Sunday Afternoon Byzantine Chant ~ RIP ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

Romanian Orthodox Byzantine Chant
Fericirile, glas 1 (The Beatitudes, Tone 1)


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RIP ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN, AN ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN

SOLZHENITSYN DEAD at 89


What I Learned in the Gulag

In the course of his sufferings and imprisonment he came to Christian faith and is an Orthodox believer.
Now living outside of Russia (in Vermont), Solzhenitsyn in one sense is almost a symbol of the contemporary Orthodox revival in Russia. Born with the Revolution, he underwent the sixty years of suffering of the Russian people and emerged a victor, with a strong Christian faith and a message for the world based on his experience. Most of what Russia has to tell s today in the free world can be seen in Solzhenitsyn. Here I will try to speak of the main points of this message, drawn not from his fiction, but from his public addresses and articles.

[SNIP]

First of all, Solzhenitsyn has told us about Gulag.
Of course, many spoke of the Soviet slave system before Solzhenitsyn, but the world did not listen. Only in recent years has the world been ready to hear of this frightful reality which Solzhenitsyn has described with tremendous power.
He speaks of Gulag not merely as the prison system of one modern country, but as the logical end of the whole of modern history once God has been removed from men's lives. This is not merely a "Russian" experiment—it is the end of all peoples who remove God from the center of life. And Gulag is an essential part of atheist society—if you remove it, the Soviet system itself will crumble. Atheism is based on the evil in man's nature, and Gulag is only the natural expression of this. Russia's experience with Gulag is for the whole of humanity, and no one should presume to comment on the nature and meaning of modern history until he has read this book.