Artists and Dictators Have Never Gotten Along

 

History records that the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was much the work of one man, Mikhail Gorbachev, and there is some truth to that.

But one could also argue that the fall actually began in 1962, with the publication of a single book, and the astonishing bravery of the man who wrote it, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The book was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and the simple fact of its publication was, at the time, seismic.

Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, was walking a tightrope. He needed to find a way to pull Russia out of the abyss of Stalinism, and restore some sort of normal life after three decades of hellish oppression and mass death. But he had to do this without allowing any meaningful change to the sclerotic system that had created Stalin, and given absolute power to the Communist Party.

So, for a short time, there was what became known as the “Khrushchev Thaw,” a loosening of the totalitarian shackles — both physical and psychological — that had terrorized the Russian people for so long.

It was a slight opening, a sliver of sunlight on an excruciating era in Russian history. And in one of his more symbolic gestures, Khrushchev personally approved the publication of this one small novel, which was based on Solzhenitsyn’s own personal experience of life in Stalin’s vast prison system.

The Thaw was detested within the inner circle of the Party, and in 1964, Khrushchev was rudely removed and replaced with Leonid Brezhnev, a blank-faced thug in a bad suit, who was having none of that sunlight crap, not on his watch.

But the book was already out there, and it was an instant sensation. It was short, easy-to-read, deceptively subversive, and well worth reading to this day.

It is indeed the story of one day. Ivan Denisovich is a zek —Russian slang for ‘prisoner’ — trapped in the vast Soviet ‘gulag,' a word we might never have known were it not for Solzhenitsyn.

Ivan is a political prisoner, which is to say his only crime was to say the wrong thing to the wrong informer at the wrong time. But he was sentenced to eight years in the gulag, the same amount of time Solzhenitsyn himself served.

Not being a “real” criminal, Ivan’s day is filled with the routine dangers of life in a hard labor camp, under unspeakably cruel conditions. His existence — such as it is — is defined by subzero temperatures, starvation rations, and a culture of thievery and menace. Trapped in the maw of a vast institution that can crush him at will, he lives by his wits and does just enough to survive.

It’s a day that we in the West have no hope of understanding, at least not yet. To us it seems inconceivable that any life could be so cold and cruel. But what makes Ivan’s day especially horrifying to us — and what makes Solzhenitsyn such a powerful writer — is that for Ivan it was, in fact, a good day.

He’d finagled an extra piece of bread. He’d found the hours spent bricklaying surprisingly satisfying to his battered psyche. He’d scored a few minuscule victories. He’d avoided trouble. He’d stayed alive.

It's hard to overstate the impact of the publication of this one little novel. Almost instantly, Solzhenitsyn had a place on the world stage, and there was an eager market for his subsequent, more formidable works. All of which were banned in Russia.

His best novels, In the First Circle and Cancer Ward, were scathing but deeply human stories of struggle and privation, both inside and outside the gulag system. Both books were reviled by the Soviet authorities, and Solzhenitsyn was harassed unmercifully. He was thrown out of the Writer’s Union, and at one point was poisoned.

Still, he wrote as if possessed, finally finishing his magnum opus, the voluminous non-fiction exposé Gulag Archipelago, which told the world the whole sordid story of slave labor and mass death that flourished under Stalin. The book landed like a bomb, selling in the tens of millions almost immediately. But not in Russia, where it was, of course, banned.

Gulag won Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he didn’t collect, for fear he wouldn’t be allowed back into Russia if he made the trip to Stockholm.

In 1974, he was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and flown to West Germany, which made for front page headlines all over the world. He eventually settled in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont, where he lived as a hermit, writing twelve hours a day. Thanks to Gorbachev, his citizenship was restored in 1990, and he returned to Russia, where he lived out his life as a cranky celebrity with eccentric religious leanings.

But for many years, he was the voice of Russian dissidence, and his story has echoes.

Artists and dictators have never liked each other. Artists tend to deal in truth and objective reality, something dictators have little use for. But even dictators understand that art — by which I mean all the arts — has both relevance and resonance. It moves people. Which is why authoritarian systems inevitably want to control it.

The Writer’s Union that expelled Solzhenitsyn was an instrument of that control. You had to be a member to publish at all, anywhere. You were told what you could and could not write. You submitted every word to a censor for approval. You understood that your job was to write adoringly of life in the “workers’ paradise” Stalin had created. Your vapid works of “socialist realism” — which were neither socialist nor realistic — earned you a cushy living, toeing the party line. Solzhenitsyn refused to toe it.

The art world is already a target for Trump and his junta. The wanton cutoff of long-standing government support for arts programs and museums seems somehow less pressing than, say, meat inspection or Social Security, but this is neither incidental nor accidental. It's pure Project 2025. They detest anything they can’t understand, and art of any kind — except maybe porn — is quite beyond them.

The junta is still young, and there hasn’t yet been time to assess the damage it’s inflicting on the art world. But we can already discern its effect on art’s second cousins — the journalists, pundits, and media figures who are trying to maneuver in this fluid new environment. We can already see who is — and who isn’t — willing to kiss the ring, and we can all expect to have heroes who let us down.

Russian history is more relevant today than it was three months ago, and I expect to revisit it in this space. Even as our imaginations for the future take us to dark places we hope never to see, we can safely say that the Russian people have already been there, and many times. It’s often said that Russians don’t hope for things to get better, only that they don’t get worse.

My sympathies for the Russian people are almost equal to my rage at them for their MAGA-like cluelessness, for putting up with century after century of stupid rule and wasted lives. That there are people in this country who actually admire Russia — who look up to Putin — betrays a chasm of ignorance I still can’t fathom.

The eighty million people who voted Trump into office are about to learn the hard way that if you’re shopping for a new model for your country, you couldn’t do worse than Russia. I just wish I didn’t have to learn it with them.