2 Roubles A.I. Solzhenitsyn

Issued three years after Solzhenitsyn's centenary and ten years after his death, this coin arrived during a period of conspicuous state rehabilitation of the writer — the same government whose predecessors had expelled him in 1974 now commissioning his portrait on legal tender. The Bank of Russia's commemorative rouble series honoring cultural figures has run for decades, but Solzhenitsyn's inclusion carried an unmistakable political charge given his complicated post-Soviet reception, particularly his later nationalism and criticism of Western liberal democracy, which made him a more comfortable figure for the Russian state by the 2010s.