“Man has forgotten God, that is why this has happened” was Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s response when questioned about the decline of modern culture.
“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.’
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval.
But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.'”
This echoed another Russian author, Dostoevsky, in whose book, The Brothers Karamazov, the character Ivan Karamazov contended that if there is no God, “everything is permitted.”
Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for eight years by Joseph Stalin, as he described in his autobiographical lecture, printed in the Nobel Foundation’s publication, Les Prix Nobel, 1971:
“I was arrested on the grounds of what the censorship had found in my correspondence with a school friend, mainly because of certain disrespectful remarks about Stalin, although we referred to him in disguised terms.
A further basis for the ‘charge’ were drafts of stories and reflections which had been found in my map case.”
Stalin said:
“Crisis alone permitted the authorities to demand—and obtain—total submission and all the necessary sacrifices from its citizens.”
Stalin controlled citizens through “fear and food,” keeping them in constant fear of organizing against him by carting people away in the night, and intentionally keeping a food shortage so people did not have resources to rebel.
Stalin engineered a famine in his war against the kulaks that killed millions. Richard Pipes commented on the absolute power of Russia’s Josef Stalin in his book, Communism-A History (Random House, 2001):
“To break the resistance of the peasants in the Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Kazakhstan, Stalin inflicted on these areas in 1932-33 an artificial famine, shipping out all the food from entire districts and deploying the army to prevent the starving peasants from migrating in search of nourishment. It is estimated that between 6 and 7 million people perished in this man-made catastrophe.”
Richard Pipes continued, that after this:
“Stalin’s regime needed another crisis…as Fidel Castro, the leader of Communist Cuba, would explain…’The revolution needs the enemy…The revolution needs for its development its antithesis.’…And if enemies were lacking, they had to be fabricated.
In 1934, a prominent Bolshevik, Sergei Kirov, the party boss of Lenningrad, was assassinated under mysterious conditions…evidence points to Stalin…Kirov was gaining too much popularity in party ranks for Stalin’s comfort. His assassination brought Stalin two advantages: it rid him of a potential rival and provided a rationale for instigating a vast campaign against alledged anti-Soviet conspirators…
Purges of the 1930’s were a terror campaign that in indiscriminate ferocity and number of victims had no parallel in world history…Authorities…beat them until they confess to their crimes they have not committed.”
Solzhenitsyn was Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but the Communist government did not allow him to leave the country to accept it.
Solzhenitsyn began publishing “The Gulag Archipelago” in 1973, and in response to international pressure, the Soviet Union expelled him on FEBRUARY 13, 1974.
The following year in Washington, D.C., Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned:
“I…call upon America to be more careful…because they are trying to weaken you…to disarm your strong and magnificent country in the face of this fearful threat-one that has never been seen before in the history of the world.”
William J. Federer is a nationally known speaker, best-selling author, and president of Amerisearch, Inc., a publishing company dedicated to researching America’s noble heritage.
To learn more about the author please visit William Federer
Featured image: Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev, 1994
Leave a Reply