On October 20, a monument to Alexander Solzhenitsyn was dismantled in central Vladivostok, where it had stood since 2015. It was supposed to be moved to a park commemorating victims of political repression, but the very next day it was unexpectedly put back. The official explanation was that it was too large for the new site. Vladivostok’s role in this story is no coincidence. It was there that Solzhenitsyn began his journey across Russia in 1994, after 20 years in exile. The writer traveled across the country to Moscow by train. After returning, he became active in politics, criticizing Gorbachev and Yeltsin but speaking favorably of Putin. The feeling is mutual: Putin honors Solzhenitsyn’s memory despite the writer’s views on the USSR and its suppression of dissent. At Meduza’s request, historian Alexey Uvarov explains how Solzhenitsyn’s contradictory views took shape — and how they foreshadowed the Russian-Ukrainian war.
From Kislovodsk to Vermont: How Solzhenitsyn survived war and the camps and ended up in exile
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk in 1918. His father died before he was born, and his mother raised him alone in Rostov-on-Don. The family was poor, but Solzhenitsyn developed a love of literature as a child. While still in school, he dreamed of writing a novel about the 1917 revolution. Like many of his peers, he sincerely believed in communism and saw the revolution as the first step toward building a just society. In 1936, Solzhenitsyn enrolled in the physics and mathematics department at Rostov University. He continued to dream of a writing career.
Solzhenitsyn was drafted into the army in 1941. After artillery school, he was sent to the front, where he commanded a sound-ranging battery, rose to the rank of captain, and received two military decorations. During the war, however, he began to question Joseph Stalin’s policies. Solzhenitsyn had not yet rejected communism itself. He believed Stalin had distorted Lenin’s ideas and that the Soviet system needed to return to its original principles. He discussed these thoughts in letters to his school friend Nikolai Vitkevich. Military censors read the letters, and in February 1945 Solzhenitsyn was arrested at the front. In July, the Special Council of the NKVD, the Soviet internal affairs agency, sentenced him to eight years in labor camps on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and attempting to establish an anti-Soviet organization.
Solzhenitsyn’s views gradually changed in prison. In conversations with other prisoners, he encountered criticism of Marxism itself as well as of Stalin. In time, the writer concluded that repression was inherent in the Soviet system, rather than simply a consequence of Stalin’s mistakes. He abandoned communism and returned to the Christian faith in which he had been raised. Solzhenitsyn spent part of his sentence in a “sharashka,” a secret research institute staffed by prisoners, and the final three years in a camp for political prisoners in Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan. After his release in 1953, he was sent into indefinite internal exile in Kazakhstan. Only in 1956 was Solzhenitsyn able to return to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic; a year later, his conviction was overturned and his name cleared. He settled in Ryazan, took a job as a schoolteacher, and continued writing.
The Soviet “Thaw” gave him an opportunity to publish his work. In 1962, Alexander Tvardovsky, editor in chief of the journal Novy Mir, secured Nikita Khrushchev’s personal permission to publish Solzhenitsyn’s novella “Odin den Ivana Denisovicha” (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”). The work attracted enormous interest and immediately made its author famous. But while the Soviet leadership was prepared to condemn Stalin’s crimes, it would not condemn the system of party dictatorship itself. After Khrushchev’s removal in 1964, Solzhenitsyn’s works were gradually barred from publication.
The writer had no intention of renouncing his work. In 1967, he openly challenged censorship, while his novel “V kruge pervom” (“In the First Circle”) and novella “Rakovy korpus” (“Cancer Ward”) circulated in samizdat — clandestinely copied editions — and were published abroad. In 1969, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Writers’ Union. A year later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
His conflict with the authorities culminated in the publication of “Arkhipelag GULAG” (“The Gulag Archipelago”), which Solzhenitsyn had worked on in secret for many years. Drawing on his own experiences and the testimony of hundreds of former prisoners, he showed that mass repression had begun under Lenin and was rooted in the very nature of the Soviet state. The first volume was published in Paris in December 1973. By then, Solzhenitsyn was offering his own vision of the country’s future as well as criticizing its rulers.
That same year, he sent the Soviet leadership his “Pismo vozhdyam Sovetskogo Soyuza” (“Letter to the Soviet Leaders”), calling on them to abandon communist ideology and concentrate on domestic problems. The writer did not, however, advocate a transition to Western liberal democracy and was open to retaining authoritarian rule. In February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and expelled to West Germany. He later moved to Switzerland, then to the United States in 1976.
The Vermont recluse: How Solzhenitsyn became a critic of both the USSR and the West
In 1976, Solzhenitsyn settled with his wife and children in the small town of Cavendish, Vermont. He bought a house surrounded by woods, where he could work away from journalists and public attention. His main project was the historical epic “Krasnoye Koleso” (“The Red Wheel”), which he had conceived in his youth. In it, the writer sought to understand the causes of the 1917 revolution and the Bolsheviks’ rise to power. He studied archival documents and eyewitness accounts, then spent months working on the manuscript.
Solzhenitsyn also maintained his ties to the USSR. After the publication of “The Gulag Archipelago,” he had established a fund to help Soviet political prisoners and their families, donating royalties from the book’s sales. Human rights activists secretly distributed the money inside the country. In 1977, Alexander Ginzburg, one of the fund’s leaders, was arrested, but the organization continued its work. Solzhenitsyn also collected Russian émigrés’ recollections to preserve accounts of the revolution, wars, and Soviet repression.
Although the writer rarely appeared in public, he continued to make political statements. His views differed markedly from those of many other critics of the USSR. Solzhenitsyn considered communism a destructive ideology, but he did not see Western society as a model for Russia’s future. This became particularly clear in June 1978, when he addressed Harvard University’s graduating class. Instead of praising American democracy, the writer criticized Western materialism, the excessive emphasis on individual rights, the influence of the press, and politicians’ unwillingness to confront communist regimes. The speech prompted debate in the press: Many critics accused Solzhenitsyn of ingratitude toward the country that had given him refuge and of rejecting liberal democracy.
Solzhenitsyn also clashed with other émigrés from the USSR. His dispute with the writer Andrei Sinyavsky was particularly bitter. In “Nashi plyuralisty” (“Our Pluralists”), an article published in 1983, Solzhenitsyn accused some émigré intellectuals of having collaborated with the Soviet authorities and now claiming the right to determine Russia’s future. His opponents, in turn, criticized his Russian nationalism and authoritarian views.
Christianity was central to Solzhenitsyn’s worldview. In May 1983, he received the Templeton Prize for his contribution to religious thought. Speaking in London to mark the award, the writer said that society’s abandonment of faith in God was the main cause of Russia’s 20th-century tragedies. He saw this loss of faith as the source of both Soviet totalitarianism and the moral crisis in Western society.
In 1985, Solzhenitsyn remained one of the world’s best-known Russian writers, but his works were still not being published in his homeland. The possibility of returning to Russia seemed remote.
Perestroika and the return to Russia: How Solzhenitsyn planned the country’s future from exile
Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985 changed conditions in the USSR. His policies of perestroika and glasnost allowed previously forbidden subjects, including Stalinist repression, to be discussed openly. The authorities were in no hurry to allow Solzhenitsyn’s works back into print, however. In 1987, Novy Mir editor in chief Sergei Zalygin said the journal planned to publish “Cancer Ward,” and the following year he approached the writer himself. But Solzhenitsyn set a condition: “The Gulag Archipelago” had to be published in the USSR first. He believed readers needed access to this book about the Soviet system’s crimes before any of his other works.
In 1989, Novy Mir finally began publishing chapters of “The Gulag Archipelago.” Other works by the writer soon began appearing in the USSR, and he again became a subject of public debate. In August 1990, Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship and that of his wife. The writer was not yet planning to return, however. He wanted to finish “The Red Wheel” and secure the formal dismissal of the treason charge brought against him before his expulsion in 1974.
Solzhenitsyn was already taking an active part in discussions about the country’s future. In September 1990, Komsomolskaya Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta published his article “Kak nam obustroit Rossiyu?” (“Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals”), with a print run of nearly 27 million copies.
The writer took it as a given that the communist system was doomed and proposed his own plan for transforming the state. He called for abandoning imperial ambitions and not using force to hold on to republics seeking independence.
At the same time, Solzhenitsyn advocated preserving a union of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. He also proposed redrawing some republics’ borders because he considered parts of their territory historically Russian. The writer envisioned Russia as a state with strong local self-government, grounded in national and Christian traditions rather than Western political models.
The article provoked fierce debate. Many welcomed the call to abandon communism and focus on domestic problems. But the proposals concerning Ukraine’s and Kazakhstan’s borders drew sharp criticism. Gorbachev also rejected the plan, considering Solzhenitsyn’s views too conservative. Events moved faster than the writer had anticipated. In December 1991, the USSR collapsed, and his proposed union never materialized.
By then, the legal barriers to Solzhenitsyn’s return had also been removed. In September 1991, the Soviet Prosecutor General’s Office dismissed the case against him, finding that his actions did not constitute a crime. But the writer remained in Vermont for almost another three years. He continued working on his books and following Russian politics. Solzhenitsyn welcomed the fall of the communist regime, but Boris Yeltsin’s economic reforms and the population’s impoverishment left him increasingly disillusioned.
On May 27, 1994, 20 years after his expulsion, Solzhenitsyn finally returned to Russia with his wife and son. He deliberately chose a route through the Far East so that he could cross the country by train and see how it had changed. His plane landed first in Magadan, then in Vladivostok. From there, the writer traveled west by rail, arriving in Moscow on July 21.
From support to disillusionment: How Solzhenitsyn became an unyielding opponent of Yeltsin
After returning to Russia, Solzhenitsyn had no intention of confining himself to literature. Over his 20 years in exile, he had developed his own vision of how the country should be organized after communism, and now he wanted to join the debate over its future. But what he saw on his journey across Russia disappointed him. The writer spoke of poverty, corruption, and a privatization process that had put state property into the hands of a small group of people. He called the political system a “sham democracy” and “an ingenious fusion of bureaucrats, Soviet party officials, and hardened wheeler-dealers.”
The Kremlin initially counted on his support. Solzhenitsyn’s biographer Lyudmila Saraskina writes that Yeltsin was certain the writer would be “on our side.” Reformers saw him as an ally against communism, but his criticism of the economic changes increasingly echoed the rhetoric of the communist opposition. The liberal press began calling Solzhenitsyn “the choirmaster of the doomsayers.”
Solzhenitsyn laid out his views most fully in a speech to the State Duma on October 28, 1994. Lawmakers had spent several months debating whether to invite the writer, with the pro-presidential Russia’s Choice faction voting against it. Solzhenitsyn spoke for about an hour. He said Russia had “no democracy, only oligarchy” — rule by “a small, closed circle of people.” He proposed developing local self-government along the lines of the prerevolutionary zemstvos, elected bodies responsible for schools, hospitals, and roads. The writer did not oppose a strong presidency and believed it should be preserved, but he thought its powers should be increasingly limited at lower levels of government, with residents making their own decisions at the local level. Solzhenitsyn also expressed mixed views on the idea of having the president appoint regional leaders. He warned lawmakers that parliament risked sharing the fate of the prerevolutionary Dumas if it could not stand up to the executive branch.
Lawmakers gave the speech a cool reception: No one asked questions, and the applause was tepid. The writer’s supporters saw this as evidence of politicians’ indifference to the country’s troubles. Reformers, meanwhile, considered Solzhenitsyn’s proposals outdated. Yegor Gaidar said with regret that the speech had pleased the communists.
His relationship with Yeltsin was also difficult. In August 1991, Solzhenitsyn welcomed Yeltsin’s resistance to the State Committee for the State of Emergency, which had attempted a coup, but soon began criticizing his economic policies. In June 1992, they spoke by phone for 40 minutes, and the writer said he had “failed to convince him of anything.” The president also publicly challenged his prominent critic. In “Zapiski prezidenta” (“The Struggle for Russia”), he responded to Solzhenitsyn’s question about whether he would treat his own mother with shock therapy: “I would use shock therapy on myself, and not just one time.”
On November 16, 1994, they met in person, with their wives and without journalists. Yeltsin’s press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, recalled that the president was nervous and that his advisers had tried to talk him out of the meeting. The conversation lasted about four hours and, in Kostikov’s words, proceeded “without glossing over political differences.” Solzhenitsyn recounted his journey across the country and outlined his proposals. But no noticeable changes in government policy followed.
Another source of disagreement soon emerged. In December 1994, Russian troops entered Chechnya, which had effectively been outside Moscow’s control since 1991. Solzhenitsyn considered the decision to go to war a “grave political mistake.” In 1992, he had advised Yeltsin to let Chechnya go if it wanted to secede. Later, the writer proposed recognizing the republic’s independence, but separating it from Russia with a line of military posts along the border and retaining the territory on the left bank of the Terek River as part of Russia. In 2000, after Chechen militants invaded Dagestan, he acknowledged that his earlier advice to Yeltsin had been a mistake.
Solzhenitsyn also tried to reach television audiences. Beginning in April 1995, his 15-minute addresses aired on ORT every two weeks. He spoke about schools, the army, elections, the situation of Russians outside Russia, and the war in Chechnya. But the program was canceled after 12 episodes. The 13th episode, devoted to people’s disillusionment with politics and criticism of the authorities, never aired. “They’ve shut me up, just as I expected,” Solzhenitsyn said. ORT’s management said it had made the decision because of the approaching parliamentary elections and the need to maintain political balance. But because other critical programs were taken off the air at the same time, the decision prompted suspicions of political censorship. Solzhenitsyn no longer had a regular television audience, though he continued to travel around the country and express his views in the press.
By the late 1990s, his criticism of Yeltsin had grown even harsher. In May 1998, he published “Rossiya v obvale” (“Russia in Collapse”). In it, Solzhenitsyn accused the authorities of carrying out unfair privatization, destroying industry and science, impoverishing the population, and giving in to the West. He did not call for a return to the Soviet system, but he considered the existing political order unacceptable. The book appeared three months before the August debt default, which gave his criticism added weight.
His differences with Yeltsin came to a head in December 1998. To mark the writer’s 80th birthday, the president awarded him the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle, Russia’s highest state honor. Solzhenitsyn had sent the presidential administration a written refusal in advance, but Yeltsin signed the decree anyway. On December 11, his birthday, at the premiere of Yury Lyubimov’s play “Sharashka” (“The Prison Research Institute”) at the Taganka Theater, he said from the stage: “I cannot accept an award from the country’s highest authority, which has brought Russia to its present disastrous state.” The writer did, however, accept Yeltsin’s personal birthday greetings.
Putin and Solzhenitsyn: How a dissident and a KGB officer grew close
Solzhenitsyn entered 2000 as an unyielding critic of Yeltsin. He reacted sharply to Yeltsin’s resignation and acting President Putin’s decree granting the former head of state immunity. Speaking at the Russian State Library in May 2000, he said: “I consider it disgraceful to absolve Yeltsin of responsibility. And probably not just Yeltsin — another hundred or two should stand trial along with him!”
Solzhenitsyn was initially wary of the country’s new leadership as well. In interviews with NTV and Novaya Gazeta, he criticized Putin’s intention to continue Yeltsin’s reforms: “So far, we have seen no encouraging steps from the new authorities to put things right.”
Within a few months, however, his attitude toward the new president had become noticeably more favorable. On September 20, 2000, Putin and his wife visited Solzhenitsyn at his country home in Troitse-Lykovo. The following day, the writer said the president had made a good impression on him. He praised Putin’s quick mind and described his decisions as “prudent and sound,” saying Putin had “no thirst for personal power.” Solzhenitsyn said the two did not always agree, but listened carefully to each other’s arguments.
The meeting provoked debate. To many former Soviet dissidents, the growing closeness between the author of “The Gulag Archipelago” and a former KGB officer seemed paradoxical. Andrei Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner, wondered how “the regime’s most fearless opponent became friends with a KGB colonel.”
Still, Solzhenitsyn’s approval of the president did not mean he stopped criticizing the authorities. In December 2000, while accepting an award from the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, he sharply criticized the political elite, which he believed was dominated by “unrepentant members of the old nomenclatura” and “rapacious former heads of the Komsomol.” Answering journalists’ questions after the ceremony, the writer recounted what he had told Putin at their private meeting: “Strengthening the state is necessary for Russia’s unity, but strengthening the state will not make Russia flourish. Russia can flourish only when millions are free to speak, when they are free in word and deed to shape their own destiny.”
Solzhenitsyn and Putin agreed above all on the need to strengthen the state. The writer believed that the collapse of the USSR and the economic upheavals of the 1990s had left Russia in a deep crisis, and that the new president was trying to rebuild the state.
In a July 2007 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Solzhenitsyn said Putin had inherited a country that had been “ransacked and knocked off its feet” and had begun gradually rebuilding it. The writer also said he was “dismayed” by the slow development of local self-government and regretted the absence of a sizable, constructive political opposition in Russia. In the same interview, he called Putin’s decision to abolish elections to the State Duma in single-member districts a mistake.
In private conversations, Solzhenitsyn could be even more explicit in criticizing Putin’s decisions. In April 2008, a few months before his death, he met with U.S. Ambassador William Burns. According to a diplomatic cable published later, the writer called the abolition of gubernatorial elections a “mistake.” He said citizens should be able to choose their own representatives in government and hold them accountable. As an example, Solzhenitsyn recalled town meetings in Vermont, which he called the very essence of democracy.
Putin and Solzhenitsyn also had similar views on relations with the West. Solzhenitsyn had long criticized Western policy, but his judgments became even harsher after NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. In a 2006 interview with Moskovskiye Novosti, he said NATO’s expansion was intended to encircle Russia and strip it of its sovereignty. A year later, the writer called Putin’s foreign policy “quite reasonable and more foresighted,” while criticizing NATO’s efforts to bring former Soviet republics, particularly Ukraine, into its orbit.
The Russian State Prize, awarded to Solzhenitsyn in 2007 “for outstanding achievements in humanitarian work,” symbolized the closeness between the writer and the president. Solzhenitsyn had refused the Order of St. Andrew from Yeltsin in 1998, but accepted Putin’s award. He explained his decision by noting that the prize had been awarded by a panel of experts rather than by the president personally. In his Der Spiegel interview, Solzhenitsyn also answered a question about Putin’s past: “Vladimir Putin — yes, he was an officer of the intelligence services, but he was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag.”
On June 12, 2007, the writer’s wife, Natalia, accepted the award at the Kremlin. Solzhenitsyn himself was unable to attend because of his health. After the ceremony, Putin visited him at home for another conversation. The president told journalists that many of the authorities’ actions were in keeping with Solzhenitsyn’s ideas.
Life after death: How the authorities put Solzhenitsyn’s legacy to work for them
Solzhenitsyn died on August 3, 2008, at 89. By then, Putin had become prime minister, and Dmitry Medvedev was president. Both paid their respects to the writer: Putin attended the public memorial service, and Medvedev the funeral at the Donskoy Monastery. On the day of the funeral, Medvedev signed a decree commemorating Solzhenitsyn. Scholarships were established in his honor, and Moscow’s Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya Street was soon renamed Alexander Solzhenitsyn Street, despite protests from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Later, an abridged version of “The Gulag Archipelago,” prepared with the involvement of the writer’s widow, Natalia, was produced for schoolchildren.
The Russian authorities continued to honor Solzhenitsyn’s memory in the years that followed. In December 2018, to mark the centenary of the writer’s birth, Putin personally unveiled a monument to him in Moscow. In his speech, the president called Solzhenitsyn a “true patriot” who, even in exile, “opposed any manifestations of Russophobia.” In this way, Solzhenitsyn’s devotion to Russia and defense of its national interests — not just his fight against Soviet repression — took on special prominence in the official portrayal of the writer.
The writer’s widow, Natalia Solzhenitsyna, plays an important role in preserving and interpreting his legacy. In a 2018 interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, she supported the annexation of Crimea, calling it a restoration of historical justice. Solzhenitsyna also acknowledged that the peninsula’s annexation was contentious under international law and opposed Russian intervention in the Donbas. She said the intervention was an enormous mistake that the country would come to regret.
In 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the publisher AST released “S Ukrainoy budet chrezvychayno bolno” (“Ukraine Will Be an Extremely Painful Problem”), a collection compiled by Solzhenitsyna. The book continued a project begun in 2018 with the collection “Rossiya. Zapad. Ukraina” (“Russia. The West. Ukraine”). It brought together Solzhenitsyn’s statements on Russian-Ukrainian relations, disputed territories, and Western policy. In the foreword, the writer’s widow repeated her husband’s arguments about the injustice of Ukraine’s Soviet-era borders and Western countries’ responsibility for the deterioration in relations between Russia and Ukraine.
Yet in May 2022, Natalia Solzhenitsyna also signed a written pledge vouching for opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who had been arrested on charges of spreading “fake news” about the Russian army.
Solzhenitsyn, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan: How the writer’s views grew more radical
Solzhenitsyn’s views provoked particularly fierce debate in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The writer recognized peoples’ right to self-determination and opposed forcibly keeping republics within a common state. Yet he considered large parts of Ukrainian and Kazakhstani territory historically Russian. This contradiction persisted in his statements for decades.
Solzhenitsyn’s early reflections on Ukraine seemed fairly conciliatory. In “The Gulag Archipelago,” the bulk of which he finished writing in 1968, the writer recalled his conversations with Ukrainian nationalists in Soviet camps. He criticized the authorities’ habit of labeling them bandits and considered Ukrainians’ desire for independence understandable.
Despite their shared history, Russians and Ukrainians had failed over several centuries to learn to live in harmony, Solzhenitsyn acknowledged. “Ukraine will be an extremely painful problem,” he warned. But he considered it unacceptable to hold on to Ukraine by force. Ukrainians themselves, he believed, should decide their country’s future. The writer nevertheless hoped that a peaceful separation would eventually allow the two peoples to reunite.
In May 1975, Solzhenitsyn recorded an Easter radio address to Ukrainians in Canada. In it, he recalled his own Ukrainian roots: His mother was almost entirely of Ukrainian descent, and his maternal grandfather spoke Ukrainian. The writer said he did not speak Ukrainian fluently but understood it well. He recalled Ukrainians’ suffering, including the famine of the 1930s, and his friendships with Ukrainian prisoners in Soviet camps. Polish historian Grzegorz Przebinda of Jagiellonian University said the address was included in neither the 2018 collection “Russia. The West. Ukraine” nor the 2022 volume “Ukraine Will Be an Extremely Painful Problem,” both prepared by the writer’s widow.
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Even during this period, however, Solzhenitsyn’s attitude toward Ukraine was becoming more contradictory. Przebinda found that, when preparing a new edition of “The Gulag Archipelago” in 1980, the writer added a remark to his earlier reflections saying that Khrushchev had arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine. At the same time, some sympathetic statements about the Ukrainian national movement disappeared from the book.
Solzhenitsyn nevertheless continued to oppose violence between the two peoples. In 1981, he sent a letter to the organizers of a conference on Russian-Ukrainian relations in Toronto. In it, the writer urged that no one be held by force and promised that “never, under any circumstances, shall I take part in a Russian-Ukrainian clash or allow my sons to do so.”
By the early 1990s, territorial claims were becoming increasingly prominent in his thinking. In “Rebuilding Russia,” Solzhenitsyn proposed letting most Soviet republics go while preserving a union of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. He denied that a distinct Ukrainian people had existed since the early Middle Ages, calling such ideas “a recently invented falsehood.” The writer also maintained that the Kherson region, the area around the Sea of Azov, Crimea, and the Donbas had never been part of historical Ukraine. He considered Kazakhstan’s territory an artificial creation of the Soviet authorities and proposed keeping its northern regions within Russia. Solzhenitsyn still recognized Ukrainians’ and Kazakhs’ right to independence in principle, but he believed that each region should decide separately which state it would belong to.
These proposals provoked a sharp reaction. In September 1990, participants in a rally in Alma-Ata against Solzhenitsyn’s territorial claims publicly burned a newspaper containing his article. The Lviv Regional Council also condemned the writer’s statements. His critics included former Ukrainian political prisoners who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, had endured the Soviet camps.
In August 1991, before the Soviet Union collapsed, Solzhenitsyn called on Yeltsin to reconsider the Soviet republics’ borders. He asked the president to ensure that votes in Ukraine’s forthcoming independence referendum would be counted separately in each region. In the writer’s view, residents should decide for themselves which state their territories belonged to. In a 1994 interview with Forbes, he again said he wished Ukraine success, but only within borders that he himself considered ethnically justified.
In his final years, Solzhenitsyn’s views on Ukrainian politics hardened further. In 2006, he called the alleged suppression of the Russian language in Ukraine “an act of atrocity” and again questioned Ukraine’s right to Crimea and its eastern regions. In April 2008, four months before his death, he published an article in Izvestia titled “Possorit rodnye narody?” (“Swallowing Shameless Lies”). The writer opposed recognizing the famine of 1932–1933 as a genocide of Ukrainians and compared the Ukrainian authorities’ arguments to Bolshevik propaganda.
The article outraged former Ukrainian political prisoners. Levko Lukyanenko and other human rights advocates called on Russian intellectuals not to support this interpretation of the Holodomor. They also expressed hope that Solzhenitsyn himself would find the courage to “live not by lies” — a reference to his own 1974 essay, “Zhit ne po lzhi” (“Live Not by Lies”).
How to view Solzhenitsyn in 2026
It would be wrong to reduce Solzhenitsyn either to his “great-power” views or to his condemnation of Soviet camps and repression. He was a complex person whose political convictions changed throughout his life. Though he did not support Western liberal democracy, the writer defended freedom of speech, human dignity, and local self-government.
But in today’s Russia, the “great-power” side of his legacy has come to the fore. Putin found ideas that matched his own views in the writer’s reflections on a strong state and national interests. As a result, Solzhenitsyn, who remains unacceptable to many admirers of the Soviet past, has gained a prominent place in the state’s efforts to shape historical memory.
Other parts of his legacy, meanwhile, increasingly conflict with the Russian authorities’ actions. Even as the state honors the author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” a Moscow museum devoted to Soviet repression has been closed and replaced by a museum of victims of Nazi crimes.
Still more striking is the contradiction with the principle of “protecting the people,” which Solzhenitsyn considered one of the state’s main responsibilities and which Putin himself quoted in 2006. The war against Ukraine, with its enormous loss of life, is difficult to reconcile with that principle. In closing, all that remains is to quote Solzhenitsyn once more, from his essay “‘Russky vopros’ k kontsu XX veka” (“The ‘Russian Question’ at the End of the Twentieth Century”):
We do not need to be a world arbiter, to compete for international leadership (stronger volunteers will surface); all our efforts must be directed inwards, towards assiduous inner development.
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Alexey Uvarov