Johnson's Russia List
#7464
12 December 2003
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A CDI Project
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#2
Solzhenitsyn turns 85; Putin calls him moral authority for generations
December 11, 2003
AP
President Vladimir Putin sent a congratulatory message to Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, whose accounts of Stalin's repression and the Gulag labor
camp system riveted Russians and shocked the West, on his 85th birthday
Thursday.
"Your name, your life is inextricably linked with the key, dramatic turning
points 20th century Russian history. And you never accepted compromise,
always standing firmly by your convictions," Putin said in the message,
according to the Kremlin press service.
Solzhenitsyn, who spent a decade in a labor camp and documented life in the
camps in his "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy, won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1970 and was expelled from the Soviet Union four years later,
making his home in the United States.
"For several generations of citizens of our country, you were an
indisputable moral authority, an example of devoted and selfless service to
the people and the fatherland," Putin's message said.
Solzhenitsyn's role as a moral arbiter and a literary star have declined
since he returned to Russia in 1994, taking a train across the country to
Moscow and criticizing the corruption and poverty of post-Soviet Russia.
Solzhenitsyn made favorable statements about Putin early in his presidency,
but lashed out at him in 2002 for failing to crack down on tycoons who
snapped up state enterprises in the scandal-tainted privatizations of the
1990s.
Putin, a former KGB officer and one-time leader of the feared agency's
post-Soviet successor who has expressed pride about his past, has been
careful about criticizing Stalin, still a popular figure among many
Russians who yearn for law and order.
Solzhenitsyn, who was hospitalized with high blood pressure for some time
last January, planned to celebrate his birthday at his home outside Moscow
with family, state-run Rossiya television reported.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, sent
Solzhenitsyn a birthday telegram, saying, "You were exiled from the
fatherland, but they could not drive you from the hearts of many thousands
of Russians," the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
"You have gone through the trials of World War II, you were not crushed by
repressions and the nightmare of the camps, you did not yield in the 1960s
and 1970s when they tried to silence you and exclude you from the spiritual
life of the people," it said.
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