This appeal was written in April 1981, in immediate response to an invitation to participate in a Conference on Ukrainian-Russian Relations to be held on 8–9 October 1981 in Hamilton, Ontario. The original Russian text was first published in Russkaya Mysl (18 June 1981) and Novoye Russkoye Slovo (20 June 1981) in advance of that year’s Captive Nations Week. It was also published and debated in several Ukrainian émigré newspapers, e.g. Svoboda (5, 6, and 7 August 1981). In Russia, it was first published in the journal Zvezda (1993: no. 12). In English, an uncredited translation appeared in Potichnyj Peter J et al., Ukraine and Russia in Their Historical Encounter (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, University of Alberta, Edmonton: 1992), 332–35. The below 2023 English translation by Ignat Solzhenitsyn is the first authorized rendering of this text into English.

To the Conference on Russian-Ukrainian Relations in Toronto and to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute

April 1981

Most Esteemed Gentlemen:

I cordially thank you for inviting me to attend your conference. Unfortunately, my intensive work schedule has made it impossible for me, for many years now, to travel and participate in public events.

However, your invitation gives me both a reason and a right to expound certain considerations in writing.

There is no doubt that the Russian-Ukrainian question is one of the major questions of modernity and, certainly, of crucial importance to our peoples. But, in my view, the degree to which flames of passion are being fanned around it, and the resulting fever pitch, are truly ruinous.

In the Stalin camps, my Russian friends and I were always as one with the Ukrainians, one solid wall against Communism, and between us there arose no reproaches or accusations. And in recent years, the Russian Social Fund that I created has extended broad help to Ukrainian and Lithuanian political prisoners, certainly to no less an extent than to the Russian; the Fund makes no distinction between nationalities but considers only who is victimized by Communism.

In this current intense rage of passions—is there not an émigré affliction, a loss of a sense of direction? Very little is actually being done to combat Communism (indeed, some major émigré groupings are still contaminated by socialist utopias), while the whole thrust of passions is wasted on accusing one’s brethren. I would propose that we not overestimate how much an émigré community understands and conceives of the true sentiments in its homeland, in particular among those who left long ago or were even born abroad. And if your conference seeks to initiate a fundamental dialogue on Russian-Ukrainian relations, you must never, not for a minute, forget that it is about relations between peoples, and not between émigrés.

And what a pity that this dialogue quickly loses all moral altitude, all conceivable depth, all historical perspective, but is instead reduced solely to the sharpest issue: separatism or federation (as if there would be no further problems on the other side of this divide). Maybe I too am expected to weigh in only on this one single question?

I have repeatedly stated, and reiterate here, that no one should retain anyone else by force, none of the antagonists should resort to coercion towards the other side, nor towards one’s own side, nor to a whole people or any small minority it encompasses, for each minority contains, in turn, its own minority. And the wishes of a group of fifty people should be heard and heeded just the same as the wishes of fifty million. Whatever the circumstances, the local viewpoint should be recognized and implemented. And therefore, all problems can only truly be settled by the local population and not in remote émigré disputes tainted by misshapen emotions.

The distorted atmosphere here is well known, alas. But I will provide one characteristic example: Last year, in the American journal Foreign Affairs, I published an article whose entire content and purpose was to dissuade the West from its self-soothing perception of the monstrous, 150-year-long (if not 200-year-long, beginning with the Jacobins) Communist evil as a Russian national phenomenon. I emphasized that all peoples who have been captured by Communism during any decade and in any part of the planet are (or may become) its victims. It would seem that, in our day and age, when Communism already swarms in the festering hotbeds of four continents and has seized half the world, having found among each nation willing servants to do its bidding—such a false preconception could not hold, especially not among those peoples and nations who have experienced Communism at close proximity. Yet, to my amazement, a certain segment of the Ukrainian community in the United States reacted vehemently and paradoxically to my article (which contained not one bad word about Ukraine). For example, there was L. Dobryansky’s article, placed in the Congressional Record in June 1980, and then the pamphlet “Captured Nations in 1980”, published by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. Just for maintaining that the Russian people, like all others, were enslaved by Communism (and having claimed no special rights for them of any kind)—for this alone I was showered with a fusillade of accusations of purportedly championing “militant nationalism”, “Russian chauvinism,” and even likened to a “Communist quisling”. Dobryansky’s article teems with a frenzied, obsessively repeated, hatred of Russians, while Russia is interpreted according to Marx, and today’s Communism referred to as mythical! The pamphlet also resorts to a popular Leninist formula about Russia. Even today, the authors of the pamphlet persist in referring to Mainland China and Tibet as countries seized by Russians, and to the Russian nation as the general oppressor of the world (whereby the Russians themselves are supposed to thrive?…). In summer 1980, at a Ukrainian meeting in Buffalo during “Captive Nations Week”, the main speaker developed this idea as follows: Solzhenitsyn is indifferent to the captive peoples, he is sick and needs treatment (excellent Soviet phraseology). “Communism is a myth!”, he proclaimed. “It is not the Communists but the Russians who want to conquer the whole world.” (Russians —whose birth rate has fallen below replacement level, whose millions are starving, whose advocates of religious and national consciousness are flung into prison.)

These emphatic professions that “Communism is a myth” can only serve to make us all slaves, on five continents and for ten generations ahead. Apparently, there is no need for America to sober up and take stock of world Communism—it does not exist.

Well, gentlemen, in such an atmosphere and in such a state of benightedness there is no point in discussing anything, and any dialogues and conferences will be fruitless. A sound assessment of both present and future can only be founded on an understanding of Communism as an international, historical and metaphysical evil, rather than a Muscovite one. (And any socialist angle invariably camouflages and softens the villainous irrevocability of Communism.)

One listens to these smug assailants and wonders: do they really take themselves to be Christians? Surely, sowing hatred between peoples has never done good to any side. Mutual goodwill should supersede and transcend razor-edged controversies. The principle of self-limitation and repentance must underlie any approach to national problems.

I am particularly pained by the fierce intolerance that rages around the Russian-Ukrainian question (ruinous to both nations and beneficial only to their enemies) because of my own mixed Russian-Ukrainian origin, and because I was raised under the combined influence of both these cultures, and because I have never experienced, nor do I now, any antagonism between the two. On various occasions I have written and publicly spoken of Ukraine and her people, of the tragedy of the Ukrainian famine. I have quite a few old friends in Ukraine and, to me, the sufferings of Russians and Ukrainians alike invariably occupy equal space in the rows of Communist-induced suffering. In my heart’s perception there is no room for a Russian-Ukrainian conflict and should, God forbid, the issue ever come to a head I can safely affirm: never, under any circumstances, shall I take part in a Russian-Ukrainian clash or allow my sons to do so—no matter what reckless hotheads might try to drag us there.

But amongst the mass of population that suffers from Communism day in and day out there is no mutual intolerance; these questions are viewed more deeply and more responsibly. Our mutual twentieth-century problems cannot be solved solely by determining that, once upon a time, one of our branches fell under the Tatars and the other under the Poles, or by sussing out whether Ilya Muromets served Kiev as a Russian or a Ukrainian. The Russian-Ukrainian dialogue must not simply tow the line of divergence and division but ought also embrace the path of a commonality not easily dismissed. Out of the sufferings and national ordeals of our peoples (all peoples of Eastern Europe, in fact) we must learn to draw the experience not of discord but of unity. Six years ago I already attempted to express this concept in an appeal to the Strasbourg conference of Communist-enslaved peoples; and I attach it here with a request to make it public at your conference.

And this is the sum of what I would have to say in the discussion you propose.

I consider this communication to be an open letter.

With very best wishes,

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Translated from the Russian by Ignat Solzhenitsyn;
© 2023 English-language copyright Ignat Solzhenitsyn