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Russia is now ripe for freedom revolution, warns Solzhenitsyn

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From Jeremy Page in Moscow
THE former dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has emerged from three years in obscurity with a warning that Russia could face a Ukrainian-style revolution.

The 86-year-old Nobel laureate, who spent ten years in the Soviet gulag, said in his first television interview since 2002 that Russia was not backsliding on democracy because it had never been truly democratic.

“It is often said that democracy is being taken away from us and that there is a threat to our democracy. What democracy is threatened? Power of the people? We don’t have it,” he told Rossiya, the state-run channel.

“We have nothing that resembles democracy. We are trying to build democracy without self-governance. Before anything, we must begin to build a system so that the people can manage their own destinies.”

He said that the State Duma, dominated by the Kremlin’s supporters, was acting “as if it were drunk” and the country could face an upheaval similar to last year’s Orange Revolution in Ukraine if the Government did not change course.

“An Orange Revolution may take place if tensions between the public and the authorities flare up and money begins flowing to the opposition,” he said.

Solzhenitsyn is the latest prominent figure to re-ignite political debate in Russia since President Putin backtracked on democratic reforms this year by abolishing direct elections for regional governors. But the author did not give his backing to the liberal Opposition.

Instead, he condemned Russia’s Parliament and all its political parties, as well as criticising the United States for trying to impose democracy on other countries. “Democracy is not worth a brass farthing if it is being installed by bayonets. Democracy should grow slowly and gradually.”

He also pointed out that the local elections abolished by Mr Putin’s new legislation were distorted by corruption and organised crime. Analysts said that might explain why the interview was aired on Rossiya, the Government’s mouthpiece.

Solzhenitsyn is regarded as one of Russia’s few independent moral and political authorities but is often criticised in the West for his nationalism and religious orthodoxy. In a previous televised interview, he attacked Mr Putin for failing to crack down on the oligarchs, the two dozen businessmen who bought state assets cheaply in the privatisations of the 1990s. President Putin is under fire in the West precisely because of the state’s legal assault on one oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The oil tycoon was jailed for nine years last week after what was seen as a Kremlin-orchestrated show trial to punish a potential political rival and seize his property.

Vladimir Kolesnikov, Russia’s Deputy Prosecutor General, told NTV television late on Sunday that there could be more such trials. “I can say one thing, [Khodorkovsky’s] case will not be the last.”

Solzhenitsyn appeared to have no sympathy for the fallen oil magnate. “The world has never seen such rapid privatisation,” he said. “The world has never seen such idiots. They gave away our God-given resources at lightning speed — oil, nonferrous metals, coal, production. They fully robbed Russia. From scratch, from nothing we bred billionaires who have done nothing for Russia.”

A life in exile
# Spent ten years in the Soviet gulag after he wrote a letter criticising Joseph Stalin in 1945
# One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his account of life in the gulag, made him famous when it was published in 1962 and translated into 35 languages
# In 1970 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature
# He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 for writing The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the labour camp system in Soviet Russia
# He continued to write as an exile in Switzerland and the US before returning to Russia in 1994 after a pardon from Mikhail Gorbachev

June 6, 2005 at 08:25 PM in Russia | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home