structural:reformatting
Criticism of communism and allegations of fascist sympathies

Solzhenitsyn viewed the Soviet Union as a police state significantly more oppressive than the Russian Empire 's House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not censor literature or the media to the extremely systematic style as the Soviet-era Glavlit, that Tsarist era political prisoners were not forced into labor camps to even remotely the same degree, and that the number of political prisoners and internal exiles under the Romanovs were only one ten-thousandth of the numbers of both following the October Revolution. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.

Shortly before his return to Russia, Solzhenitsyn delivered a speech in Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Vendée Uprising. During his speech, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with the Jacobin Club during the French Revolution. He also compared the Vendean rebels with the Russian, Ukrainian, and Cossack peasants who rebelled against the Bolsheviks, saying that both were destroyed mercilessly by revolutionary despotism. He commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the Thermidorian reaction and the toppling of the Jacobins and the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent continued to accelerate until the Khrushchev thaw of the 1950s.

According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all the traditional cultures of all ethnic groups were equally oppressed in favor of atheism and Marxist–Leninism. Traditional Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of peasant uprisings by ethnic Russians than among any other Soviet ethnic group. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, moderate and non-colonialist Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church, once cleansed of Caesaropapism, should not be regarded as a threat to the civilization of the West but rather as its ally.

Solzhenitsyn made a speaking tour after Francisco Franco 's death, and "told liberals not to push too hard for changes because Spain had more freedoms now than the Soviet Union had ever known." As reported by The New York Times, he "blamed Communism for the death of 110 million Russians and derided those in Spain who complained of dictatorship." Solzhenitsyn recalled: "I had to explain to the people of Spain in the most concise possible terms what it meant to have been subjugated by an ideology as we in the Soviet Union had been, and give the Spanish to understand what a terrible fate they escaped in 1939". This was because Solzhenitsyn saw at least some parallels between the Spanish Civil War between the Nationalists and the Republicans and the Russian Civil War between the anti-communist White Army and the Communist Red Army. This was neither a popular or commonly held view at that time. Winston Lord, a protégé of the then United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, called Solzhenitsyn, "just about a fascist", and Elisa Kriza alleged that Solzhenitsyn held "benevolent views" on Francoist Spain because it was a pro-Christian government, and his Christian worldview operated ideologically. In The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones, the Nationalist uprising against the Second Spanish Republic is "held up as a model of a proper Christian response", to religious persecution by the Far Left, such as the Spanish Red Terror by the Republican forces. According to Peter Brooke, however, Solzhenitsyn in reality approached the position argued by Christian Dmitri Panin, with whom he had a fall out in exile, namely that evil "must be confronted by force, and the centralised, spiritually independent Roman Catholic Church is better placed to do it than Orthodoxy with its otherworldliness and tradition of subservience to the State."

In 1983 he met Margaret Thatcher and told her "the German army could have liberated the Soviet Union from Communism but Hitler was stupid and did not use this weapon".

In "Rebuilding Russia", an essay first published in 1990 in Komsomolskaya Pravda, Solzhenitsyn urged the Soviet Union to grant independence to all the non-Slav republics, which he claimed were sapping the Russian nation and he called for the creation of a new Slavic state bringing together Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Kazakhstan that he considered to be Russified. Regarding Ukraine he wrote “All the talk of a separate Ukrainian people existing since something like the ninth century and possessing its own non-Russian language is recently invented falsehood” and "we all sprang from precious Kiev".