SOLZHENITSYN, WITNESS TO THE ALL IMPORTANT TRUTH

THE third spiritual guide of the Russian people in their present Calvary is undoubtedly Solzhenitsyn. To get to know him, let us begin by opening the Solzhenitsyn Album. The photographs, the biography, the summary and choice of texts all breathe an uprightness, a solidity and serenity in trial, even a joy, so characteristic of the strastoterptsi of Russian tradition, of the «innocent who has suffered the passion». That is sufficient to mark him out as the greatest of the emigrés to have been expelled from the USSR. I do not say dissidents for that is a word that sullies all who so call themselves. A dissident is a Soviet who is not happy with the regime as it exists at present or anything else for that matter! But Solzhenitsyn is a Russian who has returned from hell and who stands as a witness to the massacre of millions of his brothers, as an indomitable and courageous accuser of the Soviet regime, Communist ideology and the Communist party, and of nothing else or besides, because Communism is per se inhuman, atheistic and diabolical in all places and at all times: from Moscow to Peking, Cuba and Luanda, and from Lenin to Stalin and Andropov. This suffices to mark him out as the herald and already the hero of counter-revolutionary Christian and Russian nationalism.

    What makes matters worse for the Soviet State is that Solzhenitsyn is a very great writer, the greatest Russian novelist since Dostoyevsky. A novelist historian of another Human Comedy which, unlike that of Balzac and yet rather more minutely than that of Dante’s Divine Comedy, relates thousands of unimagined but authentically lived dramas and passions. These no longer explode in a confined climate but in a hell of woe and hatred, resulting in the atrocious count of corpses by the million, unearthed for History.

    With his genius for observation, his memory, his speed of narrative, suppleness of writing and spontaneous effusion – but one has to read him in his own language – he is a born writer whose very existence has provided him with a surfeit of themes for some fantastic stories. Add to this talent, a heart which lies hidden beneath an apparent coldness, sometimes taken for pride and egocentrism. His courage, moral strength and magnanimity make Alexander Solzhenitsyn a great man. His understanding of the fight against the terrifying enemy that is the Soviet state, that “diabolical Vatican”, and the shrewd candour with which he catches out the perverse, make him like another David aiming the deadly pebbles of his sling at Goliath’s forehead.

    So one fine morning he set out from Riazan for Moscow to establish a «second power», the liberating power of the Russian writer, both human and Christian!

THE JOURNEY OF AN HONEST RUSSIAN WRITER

    There is nothing more poignant than the first pages of the Album: the grandeur and wretchedness of the family of an officer of the imperial army caught up in the immense debacle of the Revolution. His father died only three months after he was born, and the family property was seized. His mother became a typist at Rostov, and they had nowhere to live in except rented tumbledown shacks or stable corners... This poverty and lack of privacy is difficult to imagine, and it went on for twenty years, from one war to the next, from one calamity to the next. And always there was the fear of police searches...

    And yet Alexander worked hard and succeeded in entering the military academy in 1942. Like his father, he would become an artillery officer. From 1943 until the last days of the war in 1945 he fought on the Lithuanian front. In appearance and in reality he was a loyal Soviet citizen, who could have been steered, as he himself will later admit, towards the NKVD to become one of the quarter of a million executioners in the USSR. He was neither a demon, nor a diabolic in the sense we have stated, but he was dehumanised and to a certain extent “possessed” as are the mass of people in the USSR, that is to say intoxicated, passive and led by the State wherever the devil wishes to lead them.

    Providentially – yes, providentially! – he was arrested on 9 February 1945 while still on the front, stripped of his rank and condemned to eight years’ detention for having criticized Stalin, the inspired Father of the peoples, in a private correspondence which was seized by the censor. Then it was that he discovered the horror of the camps, of the “Gulag”. What a fall! What a shock! He relived Dostoyevsky’s experience of The House of the Dead, the same spiritual conversion and the same communion with the outcasts of the people. But his analysis of the situation was essentially different from Dostoyevsky’s. Whereas Dostoyevsky had learned devotion towards the Tsar and the Church, Solzhenitsyn conceived a lucid, total and definitive hatred for the Stalinist state, for Marxism-Leninism its religion, and for the Communist party its practitioner. Was it a desire for revenge? Was it mere fury? No, it was a calm decision to fight all his life against the Diabolics who one day in 1917 had seized power by surprise and had held on to it by means of terror, enslaving the immense and beloved Russian people and, worse still, piling up their corpses by the million.

    At the end of eight years, to add to his misery, Alexander Isayevich underwent an operation for cancer and was condemned by his doctors to a hospital in Tashkent. His wife refused to see him again and she married someone else; imagine, a hospital in Tashkent (see the distance on a map)! He languished in his misery as a zek convicted for perpetuity, and yet he recovered and was restored to life! Was it a miracle? He believes it was. His life had a meaning therefore and his vocation as a writer became a sacred mission. «One could so easily have taken a breather, relaxed and stretched one’s legs, but duty towards the dead does not permit such a respite: they are dead, you are alive – do your duty so that the world might learn about ALL THIS.» (The Oak Tree) The «all important Truth»: «my life’s work» or rather «the testament of the millions who have disappeared, of the millions who were unable to whisper their own testament, even to murmur it in a groan as they lay on the floor of their camp hut – their testament… The skulls of all those who are lying in the common graves of the camps are counting so much on me.»

    His first works he composed in his memory. Later, when he was a maths teacher at Riazan, he wrote them down but concealed his manuscripts. I believe he is the first Russian writer to have fully shared in the condition of his people. He was like a moujik, profoundly at one with the masses crushed by the Bolshevik steamroller. It is these people that he brings to life in his short stories, The House of Matriona, what a masterpiece! And before long it is the whole terrifying throng of those who have disappeared in the Gulag – the dead, the mad and the crippled – whom he brings to life by way of an offering to Holy Russia both past and future... The people in the First Circle, the people in the Cancer Ward, and the two hundred and twenty seven characters of the Gulag Archipelago, are all companions in woe of Ivan Denisovich, Cht-854, the courageous, ironical and serene zek who saves them from the worst, from uselessness and oblivion, by telling us about them.

    In 1960 the moment had come to publish these manuscripts, which were now in danger of being searched out and destroyed. But what a problem! What an impossibility! What dangers and conflicts! The enormous work which chronicles this dangerous path, The Oak and the Calf, relates the writer’s victorious journey to freedom through the stupid carapace of Communist bureaucracy. One admires the continuous, untiring, astute and unshakeable drive of this survivor from the death camps, ready to return there at any moment, in order to let the world know of the appalling system that had ruled the immense territory of the Soviet Union for half a century without anyone appearing to be aware of it, or, if they were aware, being moved by it.

    The immediate benefit of his work can be measured by reading the abject little book published by Novosti, The Last Circle (Moscow, 1974). On every page, the adversary screams rather than cries out touché! And his defence, which consists in republishing the enormous lies of Soviet official history, the only history accessible to the millions of citizens of the USSR, produces by contrast a sense of the enormity of the falsification and of truth’s liberating splendour.

HIS ACHIEVEMENTS AND FAILURE IN THE EAST

    Providentially, Solzhenitsyn was able to take advantage of the liberalisation begun in 1961 at the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist Party by Kruschev’s «sudden, thunderous and furious attack» on Stalin’s cruel dictatorship. «Destalinisation» did not last long, but long enough for Solzhenitsyn to gain a sudden and extraordinary popularity in Russia. His A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had made known the «all important truth», but what is more, its publication was epoch-making: it had become possible to speak openly of these horrors! Stalinism came back again worse than ever in 1963, and especially in 1965. But Solzhenitsyn did not retreat. His fame, which had now spread abroad, enabled him to defy the Communist power. He demanded the liberation of an enslaved people, and firstly the freedom of thought, speech and writing. His noble and indeed inordinate ambition was to create another power, a counter-power, out of «liberal writers» who would rival and curb the power of the Party State. Relying from one day to the next on international opinion, and having become a Nobel prize winner in October 1970, he thought he could beat the party.

    The Oak and the Calf succeeded – in just 500 pages! – in making our Western minds understand how a survivor from the Gulag, become a kind of perpetual serf of the State, could live firstly as an «underground writer», then «be discovered», publish a book, a novel, be forgotten again, and then return to the charge sufficiently to reawaken the soul of his people through the open proclamation of Truth and Justice. The book told how he took advantage of the thaw to press forward and make headway – one day he would regret that he had not gone further and faster – through the door that the slow, stupid and thick-skinned administration had left open to him. And then one day «the breakthrough was achieved»; Tvardovsky’s Novy Mir may have been censored, but he himself was too well known in Russia and abroad for his denunciation of the horror of the camps, and so he was left in peace.

    What had been revealed, what the best analysis showed, was that this apparently monolithic state socialism, seen from the outside as a solid block without a crack, was in reality a mountain of cowardice, stupidity and irresponsibility. The man who had decided never to silence the Truth, never to fear anything in this world of reflex-conditioned slaves, strong in the kind of boldness that disorientates and inspires panic in subordinates, had succeeded in overturning several barriers. «To make the voice of the opposition heard was something new in Russia»... (I note in passing how his actions resemble our own manoeuvres and offensives to get a hearing from the Christian people and from the Pope, despite the thick skin of postconciliar ecclesiasticism).

    But, by constantly wearing away at it, would the calf succeed in reaching the end of the already fifty year old oak? Would the writer succeed in reaching the centre of the Soviet machine? and staying there? Would he succeed in establishing in the USSR a counter-power, the recognized expression of a free opposition? If he thought it possible, he was mistaken on a number of heads, as for example the pressure brought to bear on the leaders of the Kremlin by the weight of world opinion, and the solidity of world opinion before the slightest frown of those same leaders! The machine has all the slow reflexes of a sleeping cat. Sluggishly it gives way, then suddenly an eye opens, a spring is released and it strikes: «Your goose is cooked, my fine friend!» (The Oak and the Calf) On 13 February 1974, Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was deprived of Soviet citizenship and expelled from the USSR. The cat had let the mouse run onto its back but with one blow of its paw it had hurled the mouse to the other side of the pond, for want of being able to maul it and eat it at leisure. A Nobel prize winner cannot be sent back to the Gulag, but he can be sent to America where there are already so many of them!

    The key question was whether he would there be able to continue his implacable fight against Moscow’s enslaving Communism. He thought he could, and he did so more ably and effectively than ever before.

HIS ACHIEVEMENTS AND FAILURE IN THE WEST

    The problem I had long put to myself, refusing to attribute any real importance to Solzhenitsyn the émigré until I had found the answer, was this: How did the West, so deeply in collusion with the Soviet Union, so careful not to displease its leaders in any way, and furthermore so closely controlled and infiltrated by the KGB, embark with such enthusiasm on the Solzhenitsyn project? How is it that in 1963 the West gave such tremendous publicity to this unknown Russian, this fierce witness against the Soviet labour and death camps, and to the publication of every one of his new books, each more devastating for the leaders of the Kremlin and more anticommunist than the last: The First Circle in 1968, The Gulag Archipelago in 1973, etc? How was it that the West went so far as to award him the Nobel Prize in 1970, which is normally reserved by Stockholm’s liberal freemasons for pacifist, internationalist, neutralist crypto-communists of every tendency except reactionary!

    I understood why after carefully reading a book which had providentially fallen into my hands, Olga Carlisle’s Solzhenitsyn and the Secret Circle (Alain Moreau, 1979). This courageous Muscovite is a woman with a heart and, married to a solid American, a woman of action capable of holding her own in the world of affairs. Solzhenitsyn had met her in Moscow, at a gathering of the «liberal opposition», and had entrusted her in 1967 with the formidable task of preparing in great secrecy and then publishing with great publicity The First Circle. She and her American friends acquitted themselves remarkably well of this mission, as she relates in her book. She continues her story, always with the same sincerity, telling of Solzhenitsyn’s inexplicable split with their group, which she attributes to harshness and ingratitude on his part, culminating in defamation and lies against them.

    But she keeps her sense of fair play to the end, forgives all, and is willing to forget everything. She wishes only to remember the work accomplished by America, her new country, in the service of the freedom of the Russian people, her beloved people, by the «secret circle’s» collaboration with this very great man, Solzhenitsyn, whose minor defects are the excusable counterpart of genius.

    Olga Carlisle is of the greatest interest for what concerns us here, because she incarnates the generosity of America in welcoming Solzhenitsyn’s work. In my mind Olga has now merged indistinctly, as she herself so ardently desired, with the statue of Liberty welcoming one at the entrance to New York harbour. She brandishes the torch of Freedom with the same fierce folly and with all the charm of a Russian émigreé to boot.

(G de Nantes, RUSSIA BEFORE AND AFTER 1983, CRC n^o 153, Dec 1982, p. 38-41)

     Since then the fire has continued to smoulder under the ashes. Or to be more precise, as we know from the Third Secret of Fatima, it threatens to blaze out from «the flaming sword» of the Angel of extermination, because we have continued to offend Our Lord God. How can Cardinals Sodano and Ratzinger possibly declare: «The events to which the third part of the “secret” of Fatima refers now seem to belong to the past»?! Such statements are scandalously cavalier, indicating how little importance the highest authorities in the Church place on a warning which they themselves have published as something that comes from Heaven! They display a total blindness to the world’s real situation.

     We have recently quoted from a remarkable essay by Alexandre del Valle, Wars against Europe: Bosnia – Kosovo – Chechnya… (published by Syrtes, May 2000) The cover is adorned with an illustration which effectively summarises the 432 pages of this exhaustive analysis of «the major strategic pact which will determine the evolution of our small planet on the edge of the next millennium» (Valeurs actuelles, 8 September): the impassive and candid face of Vladimir Putin, telescoped between those of Bill Clinton and Oussama ben Laden, demonstrates how Russia is caught in a pincer movement between the Islamist jihad and the American superpower, both conspiring to smother her.

     Valeurs actuelles considers it to be «unnatural» this «objective alliance between the jihad and McWorld, that is between Islamist fundamentalism and American globalisation». Really? It hardly appears in the manner in which they make war: the savage bombing of Yugoslavia rivals the war conducted by the Chechens for barbarity.

THE DIABOLICS

     Already, during the times of the Soviet Union, the United States were the objective allies of one of the worst forms of barbarity, as is revealed in Olga Carlisle’s history. Her book Solzhentisyn and the Secret Circle (Alain Moreau, 1979) was studied in depth by the Abbé de Nantes: «When I closed this book, I understood everything», he wrote (English CRC n^o 153, p. 43).

     The question was as follows: «Why was Solzhenitsyn assured of a worldwide success by all the mass media despite their being in the power of the “Usurers” and the KGB working in collusion? And why should Olga, a small unsuspecting cog in this heavy machine, devote herself to this task with such heroic zeal?» Why indeed?

     Why? «Because this unfortunate zek was going to play his part in the great anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian concert, non-violent and pacifist, which the powers ruling the world had decided to launch. Olga, the unrepentant revolutionary socialist, along with the progressivist publishers Harper and Row and the New York Times were all going to march, using Solzhenitsyn as their battering ram, against Stalin, and therefore against Nixon! against all fascisms and all dictatorships, for they all look alike. Just as in 1917, it was held that it was better to give way to marxist-leninist idealists than to go back to the autocracy of the tsars. Which translates: it was better to yield Vietnam to the Communists than to wage this dirty war on behalf of the corrupt dictators of Saigon, be they Diem or Thieu or anyone else…» Who else? Putin, for example?

     Well, twenty years later, the time has past when «Solzhenitsyn’s protest against Marxism, delivered in an American climate saturated with tolstoyan non-violence and liberty, was understood as a moral insurrection against the excesses of the Stalinist era that was directly applicable to the excesses of American violence in Vietnam…» There if anywhere can be seen «the unnatural alliance»! And now this alliance has been broken, and an auspicious dialogue has been restored between the writer and a head of State who is determined to put down the Islamist rebellion in Chechnya as well as to deliver the Russian people, enslaved for half a century, from the most inhuman and diabolical tyranny in history.

     «Solzhenitsyn was deceived by America, continues the Abbé de Nantes, as have been and still are all the peoples of the world.

     «He began to understand his mistake as he learned of the progressivist ideas and commitments – crypto-communist, oh horror! – of dear Olga and her “secret circle” in New York. Whence his break with them…

     «But in 1974, expelled from the USSR, where was he to go, where was he to find refuge, protection and a hearing? In the USA! He therefore had to play down his denunciations of the New York progressivist clique. Paradoxically, it was only after he had flown over the statue of Liberty that he had to learn to keep silent and maintain a close check on himself as he arrived in Olga’s new country, generous America, the chosen place of the KGB and tolstoyan “non-violence” which served it as its alibi.

     «All things considered, he had been freer to proclaim “the all important truth” in Moscow.» (p. 43)

     Now he is back, having escaped from his property at Vermont, a gilded prison, of which the Abbé de Nantes wrote that «its pine trees and silver birches may resemble those of Naroforminsk, but they are surrounded by high barbed wire fences, mounted by a notice “KEEP OUT” which possibly contains an equally menacing message on its other side: “KEEP IN”…»

     From now on, Solzhenitsyn is free to play «his role as the great Russian and Christian thinker», a title happily given him by our Father twenty years ago. Observing that the Russian writer had fulfilled «his primary mission, the same that was incumbent on Dostoyevsky after his return in 1859 from the labour camps in Siberia until his death in 1881: that of denouncing the diabolics and making known the horror of the Soviet regime to Russia and the entire world», the Abbé de Nantes added:

     «What Solzhenitsyn has yet to say is that one cannot fight Marx with the speeches of Tolstoy, that it is impossible to fight against satanic Bolshevism with a programme of secular and socialist democracy! That Russia must guard against imitating the West, for to do so would be to return to the source of all her troubles! That she must go back further still, to the Holy Russia of the startsi and the tsars, for there alone lies her hope. And we ourselves will have to learn from her lessons.» (p. 45)

    The church of the Resurrection of Christ at Saint Petersburg, the former Leningrad returned to its baptismal name, and Vladimir Putin's birthplace. The Holy Face of Christ, seen here above the church entrance and presented by two angels at the summit of a kind of triumphal arch, is regarded as “the icon” par excellence, particularly in Russia and Serbia. Acheiropoietic, «not made by human hand», it is endowed with a miraculous power, victorious over every ill. Painted on the standards of armies in the field, it puts the enemy to flight (cf. photo of one of these standards, English CRC no 330, May 2000, p. 25).

    According to an immemorial tradition, reported of both King Abgar’s Mandylion in the East and “the Veronica” in the West, this Holy Face is the authentic portrait of Christ, obtained by the direct contact of the linen against the Lord’s face. Modern science allows us to identify that such is indeed the case with the Holy Face imprinted on the Holy Shroud of Turin. And a careful study of iconographic traditions in both East and West reveal that all the representations of the Holy Mandylion and “the Veronica” derive from the Holy Shroud (ibid.).

VICTIM OF EXPIATION

     The Abbé de Nantes admirably explains the dominant idea that has always pervaded the Russian soul:

     «She has no devotion more reverential, none more emotional, than that of the Holy Innocents who suffered the Passion. Russia beholds herself in her strastoterptsi; she contemplates in them her own vocation, her destiny, her sacred future. We see this in the reflections of Dostoyevsky’s most humble characters. We read it as a solidly constructed doctrine in Soloviev’s magisterial works, of salvation for Russia first of all and then for the world. It is the idea of the “podwig”, which is an act of heroism, an act of generosity involving sacrifice, self-limitation and self-renunciation, an act of humiliation and expiation that pledges peace and salvation… It is the treasure of a simple evangelical reality, exploited both politically and socially in its full depth and meaning: Per crucem ad lucem. It means entering into the Kingdom of God by sacrificing the things of this world, its glories and ambitions, to the point of giving one’s life for other peoples. The Russian saints have given their people a feeling, a taste and a hope of this. And finally God took them at their word. In 1917.» (p. 47)

     By canonising Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, which this summer brought fifty bishops together in Moscow from 13 to 19 August, has honoured this holy hope.

     The ceremony took place on Sunday 20 August in the Church of Saint-Saviour’s, the greatest cathedral in Russia, dynamited on Stalin’s orders but rebuilt in 1995. Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Fedorovna, their son, the heir to the throne, the tsarevitch Alexei, and their four daughters – Olga, Tatiana, Anastasia and Maria – were proclaimed martyrs of the Bolshevik regime and from henceforth will be venerated by the Russian Orthodox with the same honour as eight hundred and sixty of their compatriots, priests and monks for the most part, all victims of the Stalinist purges between 1917 and 1937.

     «This dominant idea, which I have found in virtually no other book of any other nation», continues the Abbé de Nantes, «can be found in Solzhenitsyn where he sets out his political programme – yes, political! – of “national and religious renascence”, under the title: OF REPENTANCE AND MODERATION AS CATEGORIES OF THE LIFE OF NATIONS (Seuil, 1974), and again in his LETTER TO THE LEADERS OF THE SOVIET UNION, writings so evidently misunderstood and incomprehensible to Russia’s lodgers, and to their landlords and servants whose pockets have been lined with gold. Here he repeats, in a Russian purified by ten years of the gulag and fifty years of the podwig: “For my part I can see no salvation for mankind except through self-restraint practised by each individual and each nation” (The Error of the West).»

     The Abbé de Nantes goes on to recall a passage from Dostoyevsky which brings tears to one’s eyes: «It is that page where Sonia Semionovna, one of the most pathetic of his humiliated figures, is reading to Raskolnikov the Gospel account of Lazarus’ resurrection from the dead. It makes her tremble with emotion and exultation. She whom she loves is about to leave for the labour camps. He is going to suffer, perhaps to die. In any case, to make expiation. This is how it should be. In the world’s eyes everything appears to be lost, but his soul – and here Sonia’s face lights up at this future certainty – his soul, previously that of a godless assassin, will there recover its purity. One day he too will rise again, after the time of trial, and the Face of Christ will appear to him…» (p. 47)

     We are witnessing this resurrection of “Lazarus”, a figure of Russia returning to life, personified by the Orthodox Metropolitan Kirill. Sent by Patriarch Alexis II, he visited Turin, on Friday 22 and Saturday 23 September, there to contemplate and venerate the acheiropoietic Face of Christ, «not made by human hand», during the exposition of the Holy Shroud.

AND GORBACHEV?

     In January Gorbachev described Vladimir Putin as «a man of the oligarchy» in an interview published by the Italian daily La Stampa: «The regime will not change», he declared, «there will be no struggle against corruption; the interests and privileges of the oligarchy will be protected before everything else.»

     Scarcely had he been elected president of the Federation than Putin rapidly disproved this prognostic: «Having put one super-banker in prison, implemented a daring tax reform, drawn up ukases against the governors and duelled with Berezovski, the Russian President is striking hard and fast», observes Pierre Lorrain in an article entitled PUTIN’S BLITZKRIEG (Valeurs actuelles, 23 June). And let us add: all with a consummate wisdom.

     The “super-banker” in question ,Vladimir Goussinski, is also president of the Russian Jewish Congress (RJC). To avoid  being taxed with anti-Semitism, Putin hastened to create a Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia (FJCR), based on the hassidic obedience of Lubavitch, the name of a small town in Belarus where this movement had taken root in 1813 after fleeing from the armies of Napoleon. Founded in 1734 by Israel Bal Shem Tov, at a time when the “Mystics” were announcing the great apostasy of the “pagans”, Hassidism turned the eyes of the Jews, after seventeen centuries of “exile”, towards the Messiah to come, as the Essenians had done two thousand years beforehand (cf. English CRC n^o 315, January 1999, Salvation comes from the Jews, p. 18).

     Putin could not have done better than to receive the leaders of the most religious of the Jews at the Kremlin… and on what day? You’ll never guess. 12 June! It was as if he had chosen for this new masterstroke the anniversary of the occupation of Pristina airport.

     The next day, 13 June, Goussinski was arrested. On that same day, the Lubavitch Jews appointed their own chief rabbi, Berl Lazar, to stand against his opposite number in the RJC, Adolph Shayevich.

     Valeurs actuelles for 23 June describes this as a political calculation by Putin: «Divide and conquer, the classic approach of the KGB.» Perhaps. But the event was of an international significance that surpassed all considerations of domestic politics. For, as we have previously emphasised, in his anti-islamic crusade Putin does not separate the Jews from the «bearers of the cross», as the Moslems call Christians (cf. English CRC n^o 331, June-July 2000, p. 32).

     And Gorbachev? Are we to think that he made a blunder? That would be to forget that Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Gorbachev are Russians… and therefore indecipherable to our western minds. Our Father has compared them to two ships sailing on the ocean, with no apparent communication between them… But radio silence is absolutely essential, and one cannot draw any conclusions from this… Vladimir Putin, at forty-seven, has had little experience of the long and tragic history of which Gorbachev was not only a witness but also a protagonist. For this reason, the latter is and will remain Putin’s mentor. Moreover, the links between the two men are well established. On his return from Dresde, Putin became the private assistant of Anatole Sobtchak, a brilliant professor of law at the University of Saint Petersburg and a personal friend of the Gorbachevs.

     Let us not lose sight of Gorbachev…

     For the time being he has every reason to be pleased with his student. The latter has defended the work of his master, the Community of Independent States (CIS) created during the dissolution of the USSR on 8 December 1991. It is now menaced in its very existence by Islamist terrorism, supported by what Putin calls the «United States of Islam». He is keeping a close eye on them: «According to our secret services, the extremists who are today fighting in the Philippines may well turn up again somewhere in Afghanistan, tomorrow in Chechnya, and the day after in Kosovo.» Therefore he has ruled out the possibility of travelling without a visa in the Community. The absence of frontier controls in Azerbaijan and Georgia was allowing the Chechen rebels to escape. Furthermore, Putin intends to wage a much more effective «fight against organised crime and drug trafficking». Putin takes serious measures, correct measures, and is indeed the only one to do so among today’s heads of State.