RUSSIA: Russian writer and former dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn has accused Nato of trying to crush Russia. The Nobel laureate, who was sheltered in the West for 20 years after being expelled by Moscow during the Cold War, says the alliance is "preparing to completely encircle Russia and deprive it of its sovereignty".
In a rare press interview, the 87-year-old told the Moscow News: "Though it is clear that present-day Russia poses no threat to them, Nato is methodically and persistently building up its military machine." His comments come amid a hardening national mood in Russia, a country where many feel put upon by the West.
Earlier this week, hardline nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky accused London of trying to undermine the state. "As long as there is Great Britain, there will be a plot against us," he told his audience in the Kremlin Palace.
And on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin told the West that if it refused to sell state-controlled Gazprom its energy supply companies, Europe's gas supplies might be diverted to China.
Mr Solzhenitsyn is regarded by many Russians as the "conscience of the nation" for his books recording the horrors of the Soviet penal system. He became the Soviet Union's most famous dissident when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970 for books written while in internal exile.
A war hero, he was jailed for eight years in a labour camp by the Soviets for anti-Stalin comments in a letter to a friend.
His experiences in labour camps, and subsequently in a hospital for cancer victims, infused his acclaimed works One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward.
Much of his output was penned by hand, in secret, on stray scraps of paper. Even after finishing his time in labour camps, he was subjected to internal exile in the countryside.
While the communists were his chief targets, most famously in the Gulag Archipelago, he also contrasted the incompetence of Tsarist generals with the heroism of the ordinary soldier in his book August 1914.
He won the Nobel Prize in 1970, and the Soviets, feeling unable to jail or execute him, expelled him in 1974.
He returned in 1994, chiding the West for being decadent, and since then he has given backing to a resurgent Russian nationalism.
He lives as a virtual recluse, surfacing from time to time to chide both the West and Russia's rulers, and to call for a new, strong Russian nation to take shape.
In the latest interview he accuses Nato of signing up states bordering Russia under the guise of supporting democratic upheavals, such as Ukraine's Orange Revolution and Kyrgystan's Tulip Revolution.
"This involves open material and ideological support for the 'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of north Atlantic interests on central Asia," he said.
While continuing to criticise the United States, he has also lashed out at Russia's freewheeling capitalists for their "grandiose plundering of Russia in the 1990s".
However, he has disappointed some liberals by backing President Putin, a former agent with the KGB, in his drive to build Russia into a strong nation.
The two men enjoyed a three-hour meeting, with their wives, in the writer's summer house outside Moscow in 2000, his own troubles at the hands of the KGB apparently forgotten.
In yesterday's interview, Mr Solzhenitsyn praised President Putin's "sensible" foreign policy, but called for reforms to be implemented faster. His writing output since returning home has been modest: he has penned short stories and a history of Russian Jewish relations.