Natalia Solzhenitsyn, widow of the renowned Russian dissident, is at it again. She has again rejected the idea that Russia under Vladimir Putin is a dictatorship and labelled those who think so as liars or simply plain ignorant.
In September 2000, her husband, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the former political prisoner who played a crucial role in exposing the Soviet Gulag, told Russian television that Putin should be praised for “the prudence and soundness of his decisions and judgments. He has a quick mind and agile wit and has no lust for personal power, no thrill of power.”
Now, after Putin has turned Russia into a mafia state with nuclear weapons, crushed Chechnya, invaded Georgia and Ukraine, transformed Belarus into a vassal state, worked hard to undermine the democratic world and continues to threaten it directly and indirectly, and suppressed dissent at home, Solzhenitsyn’s widow is reaffirming her husband’s praise for a leader “restoring Russia’s greatness.”
“Crimea is Russian,” she declared a few years ago. The worst enemy of the Ukrainians is their “nationalist” leadership.
Her late husband – the man many in the West celebrated as the conscience of the twentieth century – had the same blind spot regarding Russian imperial despotic power. He simply used different language to describe it.
Certainly, Solzhenitsyn documented Communist atrocities with unflinching courage. Many others did as well, incidentally, but did not achieve the fame he did – Viktor Kravchenko, Ivan Bahrainy, Anatoly Marchenko, and Valentyn Moroz, to name a few with Ukrainian names.
But Solzhenitsyn’s issue with the Soviet system was not primarily about tyranny. It was that the wrong people were running the Russian empire. He did not want freedom for the peoples trapped inside the USSR; he wanted a different form of Russian domination.
Look at what he actually said. In 1990, Soviet republics were finally escaping Moscow’s stranglehold. Solzhenitsyn published “Rebuilding Russia.” Did he welcome these nations into the community of free peoples? Not at all. He proposed forcibly uniting Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan into a new Greater Russia.
This was not a voluntary federation. It was the old imperial project disguised as democracy. His reasoning for cutting loose Central Asia and the Caucasus was that those territories were “sapping the Russian nation.” They were not worth the trouble.
Solzhenitsyn outright denied that Ukrainians and Belarusians were real peoples. In “Rebuilding Russia,” he called Ukrainian distinctiveness a “recently invented falsehood” – the entire idea of a separate Ukrainian people and language was fabricated.
“We all sprang from precious Kiev, [Kyiv]” he wrote, casually stealing a thousand years of Ukrainian history and placing a Russian flag over it, just as the Russian tsars and the generals of the anti-Bolshevik “White” movement did in 1918-20, and as Putin has now done.
This was not elderly confusion or historical oversight. It was the same toxic ideology that has fueled Russian aggression for centuries – the same denial of Ukrainian identity that erupted into war in 1918-20 and again in 2014. The same lie is killing people right now.
Kazakhstan? In 1996, Solzhenitsyn openly advocated for Russia to annex northern Kazakhstan. The backlash was so fierce that Kazakhstan’s prosecutor general accused him of interfering in their internal affairs.
Solzhenitsyn’s logic was brutally simple: Russians live there, so Russia should rule there. Borders, sovereignty, and the wishes of the people living there were irrelevant.
This is the same argument about the so-called “Russian world” that Putin has used to justify his imperialist aggression, with Solzhenitsyn becoming, as a Western analyst described, one of his “spiritual gurus.”
I was among the first to caution Western fans of Solzhenitsyn and his brand of “neo-Slavophilism.” In a review of the book “Solzhenitsyn in Exile,” published in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal on Jan. 10, 1986, I wrote: “It is high time that a more balanced assessment of him supersede distorted images created by his admirers and denigrators.”
I noted that some of the ideas about “Russianness” that he was promoting in exile were being “echoed in Soviet attacks on the West,” and that while as a writer “he holds his own… Solzhenitsyn the prophet is out of his depth.”
Other critics who called out Solzhenitsyn went further. William Harrison labeled him an “arch-reactionary.” Belarusian philosopher Ales Antsipenka called him a “common Russian imperialist.” Ukrainian writer Yevhen Sverstiuk, himself a former political prisoner, said Solzhenitsyn had “joined the very narrow, reactionary, and primitive world of Russian imperial ideology.”
These were not insults; they were diagnoses.
His later years proved us right. Solzhenitsyn became a Putin cheerleader. He attacked Ukraine’s Orange Revolution as a NATO conspiracy and insisted Crimea and southeastern Ukraine were “never part of historical Ukraine” but were “forcibly incorporated” into the modern Ukrainian state.
Natalia Solzhenitsyn’s recent comments serve as a timely reminder: opposing one form of tyranny does not make someone a champion of freedom. Her husband demonstrated that it is possible to be both a victim of oppression and an advocate for oppressing others.
This is why Ukrainians and many other non-Russians are wary of Russian anti-Putinists who hesitate to denounce Russian imperialism and Russia’s proclaimed right to “greatness.” As the saying goes, “Scratch a Russian liberal and you will find an imperialist” – and, more often than not, this proves true.
Last year, Natalia Solzhenitsyn received a second award from Putin.
Two of Solzhenitsyn’s sons, Ignat and Yermolai, do not live in Russia. The third, Stepan Solzhenitsyn, according to a US publication in 2020, “now heads a major coal company in Russia that belongs to Andrey Melnichenko, the billionaire oligarch, but whose mines were first developed by Stalin-era GULAG prisoners.”
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.