Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer and historian and Nobel laureate, who chronicled the horrors of the Soviet Union’s “Gulag” or prison camp system was buried Wednesday in the cemetery of Moscow’s Donskoy Monastery, the resting place of some of Russia’s leading writers and philosophers.

As stated by freelance online columnist Allen Roland, “ was ahead of his time and saw the West most clearly especially the potential of an oncoming spiritual crisis in combination with the political crisis of today’s world.

Roland goes on to point out that Solzhenitsyn prophetically wrote of this in his WARNING TO THE WEST in 1974.

"We are approaching a major turning point in world history, in the history of civilization. It’s the sort of turning point where the hierarchy of values which we have venerated, and we use to determine what is important to us and what caused our hearts to beat is starting to rock and may collapse. These two crises, the political crisis of today’s world and the oncoming spiritual crisis, are occurring at the same time. Your leaders will need profound intuition, spiritual foresight, high qualities of mind and soul. May God grant that in those times you will have at the helm personalities as great as those who created your country." 

Solzhenitsyn served as a Commander in the Red Army during World War II and was twice decorated before being arrested for writing a derogatory comment about Josef Stalin. He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was beaten and interrogated. He was sentenced in his absence by a three-man tribunal of the Soviet security police to an eight-year term in a labour camp, to be followed by permanent internal exile. This was the normal sentence for most crimes at the time

During his years of exile he spent his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote, "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known.

Amazingly, his novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the time. The novel brought the Soviet system of prison labour to the attention of the West causing as much a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did the West. 

 In 1965 the publishing of his work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person , and, the KGB seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. while Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work upon the most subversive of all his writings, the monumental Gulag Archipelago

In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature but could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow.

The Gulag Archipelago was a three-volume work on the Soviet prison camp system. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn’s own experience as well as the testimony of 227 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn’s own research into the history of the penal system.

The Gulag Archipelago is a testament to Solzhenitsyn, the man, and a chronicle of an important slice of history that has many lessons to those of us “in the West” that have been smug and arrogant enough to believe that that sort of thing could not possibly happen here, in America.

Think and look again as the past seven plus years under the George W. Bush administration has stripped us of many of the safeguards that have protected us from an “American Gulag.” However we now find ourselves on an extremely slippery slope with the end result not quite realized. 

AROUND THE BLOGOSPHERE:

Solzhenitsyn’s Final Interview - Q: And your strength did not leave you even in moments of desperation? Solzhenitsyn: Yes. I would often think: whatever the outcome is going to be, let it be. And then things would turn out all right. It looks like some good came out of it.

Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn and Liberalism - I think the problem with Gopnik’s approach is thrown into relief by the embarrassed and/or dismissive way that many of the obituaries for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have treated the Russian giant’s more politically incorrect ideas - his mix …

Solzhenitsyn Dead - After all, Solzhenitsyn was exposing a brutal system of repression where anti-government speech was forbidden and where people could be sentenced to internal exile or locked up in prison without the benefit of a fair trial if they so …

For the lack of a Solzhenitsyn! - This past Sunday another citizen of the world, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, started his walk in that never-ending pilgrimage we refer to as immortality. And he did it, not just as a laureate man of letters, but as a man of well thought-out …

Colson on Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Speech - Earlier this week I reflected on the Class Day speech that Solzhenitsyn gave at Harvard in 1978. Over at Christianity Today, Chuck Colson offers some reflections of his own, namely comparing Solzhenitsyn to the prophet Jeremiah. …