“Who is the most controversial Russian writer?”


“Who is the most controversial Russian writer?”


Must be Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of the anti-Soviet magnum opus “The Gulag Archipelago”.

Consider the following:

  • The man got the highest seal of approval from the liberal West (the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1970), and from the great admirer of Russia’s imperial legacy, President Putin.
  • His work is a searing indictment of Soviet rule as a destroyer of the glorious tradition of Imperial Russia. However, in post-Soviet Russia, the USSR is considered an heir to the millennial tradition of the Russian civilization. Moreover, it was a pinnacle of it.
  • Solzhenitsyn viewed the secret police NKVD/KGB as core elements of Communist rule, the Devil incarnated. Meanwhile, the ongoing nation-building in Russia is headed by a proud alumnus of the KGB, with thousands of his colleagues forming the core of our ruling class. Together, they carry on the torch of Stalin’s police state, forever vigilant, never repentant.
  • The man found refuge from the KGB in America, the flag bearer of liberal democracy—the system he despised almost as much as Communism.
  • In his fight against the USSR, Solzhenitsyn found himself side-by-side with Soviet dissidents, a tiny minority where ethnic Jews were over-represented. However, he came later to author a treatise, “Two Hundred Years Together,” a text that would become a major reference work for overt and covert anti-Semites among our ethnic nationalists.
  • He wrote “The Gulag Archipelago” in the midst of a thick blanket of secrecy over everything concerning Stalin’s purges and the dirty work of NKVD. His research was based on many oral testimonies of Gulag survivors, not hard statistics or archived documents. This made it possible for his many detractors to dismiss his work as “campfire tales” in their efforts to whitewash Stalinism. And yet, under Putin, it made it into the school curriculum.
  • Solzhenitsyn was a prominent champion of Russian ethnic nationalism. Meanwhile, hardcore nationalists have always been the primary source of trouble for our multi-ethnic Derzháva (“the mighty State”).

Below, a piece by Elliott Banfield, “After the Eclipse”. According to the artist, Soviet rule was a deviation, a devastating hiccup in the history of Russian civilization. This was exactly Solzhenitsyn’s point of view.

However, modern Russia treats Soviet rule as a dramatic but magnificent continuation of our imperial tradition. The USSR’s victory over Nazi Germany is now celebrated as a preeminent event of our history. According to the new canon, the two disks you see here are in effect two sides of the same shiny medal.