Solzhenitsyn-Communism

Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet totalitarian regime, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the
House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not practice any real censorship in the style of the Soviet Glavlit,
[77]
that political prisoners
typically were not forced into labor camps,
[78]
and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of those in the
Soviet Union. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, or Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian
Army.
[citation needed]
In a speech commemorating the Royalist Vende Uprising, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with Jacobins of the French Revolution.
However, he commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent raged
unabated from 1917 until the Khrushchev thaw in the 1950s.
[citation needed]
According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all ethnic cultures have been oppressed in favor
of an atheistic Marxism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of
ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalismand the Orthodox
Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.
[79]
In "Rebuilding Russia," an essay first published in 1990 in "Komsomolskaya Pravda" Solzhenitsyn urged Russia to cast off all non-Slav republics, which
he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts
of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified.
[5]
In 2006 Solzhenitsyn accused NATO of trying to bring Russia under its control; he claimed this was visual because of its "ideological support for the
'colour revolutions' and the paradoxical forcing of North Atlantic interests on Central Asia".
[80]
In an 2006 interview with Der Spiegel he stated "This
was especially painful in the case of Ukraine, a country whose closeness to Russia is defined by literally millions of family ties among our peoples,
relatives living on different sides of the national border. At one fell stroke, these families could be torn apart by a new dividing line, the border of a
military bloc."
[81]
Solzhenitsyn said that for every country, great power status deforms and harms the national character and that he has never wished great power
status for Russia. He rejected the view that the USA and Russia are natural rivals, saying that before the [Russian] revolution, they were natural allies
and that during the American Civil War, Russia supported Lincoln and the North [in contrast to Britain and France, which supported the
Confederacy], and then they were allies in the First World War. But beginning with Communism, Russia ceased to exist and the confrontation was
not at all with Russia but with the Communist Soviet Union.
[citation needed]