Free Republic

On the day Solzhenitsyn was arrested, February, 12, 1974, he released the text of “Live Not by Lies.” The next day, he was exiled to the West, where he received a hero’s welcome. This moment marks the peak of his fame. Solzhenitsyn equates “lies” with ideology, the illusion that human nature and society can be reshaped to predetermined specifications. And his last word before leaving his homeland urges Soviet citizens as individuals to refrain from cooperating with the regime’s lies. Even the most timid can take this least demanding step toward spiritual independence. If many march together on this path...

Alexander Solzhenitzen's middle son talks about his father. The format of the interview is similar to Levin https://youtu.be/p1OYMYpj3Lo

When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, gave in his Noble Lecture the credo, “Let the lie come into the world. Let it even triumph. But not through me,” that was based. Not participating in transparent lies or mass delusion is based. Doing so against the madness of the following crowd is based. Nearly everything that it means to be based is either contained within or predicated upon this one trait of character. Solzhenitsyn wrote those words as a result of his observations living in what may have been the most brutal tyranny of human history: Stalin’s USSR. That...

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Achipelago is a gripping account of the veritable hell inflicted on the Russian populace through the rise and establishment of Soviet Communism, and presents much insight into mentalities in play in our own time and in our own country. As the pages progress through the eyewitness accounts, a reader who strives to be civilized might find himself struggling with disbelief that what is being presented is true and accurate, that this is not some exaggeration, not some plot for Hollywood’s latest horror flick that would make Friday the Thirteenth seem appropriate for children, that it was...

"The people controlling Joe Biden have just erased the Constitution for good. All that is now required for a citizen to lose all rights to own property or conduct business in any way is a simple accusation of Russian ‘involvement.’ The American Thinker explained: Executive Order Canceling the Constitution On April 15, President Biden signed an Executive Order on Blocking Property with Respect to Specified Harmful Foreign Activities of the Government of the Russian Federation. Contrary to its title, this EO is not about Russia. It is designed to allow the Biden administration to deprive American citizens and organizations of...

Welcome to the weekend just six days before Christmas preparations underway here there and everywhere. Some scrooges and grinches out there in the USA to be sure of course at the very top in the UK as illustrated in this cartoon... Now the talk show hosts are actually willing to criticize the mask and support businesses being locked down by the government ala Buck Sexton and Glenn Beck. I guess those radio guys need to move in some new direction of course Ammon Bundy and People's Rights leading the way in resisting when it comes to masks and business shut...

Back in the ever changing conditions at Camp Covid-19 the prison for everyone and that reminds me of a television series I watched 50 years ago..... The "crisis" has given plans of our rulers to ban cars in cities a big push forward.... The coronavirus stats are out in full with Worldometers putting out the Saturday number as 43,851 nationwide with 6,079 in Texas a record number for one day in that state..... North Korea's Bluff And Bluster For The 70th Anniversary of the Korean War And The "Health" Of Kim Jong Un..... Newsdump Update: Phoenix Church And Air Filtration...

The western world is in upheaval, a devilish revolutionary fever brought about by an extreme "progressivism" gone awry, the culture of "wokeness", that erupts in rage at the end of the illegitimate lockdowns imposed by various governments. Exactly 42 years ago today, on June 8, 1978, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn traveled the New England roads from his place of refuge in Vermont to the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, Harvard University, where he delivered the keynote Commencement Address for that year. It was his first major public address in America since taking refuge in the country three years...

Here's a video that Ammon Bundy linked to on Facebook..... The world is still turning...See Gavin Seim with his Mexican street tour streamed live Friday afternoon.... Well here we are in Venezuela but I thought that was socialism and a bad place that the United States wasn't or that voting the right way would save us from. The pride, the vanity, the arrogance.... Our insider elites driving negative narratives against China and Russia economic competitors but as I recall Republican President Richard Nixon opened up China.... Russia and China are the enemy, I still say its the Republicans and Democrats...

Minneapolis once had the reputation of being a nice city. That seems, now, like a long time ago in a galaxy far away. These days, the reality is different. This sickening video of a gang of youths viciously brutalizing a man just outside Target Field, where the Twins play baseball, has gone national. It is visual proof of how feral downtown Minneapolis has become: Or, to take another example, on the last night of the Minnesota State Fair, generally thought of as one of the more wholesome events a family can attend, there was a gang rumble just outside the...

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, pundits offered a variety of reasons for its failure: economic, political, military. Few thought to add a fourth, more elusive cause: the regime’s total loss of credibility. This hard-to-measure process had started in 1956, when Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave his so-called secret speech to party leaders, in which he denounced Josef Stalin’s purges and officially revealed the existence of the gulag prison system. Not long afterward, Boris Pasternak allowed his suppressed novel “Doctor Zhivago” to be published in the West, tearing another hole in the Iron Curtain. Then, in 1962, the literary magazine...

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Russian writer and I must say prophet Alexander Solzhenitsyn. A statue was erected this month in a Moscow neighborhood to mark the anniversary of his birth with Russia's President Vladimir Putin paying his respects. Its a story that happens to take place in an around December 25th, 1949. Christmas Day in the Western nations, but not in Russia. However, it certainly is the Christmas season as it happened USSR style. Among other people in the story are the prisoners of the "best prison" in the Soviet Gulag Archipelago on...

Editor’s Note: This article, which originally ran in the July 22, 1983, issue of National Review, is adapted from the address Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave on the occasion of his acceptance, in London on May 10, 1983, of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. In announcing the 1983 award, the Templeton Foundation described Mr. Solzhenitsyn as “a pioneer in the renaissance of religion in atheist nations.” Mr. Solzhenitsyn ’s introductory remarks were made at the awards ceremony at Buckingham Palace, with Prince Philip presiding. The address proper was delivered later the same day at the London Guildhall. Today, December 11,...

All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain. ...We must first recognize the horror perpetrated not by some outside force, not by class or national enemies, but within each of us individually, and within every society. This is especially true of a free and highly developed society, for here in particular we have surely brought everything upon ourselves, of our own free will. We ourselves, in our...

Once we have taken up the word, it is thereafter impossible to turn away: A writer is no detached judge of his countrymen and contemporaries; he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his country or by his people. And if the tanks of his fatherland have bloodied the pavement of a foreign capital, then rust-colored stains have forever bespattered the writer’s face. And if on some fateful night a trusting Friend is strangled in his sleep—then the palms of the writer bear the bruises from that rope. And if his youthful fellow citizens nonchalantly proclaim the advantages...

By: Pastor Bill Randles ”“Wisdom cries out loud in the streets, she raises her voice in the squares…” Proverbs 1:20Harvard’s motto is “Veritas”. Many of you have already found out, and others will find out in the course of their lives, that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on its pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. (From Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard address “A World Split Apart”)Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Nobel Prize winning author, Soviet dissident and a survivor of an eight year sentence in...

A decade after the hugely influential author's death, some young Russians admit to only a passing knowledge of Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who won a Nobel Prize for chronicling the horrors of the Soviet Gulag. "Solzhenitsyn was a dissident, someone who opposed the Soviet regime and he was a great writer," summed up Alexander Polyakovsky, 23, who is studying international relations. He admits he has not read any of the author's books. "They talked about him a bit when I was at high school, during the Russian literature lessons, but I don't remember too much," he added. Alexander Altunyan,...

Your word I have hidden in my heart, That I might not sin against You! (Ps. 119:11) Years ago, I heard a statement from an American monk: “The contemplative need go no further than his own heart to find the source of all violence in the world.” It struck me as true then and has only seemed more so as the years have passed. At the time (not long after the Vietnam War) this monastic was remarking on the many young people whom they had visiting his monastery who were “so deeply angry about peace.” The statement echoed an experience...

In today’s Russia it is not fashionable to delve too deeply into Gulag history, and 60-year-old Panikarov’s collection is one of just two museums devoted entirely to the Gulag in the whole country. Indeed, even Panikarov himself has a somewhat surprising view: “We should not have one-sided evaluations... “It was fashionable to say bad things about the USSR. Now it is again fashionable to insult Russia. We have sanctions against us. The west looks for negative things.” Panikarov’s views on the Gulag are part of a larger trend. With the Soviet victory in the second world war elevated to a...

One of the things that always strikes contemporary visitors to Russia is the lack of monuments to the victims of Stalin's execution squads and concentration camps. There are a few scattered memorials, but no national monument or place of mourning. Worse, 15 years after glasnost, 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been no trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions, no government inquiries into what happened in the past, and no public debate. This was not always the case. During the 1980s, when glasnost was just beginning in Russia, Gulag survivors' memoirs sold millions of copies,...