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But this, as Solzhenitsyn points out, is no way to write history. "My object," he declares, "is to examine the social reasons for this unheard-of phenomenon: that several hundred thousand young people took up arms against their mother country on the side of her worst enemy. We must consider who was to blame—these young people or the motherland. You cannot explain it by some inborn biological instinct for treachery.
In general," he concludes, "the war showed us that the worst thing on earth is to be a Russian."
The Kremlin would clearly have preferred a harsher punishment for Solzhenitsyn had he been less famous and more vulnerable, but exile had its political advantages. The author's deportation was unlikely to cause more than an intense but brief flurry of dismay at the 34-nation European Security Conference currently meeting in Geneva.
Plans for the Brezhnev-Nixon summit next spring continued in Washington, and the White House declined to comment on the deportation. Predictably, Democratic Senator Henry Jackson called Nixon's silence "deplorable." He said that "the Administration has posed a false choice between avoiding nuclear war and keeping faith with the traditional value of individual liberty."
High-level State Department officials, on the other hand, were relieved that the writer was out of prison before Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was obliged to face the issue of his arrest. Explained one U.S. Government official: "Kissinger was rescued from a terribly difficult situation. He would have had to deplore the arrest or lose a great deal of stature. From his standpoint, he was very lucky." Kissinger's statement was distinctly cool. He said that Solzhenitsyn would be welcome to settle in the U.S., but added that "our constant view has been that the necessity for detente does not reflect approbation of the Soviet domestic structure." That necessity, in Kissinger's view, is rooted in the threat to the world's survival posed by the U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals; hence the absolute priority given to a measure of concord and understanding between the two superpowers.
From that perspective, the Solzhenitsyn case has long been regarded by the Nixon Administration as troublesome for the course of detente, however just the writer's case and criticisms of the Soviet regime. In turn, Solzhenitsyn has often been cited by opponents of East-West accommodation as the symbol and proof of the Kremlin's resistance to any ideological or social change.