"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, Fyodor 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
alleged 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.
Get the book, Endangered SpeechesThe 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."
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