The view of Alexander Solzhenitsyn projected in the press, both popular and literary, in the bourgeois countries is of some kind of embattled Western liberal, who, amid the severities of ‘totalitarianism’, continues resolutely to articulate the values that underpin the Free World. We do not see him treated as a Russian socialist who after decades of official dogma is conducting a genuine struggle to come to terms, artistically, with recent Soviet history, to deal with real problems of common life and its valuation in a transitional society. Nor is he even shown to be the author of a certain kind of typically Russian social novel discernibly in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky—but always as the Scourge of Communism.

Naturally, it is easy for the champions of the Western bourgeoisie to appropriate Solzhenitsyn to their own ideological purposes (along with many other ‘dissident intellectuals’): do not, after all, the demands most often raised by the ‘cultural opposition’ such as those for freedom of speech and of publication—the civil rights most cherished by the intelligentsia—have the very appearance of ‘liberal’ demands? This mystification is easy to dispel. Noticeably, the Western press only reports the activities of the intellectuals: widespread factory occupations, food riots, work stoppages, street demonstrations, and the storming of the party headquarters in Novocherkask by local factory workers (all of which took place when Kruschev announced rises in meat and dairy prices in 1962, the year of Solzhenitsyn’s first publication) are not reported in the West with such alacrity. And in any case, as Harding remarks, freedom of speech is by no means a liberal call in the Russian context: by raising demands which the state bureaucracy dare not satisfy, the intellectuals must eventually consider the abolition of the bureaucracy itself and a means of achieving this, and thus their dissent falls within the dynamic of permanent revolution.