Authors

Elisa Kriza¹;  ¹ Bamberg University, Germany

Discussion

During the present war and since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russian media has been citing Nobel Prize winner and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) to justify military engagement in Ukraine (de facto invasion). In the West, Solzhenitsyn is one-sidedly remembered as a moral icon for his opposition to communism. But nationalism defined his thought, and its tragic legacy begs reassessment. Solzhenitsyn espoused nationalistic, imperialist views about Ukraine that hark back to the Tsarist Empire but have found resonance among the present political elite, with disastrous consequences. Solzhenitsyn’s revanchist vision of a “Greater Russia” that encompasses parts of countries such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan have been increasingly and dangerously adopted by President Vladimir Putin and his pundits. My paper will analyse critically the development of anti-Ukrainian views in Solzhenitsyn’s oeuvre and zoom in on seminal texts by the Nobel Laureate which have provided the bellicose narratives that have become familiar to the world at large as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022: a) the false notion that Ukraine is not a “real country” and the devaluation of its culture, b) the idea that the Eastern part of Ukraine, the Kherson region, and Crimea are allegedly “in reality Russian” and not Ukrainian; and c) that the demographic decline of white, Christian Russians in Russia can purportedly be solved by territorial expansion into Ukraine.