Solzhenitsyn is dead

In the year after his death, Time published an article by Andrei Sakharov in which he accounted for the many differences in style and principle between himself and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It's defensive—polite but prickly. Still, it captures something about the spirit of the public debate these men were having (as, all the while, they battled the Politburo and fought for freedom and transparency and wrote billions of words). Solzhenitsyn as the unreconstructed czarist gets lost in the obituaries, justifiably overshadowed by Solzhenitsyn the monumental exposer of Soviet crimes; but late in his life, the patriarchal character whom he always hoped would do the work that Gorbachev made possible appeared—Putin—and the faith that Solzhenitsyn sometimes expressed in Putin puts him at ends with those who imagine Putin quite differently. Sakharov did not live for long enough to debate Solzhenitsyn over Putin and Russia's future, and now both of them are gone, but the debate continues and on nearly the same terms as when Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn both began thinking past the end of the Soviet Union and toward Russia's future.

John Mark Reynolds offers that Solzhenitsyn was "a man of a better future living in a twenty-first century still caught in the backwash of 1914–1918. . . . Solzhenitsyn lived in his heart and mind in a world that was ruled by Christ." On the advice that one should not speak ill of those who speak highly of the dead, I will just say that that is another point of view.