in opposition to the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

One surprise of the Russo-Ukraine war has clearly been the weakness and incompetence of the Russian military, which appears to have been foreshadowed by the internal conflicts in US intelligence in the 1970s. Yet Solzhenitsyn, to the extent that he tried to become a US political figure while he was here, effectively allied himself with the neoconservatives who promoted the idea that Russia was a world power comparable to the US. But Brooke goes on to point out that Solzhenitsyn actually isn't very Orthodox:

I discussed Solzhenitsyn's somewhat ambiguous attitude to historic Orthodoxy in an article published in 2010 in the online Dublin Review of Books, and I feel I can't do better than to repeat what I wrote then:

'The major theme of the Templeton Address, which Solzhenitsyn gave in 1984, is that the horrors that surround us derive from our loss of a sense of responsibility to something higher than ourselves - to God: "If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty millions of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

. . . Indeed, given the importance Solzhenitsyn attaches to religion, there is something a little odd about his attitude to the Orthodox Church ... Although he often refers to the martyrdom of the priests, monks and nuns of the Orthodox Church under Bolshevism, there are very few priests mentioned in The Gulag Archipelago.

. . . When he does mention the Orthodox Church he is often critical of it. One of his recurring themes is the sin which the Church committed in its persecution of the Old Believers - Orthodox Christians who refused to accept certain reforms of liturgical practice that were introduced in the seventeenth century. Without ever going into it very deeply Solzhenitsyn several times refers to the Old Believers as representing the genuine spirit of Old Russia. He sees the reforms of Peter the Great (when the supposedly independent patriarchate of Moscow was suppressed and the Church reduced to being a department of state after the manner of the Church of England) as an extension of the crime committed against the Old Believers.

So for Solzhenitsyn, Orthodoxy is something of a reified entity that represents some authentic quality of the past that's no longer present, which sorta-kinda explains the USSR (but not present-day Russia, apparently). Beyond that, Brooke suggests that Solzhenitsyn at least leaned toward a view that only a version of Christianity that had a centralized authority in opposition to the State -- i.e., Roman Catholicism -- could succeed against the USSR at the time he wrote. But post-USSR Putin, the apparent majority of present-day Russians, and much of the Western right continue to be of the view that a State-sonsored conservative Russian Orthodoxy will save the world from dissipation, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a righteous instrument of this view.

We simply don't know how Solzhenitsyn would react to Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. Brooke's tentative conclusion seems to be that Solzhenitsyn, like Dostoevsky, was not ultimately a rationalist, and it's hard to avoid thinking Solzhenitsyn's view would be emotionally pro-Russian, bolstered by an incomplete understanding of Orthodoxy, although I'm not sure if there can on fact be a rationalist justification for Orthodoxy at all. But that's a different subject. The big problem I see for now is that an essentially emotional view of Russia and Russian Orthodoxy can't survive the current war.