"ЦРВЕНИ ТОЧАК" АЛЕКСАНДРА СОЛЖЕЊИЦИНА И ЊЕГОВА „РЕХАБИЛИТАЦИЈА” СТОЛИПИНА
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Red Wheel” and his „rehabilitation” of Stolypin

Summary/Abstract: Although his world glory came with „The Gulag Archipelago”, „The Red Wheel” has to be considered magnum opus of the famous Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In this colossal work, divided in the four „knots” (the detailed accounts of relatively brief periods), Solzhenitsyn presents his own view on the revolution of 1917, derived from his lasting and patient researches of historical evidence. A considerable part of the fi rst „knot” of „The Red Wheel”, „August 1914”, is devoted to Peter Stolypin, the Russian Prime Minister (1906–1911), whom Solzhenitsyn admires with great intensity and, occasionally, lack of reserve. In contrast with the Soviet and partly in contrast with the Western historiography, Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the positive sides of Stolypin’s controversial statesmanship. He staunchly defends Stolypin’s method of using courts martial in his war against the revolutionary terrorism as inevitable and necessary. Surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn mostly respects Stolypin’s agrarian reform which authorized peasants to leave the anachronistic land communes: although he could be regarded as belonging to the Slavophile tradition of the 19th century, he rejects the ideal of land commune that Slavophiles uncritically admired.

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