Cathy Young on Solzhenitsyn's paradox

Cathy Young discusses the complex of beliefs that kept Alexander Solzhenitsyn from embracing the west even as he decried the excesses of Stalinism:

. . . Solzhenitsyn pointedly refused to criticize Putin's assertion that Russia should not dwell on the horrors of the Stalinist past; instead, he complained that both the West and the former Eastern-bloc Soviet satellites were using Stalin-era atrocities as a moral bludgeon against Russia.

Putin's Russia was hardly Solzhenitsyn's ideal; its rampant consumerism and kitschy pop culture far exceeded the Western materialism that he deplored. And yet Putin's authoritarian regime, with its emphasis on national unity, its ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, and its assertiveness in foreign affairs appealed strongly to the writer.

This was the sad paradox of Solzhenitsyn's final years. The man who once wrote to Soviet leaders demanding the abolition of censorship never protested the revival of censorship. The man who used his Nobel Prize to start a fund for political prisoners kept quiet about the new political prisoners of Putin's regime. The man who coined the slogan "To live not by the lie" had a cozy relationship with a government that rigged elections and filled the media with lies big and small. The man who had once asked the West for "more interference in our internal affairs" joined the chorus of anti-Western agitprop.

It's important to keep Solzhenitsyn's worldview clear: he was never a libertarian or even really a liberal in the western sense. He chronicled the horrors of the gulag system within Stalinist Russia, but he didn't object to the idea of authoritarian government itself. His personal preference was clearly illustrated by his rejection of the west and his acceptance of Vladimir Putin's government with all its political repression and economic corruption.