This article originally appeared in the Russian weekly newspaper Express Khronika in response to an by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn printed in Le Monde and The New York Times. Express Khronika reports on human rights and democratic movements. It started in 1987 after being circulated for years as samizdat. Aleksandr Podrabinek is currently its Editor in Chief. Podrabinek is a well-known human rights activist who served more than eight years in prison for work that included the 1978 publicationof Punitive Medicine, a book which documented Soviet psychiatric abuses.

How does Russia appear to us today? After ten years of doubts, hopes, illusions, and disappointment, people of good sense are coming to the conclusion that the current state of Russia is pre-catastrophic. The path, along which our country is moving, will hardly lead Russia to democracy and a free market economy. And it is already evident that neither are present in contemporary Russia. In this Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is undoubtedly right ("To the current state of Russia" Le Monde, 27 November 1996). However, many are speaking about the catastrophic situation in the country, even communists. Clearly for some this theme is a propaganda trick in a political game; for others it is a way of keeping up with fashion; for still others, who after decades of silence now speak incessantly, it is a way of savouring the taste of freedom of speech. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn cannot be placed in any of these categories. He does not need to earn political capital and never followed fashion, but on the contrary, always said what he thought and knew, at personal risk to himself. If the communists today criticise the government in order to seize power, achieve a revanche, and return Russia to socialism, Solzhenitsyn can in no way be suspected of political games or power seeking. How can one not agree with Solzhenitsyn in his assessment of the current state power in Russia! An irresponsible oligarchy, impudently flouting the law, seems no longer to hide its claims to everything permissible [anything goes] and uncontrollability. And the assessment by Solzhenitsyn of the folly of the election campaign under the "badly constructed electoral system" is absolutely true. And the criminalisation of the economy with the connivance of the authorities is appraised with complete precision - who would dispute this?

Yet despite the accurate assessments and just criticism, one wishes to object to Solzhenitsyn, in the part where he defines ways out of the current state of affairs, and responsibility for it. "With the cohesive resistance of the presidential apparatus, the government, the State Duma, the bosses of political parties and the majority of governors, the creation of organs of local government [self-management] and above all fenced off the possibility of any financial basis for it," writes Solzhenitsyn. This is true, but it is not significant. Is it possible to expect the central authorities to want to decentralise their own power? And what will be the price of local self-government, if all receive their opportunities from the hand of the centre? The misfortune is not that the centre suppresses local self-government and does not finance it, but that there is not a sufficiently strong movement in the provinces for self-government. There is only the bacchanalia of the bureaucrats under signboards of sovereignty and slogans of traditional hostility towards Moscow. It appears that in the provinces this is enough to receive the support of the majority of voters. And where is the aspiration to manage one's life, to take charge of one's fate? There is not even mention of such an aspiration! And if a few do have it, it is submerged in the sea of indifference of the majority towards everything under the sun, including towards themselves and the fate of their children! Local self-government is unthinkable without the awakening of civic consciousness, but it is nowhere to be found, it has not been awakened, and it is unknown when it will awaken. What here are the president, Duma, political bosses and other ill-esteemed figures, who have not given the Russian people local self-government? One must note that during the past ten years there was no serious political repression and the struggle for local self-government did not entail risk to personal liberty. But the activists in the provinces are not visible. If there is no demand, there will be no supply.

It is true that amongst the people "there is no strength left for an explosion", since "during this decade our ruling circles revealed themselves in a moral sense to be no better than the previous communists." Indeed why should the current ruling circles become morally better - it is those very same communists, who are now disguised as democrats. Only yesterday they discarded their party cards, and began to attend church and speak from podiums about human rights. Nor is their audience much better. "Salvation Committees," which Aleksandr Isayevich writes almost sympathetically, arose in the Kuzbass and are controlled by communists. Are they "self-willed local organs... for the defence of their collapsing life?"

If they defend anything, it is the interests of official trade unions, seeking new subsidies from the budget: in words, they are for the miners; in deeds they are for their shady bank operations and personal enrichment. And as has been repeatedly demonstrated, the money not paid to miners for their work is not so much withheld by the centre as by the directors and the trade unions that are obedient to them, in return for a good percentage...

Not for the first time Solzhentisyn denounces Gaidar and Chubais, privatisation and shock therapy (which, we note, did not really happen), the inconsistency and contradictions of economic reform. Indeed today only the lazy do not abuse them. No one, however, can say exactly how this reform should have been conducted, so that no one would abuse its authors. Aleksandr Isayevich also does not explain this. I suspect no one knows, which of course does not prevent anyone from abusing the reformers and giving good advice. Amongst such good advisers, it is hard to include Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who according to Solzhenitsyn "named the Chubais privatisation as 'the greatest catastrophe in world history'." "A striking example," continues Solzhenitsyn, "of when a state gave away the national fortune to shady private persons, without itself receiving any noticeable revenue." But it is already unclear which is bad: giving away the national fortune to shady persons, or for the state not to receive any noticeable revenue. It is understood why Luzhkov considers Chubais guilty of the greatest world catastrophe: the mayor with expressively honest eyes found it hard to endure the distribution, almost free of charge, of national treasures. In Moscow a noticeable revenue was received. Indeed to all appearances it was a very noticeable revenue. We will not specify, however, who precisely received it. There is no confidence that the national fortune in Moscow was distributed amongst persons with stainless biographies and not implicated in corruption.

In general, one would like to agree with Solzhenitsyn. This doesn't always happen, mainly because the strange arrangement of accents evokes bewilderment and even confusion. Is General Lebed "a fresh man, completely alien to the current oligarchy and its vices?" A career military officer, a "hero" of the war in Afghanistan (read: organiser of mass murders), a very adroit politician, skilfully playing the public mood, he is a fresh man, alien to the vices of the oligarchy? If it is so, then to cite Bulgakov, the general is not in his first freshness. The action in Budyonnovsk was a terrorist act? Then why was the entire war waged by Russia in Chechnya not a terrorist act? Furthermore. Solzhenitsyn describes the Chechen militiamen as "the enemy." Whose enemy? This cursory word grates on the ear and evokes bewilderment: for me the greater enemy is the federal forces, not the Chechen separatists. As if in regret, Solzhenitsyn states that at some moment the Moscow authorities "allowed the Chechen fighters without fighting to regain all their lost districts." If one did not know that at the beginning of the Russian-Chechen conflict (when one did not yet even think of war), Solzhenitsyn proposed to give Chechnya full independence, then one might have thought that the renowned writer supports the war unleashed by Moscow. At the end of his article in 'Le Monde,' Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes that the entire destructive course of events in Russia during the past ten years occurred because the authorities bunglingly borrowed foreign models and neglected their own Russian experience. This claim of Solzhenitsyn is hardly absolutely true. Both good and bad can be found in foreign models, and in our indigenous ones. The question is, who is searching. The question is, who and what do they want to find. There is no doubt that Solzhenitsyn is interested in the truth. Precisely for this reason, it is worth objecting to him, when one has such objections.

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