This year, 2023, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary and historical masterpiece which described brilliantly the inhuman “archipelago” of horrific concentration camps established by Lenin in the wake of the creation of the Soviet Union in 1918 and expanded and refined under Stalin and his successors.
Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918 to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, was raised in poverty in the early years of the Soviet Union. While his mother was devoutly Russian Orthodox, Solzhenitsyn gradually became an atheist socialist before serving as a decorated artillery officer in the Red Army during World War II. After criticizing Stalin in a private letter, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to 8 years of hard labor in the Siberian concentration camps.
During his imprisonment, he regained the Christian faith of his childhood, partly by observing the faith of Christians in the terrible conditions of the camps (he alludes to this in his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962))…
The rest of the article can be found where it was originally posted by the Christian Post, here.
