Reply #133: I read The Gulag Archepeligo and The Cancer Ward

[daleo]

If I remember, though, Solzhenitsyn turned out to be a slavophile in the end, who was in agreement with Putin. Things can be complicated that way.

MOSCOW - In the last years of his long and stubbornly contrarian life, Alexander Solzhenitsyn finally found a political system he could embrace: Vladimir Putin's Russia.

"Putin inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people," Solzhenitsyn told the German magazine Der Spiegel in a 2007 interview, when Putin was still president. "And he started to do what was possible, a slow and gradual restoration. These efforts were not noticed, nor appreciated, immediately. In any case, one is hard-pressed to find examples in history when steps by one country to restore its strength were met favorably by other governments."

http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2008/08/05/toward_end_solzhenitsyn_embraced_putins_russia/