Vladimir Soloukhin

Who was Vladimir Soloukhin?

Vladimir Alexeyevich Soloukhin was a Russian poet and writer. Born in Alepino, a village in what is now in Sobinsky District, Vladimir Oblast, he was raised in a peasant family.

Soloukhin was educated in a mechanical technicum, where he studied to be a mechanic.

His first poems were published in the Vladimir newspaper Prizyv.

After his military service from 1942-1945 in the Kremlin guard, he began his serious literary career, and in 1951 graduated from the Gorky Moscow Literary Institute.

In 1958-1981, he worked in the editorial offices of the prominent newspaper Molodaya Gvardiya and in the literary journal Nash Sovremennik.

In his articles he published in the second half of the 1950s and the beginning of 1960s, he manifested himself as a Russian patriot, and stressed the need to preserve national traditions, and pondered the ways of the development of the Russian arts.

His journalistic expressions of opinion during the later years of perestroika idealized pre-revolutionary Russia. In his article "Reading Lenin", Soloukhin was one of the first in Russia to publicly ask for revising the role of Lenin in the history of Russia. At that time, a thesis was popular, claiming that the crimes of the Stalinist era were a result of "violating Leninist principles", whereas Soloukhin interpreted Stalinism as the logical consequence of Lenin's policies.