Translated material
After Solzhenitsyn
With a superhuman effort of talent, will and courage, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, together with a few other people, managed to turn back the “red wheel” of Russian history. He has immeasurably less chance of changing the future of Russia, and not only due to physical death. Let's be honest: after Solzhenitsyn returned from forced emigration, Russia practically did not notice him. And so far there are no prerequisites for what will be noticed after death. Although the Russian authorities have learned to use the great writer for opportunistic, short-term political purposes: for example, they managed to fuss with the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Yushchenko article, as it seemed to the authorities, “To quarrel between native peoples?” about the Ukrainian interpretation of the Holodomor. Something tells me that if Alexander Isaevich suddenly supported the Ukrainian position, it would be much more difficult to publish his article in the official Russian media, regardless of the name of the author.
Immediately after saying goodbye to Alexander Isaevich at the Russian Academy of Sciences, the man from whose hands the family of the great writer accepted the State Prize (the writer refused Yeltsin’s attentions, although it was Yeltsin and Gorbachev who liberated the country from the yoke of communism, which he fought all his life with his books and his destiny), Vladimir Putin met with Education Minister Andrei Fursenko. And at this meeting he said the following words: “This is a man who, together with the people, experienced a great tragedy and repression; with his life and work, Solzhenitsyn inoculated society significantly against all types of tyranny.” Alas, the events of the last years of Russian history, including the very recent statist Internet entertainment “The Name of Russia”, which already - on the topic of the day - includes the name of Solzhenitsyn, indicate the opposite. Solzhenitsyn may have inoculated society against tyranny, but this vaccine is not yet effective. There are certainly no fewer people in today's Russia who like Stalin than those who are familiar with Solzhenitsyn's work. And this is a shame for the country.
According to his political views, Alexander Isaevich is very much in the hands of the current Russian government. After all, he was a staunch opponent of parliamentarism, believed that classical political parties were not suitable for Russia, and in terms of fiery insults to the West and the values of the Western world, he was not inferior to the most vociferous Kremlin political scientists, disproportionately surpassing them in terms of talent. If desired, it would not be too much of a political technological twist (we have seen worse twists) to write Solzhenitsyn as a “sovereign democrat.” Nevertheless, in recent years, the Russian authorities not only did not make the great writer “one of their own”, they did not hear or listen to him at all. This happened because Solzhenitsyn and the inhabitants of the Russian political Olympus are simply incomparable interlocutors.
The main point of mental divergence between Solzhenitsyn and the Russian political elite of the early 21st century is the degree of sincerity, the conflict of ideals with interests. In any word written or spoken by Solzhenitsyn, not a single person could suspect an ounce of falsehood. Whereas, often the words spoken by the Russian authorities either do not carry any semantic load, or, on the contrary, contain hidden meanings and mean something completely different from what they say. The authorities have only interests; Solzhenitsyn was an undoubted idealist.
One can argue with the way Solzhenitsyn wanted to see Russia, attribute to him a naive view of the country, considering it completely utopian, or, on the contrary, find an abyss of hidden wisdom in his positive political program. But today's Russian elite does not have any image of Russia in their heads; all that is important to them is the conversion of power into property. Solzhenitsyn wanted to see Russia established on certain moral grounds. The Russian government, in full accordance with television advertising, seems to consider its gas monopoly its only national asset.
A spiritualist and patriot, Solzhenitsyn embodied in his personal destiny the liberal (which, incidentally, are also Christian) ideals of a free individual, who through work on himself chooses what to believe in, what to worship, what to defend. Our quasi-soilists and quasi-patriots in the political elite defend the purely material foundations of their existence.
Solzhenitsyn ended his earthly journey at the moment when he mentally parted ways with Russia, perhaps even stronger than in Soviet times - then, after all, he was the living embodiment of the ideals of thousands of thinking people. If Russia is truly going to become a country in which most people would be happy to live and which could serve as an example for others to follow, it needs to understand the main lesson of Solzhenitsyn's life. A country, just like an individual, must not live by lies. This, alas, does not apply to the Russia from which the main Russian writer of the 20th century, Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, passed into immortality.