A Defense of Czarist Rule : Moscow Publishes Solzhenitsyn Extract

MOSCOW-A leading Soviet weekly today published a defense of Russian czarist rule by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, together with a front-page photograph of the writer now living in exile in the United States.

The extract from the author’s massive “Red Wheel” cycle appeared in the Writers’ Union organ, Literary Gazette, which once denounced Solzhenitsyn as a vile slanderer whom it consigned to “the rubbish heap of history.”

Its appearance marked a new stage in the re-evaluation of Russian history, under way for the last three years.

Up to now, Soviet publications with a wide readership have usually portrayed czarist rule as almost totally black and ministers in the last czar’s government as incompetent or tyrannical.

But the Solzhenitsyn piece, and Literary Gazette’s commentary, drew a sympathetic portrait of the last czarist agriculture minister, Alexander Rittikh, and his efforts to solve bread shortages and win the confidence of peasants.

Recently the official Writers’ Union, which expelled Solzhenitsyn in 1970 as an “ideological enemy” of the Soviet system, voted to readmit him and appealed to the country’s new Parliament to restore his citizenship.

The writer, a professed monarchist who lives in Vermont, has indicated he might consider making a visit to the Soviet Union but would not yet want to return and take up permanent residence again.

The extract depicts progressives and left-wingers in the pre-revolutionary Duma parliament as working to seize power rather than help solve urgent food problems.

The villains are opposition figures Alexander Kerensky, Pavel Milyukov and Nikolai Chkheidze, who entered the provisional government formed after the czar was ousted. It was itself overthrown by the Bolsheviks eight months later.

The introduction to the Solzhenitsyn extract said Rittikh suggested a way out of the shortages of early 1917, but Milyukov and Kerensky “had no time for boring facts on food supplies--a struggle for power was under way in which all means were good.”