Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a towering figure of morality and courage in a twentieth century far too lacking in both qualities. The fact that the monstrous, totalitarian evil of Soviet Communism could not eliminate the possibility of an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is an eloquent testimony to both the triumph of the human spirit and the full and complete error of virtually every basic truth claim of Soviet Communism.
If what the Bolsheviks believed about man had been true, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would have been impossible. That he did exist, and triumph, having been born in 1918, a year after the Communist nightmare descended on the people of his native land, is both inspirational and instructive.
Despite the massive efforts (including the killing of tens of millions of their fellow human beings, and the brutal incarceration of even more tens of millions) of the Communists to eradicate religion and create the “new” Soviet man, the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns of Russia survived and rose up to furnish eloquent testimony to the evil of the Soviet system and the terrible, terrible cost it exacted on real human beings by the tens of millions.
I can remember reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich as a senior in high school. It was a transformative event. In an odd way, it served as a companion volume to Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, which told of Communism’s evil and how it posed a mortal peril to human freedom. Witness painted the general landscape; Solzhenitsyn’s One Day gave it an agonized human face.
I knew Communism was evil and had brutalized millions of people. I knew it was the mortal enemy of freedom. I had even heard from political and religious refugees who had managed to escape Communist tyranny and had given heartbreaking testimony to their own and their fellow dissidents’ suffering.
In One Day, Solzhenitsyn (it must not be forgotten he was a great writer, as well as a brave and courageous man) vividly dramatizes one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, a prisoner in the vast Soviet Gulag concentration camp system.
While painting a graphic picture of the stifling horror of the camps, Solzhenitsyn also inspired us by his vivid portrayal of the indomitable, unquenchable human spirit.
Thank you, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn–hero of human freedom and eloquent witness against monstrous tyranny.