They were interviewing Russians, both old and young, about Solzhenitsyn. He appears to have been a strong traditionalist, a Russian nationalist, a fervently religious Russian orthodox who never embraced modern life, neither in Russia nor when he was in exile in Vermont in the US. The older Russians respect him as great writer while young Russians barely know who he was.

His opposition to the Soviet State and its oppressive system was quite apparently in no way an endorsement of a Western, consumer-driven capitalist alternative. He regarded that "modern" lifestyle as shallow, soulless, and hated it, and basically exiled himself away from it by cloistering himself and his family in rural Vermont for 20 years, until returning to Russia in the mid 1990's.