This blog began with a reflection on Alexandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago". With Solzhenitsyn's death last week, it is again time to remember his legacy.
In his latter years, Solzhenitsyn was felt by some to have become a pawn of the Putin regime. He returned to his Russian "homeland" in the 1990s, having been, by all accounts deeply uncomfortable with Western "materialism" and "moral ambivalence", albeit that Solzhenitsyn's exile to the United States had been brought about by his far deeper antipathy for totalitarian communism. Although it had not started out this way, Alexandr Isaevich had been a supporter of the Revolution, and it was only after World War II that he fell out with the Soviet State, as his understanding of its powerful means of oppression - in Solzhenitsyn's case, The Gulag and internal exile - deepened like an infernal chasm.
It was also last week, that conflict broke out between the former Soviet State of Georgia and the Russian Federation. This is primarily a dispute about territory and "homeland", although the discordant political personalities, and aspirations, of the Russian and Georgian Governments are important. Western material interests too come into play, as Europe is deeply dependent on Russian reserves of oil and gas, and there is some moral ambivalence about the conflict as a consequence. Although some optimism should be attached to the intervention of the European Union, of which, along with NATO, Georgia's present government would one day like it to be part, we should all be ever wary of the potential for Russian oppression.
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