[lbo-talk] Solzhenitsyn and Putin

[" Chris Doss "]

Most of this piece was blathering hagiographic idiocy, but this snippet is interesting:

New Times
January 2004
THE MESSIAH WE HAVE LOST
Solzhenitsin s dream has come true: the authorities seek his advice
By Ilya Milstein

Soon Alexander Solzhenitsin will turn 85. It is the age of a patriarch
time to do some last reckoning looking at the world almost from above.

But the record is contradictory.

----

Success intoxicates people in different, sometimes very queer ways. But in
every case it is self-betrayal, betrayal of one s predestination and of
one s gift that is not fully perceived. Solzhenitsin was born a writer, one
of  small  and  medium  works, even the GULAG is not a Cyclop-size novel
story about the camps but a collection of brilliant short stories of human
fates in the grips of soul crushing machines of destruction. Whatever the
author s convictions gained through suffering may have been, it was given
to him to express them in strictly weighed artistic forms without claims to
global historical generalizations and final verdicts. That is why
Solzhenitsin in his best works is a true humanist writing in the best
traditions of Russian classical prose. That is why in his worst books he is
almost an untalented obscurant oblivious of the artist and God in himself.
Being deprived of good taste is punishment for betraying his native
literature.

VVP at the end of the tunnel

His homecoming in a Malenkov-style coat with the BBC TV cameras clicking
looked like a malicious self-parody. His TV discourses were empty and soon
became boring. His newest publicism was hitting hard but all of it off
target. His literary portraits (of Vassily Grossman and David Samoilov)
were written in a careless, superficial and evil language and had one
purpose: to get even with dead men who were not there to respond. His
notorious two volume collection Two Hundred Years Together is such a stupid
book (good Jews stand for Russia, bad ones are against it, and the author
is between them calling on all to repent, giving out cookies to useful Jews
for their good words about Russians, and kicking bad ones for Russophobia)
that one feels embarrassed to discuss it. Only his prose, the  small form
lights up with rare flashes of the talent he used to have (The Apricot Jam).

Today he lives like a recluse, a man of little interest to his compatriots
who in the last few years have seen too many geniuses and prophets to need
any now. Sometimes, out of boredom or indignation he would provoke media
interest in himself and then the citizenry would again speak about him.
Like those times when Solzhenitsin would recall his mission as a humanist
writer and raise his voice in favour of capital punishment... Or, like now,
he is thrashing Deitsch and other calumnists who attacked his good name.
But his life has been fulfilled and he rarely digresses to deal with details.

The main thing has come true: the authorities seek his advice. There are
reasons to believe that, starting from 1999, to not a small degree life in
Russia has been progressing to Solzhenitsin s scenario. His ideas are part
of the foundations of Russia s domestic policies.

He has a worthy disciple in the Kremlin though they do not meet often:
officially only on one occasion.

... A three-year old film recorded the writer and the leader going down the
corridor of the Nobel laureate s estate. The camera also peeked into the
author s den. There, with an abundant library in the background, the two
talked animatedly. Putin was listening to Solzhenitsin.

The event had a continuation. In a ten-minute interview shown on the
government channel RTV, the author described in detail his recollections of
the historic meeting. He looked happy. He liked Vladimir Putin immensely.
Somewhat inconsistently and very emotionally he stressed the almost
complete concurrence of his personal views and the state positions outlined
by Putin. The host and his guest did not agree on only one point:
Solzhenitsin thought that the  cleanup  of the Federation Council had been
too mild. In his opinion the senators need not be elected, they must be the
president s appointees.  Not all at once..  must have been Putin s response...

The author of Lenin in Zurich made special mention of the Russian
president s agile mind.

It is easy to guess why these two turned out to be close. Right after he
was proclaimed the heir, Putin had a quite definite programme:  to freeze
Russia a bit calling it the establishment of order, to re-divide the
property and consolidate his personal power with the law enforcers
backing, and to clamp down on the media. This kind of scenario does not
disturb the ex-convict any longer. Because the author s world outlook has
not changed since the time he proclaimed it in clear terms. Its essence is
a mild authoritarianism without the communists and with the national idea
as its basis. This is the root of his deep personal hatred of the
cosmopolitan reformers of Gaidar s era about which Solzhenitsin has written
quite a few furious words. Consequently, the cancellation of robber
privatization. Also it would be a good idea to redraw the borders with
Ukraine and Kazakhstan. It is easy to guess that in Putin s battles with
the moguls or with Ukrainians over Tusla, the KGB colonel enjoys the full
support of the author. For him, and even less for Putin, freedom of speech
as such, as well as professional journalism have long ceased to be
determining values. Solzhenitsin s birthday was the completion of one more
circle of his life. The first one had been mixed with his earlier romantic
ideas of a happy marriage of Leninism to patriotism. At the end of it he
has been embraced by VVP.

What kind of a person has Solzhenitsin discovered in Putin?

As we re-read The Russian Question.., we see the ideal statesman, in
Solzhenitsin s view, a new Stolypin whom Russia needs so much. A man  who
at the same time would be wise, courageous and unselfish . As we listen to
the author s ample lauding of the president we learn of Putin s  hard work
for the good of Russia  and of his  quick mind  which is a euphemism for
the wisdom of the Kremlin. We also find in Solzhenitsin s texts  the will
which the heir speaks tirelessly of (Putin s adjective for it is
 political , Solzhenitsin s more often is  human ) as he explains his
vision of Russia s overall prospects and the decisive actions needed for
the cause. Though his wish  to waste them in the john  differed in style
from the words of the Nobel Prize winner, the essence is the same: the
author is for the war in Chechnya and denounces the Chechens, thus erasing
all he had written about them in his Archipelago. Actually, Putin is simply
repeating Solzhenitsin in the language available to him. They are natural
allies.

It is more than just a matter of ideology.

The CheKa man in the Kremlin needs the moral backing of the man whom in
years past he could have accompanied to the FRG as a member of a special
escort. The former dissident is striving for the materialization of his
 only true  futurological project. One gets the big picture from a
distance: from the height of his fame, age, experience and patriotic
desperation, Solzhenitsin saw in the smallish president all the things that
others had missed. The subsequent developments proved that he had been
right. Authoritarianism (already not very soft) is there. Orthodoxy is
gaining ground and is acquiring the status of the official religion. A
creeping revision of privatization has begun and the Khodorkovsky affair is
a vivid example of it. From the time Putin took the reins in the Kremlin,
Russia s modern history has been a la Solzhenitsin, and the author is not
at all worried by the fact that the KGB is at the nation s helm. His
patriotism is above such trifles.

Solzhenitsin is unquestionably right about one thing: the aspiration for
freedom in Russia has always turned into a  triumph of pornography , with
October ever replacing February. Yet the state patriotic road has always
led to the same dead end that always has plenty of barbed wire, cheap
sausage and censorship for every thinking person. Fortunately, an artist
had a choice sometimes, a chance not to participate in the affairs of the
state, to distance himself from the Kremlins and the tsars. Solzhenitsin,
however, possesses too much public temperament. Too much suffering went
into building his self-rightness. The phantom pains that have queerly fused
his hatred of the totalitarian regime with hopes for the police regime that
is to save Russia are too strong.

 The wolf-hound is right, the cannibal is not : in times long past this
moral maxim had a very different meaning for him. One should have crushed
the oppressive regime entrenched in the Kremlin and Lubyanka. According to
Solzhenitsin, today Putin is right, his political enemies are playing the
part of cannibals. They are being hunted down now. Solzhenitsin describes
them sometimes even tougher than the heir when he thinks aloud about the
 rejoicing, laughing nouveau riches and thieves, brokers, and hackneyed
journalists   Drown them, what else is there to do? Do it pitilessly. But
somehow one pities Solzhenitsin.

Should something happen, God forbid, a new GULAG will be written by someone
else. It is not a question of age at all. He just will not write it, that s
all there is to it.