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It causes great sadness to think back on all that the decaying monuments and buildings of the Third Reich represents. It is grievous still, almost three quarters of a century later, to see the lingering results of the attempted murder of European civilization. It is sadder to recognize the ideology that supported the Third Reich. Namely, the deeply flawed and essentially falsely religious idea that the power of the unfettered human will can restructure reality continues in the West, albeit in new forms. The fact is that the belief in the triumph of the human will to power continues to...

How should comtemporary Russians remember Soviet-era political repressions?OrthoChristian.com continues its endeavor to publish material on the theme of the 1917 revolution towards the end this centennial year. In this article, Vasiliy Shchipkov, who holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Moscow State Institute of International Relations, discusses the Christian approach to remembering the terrible time of Soviet repressions vs. a mentality of retribution.Great Consecration of the Church of the Resurrection of Christ and the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church in Sretensky Monastery. Photo: G.Balayants / Pravoslavie.ru My family knows about repressions, about political and religious persecutions, not from...

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Dramatization of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic anti-Soviet novel, "In the First Circle."

The Russian author thought it was no coincidence that Soviet Russia shared certain common problems with the West, for he saw socialism and liberalism as kindred ideologiesWith tensions between America and Russia running high, it is worth reconsidering a figure who once cast a long shadow across both lands: Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. As a writer, Solzhenitsyn acquired renown through works such as One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch and Gulag Archipelago, whereby he not only exposed the follies, pretensions, and crimes of Marxist-Leninism but also testified to the power infused into the human spirit by its...

News Analysis Brethren, Peace be with you. I was listening with great interest to this news item at NPR, titled In 'Red Notice,' Success Draws Treachery, Tragedy In Putin's Russia. It is an interview of William Browder, the founder of Hermitage Capital Management, a company he started in Russia in 1996. That, he says, drew the attention and machinations of a corrupt group of Russian officials. It's also about Browder's new book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice, in which he tells the story of how it happened. Brothers and sisters, I...

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's charge in his latest book that Jews were as much perpetrators of Soviet communist repression as they were its victims has infuriated Russian Jews, who say that the book is filled with inaccuracies. One prominent Jewish leader told Britain's Guardian newspaper that the book was without merit. "This is a mistake, but even geniuses make mistakes," Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress told the Guardian. "Richard Wagner did not like the Jews, but was a great composer. Dostoyevsky was a great Russian writer, but had a very sceptical attitude towards the Jews. "This is not a...

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to...

The Voice of a Prophet - Solzhenitsyn on the Ukraine Crisis by Joseph Pearce The greatest difficulty arose from the ethnic mix in the Ukraine itself in which, in different regions of the country, there were different proportions of those who consider themselves Ukrainians, those who consider themselves Russians and those who consider themselves neither. “Maybe it will be necessary to have a referendum in each region and then ensure preferential and delicate treatment of those who would want to leave.” For this to happen, the Ukraine would need to show the same restraint and good sense towards the...

Parliament voted to free ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko from prison by decriminalizing the article in the criminal procedural code under which she was convicted. A constitutional majority of 310 lawmakers from a cross-section of different parties, including the Communists, voted for the measure. This makes the legislation veto-proof, preventing President Viktor Yanukovych from blocking the move. Yanukovych is widely blamed for ordering the imprisonment of his political rival. The bill that parliament passed included other articles of the criminal procedural code that were decriminalized. Batkivshchyna Party lawmaker Oleksandr Turchynov, a close ally of Tymoshenko and her former deputy prime minister,...

Venezuelan political opposition leader and founder of the Popular Will Party, Leopoldo López, will spend the next 45 days in the Ramo Verde jail in Los Teques. During that time, the Public Prosecutor’s Office will decide whether it seeks to convict him of the alleged planning of the violent incidents that happened after the opposition rally on February 12 in the center of Caracas. Judge Ralenis Tovar Guillén delivered the detention measure today at 1:00 a.m. inside the military prison where López is held. She made use of a “mobile court” unit — basically a bus repurposed to function as...

Pearce: A journalist recently stated that you believe that Russia has overthrown the evils of communism only to replace them with the evils of capitalism. Solzhenitsyn: over the years I have had to prove that socialism, which to many western thinkers is a sort of kingdom of justice, was in fact full of coercion, of bureaucratic greed and corruption and avarice, and consistent within itself that socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the...

In these dark days in which the power of secular fundamentalism appears to be on the rise and in which religious freedom seems to be imperiled, it is easy for Christians to become despondent. The clouds of radical relativism seem to obscure the light of objective truth and it can be difficult to discern any silver lining to help us illumine the future with hope. In such gloomy times the example of the martyrs can be encouraging. Those who laid down their lives for Christ and His Church in worse times than ours are beacons of light, dispelling the darkness...

Five years have passed since the demise, on August 3, 2008, of the great novelist, dissident, and thinker Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Forty-five years ago, on August 25, 1968, seven people demonstrated in the Red Square heroically against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, thus ushering in an era of open dissent and ruthless persecutions, including forcible internments into psychiatric institutions. More than twenty years ago, in December 1991, the ideocratic empire called the USSR collapsed. As historian Boris Souvarine, who wrote an unsurpassed Stalin biography, noticed mordantly: “USSR, four letters, four lies. It was neither a free union, nor Soviet, in the...

Five years ago today, August 3, 2008, one of my heroes died. I never met him, but I think I know him. Of one thing I’m certain, the influence exerted on me by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is incalculable. It’s difficult to explain the personal impact of Solzhenitsyn. He was such a massive figure in the public eye and provoked controversy (the good kind) throughout the course of his life. He was born on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk in southern Russia. Toward the end of WW II, in 1945, while serving as a captain in the Red Army, he was arrested...

It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    --Alexander Solzhenitsyn A big thanks...

In getting ready for tonight, Charles Gray asked me to keep two things in mind.  First, he asked me to remember that we have a mixed audience here in Houston Hall, both Catholic and non-Catholic.  Second, he asked me to explain what Catholics mean when we talk about the “sanctity” of human life, and why the Church deals with issues like abortion so vigorously in the public square.  As it turns out, most of my sources tonight are not Catholic.  That shouldn’t be surprising.  Catholics have no monopoly on respect for human dignity.  Catholics do have a very long tradition...

It is not understood definitively anywhere when the decline came. What is understood and easily seen is that we are a culture and society in deep trouble. There are proofs and evidence everywhere for those who care to look for such things. We were warned by one of the greatest men of the 20th century that our civilization would fall if we lost our core beliefs and our identity. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Soviet prisoner of conscience, author of Gulag Archipelago, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, a titan of moral clarity warned us about the coming

Russian schoolchildren will read “The Gulag Archipelago” novel. An abridged version of the famous book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been included into the compulsory school reading program. The decision to that effect was made by the Education Ministry on the eve of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions, which is marked on October 30. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that the book shook the whole world and became a literary monument to the victims of repressions in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn who was the victim of Stalin repressions himself worked on this book for many...

    France was the capital of the Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century intellectual movement spearheaded by writers who called themselves philosphes. They had waged a campaign of relentless criticism of the church and revealed religion, which their leader Voltaire called "The infamous thing." The crusade was so effective that by 1778, when an eighty-three year old Voltaire returned to Paris after decades away, he was received like a "victorious general," as Peter Gray describes it.  The Jesuit order had been suppressed, and various indicators showed a decline in devotion among the public. The effects were most profound in the ranks of the...