Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was often irritable as he wrote Between Two Millstones, a memoir of his American exile Tolstoyan in length. Solzhenitsyn shook the world with his Nobel-winning exhumation of Soviet “justice” and its system of forced labor camps, The Gulag Archipelago (1973). And then he shook the confidence of many Western allies five years later during his controversial Harvard commencement address. Soviet apologists jumped back with “Aha! He’s a monarchist reactionary after all!” and mainstream commentators walked away stunned by his indictment of the spiritually bankrupt society he encountered in exile.
Solzhenitsyn seldom tailored his statements to fit his audience. After laboring under years of Soviet imprisonment and censorship, he felt free to speak his mind—even if some took offense from his words.
By the time Millstones Book 2 opens, Solzhenitsyn is ensconced with his wife and children in a remote Vermont setting whose landscape reminds him of home. He is frustrated by the rebuttals he’s asked to give, the op-eds he’s invited to pen and all the speaking engagements he feels forced to decline. He is emersed in researching and writing one of 20th century literature’s most ambitious projects, a sprawling set of novels that examine the fall of the Russian Empire to the Bolsheviks, a work that builds fiction from facts, brick by historical brick. And he doesn’t want to be disturbed.
Solzhenitsyn is especially annoyed by the knee-jerk Russophobia of his Western critics, which he carefully distinguishes from anti-Communism, and the low intellectual level of many American journalists. He fends off accusations of anti-Semitism, pointing out that Russian ultra-nationalists claimed he was “selling Russia out to the Jews.” In exile, Solzhenitsyn no longer had a single enemy but was confronted by a confederacy of dunces.
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Solzhenitsyn believed that human rights should be balanced by human responsibility—to ourselves and each other. In 1994 he moved back to Russia, a country then in chaos thanks in part to the careless application of Western economic theory and the unrelenting grip of the reinvented old guard of Communist bureaucrats. He supported the rise of Vladimir Putin before his death in 2008 but one hopes he would have been disappointed had he lived to see the direction Putin took.
