August 1914

"He’s the antithesis of Tolstoy in a way. August 1914 and the Red Wheel novels are a polemic against Tolstoy because he sees this Tolstoyan inevitability of history and he says: That’s wrong! People need to make a stand and try to change things for the better! August 1914 is the 20th-century equivalent of War and Peace . But Solzhenitsyn rejects Tolstoy’s belief that individuals can’t change history. He castigates General Samsonov who failed to resist the German invasion in 1914 and he abhors the sort of Tolstoyan fatalism that seizes the Russian leadership. Solzhenitsyn viewed 1914 as Russia’s last opportunity to save itself from the Bolshevik horror. It was that moment when people united against a common enemy, but because of political shenanigans, lack of will and incompetence, that was lost. It sounds serious, but he’s quite mocking and joking. It’s a diatribe against Bolshevism and all its horrors and he uses every weapon including humour. There are nice passages about Lenin and his lover, Inessa Armand, who he took up with when he got fed up with Krupskaya. He describes Lenin having this great stroke of luck meeting the beautiful Inessa and Nadia Krupskaya goes along with it because free love had always been the policy of the Bolsheviks. In the early days it was a rejection of bourgeois morality but they got rid of it quite soon when they realised it was a recipe for disaster. Anyway, Lenin suddenly thinks that if Inessa believed in free love in theory then perhaps she was actually practising it! You see Lenin getting into this cold sweat and worrying that she was going off with someone else. Solzhenitsyn is using every trick of a great writer to pursue his tirade against Bolshevism. He describes how Lenin is in Zurich when revolution breaks out in Russia. Lenin’s eating his dinner and he looks round and says: ‘A revolution in Russia? What rubbish!’ So he goes on eating his boiled beef, making sure he gets ‘a good slice of the fatty bit’. It’s just lovely. I do. It’s one of my favourites. But all this stuff about the revolutionaries in exile refusing to believe that revolution had broken out is absolutely true. They all held this Marxian vision that you can’t have a socialist revolution until you’ve had your interim period of bourgeois democracy. This whole doctrine of Marxism – Marx thought Russia was the least likely country ever to have a socialist revolution, so when it happened Engels had do a bit of hasty revising: he had to rewrite the doctrine of Marxism to explain why the socialist revolution had taken place in Russia, even though Marx said it never would."