"Toward end, Solzhenitsyn embraced Putin's Russia" by Peter Finn, Washington Post | August 5, 2008
MOSCOW - In the last years of his long and stubbornly contrarian life, Alexander Solzhenitsyn finally found a political system he could embrace: Vladimir Putin's Russia.
"Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people," Solzhenitsyn told the German magazine Der Spiegel in a 2007 interview, when Putin was still president. "And he started to do what was possible, a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard-pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favorably by other governments."
That Putin, a former KGB officer, should find an ardent champion among the most prominent victims of the agency he once served might seem bizarre. But Solzhenitsyn, who died Sunday at age 89, was always a very Russian puzzle: a brilliant curmudgeon, wrapped in heroism, inside a whopping ego. He was a man who exposed the murderous brutality of the Soviet Union but also lambasted what he saw as the spiritual vacuity of the West.
Solzhenitsyn had long signaled in his writing and speeches that the Russia of his dreams was no clone of Western-style democracy. It was instead a place apart from and suspicious of the West, acutely aware of its destiny as a great power and unique culture and steeped in the values of the Russian Orthodox Church and Slavic nationalism.
For the former dissident, who returned in 1994 after 20 years in exile to a country whose raw capitalism and marauding tycoons horrified him, Putin became the country's savior.
Putin, who now serves as prime minister, remembered Solzhenitsyn with equal affection yesterday.
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Also read America Vanquished to see why Putin is beloved in Russia.
