“There are three atom bombs in the world,” declared Veniamin Teush, a friend of Solzhenitsyn, after reading the typescript of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a year before its publication in the Soviet Union. “Kennedy has one, Khrushchev has another, and you have the third.”2F If it were ever published, he predicted, Soviet life, indeed the world, would never be the same again. And when, in November 1962, One Day was published in the Soviet Union, the depth of the public response and, most importantly, the reviews carried by most Soviet newspapers suggested that, with its publication, a new era had, in fact, begun. With headlines such as “Thus It Was But Will Never Be Again” and “This Must Not Happen Again,”3F they declared that the revelations that it contained about the labor camps and the absurd judicial processes which had condemned innocent people to live in them for years, and in many cases to die in them, would ensure that such things could never recur. Changes were taking place in the Soviet Union, they agreed, which would be irreversible. An indication of the unprecedented public interest in Solzhenitsyn’s story can be gained from the eloquent letter he received in mid-1963 from a reader in the Ukraine, Mark Ivanovich Kononenko: “In Khrakov I have seen all kinds of queues – for the film Tarzan, butter, women’s drawers, chicken giblets and horse-meat sausage. But I cannot remember a queue as long as the one for your book in the libraries… I waited six months and to no avail. By chance I got hold of it for forty-eight hours.”4F One Day reached every region and very nearly every social group in the Soviet Union. Its reception may well have outstripped even that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the United States of the 1850s in terms of the proportion of the country’s population who knew of its existence.
Six years later, however, in late 1968, it must have seemed all too evident that those early commentators had been overoptimistic and had exaggerated the story’s liberating force. Khrushchev had fallen and, under Brezhnev, Stalinism was reasserting itself, even if in attenuated form. The experiment in democratization of government in Czechoslovakia had just been crushed by Soviet troops. The Soviet labor camps for political prisoners, though they had been greatly reduced in number after Stalin’s death, had continued to exist throughout the Khrushchev years, despite the official acclaim given to One Day, and were again being used extensively. After a very few years of officially sanctioned glory, Solzhenitsyn was being hounded by the KGB, prevented from publishing either Cancer Ward or The First Circle in his own country, and copies of One Day were being withdrawn from libraries or put in their reserve collections.5F Moreover, within this longer timeframe it could be seen that the publication of One Day had occurred relatively late in the process of de-Stalinization.
Khrushchev had initiated de-Stalinization in 1956 with his “secret speech” to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party denouncing the brutality and injustices of the Stalin years: “Arbitrary behavior by one person encouraged and permitted arbitrariness in others. Mass arrests and deportations of many thousands of people, execution without trial and without normal investigation created conditions of insecurity, fear and even desperation.”6F While the text of that speech had not been fully publicized in the Soviet Union, it had been widely circulated amongst Party members, setting in motion an authorized critical debate on many aspects of the Stalin era. So, over the years that followed, there had been official attacks on many of Stalin’s policies, defined as consequences of the so-called “cult of personality”: his disastrous agricultural policies, the pact with Hitler and the Soviet Union’s unpreparedness for war with Germany, and some of the kinds of persecution carried out under his rule. This debate had culminated in Khrushchev’s comprehensive public denunciation of Stalin at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961 and the subsequent removal of his remains from the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square.
Khrushchev personally authorized the publication of One Day in 1962, as part of his struggle with the surviving Stalinists in the Presidium, using it as an instrument to defend himself against their increasing attacks. This and the other tactics he employed more and more desperately throughout 1963 and 1964 failed to save him. So, by the late 1960s, it must have seemed painfully obvious that the publication of One Day had been less a causally contributing factor than a late symptom, a dying gasp, in the relaxation of the oppressive features of the Soviet regime that took place under Khrushchev’s leadership. Solzhenitsyn was looking more and more like a pawn who, having been moved by the losing player in the leadership game, might very soon be permanently removed from the board.
Writing now, thirty years later, the question of his role in political change had a dramatically different aspect. Not only did the Soviet regime under Gorbachev, with the policies of glasnost (more open government) and perestroika (economic reform), discard its most oppressive features, but the Soviet Union itself has been dissolved. Solzhenitsyn, who was forced into exile in the West in 1974, has seen his novels since One Day, which were previously banned in the Soviet Union, finally (May 1989) cleared for publication, Gulag Archipelago awarded (December 1990) the State literature prize, and himself finally invited back to live in Russia. (As of October 1993 he is still talking of returning and of the advisory role he might play, without yet saying when that will be.) Indeed the whole debate about the causes of the collapse of the old Soviet system, unforeseen as it was by most specialists, remains remarkably open. Two of the major questions to be discussed by historians concern the way in which the Khrushchev years are to be written into the longer narrative of the history of the Soviet Union since the death of Stalin, and the role of writers and intellectuals after 1960 in undermining the legitimacy of the regime. These two questions intersect in the case of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day. To state the issue of this chapter simply: is there a sense in which One Day not only engaged significantly with the leadership struggles occurring at the time of its publication, but also entered the nation’s memory as a permanent symbol of mass resistance, thus playing its part in weakening the fabric of the system?
2. Recorded by Ilya Zilberberg, “A Necessary Talk with Solzhenitsyn,” published in Russian in England in 1976, quoted by Michael Scammelll, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (London, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg: Hutchinson, 1985): 400. Scammell’s monumental work is a fundamental source for any study of Solzhenitsyn.
3. Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: 450.
4. Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz (London: Allen Lane, 1970): 15-16.
5. David Burg and George Feifer, Solzhenitsyn (New York: Stein and Day, 1972): 218.
6. Quoted in, for instance, Kochan and Abraham, The Making of Modern Russia: 447.