Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn understood evil. Born in Russia just a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, he became an author and dissident who wrote about, and raised global awareness of, political repression in his country. For his efforts, he spent eight years in the Soviet GULAG prison system, followed by years of internal exile before being “rehabilitated” by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work was The Gulag Archipelago — an expose of the brutal penal colony system of Stalinist times and beyond — in which he wrote:

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956”

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Solzhenitsyn was of course writing about the evils of the Soviet system of his time; but his body of work was also a cautionary tale for future generations . . . and for other nations.

And he knew whereof he spoke.

The question is: Are we smart enough to listen?

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
11/17/25