Vladimir Putin found an entirely unexpected ally at the beginning of his rule, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who dedicated his life in prison, in exile, and in oblivion to fighting Stalinism. When the writer reached the age of eighty-nine, the Russian leader visited him at his home (2007) and awarded him the Medal for Humanitarian Work. One recalls now that the most famous Soviet dissident met with Putin in disdain of Ukraine.
Two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union (1994), Solzhenitsyn attacked Ukrainian leaders who had strongly opposed communism in the past, and now accepted the false borders imposed by Lenin, including Crimea, which was given to Ukraine by the small tyrant Nikita Khrushchev. Of course, we also remember that the first returns to the embrace of the mother Russia were in Crimea. In his first meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush, he told him: "You must understand, George, that Ukraine isn't even a homeland."
When announcing the war on Ukraine, Putin stated, "Modern Ukraine is entirely born from Russia, specifically from the creation of Bolshevik and communist Russia." Putin did not hesitate to praise Stalin's role in World War II, completely ignoring that Solzhenitsyn devoted his life to destroying the image of the leader born in Georgia, that is, outside of Russia, which keenly remembers its "foreign" leaders.
In pursuit of his vision of the motherland, he simply abandoned some Soviet republics and fought, and still fights, to regain the republics and provinces "full of" true Russian spirit. Ukraine comes at the forefront of this. Nostalgia for it appeared in his most famous work "The Gulag Archipelago," recalling the centuries in which the Russian and Ukrainian peoples shared "the same customs, language, and food." He stated then with clear anguish: "Let them try secession... It is not a solution. But let them try, they will ultimately return to Russia."
We think in following the Ukrainian issue that Putin remembered its existence shortly before the war. However, in 2009, a year after Solzhenitsyn's death, he made a successful visit in Moscow, delivering a speech in which he said: "Ukraine is Little Russia and has nothing to do with anyone between it and Great Russia."