The man who embodied Russia, for good and ill

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, dead at 89, was a writer without a country until the final years of his life. Soviet Russia affronted, abused, imprisoned and expelled him. The west, its liberties and its democracies, appalled him. Only towards the end did he discover in Vladimir Putin, the former KGB man, a political ruler who was to his taste. It sounds bizarre. It also sounds Russian, as though four centuries of a nation's history had been crammed into one career just to baffle the rest of us.

The west still does not think hard enough, or often enough, about the Russia that Solzhenitsyn, self-created prophet, tried to personify. The oversight will matter greatly before the century is very much older. For long enough the writer's lonely struggle against Stalin and his heirs was misunderstood. Now, when it suits, we overlook the reality of the Putin oligarchy, with its hand-picked president, Dmitry Medvedev, its mock parliament, censorship, corruption and murders, for the sake of gas supplies and G8 summits.

Then again, would the west have celebrated Solzhenitsyn's 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature if it had known much, or anything, about the real man? Would he have been given the prize at all? He was honoured, essentially, for three books - Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle and Cancer Ward - that captured brilliantly the cruelty and moral consequences of totalitarianism. But Solzhenitsyn's own notions of liberty could have been hand-crafted to cause westerners to squirm.

A Slav nationalist, devoutly religious, dismayed by the pollution of European Enlightenment thought, fretting over Judaism, staunch for "Great Russia", and convinced that there are no lessons to be learned from the materialist west: it led the writer to endorse both Putin and the bloody war on Chechnya.

It led the great chronicler of the Gulag to overlook a few ironies, too. The near-mystical devotion to Mother Russia produced a rhetoric the adherents of the bumbling Nicholas II would have recognised. But Stalin, too, when it suited, exploited deformed patriotism, the belief that the USSR was threatened on all sides, and the old paranoia towards "cosmopolitan" (Jewish) types. Putin, entirely predictably, also adheres to a three-fold belief in Orthodoxy, Russian strength and western perfidy.

Dostoyevsky, to whom Solzhenitsyn is wrongly compared, was a typical anti-Semite. The last Tsar was free with his talk of "Yids". Stalin staged show trials of Jewish doctors. In the first part of 2003's Two Hundred Years Together, a study of Jews in the Soviet period, Solzhenitsyn, too, appeared to pander to the bigots who re-emerged under Putin to revive the blood libels. This was not the dissident hero-artist the west had imagined.

Then again there never was a rule obliging those who struggled against Stalin and his heirs to emerge as proto-parliamentarians and liberal democrats. Solzhenitsyn, returning to Russia in 1994 after 18 years reclusive years in Vermont, certainly believed that his country was liberalising "too quickly" under Boris Yeltsin. Having survived cancer, the camps and years of harassment, he seemed to conclude that there is such a thing as too much freedom, and that the western version is a spiritual poison. Putin, arch nationalist, devoutly religious, in charge but no longer in office, does not demur.

Hence a second western mistake. After the fall of the Communists - or should we say their rebadging? - there was an assumption that Russia would follow the paths of democracy and capitalism. Soon enough, after a few necessary economic shocks, the old Cold War enemies would be just like us. The people, it was said, thirsted for our freedoms.

Instead, Solzhenitsyn and Putin alike were angered and dismayed by Yeltsin's willingness to allow the empire to shrink as the eastern bloc fell apart. Instead, Putin, surrounded by former KGB men and oligarchs, treated democracy and the rule of law as nuisances. He was rewarded, by the people, with authentic widespread popularity.

Putin has said, more than once, that democratic behaviour is no part of the Russian tradition. God, good order and general prosperity matter more, it seems. Solzhenitsyn seemed content with that. Somehow he seemed to make a sharp distinction between his own struggle against Soviet tyranny and the struggles of those who fell foul of the new order. In his fevered, often turgid late writings only Bolshevism emerged as the singular crime of the 20th century.

Tens of millions of dead count as evidence enough, perhaps. The fact remains that in each of its incarnations the Russian state has seen no need for individual liberties. The Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, taught the Bolshevik Cheka all they needed to know about brutality. Under Putin's FBS - the KGB rebadged - the press is suppressed, journalists and dissidents turn up dead, and the commanding heights of the private economy fall, magically, into the hands of the Kremlin and its cronies.

The year 2013 will see the 400th anniversary of the founding of the Romanov dynasty. Four years later, the centenary of the Revolution will arrive. In either case, only historians and deluded romantics are liable to celebrate. It is within those spans, nevertheless, that Solzhenitsyn needs to be understood: a novelist in the nineteenth-century tradition with seventeenth-century beliefs transformed into a world figure in a twentieth-century struggle. By no coincidence, those eras also explain much about 21st-century Russia.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the obsessive argument among Russian intellectuals was between those who leaned towards Europe and those Slavophiles who looked inwards and east. Solzhenitsyn was never in much doubt about where he stood but neither, ironically enough, was Stalin, and neither is Putin. In an odd way, Russian isolationism mirrors the American variety, the obvious difference being that the United States has not been invaded repeatedly. The important fact is that Russian nationalism, fierce and proud, never went away. It is a delusion to think it will disappear any time soon.

The long, respectful obituaries of Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn make dutiful mention of courage, of liberty, and of honesty. All true. But what the writer meant, and what we chose to understand him to mean, were very different things. You could say the same, at the risk of generalisation, of the Russia the writer spent a long life trying to shape. The belief in the need for a strong man at the top remains. The belief that the country is forever encircled by enemies persists. The distrust of other traditions, of the wider world, endures.

Solzhenitsyn's work poses an old test: can you admire the artist and deplore the man? Or does art and art's pretensions dissolve when they are put to the service of ideas that are impossible to stomach? The old prophet remains required reading, for all that, if the century ahead is to be understood. He was nothing if not Russian.