How Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Became Putin’s Spiritual Guru

Other borders, however, would be up for grabs. Chunks of northern Kazakhstan—areas, according to the writer, that were never truly Kazakh—should revert to Russia. So, too, should Belarus, which was hardly a distinct nation from Russia. Most importantly, swaths of Ukraine remained rightfully Russian, from eastern Ukraine to Crimea and beyond—even up to and including Kyiv. All of these lands comprised traditional Russian holdings. And all of them, this writer proposed, should comprise a future “Russian Union”—not only returning millions of ethnic Russians suddenly outside the Russian Federation’s borders to their homeland, but restoring Moscow to its rightful place in the world.

At the time, these policy proposals generated little interest, or even concern, in the West. On the one hand, that oversight is understandable, given that the West was primarily focused on securing a stable Soviet disintegration. But on the other hand, the ignorance is almost shocking, given that the author of such a blueprint, bundled into a book called Rebuilding Russia, was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author and the “dominant writer of the 20th century,” as New Yorker editor David Remnick once described him.

While much of Solzhenitsyn’s work—not least Gulag Archipelago, as well as books like Cancer Ward and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—remains widely dissected and discussed, Rebuilding Russia is arguably his most overlooked read. And given how closely the Kremlin has hewed to Solzhenitsyn’s policy recommendations in Rebuilding Russia in the years since, that oversight is all the more unfortunate—not least because of what it tells us about what the Kremlin wants in Ukraine, and even beyond.

The book itself is relatively scant, with its English translation coming in at around 90 pages—more of a manifesto than a fully developed manuscript. But even in those pages, Solzhenitsyn reveals himself not only as a Russian nationalist, but as someone who dabbles in the kinds of conspiracies and mysticism that would later saturate Russian President Vladimir Putin. Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn approvingly cites Russian fascists like Ivan Ilyin, praising the “spiritual life of a nation.” He also claims that many of the smaller nations colonized by tsarist-era Russian forces “lived well” in the Russian Empire—wholly ignoring how Russian forces brutalized entire nations in northern Asia, stripping them of population and sovereignty alike, even to the point of genocide. He even wrote that countries like Kazakhstan were “stitched together … in a completely haphazard fashion”—downplaying Kazakhs’ historic claims not only to their modern country, but even to formerly Kazakh territory still considered part of the Russian Federation.

But it is in Ukraine—and in Solzhenitsyn’s calls for a Russian Union—that Solzhenitsyn’s revanchism shines through and provides insight into the forces propelling the Kremlin and designs to come. 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.”

Instead of an independent Ukraine separating from the Russian Federation, Solzhenitsyn wrote, a new entity should rise. “There will remain nothing but an entity that might be called Rus, as it was designated in olden times … or else ‘Russia,’ a name used since the eighteenth century,” he wrote, “or—for an accurate reflection of the new circumstances—the ‘Russian Union.’”

Copies of books and personal notes of Solzhenitsyn.Laski Diffusion/Getty Images

So, too, did Solzhenitsyn’s policy proposals influence another future Russian president: Putin. While it’s unclear if Putin ever read Solzhenitsyn’s work, the current Kremlin chief was clearly a fan of Solzhenitsyn’s policy recommendations—and especially his nationalism.

It’s not difficult to see how Solzhenitsyn became, as one analyst wrote, Putin’s “spiritual guru.” Not only was Solzhenitsyn an “undoubted Russian nationalist,” as Robin Ashenden noted, but as the years passed following the publishing of Rebuilding Russia, Solzhenitsyn collapsed further and further into the kind of nationalist mania that would later drive Putin. By the mid-1990s, Solzhenitsyn began claiming that the Soviet collapse was propelled by the U.S.’s “common aim” to “use all means possible, no matter what the consequences, to weaken Russia.” (This, of course, ignores the fact that the George H.W. Bush administration not only tried to keep the Soviet Union together but actively pushed back against Ukrainian separatism.) Not long later, Solzhenitsyn sputtered that Ukraine’s democratic Orange Revolution was little more than a sign of NATO’s “plan to encircle Russia”—and that, in reality, “[v]ast tracts of land, which have never been part of historical Ukraine,” were “forcibly incorporated into the modern Ukrainian state and into its policy of acquiring NATO membership at any cost.”

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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.

Small wonder, then, that by the 2000s Solzhenitsyn had come out as a fan of Putin’s policies. Praising Putin’s “resurrection of Russia,” Solzhenitsyn accepted a state prize for cultural achievements from the Kremlin and was “deployed as part of the Kremlin’s counterrevolutionary strategy.” The famed author had become “the unofficial leader of the Russian nationalist intelligentsia,” Tomiwa Owolade wrote.

Putin chats with Solzhenitsyn at his suburban home near Moscow on Sept. 20, 2000. AFP via Getty Images

All of it culminated in a direct meeting between Putin and Solzhenitsyn, shortly before the latter’s death in 2008. Sitting at a small table, flanked by shelves upon shelves of books, Putin spoke with the ailing writer “about [Russia’s] future.” It was, at least in part, a future Solzhenitsyn had once called for. As Putin outlined, many of the policies he was pursuing—including policies regarding Russia’s former colonies, now scattered across Eastern Europe and the Caucasus and Central Asia—were “to a large extent harmonious with Solzhenitsyn’s writings.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during the opening ceremony of a new monument to Solzhenitsyn in Moscow on Dec. 11, 2018. Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

But it’s clear that Solzhenitsyn—an author of unparalleled stature, especially in a collapsing Soviet Union—structured the diffuse strands of Russian nationalism in a way that proved irresistible to future Russian leaders, and to future Russian revanchists. Calling for, and even excusing, Russian irredentism, Solzhenitsyn helped lay the groundwork in 1990 for the neo-imperialism to come—and for the continued, widespread Russian belief in the subordination and inherent falsehood of a modern, independent Ukraine.

Solzhenitsyn’s defenders will point to his passages in Rebuilding Russia that downplayed militarism as a means of expanding Russia’s borders. (“Of course, if the Ukrainian people should genuinely wish to separate, no one would dare to restrain them by force,” he wrote.) But even that defense is suspect; years after Ukrainians in places like Crimea and the Donbas clearly voted for independence from Moscow, Solzhenitsyn still refused to view these regions as rightfully Ukrainian. And given his continued support for Putin in his later years—even after the Russian president claimed that Ukraine was “not even a country”—that defense hardly remains credible.

What’s even more indefensible, however, is how the West ignored and downplayed Solzhenitsyn’s unrepentant nationalism in the post-Soviet period. Distracted by Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Soviet credentials, the West missed the imperial outlines the author had sketched—and how they infused the Kremlin in the years following. Instead of confronting Solzhenitsyn’s revanchism head-on, the West—just as it’s done with so many other Russian nationalists, even after Putin’s expanded invasion in 2022—preferred to look the other way, hoping the flames feeding such views would die out on their own.

But it’s been over three decades since Solzhenitsyn first called for his Russian Union, and those flames hardly show signs of extinguishing any time soon. If anything, Putin has only hurdled further and further into the abyss that Solzhenitsyn first laid out, with no signs of stopping. Which is why Solzhenitsyn’s playbook, and Putin’s willingness to follow, must be viewed for exactly what they are—an unmitigated threat to stability in Europe and to the idea of Ukrainian (or even Belarusian and Kazakh) nationhood itself. And while Solzhenitsyn never lived to see his Russian Union return, it’s not for Putin’s lack of trying—and it’s only thanks to the sacrifice of Ukrainians themselves that we haven’t, either.