Bill Muehlenberg

The Passing of a Prophet: Vale Solzhenitsyn

A mighty prophet has just left us. One of the great figures of the past century has passed away. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, born in Russia in 1918, was one of the great voices for freedom, morality and faith in a century of tyranny, immorality and secularism.

He was certainly a crowning figure in recent history. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. By then he had already penned some valuable works, including three important novels: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962); The First Circle (1968); and Cancer Ward (1968).

But he is of course best known for his chronicle of Soviet totalitarianism and the gulag system, which he spent so many years in. His three-volume The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1978) was his masterwork. In some 1500 pages he carefully and meticulously described the horrors of the Soviet prison camps, the barbarities and cruelties of the bankrupt Communist system, and the flickers of hope contained within the human spirit.

It was a book which would lead many lefties and communist sympathisers to reconsider their position, and cause them to think afresh of the realities of Communist dictatorships. As Daniel Mahoney wrote in 1995, The Gulag Archipelago is “one the indispensable books of the last fifty years not least because it undermined the moral and political legitimacy of the entire Communist enterprise. . . . It allowed readers on both sides of the Iron Curtain to encounter totalitarian oppression as though for the first time,”

“At their root was mankind’s and Solzhenitsyn’s nemesis: ideology. Unlike the conventional analyses of academic historians and political scientists, Solzhenitsyn’s understanding never treated the Soviet Union as merely one tyranny among others. Rather, it was an ideological regime built upon the twin pillars of violence and lies. It was ‘thanks to ideology’ that the 20th century experienced ‘evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.’ Ideology allowed tyrants and intellectuals alike to justify the unjustifiable and to amplify violence to nearly unimaginable levels.”

After his release from the gulag he spent some years in exile in the West. He returned to Russia in 1994, where he lived and wrote until his death this past weekend. He will always be remembered as a champion of freedom and faith, and a steadfast opponent of tyranny and oppression.

Perhaps one fitting way to remember the man is to look at just one episode of his life while he resided in the US. On June 8, 1978 he delivered the commencement address to Harvard University. In his stirring speech he argued that a demoralised and post-Christian West is no match for, and not much better than, Soviet totalitarianism. He called for a moral and spiritual renewal in America to enable it to withstand atheistic, humanistic communism. Yet his prophetic call was greeted with boos and derision by the educated elites at Harvard.

Despite the poor reception his words received, they are important and vital words nonetheless. Indeed, they were reprinted that year by Harper and Row as A World Split Apart. It is worth recalling some of those prophetic words. One section of his speech was on “Humanism and Its Consequences”. I reprint that section here:





His whole speech is worth reading in its entirety. Indeed, it can be found in various places on the Net, for example:

Sozhinitsyn knew that secular humanism was not the answer to our problems. Indeed, it was the cause. It gave rise to atheistic Soviet tyranny. Only the Judeo-Christian worldview can provide the hope needed to resist such darkness. Indeed, in his 1983 Templeton Prise speech he put it this way:

“Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘We 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 numbers 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 the 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’.”

Absolutely. Would that more such prophets were on the scene to proclaim such needed truths.

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