Solzhenitsyn Was a Russian Patriot

By ROBERT CONQUEST
August 8, 2008

Those of us who had long been concerned to expose and resist Stalinism, in the West as in the USSR, learned much from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I met him in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1974, soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union -- the result of his novel, "The Gulag Archipelago," being published in Paris. He was personally pleasant; I have a photograph of the two of us, he holding a Russian edition of my book, "The Great Terror," with evident approbation. He asked if I would translate a "little" poem of his. Of course I agreed.

The little poem, "Prussian Nights," turned out to be 2,000 lines! Thankfully, he and his circle helped. It was an arresting composition, increasing our knowledge of him and his times -- something worth reading, and rereading, for its stunning historical background.

Ken Fallin

Solzhenitsyn was one of the most striking public figures of our time. How should one judge him? As a writer, up there with Pasternak? As a moralist, up there with Czeslaw Milosz? But he should also be judged as one who might have won two Nobel prizes -- not just for Literature, but also for Peace.

In his public capacity, he felt bound to stand forward as the conscience of his people. He said, in a July 2007 interview in Der Spiegel, "My views developed in the course of time. But I have always believed in what I did and never acted against it." Yet above all, he saw himself as a writer -- a Russian writer.

For most of us, Russian literature is like a triangle around Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov -- Tolstoy is in his own class. Solzhenitsyn, on the strength of "August 1914" alone, competes in the Tolstoy lane.

He first came to attention in the Soviet Union, and around the world, in 1963, with the publication of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." It is a short work, avoiding anything like sensationalism. Which is why, by great luck, it got permission to be printed -- as was not the case with his later works. But as Galina Vishnevskaya (wife of Mstislav Rostropovich, in whose dacha Solzhenitsyn lived from 1968 while writing much of "The Gulag Archipelago") put it in her autobiography: "The Soviet government had let the genie out of the bottle, and however hard they tried later, they couldn't put it back in."

"Denisovich" was followed by the well-known dramas which attended his whole career as a writer -- especially surrounding his masterpieces, "The Gulag Archipelago" and "The First Circle." Most readers will agree that Solzhenitsyn's status as a world-class writer and sage depended on these works.

In his last years, he showed himself, as always, to be a Russian patriot. But this led him to take political stances that have been seen as anti-American. Indeed, even when he lived in this country and spoke publicly, as at Harvard in 1978, he was hard on much of America's culture -- though he focused on U.S. intellectuals' delusions about communism.

"Prussian Nights" was about his role as an artillery captain in the Soviet Army's 1945 advance into East Prussia, a few weeks before his arrest for having referred disrespectfully to Stalin in a letter to a friend. It is also the first piece of writing in which one finds an American context.

"Forward, forward, the front surges," he wrote, through the darkening winter:

"Studebakers, to support us,

Are hauling lighter three-inch cannons.

'Hey, there, stovepipe! Grab our tail!'

Dodges, the three-quarter ton ones,

Rush the forty-fives to fight.

Shorty mortars ride in place

At the back of Chevrolets. . . ."

I saw these transportation vehicles myself in the Balkans, at the other end of the long front. Not much sign of anti-Americanism there!

But things change. In these last few years of his life, he not only further stressed his Russian nationalism, he made various attacks on American policy and behavior -- such as the NATO bombing of Belgrade (but not the Russian bombing of Grozny).

Some giants of Russian literature appear more preachy than is common in the West, a trait that brings us to what many see as weaknesses in the Russian tradition. First is the feeling, without basis, that one is somehow being cheated -- as in Gogol; second is a tendency to exaggerate or invent. Yet along with these weaknesses there is also painful honesty.

I did not sense the weaknesses when I met him. He was religious and Russian, but without exhibition -- though it became clear he embodied Fyodor Tyuchev's famous dictum that "Russia can neither be grasped by the mind, nor measured by any common yardstick -- no attitude to her other than one of blind faith is admissible."

He remained staunchly anticommunist, noting in the July 2007 interview in Der Spiegel that the October Revolution "broke Russia's back. The Red Terror unleashed by its leaders, their willingness to drown Russia in blood, is the first and foremost proof of it." He also hoped that "the bitter Russian experience, which I have been studying and describing all my life, will be for us a lesson that keeps us from new disastrous breakdowns."

Such was his consistent view of Stalinism. He now combined it with approval of, and honors from, the new Russia that many feel is an obstacle to international peace and amity. Ideas have unintended consequences, even those of geniuses.

Mr. Conquest, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of over 20 books on Soviet history and international affairs, including "The Great Terror: A Reassessment" (40th anniversary edition, Oxford, 2007).

Thank God for the Chinese Consumer

By ZACHARY KARABELL

Don't count out the U.S. consumer. For the past decades, that has been a ready rebuttal against predictions of economic doom and gloom for America and the world. The average American's spending capacity has proven more resilient than anyone could have predicted. At various points over the last 60 years it has supplied the ballast for companies domestic and world-wide.

Many believe that those days are now over. With stretched balance sheets, declining home values and stagnant incomes squeezed by rising fuel and food costs, the legendary U.S. consumer is certainly wobbling, even if not down for the count.

AP

Shanghai

But in the year of the Beijing Olympics, the assumption that a tired U.S. consumer will lead to a long period of stagnation is about to be challenged by the new kid on the block. The health of the global economy used to rest on the back of the American consumer. Now it will rely on the Chinese.

In the U.S. and Europe, public debate centers on China as a low-cost producer that puts workers in the developed world out to pasture; hence the popularity of antitrade legislation. But the real story is the rise of the Chinese consumer, whose passion for spending is remarkably American.

In the past two years, the average gross domestic product per capita in China has passed $2,000, and now is close to $2,500. That average lumps together 250 million affluent and "rising affluent" urban residents with another 500 or 600 million people living in rural areas (and whose income may or may not exceed a dollar a day). Another several hundred million more Chinese are somewhere in between.

That core of perhaps 250 million Chinese consumers -- especially in coastal cities -- actually earn closer to $10,000 a year on average. Given modest living expenses, they are left with considerable disposable income.

OLYMPICS OPINION

Leslie Hook blogs from Beijing, with commentary from Journal editorialists and the editors of the Far Eastern Economic Review.

They are eager to spend this income. True, China has one of the higher personal savings rates in the world -- in excess of 40%. But this doesn't reflect a wariness to spend as much as the absence of things to buy, places to put money other than state-bank savings accounts, and concern about health-care costs. That is now changing. According to a recent McKinsey survey, the Chinese love to shop and spend 9.8 hours per week doing it. The average American shops 3.6 hours per week. Forty-one percent of Chinese said that shopping was their preferred leisure activity.

Chinese consumer spending is currently at about $2 trillion, still barely a fifth of U.S. consumer spending. But the gap is closing: Whereas U.S. spending is growing by about 2% a year, Chinese consumer spending is growing by 20% a year. For many global companies, the rise of the Chinese consumer is the only thing standing between them and a decline in their business.

Take Yum Brands, with its Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut restaurants. In the U.S. and Germany, it is barely growing and has anemic margins. In China, KFC is hugely popular and growing more than 25% a year. It has 2,000-plus outlets that constitute a fraction of KFC's global presence but account for a staggering 20% of the company's total profits.

KFC is one of hundreds of struggling U.S. and multinational companies doing booming business in China. Proctor & Gamble and Oil of Olay found new life selling to the Chinese. Nike has long been an avidly desired brand for young Chinese. Caterpillar, which has seen its U.S. business contract because of a weak residential construction market, has hardly been able to keep pace with the demand for its combines and earth movers in a rapidly industrializing China. Otis Elevators, a division of United Technologies, has an enviable backlog servicing China's endless skyscrapers.

Luxury companies ranging from Louis Vuitton to Versace to Coach look to Chinese affluence as the next wave to replace a waning Japanese market, an aging European one, and an unpredictable America. And, let's not forgot gambling. Macau recently surpassed Las Vegas as the most lucrative gambling destination on the planet. You can always tell a country's proclivities to spend based on its eagerness to gamble.

The rise of the Chinese consumer isn't simply a boom for global companies. Chinese exports to the developed world generate controversy, but China is now importing nearly as much as it exports -- $1.2 trillion a year -- and its imports from the U.S. have been skyrocketing. That doesn't factor in the goods consumed in China made by Chinese subsidiaries of U.S. and foreign companies.

At just about $4 trillion, China still accounts for less than 9% of global economic output. But many would say that, adjusting for purchasing power, it is actually quite a bit larger. In any event, China's rising affluence, uneven though it is, is one reason for the strong feelings of optimism and nationalism on the eve of the Beijing games.

The Chinese consumer is the only thing standing between hundreds of global companies and the abyss. While some U.S. companies may have cut jobs to outsource to China, think of how many more jobs they might be cutting if they were losing money or barely profitable. Caterpillar keeps its factories open in the U.S. because of what it currently needs to sell in China. So do countless other companies.

This is not a passing phenomenon, any more than was the rise of U.S. consumption. Given the chronic underestimation of China's growth, it's likely that Chinese purchases of foreign goods will increase more quickly than we imagine.

Yes, the Chinese like their own brands, such as Li Ning sportswear and Lenovo computers (Lenovo bought out IBM's personal computer business and itself represents a potential future wave of hybrid U.S.-Chinese consumer enterprises). But the Chinese are even hungrier for foreign brands, which are signs of rising affluence and modernity. That hunger is nowhere near sated.

To be sure, there are environmental costs to China's rapid growth, and tensions inherent in its rise. But as we turn to this controversial Olympics, it's worth asking whether any major country has emerged without causing concern elsewhere, and whether the world would now be better off if China were still wedded to rigid communist ideology and mired in poverty -- economic rights are, after all, a vital part of human rights.

Faced with the challenges of domestic growth in the U.S. and Europe in the years ahead, things would look a whole lot worse without the Chinese consumer.

Mr. Karabell is president of River Twice Research. His "Chimerica: How the United States and China Became One," will be published next year by Simon & Schuster.