Solzhenitsyn's righteous outrage (Published 2006)
In a written interview with the newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti, he has attacked the United States and NATO for what he described as "an effort totally to encircle Russia and destroy its sovereignty."
The 1970 Nobel laureate for literature has always been a critic of a modernity that, in his opinion, has produced a devastating dehumanization in the West, as well as in his own country under the rule of Lenin, Stalin and their successors.
In his American exile, he made it plain that the Russia he hoped to see in succession to Soviet Russia would not be the liberal capitalist state Americans hoped for (and attempted to install after the USSR's demise, with unhappy consequences), but a Russia displaying the national and conservative Christian solidarity he sees in Russia's past.
Today he believes that a West lost to secularism and materialism is threatening Russia: "Although it is clear that Russia, as it exists, represents no threat to NATO, the latter is methodically developing its military deployment in Eastern Europe and on Russia's southern flank." His interview coincided with a NATO meeting held in Bulgaria, where the Ukrainian defense minister declared his country's "irreversible ambition" to become a NATO member.
NATO's 2004 expansion into the Baltic states was correctly taken by the Russians as a betrayal of assurances given Moscow, following the collapse of the USSR, that NATO would not push the alliance perimeter up to the Russian frontier.
The decision to do so contributed to the creation of a new climate of what can be called a cool war with the West, further chilled by American sponsorship of the "color revolutions" in countries such as Georgia that were part of Moscow's empire in czarist times, or like Ukraine and Belarus, which are closely related culturally and occupy an ambiguous zone of historically shifting political identityat the frontier between Orthodox and Roman Christianity.