ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN told the truth about the use and abuse of power in Stalin's Soviet Union in his unforgettable novels, historical chronicles and ethico-political exhortations published from the 1960s until his death at 89 this week. During his long career he also engaged directly or indirectly with power, being imprisoned under Josef Stalin in 1945, published sensationally under Nikita Khrushchev in 1962, stripped of citizenship and deported under Leonid Brezhnev in 1975, and returned to Russia in 1994 under Boris Yeltsin. Yesterday Vladimir Putin, whom Solzhenitsyn admired for his efforts to restore Russian pride after the humiliating 1990s, laid flowers at the foot of his coffin in Moscow.
Solzhenitsyn's long life and incessant productivity as a writer made him a relentless critic of totalitarian power, who nevertheless became convinced in later life that protecting Russia's national and religious identity contains the key to the survival and freedom of its people. Several historical ironies are thereby revealed as he is mourned. Younger Russians are only dimly aware of his immense literary and political achievement in telling the true story about Stalin's gulags, at a time when older generations are inclined to revere the dictator's memory. And Solzhenitsyn's ardent nationalism, religious orthodoxy and illiberalism led him to praise Mr Putin, a classical product of the KGB who put him in the gulag for criticising Stalin's political and military leadership qualities during the second World War, in a private letter from the war front against the retreating German army.
As a writer about totalitarian power Solzhenitsyn made a long transition from literary to historical, philosophical, religious and geopolitical methods and preoccupations. The taut brevity of his masterpiece One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gave way to the major longer novels, Cancer Ward and The First Circle and then to the comprehensive three volume account of the whole horrendous system in The Gulag Archipelago. Together they decisively and irrefutably chronicled the real truth about Soviet repression, making it impossible to continue the pragmatic indifference with which it had hitherto been tolerated in the presumed interest of wider social progress by many sections of the western liberal and left-wing intelligentsia. He inspired a younger generation of dissidents in central and eastern Europe to do likewise in the 1970s and 1980s.
Solzhenitsyn's recent political views must be understood in the context of the huge political changes in Russia and the world over the last 20 years. In an interview last year he dismissed Gorbachev's rule as "not governance, but a thoughtless renunciation of power", denounced Yeltsin's "fire sale of the national patrimony" to western interests and underlined how Putin has "inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralised people" and gradually restored their pride. These are shrewd, if contestable, judgments. Anyone who wants to understand current Russian public opinion and political psychology would be foolish to disregard them, however isolated this great writer remained at the end of his extraordinary life.