Great post. Thank you. It is sad that such a revelation is not big news all over the world. But such is the power of disinformation.
From what little I could find out before his death, Solzhenitsyn thought Putin was doing a good job. Of course he was a very old man at the time and what he thought was not exactly well known. So who knows? Certainly Putin would want his support. What i wonder about is the timing of his death on August 3, 2008 and the invasion of Georgia on August 7. Could Putin have waited for his death in order not to be criticized by such a great man?
Prior to a certain point everyone thought that Putin was OK. He was seen as a sound alternative to the Communists and someone who could clean up the mafia. It is about 2008, and perhaps we can point to the war on Georgia as a turning point, that it became clear that this guy was working on a USSR 2.0 project.