Solzhenitsyn, Putin and the New Old Russia

In an article in Politico, Peter Eltsov explores the improbably relationship between Russian leader and former KGB official Vladimir Putin and the late author/dissident/KGB target Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

"Indeed, it is one of history’s ironies that the No. 1 internal enemy of the Soviet Union has now become a spiritual guru to a former KGB officer who repeatedly voices nostalgia for Soviet times. For years before his death, the fiercely patriotic Solzhenitsyn suggested that post-Soviet Russia must include Ukraine. Solzhenitsyn did not see the Ukrainians as a separate nation: “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is recently invented falsehood,” he wrote in a 1990 essay, “Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals.”

Full article here