Mother Russia's prophet returns; BOOK REVIEW

The Russian Question at the End of the Twentieth Century Alexander Solzhenitsyn Harvill Press, 7.99

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has become an almost forgotten figure. Thirty years ago he was the scourge of the Soviet establishment and darling of the Western mass media. Once he arrived in the West in 1974, though, he was summarily dismissed as a reactionary, and for 20 years he has largely refrained from political statements while devoting himself to a cycle of novels on the Russian revolution.

He has a way, however, of bouncing back and raising the issues that really matter. In 1973, for example, in his Letter to the Soviet Leaders, he predicted accurately the way in which the Soviet Union would end.

Now he has done it again. This is largely a work of history, and I would have some quibbles about his historical judgements. But the most important thing is that he extracts from his analysis the main question for Russians today, which is: are they to be Russkii or Rossiiskii?

This is indeed the fundamental dilemma, yet it is not even reflected in the English language. Russkii is the word Russians use for their language, their culture and their people. Rossiiskii refers to the state and the multinational empire. The Russian empire, both Tsarist and Soviet, has flourished by exploiting, coercing and stunting the Russian people, by preventing them from evolving to full nationhood. Russians have yet to generate a national feeling that does not involve both the imperial domination of others, and their abject subjection to their own leaders.

I am not sure, however, that Solzhenitsyn appreciates the reasons why Russia became an empire and a European great power in the first place. He often writes as if there was some other option, as if it was sheer frivolity for 18th-century Russian empresses to worry about whether or not a Saxon Elector occupied the throne of Poland. But the fact is that - unlike, say, Spain - Russia had no Pyrenees at its back to safeguard its vulnerable territories against other European powers. As a result it has frequently been invaded from the west.

Right now, for the first time in its history, there is no major strategic threat from the west.Given such relative security, Solzhenitsyn is right to believe that Russia should concentrate on its most important task, which is to heal the centuries-old rift between its elites and its people, to form a united nation where none has previously existed. Solzhenitsyn rightly comments that there are "two Russian nations: the immense provincial- village heartland, and an entirely disparate minority in the capital, alien to it in thought and Westernised in culture."

He is right, too, to suggest that the impulse must come from below, from the local productive economy and from locally elected government. He wants a moral revolution, one of self-limitation, and the central government is poorly suited to creating it.

Self-limitation also means finding a way of living in peace with the neighbouring, newly independent states with artificial borders where Russians still live in large numbers.

Solzhenitsyn rejects solutions involving force, yet often writes as if he believes Ukraine, Belarus and parts of Kazakhstan should revert to Russia. If they do, it must be by their own choice, and those who wish Russia to become a real nation, with a right to its own patriotism, should emphasise this.

Solzhenitsyn has raised absolutely the right questions, but in his answers I would like to see less vague moral teaching and more concern about practical solutions to the agonisingly difficult problems Russians face today.

The writer is professor of Russian history, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London.