Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Men Have Forgotten God

Aleksandr was a Marxist and a believer in the communist ideology of the Soviet Union in the early 1940s. Twice, during World War II, he was decorated for his service in the Red Army. But he began to have doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.

He later wrote, “There is nothing that so assists the awakening of omniscience within us as insistent thoughts about one’s own transgressions, errors, mistakes. After the difficult cycles of such ponderings over many years, whenever I mentioned the heartlessness of our highest-ranking bureaucrats, the cruelty of our executioners, I remember myself in my Captain’s shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: ‘So were we any better?’”

In February 1945, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing negative comments in private letters to a friend about how Joseph Stalin conducted the war. He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and sentenced to an eight-year term in a Gulag (labor camp).

Late in his imprisonment, Aleksandr experienced a conversion from Marxism to Christianity. He wrote of it in his massive The Gulag Archipelago, a three- volume work that gives an inside look, in numbing detail, of the Soviet prison system. He concluded, “Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning and ingenious than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime …”

Looking back on his life and studies of this history, Solzhenitsyn concluded: “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; that’s 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; that’s why all this has happened.’”

Reflect: Do you know of someone who has “forgotten God”? Stop and pray for them right now. The Bible repeatedly warns us not to forget God and encourages us to remember the Lord’s kindness toward us.