He morphed into a proponent of the values of tsarist Russia, authoritarian Russian nationalism and Orthodoxy, a stance that led him into indefensible stands on Serbian atrocities.
In exile, he also faced charges of anti-Semitism. Some critics rightly discerned an indifference to and a lack of understanding of Jewish concerns, and a tendency to reflect the unpleasant traditions of Slavophile Russia, in which Jews were unfairly blamed for the rise of the Bolsheviks.
On the charge of Jew-hatred, most scholars and commentators have declared him not guilty, not least because he spent his whole life actively denying the accusation and was a steadfast supporter of the State of Israel. This question must also not be taken out of the context of the triumph of a movement for freedom for Soviet Jewry that his books and activism influenced and aided in an era when détente with the masters of the gulag was considered the most prudent course for the West.
The point here is not just to honor him for his role in bringing down the Soviet Union, but to understand that his example must influence our attitude toward other human-rights abusers.
Despite the Olympics and the growth of capitalism in China, the laogai, the Chinese version of the Gulag Archipelago, still exists. Its prisoners – political dissidents, religious believers and others who earned the disfavor of Beijing – continue to suffer. The laogai has been documented, but sadly, it has yet to enter the lexicon or the conscience of the West the way Solzhenitsyn did with the gulag.
The legacy of the author of The Gulag Archipelago is that Bush and others who look away when confronted with the truth about places such as China, Tibet, Sudan and Iran cannot be allowed to do so without shame.
As Podhoretz wrote in 1985, Solzhenitsyn forced everyone to confront “the terrible question” of our apathy in the face of evil by his example of being a lone, powerless man who stood up to the totalitarians and faced them down. So long as there are tyrants among us, that is an example we will need to honor and remember.