Today, Russian resentment at the post-Soviet independence of its neighbours (and even more the spread of Western ideas and Western power) has produced the Georgian crisis. Moscow justifies its actions as defending the “right” of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to self-determination (but not that of another nation of the Caucasus – Chechnya). Relations with the Ukraine are also heated and just as potentially inflammable.

Solzhenitsyn, when he returned to Russia, supported Putin’s foreign policy. He remained, however, staunchly anti-Communist, branding the October Revolution as “a violent 24-hour coup d’etat” which “broke Russia’s back. The Red Terror unleashed by its leaders, their willingness to drown Russia in blood, is the first and foremost proof of it.” Even while accepting a State Prize from Putin (having in the past refused prizes from Gorbachev and Yeltsin), he emphasised his hope that “the bitter Russian experience, which I have been studying and describing all my life, will be for us a lesson that keeps us from new disastrous breakdowns”. He looked forward, he said, to a time when “all the peoples who have lived through communism will understand that communism is to blame for the bitter pages of their history.”

As for the recent past, Solzhenitsyn blamed Yeltsin for the failure of the 1990s, while praising Gorbachev who, though politically inexperienced and irresponsible, “first gave freedom of speech and movement to the citizens of our country”. But in general it was Putin he praised, as the one who “started to do what was possible – a slow and gradual restoration”. Part of this “restoration”, for Solzhenitsyn, was Russia’s emergence as a great power unsubservient to Washington.

When it came to foreign policy, Solzhenitsyn believed that, after 9/11, when Russia had given “critically important aid in Afghanistan”, the US had been completely ungrateful and then tried to push other demands. The pro-­Western mood in Russia, he said, had started changing with the Nato bombings of Serbia: “All layers of Russian society were deeply and indelibly shocked by those bombings.” Things got worse “when Nato started to spread its influence and draw the ex-­Soviet republics into its structure. This was especially painful in the case of Ukraine.”