RUSSIA:Modern Russia faces the same yawning gap between the haves and have-nots as pre-revolutionary Russia, warns the Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a new commentary on the present state of his country.
The former Soviet dissident perceives the same "alarming disorder" which faced the country during the last days of the tsar's empire in 1917 confronting it again today. The comments from the reclusive survivor of Stalin's gulags come in a new introduction to a republished commentary on the causes of the Bolshevik revolution, originally printed in the early 1980s, when he lived in exile.
"It's all the more bitter that a quarter of a century later, some of these conclusions are still applicable to the alarming disorder of today," he wrote.
There are now more billionaires based in Moscow than any other city in the world, but millions of Russians are still struggling on tiny incomes, especially outside the capital. At the moment, there are at least 500 Russians worth at least €75 million, according to Finanz magazine, while the wealthiest billionaire, Oleg Deripaska, controls assets worth over €16 billion, it estimates.
Solzhenitsyn's article has been reprinted in the widely circulated government-owned newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, an indication of Kremlin support for his warning. Despite their different backgrounds, he has supported President Vladimir Putin's appeal to traditional nationalism and his efforts to build a resurgent Russia.
Now 88, Solzhenitsyn rarely appears in public anymore. He first exposed the horrors of life in a penal colony in his autobiographical novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. According to his wife, Natalya, he wants to wake up Russia's political elite to the threats created by the chasm between rich and poor in the country.
"Alexander Isayevich is deeply worried by this gap," she said. "It's necessary to pay attention to that. If the government fails to do that, consequences would be grave."