Solzhenitsyn on America’s Expansionist Policies in Europe

Solzhenitsyn

Sixteen years ago, in an interview with Moscow News on April 28, 2006, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, accused the United States of destabilizing Europe through its policy of using NATO to encircle Russia. His words sound prophetic today: 

“The United States is placing its occupation troops in one country after another. This is the de facto situation in Bosnia for 9 years, in Kosovo and Afghanistan for 5 years each, in Iraq for 3 years so far, but it will be a long time there. There is little difference between NATO’s actions and individual U.S. actions. Clearly seeing that today’s Russia poses no threat to them, NATO is methodically and persistently developing its military apparatus – to the east of Europe and into the continental reach of Russia from the south. There is open material and ideological support for “color” revolutions, and the paradoxical introduction of North Atlantic interests – in Central Asia. All this leaves no doubt that a complete encirclement of Russia is being prepared, and then the loss of its sovereignty. No, Russia’s accession to such a Euro-Atlantic alliance, which conducts propaganda and the violent introduction into various parts of the planet of the ideology and forms of current Western democracy – would lead not to expansion, but to the decline of Christian civilization.

“What is happening in Ukraine, even from the falsely-constructed wording for the 1991 referendum (I have written and spoken about this before), is my constant bitterness and pain. The fanatical suppression and persecution of the Russian language (which in past polls was recognized as its primary language by more than 60% of the population of Ukraine) is simply an atrocious measure, and also directed against the cultural perspective of Ukraine itself. Huge expanses of land that never belonged to historical Ukraine, like Novorossia, Crimea, and the entire southeastern region, have been forcibly squeezed into the current Ukrainian state and its policy of greedy NATO membership. In Yeltsin’s entire tenure, not a single meeting with Ukrainian presidents was without capitulations and concessions on his part. The expulsion of the Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol (never ceded to the Ukrainian SSR even under Khrushchev) is a base and vicious desecration of the entire Russian history of the 19th and 20th centuries.

“Under all these conditions, Russia dares not in any form indifferently betray the many millions of the Russian population in Ukraine, to deny our unity with them.”

Solzhenitsyn’s biographer Joseph Pearce said in his March 2022 article, “Solzhenitsyn and Putin,” that in 2007, Solzhenitsyn questioned the West’s double standards in targeting Putin for his KGB background while seeing nothing wrong in George Bush’s CIA background. Here’s an excerpt from his interview: “Vladimir Putin – yes, he was an officer of the intelligence services, but he was not a KGB investigator, nor was he the head of a camp in the gulag. As for service in foreign intelligence, that is not a negative in any country – sometimes it even draws praise. George Bush Sr. was not much criticized for being the ex-head of the CIA, for example.”

In the same article, Pearce notes that Solzhenitsyn saw America’s the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia that lasted 78 days as a warcrime and a direct challenge to Russia. Solzhenitsyn said: “The cruel NATO bombings of Serbia… It’s fair to say that all layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings… So, the perception of the West as mostly a ‘knight of democracy’ has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusionment, a crushing of ideals.”