Putins gale ideer er dessverre ikke hans egne
Rather than writing for Western audiences, who’d previously praised his work exposing Soviet criminality, Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author and the “dominant writer of the 20th century,” as New Yorker editor David Remnick once described him put “Rebuilding Russia” together solely for Russian audiences. And they immediately lapped it up. With nearly 20 million copies printed, Russian readers devoured Solzhenitsyn’s calls to expand Russia’s borders and to restore the “spiritual and physical salvation of our own people.” Among those readers were soon-to-be Russian President Boris Yeltsin, for whom the book “had a big impact,” according to historian Vladislav Zubok, arguing as it did that Ukrainians and Russians were simply “one nation divided by geopolitical calamities and foreign conquest.” Yeltsin’s office pointed specifically to Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas regions as areas for potential revision.
Like many other writers, including figures such as Alexander Pushkin and Joseph Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn drenched his writings on Ukraine in unabashed Russian chauvinism. In a talking point that other Russian nationalists would later pick up, Solzhenitsyn blamed both the “Mongol invasion” and “Polish colonization” for breaking apart Russians and Ukrainians (as well as Belarusians), dividing “our people” into “three branches.” Ignoring centuries of scholarship, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is a recently invented falsehood.” Previous attempts at Ukrainian independence were elite-driven, top-down affairs—done “without soliciting the opinion of the population at large”—while the more modern efforts to create a separate Ukrainian state were nothing more than campaigns “to lop [Ukraine] off from a living organism,” a “cruel partition” that would shred apart “the lives of millions of individuals and families.”
Years later, Solzhenitsyn’s comments are almost indistinguishable from Putin’s rhetoric about Ukraine. Like Solzhenitsyn, Putin views Ukrainian territories such as Crimea and so-called Novorossiya as rightfully Russian. Like Solzhenitsyn, Putin believes that ethnic Russians in Ukraine face the “fanatical suppression and persecution of the Russian language.” And like Solzhenitsyn, Putin believed Russia could “under no circumstances … renounce our unity” with ethnic Russians in Ukraine.
It’s too much to say that Putin has relied solely on Solzhenitsyn’s blueprints for his monomaniacal obsession with Ukraine and for unleashing the most devastating war Europe has seen in nearly a century. The roots of Russian nationalism run far deeper than any one writer and long predate the work of even Solzhenitsyn.