Moshe Lewin, citado en la Revolución Naturalista:
La lucha de Solzhenitsyn se inspiraba, de hecho, en una ideología profundamente antidemocrática, a cuyo servicio estaba, y que combinaba elementos de "nacional-estatismo" y rasgos arcaicos de la religión ortodoxa. El escritor no ocultaba su hostilidad hacia los males de Occidente, ni hacia el concepto mismo de democracia, y alimentaba una concepción autoritaria propia y profundamente arraigada que, aunque no la formuló al irrumpir en la escena pública.
David Boaz en Cato & Liberty:
After he came to the United States in 1974 and was free to express himself, we discovered that he was a scathing critic not just of communism but also of capitalism, consumerism, America, modernity, and liberalism. Nevertheless, he is a hero of freedom. After spending more than a decade in the gulag and internal exile, he wrote The Gulag Archipelago and smuggled it out of the Soviet Union so it could be published in the West. He could have been sent back to prison or even executed. What an act of courage and resistance.
Yuri N. Maltsev en Mises.org:
In the West, he liked the Swiss model of local government and spoke highly of his experiences living in Vermont. Before leaving for Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke to his neighbors in a Cavendish town meeting and thanked the town for its hospitality and for respecting his privacy. He thought of the town-meeting type of self-government as the most suitable for Russia. He did not, however, make a god of democracy; he admired great Russian reformer Pyotr Stolypin with his strong promarket and antisocialist stand as the prime minister of the Russian Empire (1906-1911).
Ilya Soin en Volokh:
Unlike fellow dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn was a Russian nationalist, not a liberal democrat. As such, he was suspicious of Western-style democracy and individual rights. (...) Solzhenitsyn's nationalism also led him to endorse some of Vladimir Putin's authoritarian measures, and to oppose allowing Ukraine to become independent of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union (he did, to his credit, support independence for all the non-Slavic parts of the former Soviet empire, which he did not consider to be legitimate Russian possessions). (...)
I think that while Solzhenitsyn was wrong to excuse and minimize the crimes of czarist Russia, he was right to emphasize that the oppression of the Soviet Union was rooted more in communist ideology and institutions than in Russian cultural tradition.
Victor Davis Hanson en The Corner:
Conservatives sometimes got the impression that he didn't like the West or the United States all that much, as he saw the proper antidote to both totalitarianism, and Western-style free-market capitalism and individualism, in a proud Czarist Orthodox, all-powerful state-something akin to what is fossilizing in Putin's Russia today. (...)
In the end, his epitaph is that no one in the 20th-century did more than he to bring down a horrific and bloodthirsty system that sought at any price to destroy the free mind and all that it entails.
Conferencia de Alexander Solzhenitsyn en Harvard, 1978:
[S]hould I be asked (...) whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.
(...) After the suffering of decades of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits, introduced as by a calling card by the revolting invasion of commercial advertising, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music. (...) The Western way of life is less and less likely to become the leading model.
George Handlery en The Brussels Journal:
Let this be ended with a few lines about AIS [Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn] and the West. His judgment of Stalinism (with or without Stalin) had been part of his ethical backbone. In some ways, comprehending the nature of the West has been AIS’ weakness. Correspondingly, his role regarding it is inferior to the one he played in his own culture. It would be wrong to say that AIS completely misunderstood the West. Solzhenitsyn had an accurate, well expressed, and therefore resented assessment of the West’s weaknesses. His famous, devastating and therefore unloved 1978 commencement address at Harvard testifies to that. What he could not quite fathom were the strengths and virtues of Western civilization. In 1994, upon his return to Russia after the collapse of the USSR, initially AIS did not find popular success at home as the host of a TV program. Perhaps reflecting the confusion of many of his compatriots by the modern world, he also seems to have positioned himself against the new and the only future any developing society can have. This he did in a way that can said to be tainted by the (wrong) colors taken from the pallet of nativism. (...)
In part Solzhenitsyn is – regardless of his principled and courageous opposition to it- a product of Soviet rule. He had to spend his years in the West in isolation in order to remain a Russian writer and to avoid the KGB’s revenge. As already noted, his circumstances afforded only limited personal access to modern societies.
(...) Under examination, most of us show contradictions that resist their entirely rational explanation. In AIS’ case, it must be admitted that aptitude and much merit earned in a great role do no exclude great errors. Even so, in the ultimate analysis, Solzhenitsyn is a great man of talent with admirable courage matching a strong moral commitment.
Que descanse en paz.
