The 86-year-old Nobel laureate, who spent ten years in the Soviet gulag, said in his first television interview since 2002 that Russia was not backsliding on democracy because it had never been truly democratic.

“It is often said that democracy is being taken away from us and that there is a threat to our democracy. What democracy is threatened? Power of the people? We don’t have it,” he told Rossiya, the state-run channel.

“We have nothing that resembles democracy. We are trying to build democracy without self-governance. Before anything, we must begin to build a system so that the people can manage their own destinies.”

He said that the State Duma, dominated by the Kremlin’s supporters, was acting “as if it were drunk” and the country could face an upheaval similar to last year’s Orange Revolution in Ukraine if the Government did not change course.

“An Orange Revolution may take place if tensions between the public and the authorities flare up and money begins flowing to the opposition,” he said.

Solzhenitsyn is the latest prominent figure to re-ignite political debate in Russia since President Putin backtracked on democratic reforms this year by abolishing direct elections for regional governors. But the author did not give his backing to the liberal Opposition.

Instead, he condemned Russia’s Parliament and all its political parties, as well as criticising the United States for trying to impose democracy on other countries. “Democracy is not worth a brass farthing if it is being installed by bayonets. Democracy should grow slowly and gradually.”

He also pointed out that the local elections abolished by Mr Putin’s new legislation were distorted by corruption and organised crime. Analysts said that might explain why the interview was aired on Rossiya, the Government’s mouthpiece.

Solzhenitsyn is regarded as one of Russia’s few independent moral and political authorities but is often criticised in the West for his nationalism and religious orthodoxy. In a previous televised interview, he attacked Mr Putin for failing to crack down on the oligarchs, the two dozen businessmen who bought state assets cheaply in the privatisations of the 1990s. President Putin is under fire in the West precisely because of the state’s legal assault on one oligarchs, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The oil tycoon was jailed for nine years last week after what was seen as a Kremlin-orchestrated show trial to punish a potential political rival and seize his property.

Vladimir Kolesnikov, Russia’s Deputy Prosecutor General, told NTV television late on Sunday that there could be more such trials. “I can say one thing, [Khodorkovsky’s] case will not be the last.”

Solzhenitsyn appeared to have no sympathy for the fallen oil magnate. “The world has never seen such rapid privatisation,” he said. “The world has never seen such idiots. They gave away our God-given resources at lightning speed — oil, nonferrous metals, coal, production. They fully robbed Russia. From scratch, from nothing we bred billionaires who have done nothing for Russia.”

Rebel whose voice has lost power

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 after 20 years in exile he was welcomed as a hero.

As he toured the country by train, thousands turned out to listen to him complain about the corruption and poverty that had engulfed post-Soviet Russia. He was received by Boris Yeltsin, then President, and addressed the Duma.

But over the next decade his profile in Russia and the West waned with his health. And although he continued to write, he never achieved again the recognition that he did with his earlier work.

Solzhenitsyn fought in the Red Army during the Second World War but was arrested in 1945 for criticising Stalin, the Soviet leader, in letters to his brother-in-law. He spent the next ten years in prisons and forced labour camps around Russia and Kazakhstan. His experiences in captivity inspired his most famous works — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, Cancer Ward and the Gulag Archipelago trilogy — much of which were written in secret.

His first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962 in the period of relative openness after Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, denounced Stalin.

The period of official favour lasted only a few years and by 1966 all of Solzhenitsyn’s works were censored. In 1969 he was thrown out of the Writers’ Union.

His unpublished manuscripts were smuggled to the West, where he developed a reputation as one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent critics. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 — in what was seen in Moscow as a hostile move by the West — and was deported to West Germany four years later.

Stripped of Soviet citizenship, he settled first in Switzerland, and then in the United States, but never really adapted to life in the West.

His host country also grew increasingly uncomfortable with his radical political views. He railed against Western values almost as much as he did against the Soviet system and argued that Russia could be saved only by returning to its cultural and religious roots. He was also accused of being anti-Semitic for linking Russia’s historical suffering to its Jewish and other minorities.

He found a more sympathetic audience back home in Russia where, in 1997, he was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and established his own literature prize.

A life in exile

Spent ten years in the Soviet gulag after he wrote a letter criticising Joseph Stalin in 1945

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his account of life in the gulag, made him famous when it was published in 1962 and translated into 35 languages

In 1970 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature

He was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 for writing The Gulag Archipelago, a history of the labour camp system in Soviet Russia

He continued to write as an exile in Switzerland and the US before returning to Russia in 1994 after a pardon from Mikhail Gorbachev