Rich Lowry remembers Solzhinitsyn here. For the JLF interns and anyone too young to remember his one man struggle against Soviet Communism, this article is must reading.
In “The Gulag,” he showed how the Soviet system wasn’t perverted by
Stalin in the 1930s, but was murderous from the beginning, the
sulfurous spawn of a Vladimir Lenin determined to rid Russia “of all
kinds of harmful insects.” He argued convincingly that Soviet communism
was as evil and destructive as Nazism. But the central insight of
Solzhenitsyn’s work is not political or historical, but moral.In his suffering, he gained insight into the twistedness of the human
heart. “Gradually it was disclosed to me,” he writes, “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.”Solzhenitsyn’s suffering in the camps saved him from ideology: “It was
only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within
myself the first stirrings of good.” And for that, he made the
astonishing exclamation, “Bless you, prison, for having been in my
life!”
