I write a lot about Russia, the land from which my grandparents emigrated in the early 1900s — about its millenium-old history; the natural wonders of its vast expanses; the beauty of its art, music, literature and architecture; the generosity and soulfulness of its people . . . and the evil of its rulers.

No one understood that evil better than one of its victims: Russian author and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn survived eight years in a prison camp (1945-53) for criticizing the Soviet regime while serving in the Red Army, followed by internal exile in Kazakhstan; a long-undiagnosed, metastasized cancer that ultimately received treatment and went into remission; political rehabilitation in 1956 by the more liberal Nikita Khrushchev; and renewed persecution by subsequent, hardline regimes.

During the post-Khrushchev years, Solzhenitsyn wrote his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, for which he received the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature . . . and expulsion from his homeland in 1974. He lived in exile for 20 years until, in 1994, his Russian citizenship was restored and he was able at last to return home.

The Gulag Archipelago is difficult reading, excruciating in its detailing of the horrors of the Soviet/Russian penal colony system. And the author’s observations as to the mentality of the people who created and operated the system, and the effect on its victims and the country’s population in general, are terrifyingly relevant to the present day — and not exclusively in Russia.

And so I offer you this quote from a man who spoke from firsthand experience. Take from it what you will:

“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 I. Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956”

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Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
11/30/25