The Legacy Begins to Clarify
It may take 50, 100, or even more years before historians acquire a proper understanding of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's legacy. For his contemporaries, however, he is first of all the literary giant who almost single-handedly delivered the most powerful weapon in the East -- West ideological confrontation with his works. This weapon helped the West to defeat the "Evil Empire" with the collateral result of crushing the Communist International and "reeducating" the European Left, which to some extent was sympathetic to the Soviet experiment.
History knows other cases when words were more powerful than guns. Without going into dangerous religious waters one could point to Karl Marx, who published a powerful indictment of a capitalist system which eventually led to the enslavement of nearly half of mankind. And it took Solzhenitsyn to undo the work of Marx. For this, the world and especially Russia should be forever grateful to this man. However, when it comes to modern times, Solzhenitsyn's ideas of rebuilding his native land did not find too many followers, at least so far.
Solzhenitsyn and his wife Natalya returned to Russia in 1994
This may change eventually, due to the deep disappointment of ordinary Russians with the course of post-Communist reforms and the West in general. It was broadly expected that after liberation from Communism, Russia will turn to the West and become another member of the happy European family. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn's rejection of Western ideals and search for some mysterious "third way" for Russia had been met with disdain even by his fellow dissidents, and by such a moral beacon of Russia's pro-Western liberals as Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov.
By race, religion, history, and great culture, Russia undoubtedly belongs to the West, whatever some East European leaders and fresh NATO aspirants might say. Unfortunately, instead of embracing its prodigal son and helping it to make the transition from a totalitarian system to freedom less painful, the West flatly turned it down, and instead started the process of encircling Russia militarily and isolating it economically through pipeline politics and some other means. This may prompt some Russians to go back to Solzhenitsyn works and review his "third way" ideas that were dismissed as utopian or even dangerous by some pro-Western intellectuals in the not-so-distant past.
At this point, the only hope for Russia's integration with the West lies with Old Europe, but since Europeans are looking at this process solely from the energy prism, this may not be enough to turn things around. Medvedev's appeals to Europe to think about a new security system with Russia as its integral part are largely ignored.
In any event, neither the West nor the "third way" proponents can stop the globalization process which will make all their efforts of Russia's isolation obsolete. One should only examine the world's demographic trends and the economic interdependence of nations to realize that our planet is quickly becoming a global village, where one cannot possibly isolate almost any country, definitely not such a huge one as Russia, which boasts astronomical resources of oil, gas, fertile agricultural land, fresh water, and other vitally important commodities.
Coming back to Solzhenitsyn, one should not have expected him to know all the answers and always be right. He is neither God nor a prophet, and he had his share of mistakes which he admitted himself. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn deserves our admiration for what he did, and I wouldn't be surprised if Solzhenitsyn may eventually be canonized by the Slavic Orthodox Church. Indeed, his life was a series of miracles, from surviving Stalin's Gulag where millions perished to recovering from deadly cancer, and, most importantly, to achieving a great moral victory over his Soviet tormenters.
This process may take a long time, but a very symbolic gesture in this direction has already been made this week. It was always annoying, to say the least, when looking at the Moscow map to find the names of the streets or Metro stations picked from communist vocabulary or named after some Bolshevik or Soviet leaders. What a delight it was when I have heard the news that the Moscow city government gave the "Large Communist Street" near the "Taganka" square the name of the great Russian patriot "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn."
Edward Lozansky is President of the American University in Moscow.
I like the Thomas P.M. Barnett quote below - who the f--- elected Mikheil Saakashvili to decide American foreign policy? Or for that matter, McCain's advisor Randy Scheunemann? Russia is lying about South Ossetia being "genocide", but they way they see it, neither was Kosovo, and Pristina was not on their border like Georgia, so why not lie like the West?
"We have had almost two decades to get Russia feeling happy and secure in its place in the world--to find a new self-identity that it can be proud of. We have largely wasted those two decades. We asked and asked and asked and Russia gave and gave and gave, and finally Russia got fed up. That development, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. I want a confident, demanding Russia. I need it to run some parts of the world and help shrink some parts of the Gap I won't pretend anybody else is stepping up to handle. But I need a rule set for how that's done that I can live with, along with the rest of the Core. By not integrating Russia better into Core institutions (like NATO, which should have been killed a while ago and reborn immediately as something from Vancouver to Vladivostock--remember that one from Jim Baker?), we've done a half-assed job, giving Russia just enough connectivity (which is substantial, business-wise, and if you're slow on that uptake, you need to read deeper into the WSJ and if you're unwilling to learn then you should remain satisfied with your head-up-your-ass perspective and spare me your insights) to get rich but not enough larger pol-mil context to truly make itself happy and secure inside the Core."
"To a certain extent, Russia's rebirth was inevitable (it's got a ton of stuff and it's a highly literate population), and as we've seen in past history, its depressive phases are always followed by some manic episodes. Again, we've had years and years to work this one and we did little to prepare for this moment. If I'm king of the West, Russia is already deep inside a revamped Northern Hemispheric Security Alliance (a term from an old CNA pub I did in the mid-90s that looked ahead to roughly now). Would that have prevented all such turbulence from Russia? No. But better to finesse it within that context than to face what we face now: Russia is simply marking its sphere of influence more overtly and proposing its own rule set for its management. We didn't invite Russia properly into our 21st century, so, denied any acceptable ownership of its own 20th century history (better it be all buried, say I), it slipped back into its 19th (quelle surprise, mes ami!), and yeah, that makes our management of Russia's membership in the Core a lot more complicated. We denied them proper attention for a long time and now they're acting out to garner negative attention: "You don't let us decide some of your rules, then we'll simply decide on our own where we can!"
"Of course, a certain amount of this rule-set competition is inevitable. Hell, it's part of doing business (meaning, economics) in this world. China, for example, is constantly trying to fence off new technology rule sets (this standard or that) because it gets the logic that "he who controls the initial standard gets to dominate the market." Russia itself is clearly trying to do that in natural gas (its better long-term play) and a host of precious metals. Sure, it's doing it in a crude way, but not unlike an America playing to its strengths (like cotton) in the early 19th century. What we did to Britain, for example, in the 19th century (cheat like hell and ask for all manner of exceptions from the dominant economic/trade rule set), Russia and China and others now seek to do with us. Tough to manage, yes, but it beats the hell out of arms races and proxy wars in the Third World and brinkmanship over stupid macho bullshit. So again, I will be very, very slow to push that button."
"But more than that, I want America to act its age and recognize its progeny in globalization and to think long and hard about casually trashing any of that amazing legacy out of temporary fears better managed by cooler heads. We've worked ourselves into a bit of a strategic tie-down here. We won't be unwinding that position for quite some time, unless we're willing to trash those efforts (ill advised). The manner in which we achieved this tie down (stubborn unilateralism) has created a very bad example, which, unfortunately but hardly to our surprise, Russia is following in its usual way (f--k the diplomatic prelims, we're going in!). Moscow also now seems to echoing our use of "time horizons" when confronted with demands to leave (you know, as Jon Stewart puts it, that thing you head towards but never actually reach!). These guys are annoyingly quick learners, like a four-year-old who instantly picks up your swears."
"But admitting the reality that we're living out the last few months of a very lame-duck presidency isn't the same as freaking out and making frantic choices at Mikhail Saakashvili's behest (who the f--k elected him to run American foreign policy?)."
Tom Friedman has it right: Russia can go down this path to a certain extent and there's nothing we can do about it. But if Putin persists, then Europe will spend the bucks and make the supremely uncomfortable effort to redirect on both oil and especially gas. It'll be a bitch, but I'll tell you up front, a lot of companies are going to make a shitload of profit taking advantage of Putin's stupidity. To a degree, this path is already somewhat set and should be pursued (sign me up for the shitload!) anyway. In the meantime, however, we should stay calm but firm. Hell yes, put all sorts of carrots and sticks on the table, but be very careful with the latter, because when security promises are involved, they often get carved in stone very quickly, creating dynamics that are unbearably hard to control and which could easily overwhelm the transmission of the far more profound economic signals."
Probably many college students today see Solzhenitsyn as "that old man who says weird things".
Maybe some (in the US anyway) read his "Matryona" short story or his "One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch".
Is Solzhenitsyn relevent to today? I suggest people read the following two speech texts easily available online:
Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize speech and his later (infamous) 1978 Harvard speech.
Let his words decide if he is still relevant.
For me, his comments on the Western Press are particularly relevant these past few months.