Excerpt: Man has forgotten God, that is why this has happened was Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyns response when questioned about the decline of modern culture. Solzhenitsyn continued: 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; thats 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; thats why all this has happened. This echoed another Russian author, 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 Foundations 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. The people were kept in constant fear that government agencies would falsely accuse them and cart them away in the night, and the people were kept in a continual shortage of food, so they could not have the resources to rebel. Stalin engineered a famine in his war against the kulaks that killed millions. Richard Pipes commented on the absolute power of Russias 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.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 06:08:20 +0000
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