Russia's Heroic Literary Curmudgeon

Onetime Dissident Acclaimed Even by Those Who Disagreed With Him


By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 5, 2008; Page A06

MOSCOW, Aug. 4 -- 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 Monday.

"We are proud that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was our compatriot and contemporary," said Putin in a statement released by his office. "We will remember him as a strong, courageous person with a great sense of dignity. His activities as a writer and public figure, his entire long, thorny life journey will remain for us a model of true devotion, selfless service to the people, motherland and the ideals of freedom, justice and humaneness."

President Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's successor, also mourned the writer, saying Solzhenitsyn "worked incessantly to form moral and spiritual ideals, seeing them as an extremely important foundation supporting the state and society, and fought for their triumph."

Solzhenitsyn wrote for eight hours Sunday, as he did most days, and retired to bed at 8:30 p.m., according to Lyudmila Saraskina, one of Solzhenitsyn's biographers, who spoke to the writer's wife, Natalia. On Sunday night, he complained that he didn't feel well, and the family called an ambulance. Efforts to revive him failed, and he died at home as he had long wished, Saraskina said.

"Sunday night, he was very pale and couldn't breathe," Saraskina said in a telephone interview. "But he spent his last day wonderfully. He worked all day, writing at his desk. Recently he told me that now he only worked eight hours a day when before he used to work for 16. He thought it was very little, seven or eight hours, and he complained about it."

Russians will be able to pay their last respects to Solzhenitsyn at the headquarters of the Russian Academy of Sciences on Tuesday. He will be buried Wednesday at the Donskoy Monastery cemetery in Moscow following a funeral in the monastery's cathedral, according to a statement by the Russian Orthodox Church.

"Severe trials befell Solzhenitsyn, as they did millions of other people in this country," the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told the Russian news agency Interfax. "He was among the first to speak out about the brutality of Stalin's regime and about the people who experienced it but were not crushed. . . . To his last days he continued to work for Russia to get a worthy future, to become a truly free and democratic country, not just break away from the totalitarian past. We owe him much." Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, died in 1953.

Solzhenitsyn once described Gorbachev's administration as "amazingly politically naive, inexperienced and irresponsible towards the country."

He was even more critical of Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, telling Der Spiegel that Yeltsin started "a mass, multibillion-dollar fire sale of the national patrimony. Wanting to gain the support of regional leaders, Yeltsin called directly for separatism and passed laws that encouraged and empowered the collapse of the Russian state. This, of course, deprived Russia of its historical role for which it had worked so hard, and lowered its standing in the international community. All this met with even more hearty Western applause."

For Russia's small and powerless opposition and some of the country's writers and former dissidents, Solzhenitsyn was a polarizing figure, and his passing has been met with ambivalence as well as acclaim.

The writer was again praised Monday for his searing and unmatched chronicles of the brutal camp system known as the Gulag, where Solzhenitsyn and millions of compatriots either suffered or died. "When Solzhenitsyn first appeared on the Soviet literary scene, it was the greatest news," said the Russian writer Vladimir Voinovich, in a telephone interview. "No one wrote about Stalin's camps as he did. His impact was sensational, and I was one of his admirers."

But in a 1986 novel, "Moscow 2042," Voinovich mocked Solzhenitsyn by means of a thinly disguised character, a mad, dictatorial egoist bent on becoming the king of Russia.

"For him, Putin was an exemplary autocrat," Voinovich said in the interview. "For me, a great writer must defend mankind, and he loses his reputation if he becomes too close to the highest power."

Arseny Roginsky, head of Memorial, a Russian human rights organization dedicated to the investigation of political persecution in the Soviet Union and the commemoration of its victims, suggested that Solzhenitsyn's legacy is greater than any of his individual political views.

"Solzhenitsyn said many things I radically disagree with, including his comments on Putin," Roginsky said in a telephone interview. "But the meaning of Solzhenitsyn is not lessened because of this. Through his books -- "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago" -- he gave birth to the whole tradition of remembering the tragic past of Russia, and the connection of this memory with today and tomorrow, and building a civilized Russia."
Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant and Kremlin insider, said in an interview that Solzhenitsyn came to view Putin as "the man who restored the country, the man who saved the nation and didn't allow it to turn back to totalitarianism."

Indeed, in rare interviews, Solzhenitsyn brushed aside Western criticism of Putin's rule and the centralization of power in the Kremlin. "Of course Russia is not a democratic country yet; it is just starting to build democracy," he told Der Spiegel. "It is all too easy to take Russia to task with a long list of omissions, violations and mistakes. But did not Russia clearly and unambiguously stretch its helping hand to the West after 9/11? Only a psychological shortcoming, or else a disastrous shortsightedness, can explain the West's irrational refusal of this hand."

In 2007, Solzhenitsyn accepted a lifetime humanitarian achievement award from Putin, a state award he had refused when it was offered by Gorbachev and then Yeltsin. Putin traveled to the writer's home in Troitse-Lykovo, outside Moscow, to present the award.

"I, for my part, drew the writer's attention to the fact that some steps we are taking today are largely in accordance with what Solzhenitsyn once wrote about," said Putin, speaking to journalists after the meeting.

SOURCE: