The main value of the book Zaslavskaya saw not so much in its description and criticism of the current situation as in the revelation of its deep roots. She appreciated the report’s specific proposals, ‘which are capable of generating a consistent public policy in this area and halting or curbing the excessive growth of social inequality, mitigating its consequences, and delivering equality of opportunity for Russia’s citizens’. Zaslavskaya comments that the overall thrust of the policies proposed is predominantly social democratic, and concludes: ‘Russia currently lacks a powerful social democratic movement to make one of its main priorities the battle against unjustifiable social and economic inequality. This book provides substantial material for developing the thinking and political programme of just such a movement.’
The researchers’ ideas and conclusions struck me as highly germane and practical. I am sure they remain of importance today.
Life went on, as inevitably as the changing of the seasons, alternately joyful and sad. When I think back to 2008, two events, quite different but each in its own way of great personal significance for me, come to mind. Alexander Solzhenitsyn died, and my great-granddaughter Sasha was born.
Solzhenitsyn and I were bound in a relationship of mutual respect and critical curiosity and we had public disagreements. We met one time at a reception in the Swedish Embassy in honour of Russia’s Nobel Prize winners. Solzhenitsyn was in good spirits and enjoying the attention. He came over and we greeted each other warmly. ‘Mikhail Sergeyevich,’ he said, ‘I may have offended you. In recent years I have made many critical remarks, including some about you. You must understand, it is not from ill-will but because my heart bleeds for Russia.’ His tone was friendly and sincere. I replied: ‘Alexander Isayevich, this is a good day, honouring you and other winners of the Prize. I believe you and I have many things to talk about and hope we can find the time. Let’s meet and talk.’
It was not to be. Either he was ill, or I was, and then the day came to take our farewell of him. I was at the funeral service at the Academy of Sciences and expressed my condolences to Solzhenitsyn’s wife, Natalia Dmitrievna, his family and friends. I described my attitude to what he had done:
We are bidding farewell to a great man and a major writer, a Nobel Prize winner, a man with a unique destiny whose name will remain in the annals of Russian history. He, like millions of other citizens of our country, was subjected to severe ordeals. Solzhenitsyn was one of the first to speak out loud about the inhumanity of the Stalinist regime and about people who were not broken by their ordeals. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago are books that altered the thinking of millions of people, compelling them to re-evaluate the past and present. It is impossible to overstate the contribution they made to overcoming totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn completed his life’s work worthily, continuing to fight to the end of his days to try to ensure that Russia not only broke away from the clutches of the past, but also moved forward to a condign future, becoming a truly free and democratic country. We owe him a great deal.
And in October we had a new arrival in our family: my granddaughter, Ksenia, gave birth to a daughter, my first great-granddaughter, Sasha. She was a sturdy baby, weighing in at 3.9 kilograms or 8.6 pounds, and 52 centimetres or 20 inches tall. Ksenia sent a photo of her new baby to my mobile phone. The little girl looks just like her mother, only with black eyebrows. Olga Vandysheva, a correspondent of Komsomolskaya Pravda, asked me: ‘Did you know the Buddhists believe that someone who lives to see their great-grandchildren will go straight to heaven?’ ‘What is there to do there?’ I replied; ‘I am used to working.’
The second half of 2008 was marked by two events with the impact of a political earthquake. I will not attempt to quantify their force, but it was immediately clear that their destructive consequences would last for a long time. I am referring to the military conflict in Transcaucasia and the global financial and economic crisis.
Saakashvili’s adventure and the West: my reaction
On the night of 7 August 2008, Georgian armed forces, after firing on Russian peacekeepers, subjected the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali to a missile bombardment and occupied it. The Georgian authorities publicly declared that they were beginning to ‘restore constitutional order’ in South Ossetia. (Their wording exactly mimicked the formulation used by Boris Yeltsin in 1994 when he decided to attempt to resolve the problem of Chechnya by military means.) Russia had no option but to react. In difficult circumstances, with the Russian armed forces not yet fully recovered from the chaos of the 1990s, President Medvedev and the army acted decisively. The Georgian troops were expelled from South Ossetia.
I was on holiday, but of course closely followed the information coming in, trying not to miss a single item. I suppose what incensed me no less than the adventurism of the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in ordering the bombardment and attack on a peaceful city was the reaction of many politicians and most of the media in the West, which declared Russia the aggressor for ‘attacking little Georgia’. One of the first to expostulate that ‘Russian aggression must not go unpunished’ was US Vice-President Dick Cheney, thought to be the main instigator of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
I responded immediately, first in a brief interview with ITAR-TASS, then in greater detail on 13 August with a major article in Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Meanwhile, Western politicians and journalists for the most part continued their mud-slinging. Only after many months was it finally acknowledged in the Tagliavini Commission’s report, prepared under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, that the hostilities had been started by Georgia.
I was fighting the Western spin on the incursion literally every day. Very soon, two of my articles were published in Russia and the international press and I was interviewed by Larry King of CNN and by French and Italian reporters. My article in Rossiyskaya Gazeta was published the following day in the Washington Post, and I was immediately approached by the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. I wrote for both of them, and the Russian text was published in Novaya Gazeta. Here are those articles, with my initial reaction and ‘preliminary conclusions’. In the first article, I wrote:
The events of the past week in South Ossetia can only cause everyone pain and concern. The deaths of thousands of people, with tens of thousands turned into refugees, the destruction of towns and villages is completely unjustifiable. It is a great tragedy and a warning to everybody.
The roots of the present tragic situation can be traced back to a decision by Georgia’s separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish the autonomy of South Ossetia. That placed a time-bomb under the territorial integrity of Georgia. Every time a succession of Georgian leaders attempted to impose their will by force, they only worsened the situation there and in Abkhazia, where the problems are analogous. Fresh wounds were added to old historical grudges.