Truth in Exile
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“The memoir title alone bears meaning here. Solzhenitsyn reports that he lived between two millstones, painfully grinding him. His perennial “Bolshevik enemies are now joined by the hostile pseudo-intellectuals of both East and West and, it appears, even more powerful circles.” So constant and aggressive were the harangues and slanders, that Solzhenitsyn observes they colored American freedom in a dark light: “here, in America, I am not genuinely free, but again caged.” He didn’t face imprisonment or official persecution, but Solzhenitsyn definitely experienced ideological resistance and a systematic misrepresentation of his writings.
But he wouldn’t be muzzled. In Between Two Millstones, he condemns both communism and the Soviet Union outright, while defending the Russian nation as a fundamentally good and decent civilization, seized and pillaged by a savage regime. We learn in the memoir that even at the end of the Soviet regime, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev refused permission to publishers to print and distribute his writings. Gorbachev knew that Solzhenitsyn’s writings existentially indicted the Soviet Union. As the Central Committee’s head of Ideology, Vadim Medvedev, remarked, “To publish Solzhenitsyn is to undermine the foundations on which our present life rests.” Truer words…
He is also frank. Solzhenitsyn never hesitated to reveal to his readers the truth of things, including his own soul. Many of the western thinkers and journalists who pilloried Solzhenitsyn did not think that the Soviet Union promised the best future for mankind. But they did put their trust in an evolutionary progressiveness, which contained no space for traditional faith, patriotism, family, and decentralized conceptions of democracy. In short, Solzhenitsyn’s basic loves and principles were inconceivable to them, save as irrational despotic longings. They rushed to the worst judgments, refusing to consider context, depth of history, or that political liberty may not simply be a product of the rationalist Enlightenment project. Most of Solzhenitsyn’s enemies, communist and otherwise, were in thrall to ideology and literary politics.”