The Nobel Prize-winning writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn has lamented the state of Russian politics and government in a rare televised interview in the Russian Federation, saying it will take many years before the country has anything resembling democracy.
The 86-year-old author, who rose to prominence with his accounts of Josef Stalin’s repression and labour camps, criticised the parties that dominate Russian politics today. Speaking on the Vesti Nedelyi programme on the state-run Rossiya television, he said democracy had to come from the bottom up — and that was not happening in Russia today.
”If they are going to take away our democracy, they can take away only what we have. But if we have nothing, then nothing can be taken away,” he said. ”We have already taken everything from the people … We have nothing that resembles democracy.
”We are trying to build democracy without self-governance,” he said, according to a transcript of the interview.
Solzhenitsyn, whose best-known works include One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago, looked thin, but spoke energetically and often gestured with emotion, though only with his right arm.
He was thought to have been in poor health for several years. Born to a Cossack family in 1918, he was thrown into jail in 1945 when the KGB intercepted a letter to a friend criticising Stalin. He was sent to labour camps, but was discharged in 1953, and sent into internal exile where he began to write. Under Khrushchev’s relaxation of censorship, Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962.
Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, taking with him the new cultural freedoms. Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Soviet stance increased his stature in the West, and he settled in the United States when he was expelled from the USSR in 1973.
He had his Soviet citizenship restored to him in 1990 by Gorbachev. – Guardian Unlimited Â