New Left Review I/87-88, September-December 1974

Roy Medvedev

What Lies Ahead for Us?

The Letter to Soviet Leaders that Solzhenitsyn has recently published is a disappointing document. But it is not difficult to argue with Solzhenitsyn on this occasion, so absurd are many of his propositions. Nevertheless, however great one’s first sense of disagreement and disappointment with Solzhenitsyn’s utopian and incompetent propositions, it is impossible not to perceive that his letter reflects, even if in an extremely distorted way, many problems of our society and state which are real and acute. Not everything is so simple in what we find in this new document from Solzhenitsyn’s pen, and it cannot be brushed off as merely the naively self-confident discourse of a ‘reactionary romantic and nationalist’. The attitude which is expressed in extremely sharp and even grotesque form in Solzhenitsyn’s letter is characteristic of many people in our country, and this fact, in the first instance, compels us to give consideration to certain really difficult problems of the contemporary situation and immediate future.

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