BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS

Stephen Carter. The Politics of Solzhenitsyn. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc. 1977. 156 pp. Roy Medvedev.On Soviet Dissent: Interviews with Piero Ostellino. Translated from the Italian by William A. Packer. Edited by George Saunders. New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press. 1980. 147 pp. $10.95.

Not all who dissent (the heterodox, to translate literally the Russian inakomysliashchie) are . Among the non- Soviet dissenters probably the most prominent outside the is Alexander Solzhenitsyn; inside, Roy Medvedev,one of that remarkable pair of twins who have been ploughing their own furrows for many years in the cold hard fields of Russian thought. (The other brother, Zhores, a geneticist forced to turn gerontologist for a time, left the Soviet Union some years ago and made his home in the United Kingdom.) Both Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedevmay be distinguished,in different ways, from the liberal-legaldissidents inside and outside, many of whom worked with Andrei D. Sakharov or were encouraged by him. The books under review here give an idea of the political views of Solzhenitsyn and Medvedev,including their views on dissidents and dissidence.(Of course neither the one nor the other nor both together give as comprehensivea notion of the phenomena as would be collected from the Chronicle of Current Events or the Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR.) They are constructed on different plans: Carter combs the works of Solzhenitsyn, both fictional and publicistic, for evidence on a number of themes, while Ostellino and another interviewer let Medvedev speak in the first person. Thus Solzhenitsyn's thought emerges more carefully organized but less personally expressed then Medvedev's.

I

Carter follows Solzhenitsyn's literary works through an analysis of courts, penology, and the camps to society, the individual, and the nation among the nations. The moral and political analysis is based on severalspecific addresses,among other works. He traces similaritiesbetween Solzhenitsyn'sviews and the romantic folk-nationalismof the native- soil movement (pochvennichestvo) of the mid-nineteenth century. He is apparently im- pressed by the force of Solzhenitsyn's personality: strategic (if not moral) consistency of purpose, courage under pressure, proud militancy. In places his appraisal climbs to pane- gyric height, as where he celebrates Solzhenitsyn's "towering moral stature" as a "moral, literary and intellectual giant." Some criticisms are tucked away in the conclusion of Carter's book, but on the whole the reader would have to look elsewherefor the description, let alone criticism (cf. in Notes of a Revolutionary), of Solzhenitsyn'struculence toward his own critics and his implicit demand to be treated with a generosity that he does not reciprocate. Carter gives due, perhaps even undue, prominence to the deeply Russian side of Solzhe- nitsyn's character and beliefsbut does not dwell on the ways in which that most principled and indomitable adversary of the Soviet system is himself shaped by that system. When Carter delves into the substance of Solzhenitsyn's portrayal of , distract- ing problems are raised by his selection or style of expression. For example, writing about Solzhenitsyn's work on Soviet courts and law, Carter summarizes: "... there is no guar- antee that judicial murder and terror, as well as illegal secret police action, will not again become possible in the USSR. And people should not be duped by the fact that today contains not millions, as under Stalin, but only tens of thousands. Above all it is necessaryto change public opinion in the USSR, which contrary to Western illusions no longer supports Soviet law." Pass over little questions posed by "again," such 101

as whether convictions on framed evidence at the behest of political superiors count as judicial terror, or the question whether the correct order of magnitude is tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, and consider the last quoted sentence. What Western illusions? And what does "no longer" suggest: that according to deluded Westerners,or to Solzhe- nitsyn, or to Carter, Soviet public opinion used to support Soviet law (when?) but has stopped supporting it (since when?) in whole or in (which?) part? Is the sentence merely a clumsy way of saying that Carter, or Solzhenitsyn, does not think much of the legalist dissidents' approach, the zakonnichelkii podkhod? Such infelicities,and occasional minor errors (like promoting from grandson to son of the old Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov), impart a raffish air to what is otherwise a serious effort.

II

The Medvedev book comprises interviews of Roy Medvedevconducted in 1977 by Piero Ostellino and in 1980 by Vittorio Zucconi, with a relatively long chapter written by Medvedev on Soviet dissent in 1978-79. Though it is shorter and has less scholarly ap- paratus than the book on Solzhenitsyn, it seems to have more meat on its bones; perhaps that is because Medvedevis a political thinker while Solzhenitsyn is "only" a writer, but perhaps it indicates that Medvedev'sinterviewers were more skillful than Solzhenitsyn's analyst. Roy Medvedevis well known outside the Soviet Union through his books on Soviet history and the idea of socialist democracy as well as the account written together witr his brother Zhores of the latter's brief pseudo-psychiatricincarceration in 1970. He A respected as the leading articulator-the tendency is certainly not well enough organized to have a "leader"-of the loyal Leninist wing of the Party, a wing whose members or adherents or representatives emphasize the gap between and (late) , and proclaim the rightness of those Communist policies that, they hold, are consistent with Lenin. (They may be considered counterparts of churchmen in the mid-twentieth century who used to maintain that the only trouble with Christianity was that it had never been tried.) Whether or not Medvedevis loyal to the (true) Party, the actual Party has not been loyal to Medvedev.The interviewshave an account of his expulsion and of the inquisition conducted by the interrogators designated by the Party to look into Medvedev'shistory of Stalinism.One may infer from the interviewswhat he must have told them, for he does not strike the reader as a man who would say one thing to the Italian press and another to the Party inquisitors. He gives Stalin credit for having continued and deepened some of Lenin's policies; as historian he refuses to demarcate Stalinism sharply from Leninism till the period of forced collectivizationof agricultureand rapid efforts at industrialization, thus 1928-33. He considers the present structure of the Soviet Union authoritarian or statist ,accepting the basic classanalysis but differentiating various groups within the Soviet elite in a way that the ruling apparatus would not publicly concede. In foreign policy he finds several reasons to justify Soviet domination in East Central Europe. For example, he stresses the position of Hungary, Germany, and Romania as ex-enemiesfrom World War II, and he attaches much more importance than most foreign observers would do to the political weight of Czechoslovak Communists apart from the weight of the occupying fraternal Red Army. His program rests on what he calls socialist pluralism. He believes in the inevitability of dissent, though he appears in these interviewsto think that the containment of means that dissent will have to find new ideas, symbols, and forms. A reader who wonders whether Medvedev'svisions rest upon good vision should bear in mind that he thinks the Soviet Union has surpassedthe Westin the area of social and economic rights. Medvedevlays the responsibility for the rise of the dissident movement on the Soviet regime for attempting to reverse the process of de?talinization; even though he appears