By Alex Alexiev:
Solzhenitsyn’s reputation as a giant among writers is secure and unshakeable. Yet there is another side to him that justifies us in breaking the Latin admonition “de mortuis nihil nisi bonum,” or not speaking ill of the dead. Contrary to what some in the West have argued, it is not his criticisms of the messiness of democracy, or the libertinism of Western society, that are at issue here, but much graver errors of judgment, such as denying the Holodomor, which he called a “loony fable,” years after Robert Conquest’s magisterial Harvest of Sorrow established the facts of this Stalinist genocide in Ukraine beyond doubt. Or the fact that for over 100 million Ukrainians, Poles, Balts, Romanians, Bulgarians, and other Eastern Europeans, Solzhenitsyn remains a Russian imperialist par excellence and, as such, a mortal danger of the first order. Nor is his devotion to the Russian Orthodox church, for which he is praised by many, a great virtue. That church has always been and remains under Putin a fateful servant of Russian imperialism.
Read more: American Thinker
