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.
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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.