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FROM A POLICE STATE A Moscow Cold War Memoir |
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Desperately Seeking Solzhenitsyn |
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This is an excerpt from a book-length work in progress by Michael Johnson, presented in this form exclusively by TheColumnists.com through the courtesy of the author, who reserves all rights. |
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
for TheColumnists.com
Every journalist in Moscow wanted to be the first to find Alexander Solzhenitsyn after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. It was like a giant Easter egg hunt with the vicious KGB thugs in dark blue raincoats hiding the eggs. Ambitious young reporter that I was, I wanted to be the first journalist to find him and I was unconcerned about the consequences this publicity might have for him.
I happened to start with the volatile writer Lev Kopalev who was at a friendly stage in his stormy relationship with Solzhenitsyn. They had been zeks, or labor camp inmates, together in the 1940s and 1950s, and that’s an experience that creates bonds. Eventually they both got out of the Soviet Union and once abroad they sadly had a final and irretrievable falling out. Lev died without making his peace with Solzhenitsyn.
I got to Lev through his wife, Raisa Orlova, who had asked me to obtain a copy of a biography of Martin Luther King (“The King God Didn’t Save”) that she wanted to translate into Russian. Lev was a burly, bearded, outgoing Russian bear of a man but he could never quite make the break with his Marxist past. He was no KGB informer but his sympathies were muddled. Solzhenitsyn, I later learned, never totally trusted him. As Solzhenitsyn put it, quoting an old Russian proverb, “Even fire cannot clean a barrel that once held tar.”
But Raisa and Lev were warm and welcoming to Jacqueline and me, inviting us to their small, gloomy home for tea for a get-acquainted meeting. Raisa wanted something from me and I wanted something from Lev. Raisa spoke good English. Lev was a superb linguist but German was his main foreign language. His English was rough. It come out as a huge basso in short, prepared bursts of two or three words at a time. We spoke Russian together.
For some reason I made him nervous. Months later when I approached him at a Rostropovich concert he all but ran the other way, obviously fearful of being seen in public with an American journalist. Such was the atmosphere the KGB had created among its best and brightest.
But at his home, as tea was served, I mentally rehearsed the main item on my agenda: to get Solzhenitsyn’s telephone number, or at least his address, neither of which any foreign journalist had. We all knew that Solzhenitsyn was a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, and that would be a front-page news story. While it would mark a giant step forward for freedom of expression, it was sure to lead to trouble for anyone involved in the effort to improve human rights in the Soviet Union.
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leading candidate for the 1970 Nobel prize in literature and Johnson wanted to be the first western journalist to find him. |
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Between sips of tea, I smoothly made my request, only to be sharply refused. “Solzhenitsyn needs and deserves his privacy after all he has been through,” Lev said, with some justification. But he did agree to be the intermediary for carrying the news to Solzhenitsyn if he won.
My access to the AP teleprinter meant that I would have the news the instant it was announced. I would ring Lev, and he would ring Solzhenitsyn. I would get nothing from the arrangement other than the satisfaction of being the messenger for some very important news for a towering figure in 20th century literature. In the end, we did it Lev’s way and it proved to be ample reward.
A week later, I was on duty at the AP when the teleprinter came alive with a one-paragraph bulletin from our Stockholm office quoting the Swedish Academy as awarding the Prize to Solzhenitsyn. I remember letting out an involuntary whoop of joy. Before the paragraph had finished printing I was on the phone to Lev, who received the news with an even greater whoop. He immediately relayed the news to Solzhenitsyn by calling the Rostropovich number and asking the housemaid to summon the little man in the garage apartment. The award of the Prize would change many lives in Russia and abroad, and would further show up the Brezhnev regime as insecure and vindictive, this time to an appalling degree.
But I couldn’t stop there. With no further help from Lev, I set about contacting everyone in town who might have an inkling of Solzhenitsyn’s whereabouts. He was known to have spent many years in Ryazan, but recently had lived with various friends in and around Moscow. I invited Chicago Tribune correspondent Frank Starr to join me and we set off for Peredelkino, the town with a name that always reminds me of the sound of Russian church bells. Peredelkino was the obvious place to look--it is the writers' community 30 miles outside of Moscow. We knew that he had been sheltered from time to time by Lydia Chukovskaya, a writer who also lived there. Most of the larger properties in the village were owned and tightly controlled by the Writers’ Union, the organization that protected well-behaved writers.
There was no response to our knock at the Chukovsky front door. Somewhat at random, we tramped through the mud and knocked on doors around the village, including the Writers’ Union office, and eventually found ourselves walking through the famous Pasternak gate, and up the steps of the big, high-ceilinged, wooden house and rapped on the door. (Boris Pasternak had long since died, but the house will always be his. It is now a Pasternak museum.) A man named Stanislav Neuhaus came to the door and was most pleasant. He invited us in, and we chatted for a half hour. He was the son of Heinrich Neuhaus, the late and very celebrated Russian pianist and teacher. Neuhaus junior, who was Pasternak's stepson, had been practicing for a recital he was scheduled to give that evening in Moscow.
He didn't know where Solzhenitsyn was camping out but he talked a bit about Pasternak. Living there was like inhabiting a holy place, Neuhaus said. This was the very house where Pasternak had cowered in fear of hearing the stomp of police boots and a knock at the door to take him away to be shot or imprisoned, as had happened to so many of his writer and artist friends. Nobody knows quite why Stalin left Pasternak alone. He was allowed to write in relative freedom. He just couldn't publish most of his output in his homeland.
The next day I followed up a tip from a cellist friend, Natalya Gutman, who had been studying with Rostropovich. She had heard that Solzhenitsyn spent a lot of time out at Rostropovich’s dacha in Zhukovka, a cluster of country homes where some of the scientific and artistic elite lived, about 30 minutes from Moscow. Special police stood guard at checkpoints along the winding roads inside the complex.
We quickly found our way to Shostakovich's house, the first landmark I had been directed to, and there asked a policewoman where Rostropovich's dacha was. Surprisingly, she simply gave us directions in the most clear and courteous manner. (We thought we might be arrested for being at large in the complex without permission.) The Chicago Tribune man had dropped out but I had recruited two other journalist friends--an Italian named Pietro Sormani of Corriere della Sera and a Swiss named Roger Bernheim of Neue Zurcher Zeitung--for this second day of the hunt. We followed the pathways and soon came upon the great cellist's dacha. We cautiously climbed the steps to his big house, snow squeaking underfoot, our teeth chattering from the cold and the excitement of what we were doing.
It was mid-winter, bitterly cold and overcast with heavy, leaden skies. I could see off to the side of the property a brick concert hall under construction but work had been suspended for the winter. Clean, sharp-edged red bricks were scattered around the site. Such high-quality materials are oddities in Russia where buildings always look old a year after construction. These bricks were obviously German imports.
A lone birch tree, about two years of growth, was struggling to survive on the front lawn. Nothing stirred.
I knocked at the door, expecting Rostropovich or his wife Galina Vishnevskaya, the soprano, to appear. I don't know where my courage came from--it was such a bold intrusion on our part. But the housemaid answered the door promptly. She was a dumpy woman in her 50s, missing most of her teeth, a scarf over her straggly hair and an apron over her heavy sweater and skirt. She looked like she hadn't bathed for some time. She spoke in a heavy provincial accent that I could barely understand. I asked for "Gospodin Rostropovich," and she replied in a not unfriendly tone, "Khozyain za rubezhom. (The boss is abroad.)"
I had one hand in my coat pocket, and felt a stick of chewing gum. Why it was there, I have no clue. I never chew gum. But I offered it to the maid who beamed in a great toothless smile. She knew what chewing gum was. How she was planning to chew it I also have no clue. I then asked if a Gospodin Solzhenitsyn was living there. "Never heard of him," she said airily, "but there's a guy in a beard living in the garage over there," pointing to the outbuilding across the property. Hmmm, I thought. A beard. It could be him.
We thanked the maid and set out across the broad snow-covered lawn to the garage. Imported building materials were also scattered around the driveway. I approached the door and rapped a few times. When no one responded, I called out "Alexander Isayevich?" (his first name and patronymic). A pause of five seconds or so ensued, then came a piercing voice, none too pleasant, "Kto eto?" ("Who's there?") I replied that we were foreign journalists from Moscow who had come to congratulate him on his Nobel Prize.
At that point the door burst open and we were transfixed by this little man with a magnificent head of unkempt reddish hair that spread down his face into his beard, ending at chest level. His beady blue eyes gave us the once-over. We recognized him immediately--the author of a series of masterpieces--One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, The First Circle, all banned in Russia. When he was satisfied in his own mind that we were not KGB thugs, he confirmed his identity.
He spoke rapidly, like a man with a lot on his mind, in a strange, high-pitched voice. I started by asking him for his reaction to being selected for the Prize (probably some inane question such as "How does it feel?") He avoided the question, perhaps dreading headlines around the world that might make his situation even more difficult. He replied that he regretted he could not invite us into his humble room because he himself was a guest in the apartment owned by Rostropovich. We could see inside that he was housed in a partially completed apartment being fixed up inside the garage. The danger that this represented for Rostropovich--harboring Solzhenitsyn--was not lost upon us. Both of these men were truly heroic figures willing to risk their lives to buck the murderous Soviet regime.
The conversation that followed was brief and to the point. Solzhenitsyn confirmed that he knew about the Prize but felt he could not comment on it because his host was away. Although he had by then considerable experience with the West and the Western press, he was chary about our motives and probably had his doubts about our common sense. He was obviously not prepared for our questions. He said he had made no decision about whether to accept it or to do as Pasternak had done, reject it. And he repeated how much he regretted that we could not be invited in for tea. I told him we fully understood, and did not intend to bother him any further, and that we wished him the best of luck.
Then we made our way back to my Volkswagen. I stopped halfway and took a picture of the garage with the trembling little birch tree in the foreground. It was published all over the world along with my story confirming that Solzhenitsyn had not yet been bothered by the authorities and was sheltered by his friend Rostropovich. It was several weeks before anyone else got to him.
The consequences for harboring Solzhenitsyn were terrible for the cellist and his wife. Both were forbidden to travel abroad, and eventually Rostropovich was blocked from performing in public. He recalls stopping in a doorway in central Moscow and bursting into tears as he realized what the regime was doing to him. In her autobiography "Galina," his wife writes movingly of their friendship with Solzhenitsyn and their commitment to supporting him.
Within a couple of years,
both Solzhenitsyn and Rostropovich had been expelled from the
country and deprived of their Soviet citizenship. The Kremlin’s
hope was that they would be lost in a sea of chaotic free expression,
never to surface again.
Instead, both went to the United States where they were welcomed
as the great men that they are. Rostropovich became conductor
of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington and Solzhenitsyn
built himself a splendid house in Vermont--the closest climate
he could find to Russia’s. And they have both returned to
Moscow since the liberalization of the regime there, Solzhenitsyn
finally slowing his prolific output and Rostropovich back to
making music to sellout crowds. Neither man had dared dream that
their rehabilitation would be possible in their lifetime.
© 2001 by Michael
Johnson. Note: This chapter is actually Chapter 17 in Johnson's
book manuscript.
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