Memory Eternal: Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One of the great heroes of the fight against tyranny and a literary giant of the last century has died. Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent eight years as a prisoner in Stalin's concentration camps and later spent much of his adult life fighting to expose the horror's of Communism and the brutality of the Soviet Union's vast system of slave labor. He was for many years a pariah in his native Russia and was stripped of his citizenship and forcibly exiled in the early 1970's as a result of his public exposure of the USSR's crimes against humanity. He did not return to his homeland until 1994 when he received a hero's welcome.

Today he is regarded as one of the most important authors of the previous century. However, even during his years in exile many of his claims (such as the number of Russians murdered by the Communists being over 30 million) were dismissed by apologists for radical left politics. The vast majority of those accusations have since been confirmed as fact. In almost every respect Mr. Solzhenitsyn was a cultural conservative who was also often sharply critical of the moral decay of the West. Not surprisingly of the four obituaries I have read on major media and newspaper sites, not one has mentioned that he was also a devout Orthodox Christian.

Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn reposed at the age of 89 at his home outside of Moscow.

May his memory be eternal.