Solzhenitsyn's Child
Nina L. Khrushcheva understands the autochthonous nature of the Russian state, and how it can coopt a questionable icon, like Solzhenitsyn
Sphere: Related ContentThe old Soviet iconography has broken down completely; despite heroic efforts, not even Putin could restore Lenin, Stalin, and the old Soviet pantheon. Yet the Kremlin understands that something is needed to replace them as Russia adapts to its new oil-fueled autocracy. Solzhenitsyn, one of the most famous and heroic dissidents of the Soviet era, now seems certain to become a towering figure in the iconography of Putinism.
Throughout his presidency, Putin repeatedly invoked Russia as an ancient, powerful, and divinely ordained state going back a thousand years, a civilization separate from the West, neither Communist nor a western liberal democracy. That message echoes Solzhenitsyn’s famous commencement address at Harvard in 1978: “Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. For 1,000 years, Russia has belonged to such a category.»
For Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the gulag system enforced by the KGB, the desire to see Russia as a great nation, its eternal spirit superior to the West’s vulgar materialism, found him in old age supporting ex-KGB man Putin, who once said that there is no such thing as an ex-KGB man and who sees the Soviet Union’s collapse as the greatest geo-political catastrophe of modern times. Despite this, Solzhenitsyn seemed to accept Putin as a «good dictator,» whose silencing of his critics enhances Russia’s soul.
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