Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, writer, Nobel Prize winner, and the most famous Soviet dissident died at the age of 89 on August 3, 2008 in his home near Moscow. He lived a long and hard life, but he died the way that he wanted to: "He wanted to die in the summer – and he died in the summer," his wife Natalya said. "He wanted to die at home – and he died at home.”
Solzhenitsyn spent many years in the Soviet Gulag system and wrote his masterful Gulag Archipelago to chronicle the horrors of the brutal labor camps. One of Russia’s greatest writers, he will be remembered as an unyielding champion of freedom who dedicated himself to revealing the horrors of socialism and exposing the ultimate evil of Lenin, Stalin and their cabal of mass murderers. He became a moral and spiritual leader who exposed and condemned the nefarious nature of the socialist ideology that served as the basis for the monstrous communist slave camps established from Siberia to Ethiopia, Cuba to Vietnam, China and Yugoslavia.
Exiled from Russia in the early 1970’s he taught at Stanford University for awhile and later moved to Vermont where he lived with his family for years. In 1990 Gorbachev restored his citizenship and he returned to Russia in 1994 and actively participated in the reform process.
I had the opportunity to meet Solzhenitsyn in the mid-80’s. He was working on editing his works in English with a son of one of the saints in our assembly here. We traveled to where they were working and had the privilege of spending a brief time with him. He had a clear testimony of trusting Christ as his Savior and was quite forthright in saying that it was God’s grace that had and did sustain him through difficulties and joys, alike.
A short article chronicling his life can be read here.
Maranatha!
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