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Published: 2025-12-06
No. 4 (192) (2025)

How Putin Made Use of Solzhenitsyn

Grzegorz Władysław Przebinda
Section: Artykuły
https://doi.org/10.31261/pr.18431

Abstract

This article provides a comprehensive account of the meeting between Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a former Gulag prisoner and author of The Gulag Archipelago, who was exiled from the USSR, and Vladimir Putin, the elected President of Russia since 2000, who has a background in the KGB. The meeting, comprising two personal encounters in 2000 and 2007, as well as mutual positive references to shared values, provoked “righteous indignation” from former Russian dissidents turned democrats, as well as numerous epigones of communism in Putin’s Russia, including apologists for the KGB. The former accused Solzhenitsyn of betraying the ideals of freedom, while the latter criticized Putin for meeting amicably with a man who had contributed to the collapse of the “glorious Soviet Union.” Nevertheless, the author of this article concludes that there are grounds for Putin’s imperialist invocation of the work of the late Solzhenitsyn, who had called for a revision of the “Leninist borders” with the now independent states of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Estonia. This perspective is further underscored by Andrei Sakharov’s reflection from 1974 that “ideologues have always been gentler than the politicians who follow them.” However, it must be emphatically noted that Solzhenitsyn — who advocated for those border revisions exclusively through diplomacy and economic pressure — would undoubtedly disavow the current war and likely condemn it as loudly as he had always courageously denounced criminal communism.

Keywords:

Putin and Solzhenitsyn , Solzhenitsyn on the new Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Estonia , literature on the crimes of politicians

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Przebinda, G. W. (2025). How Putin Made Use of Solzhenitsyn . Przegląd Rusycystyczny [Russian Studies Review], (4 (192). https://doi.org/10.31261/pr.18431

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No. 4 (192) (2025)
Published: 2025-12-06

ISSN: 0137-298X
Ikona DOI 10.31261/pr
Publisher
Polskie Towarzystwo Rusycystyczne oraz Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Licence CC Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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