Opaque Lucidity

The Man With The Mustache

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. More than any other single person, he showed the West the horrible underbelly of Soviet communism. Believe it or not, the name "Solzhenitsyn" was one with which I was familiar even as a child. My mother (and father, I think) read the Gulag Archipelago series that Solzhenitsyn wrote some 35 years ago. The evils of communism were grist for the mill of our family discussions.

The death of Solzhenitsyn is a marker of sorts, an indication of the end of an era. We will soon lose everyone who witnessed firsthand the brutality of the Soviet system under Stalin or the planned genocide of the Nazis. As we have seen with the American Civil War, nation sometimes romanticize dark periods in their history. The powers that gripped the Soviet Union from 1917-1991 can never again be allowed to rule. But as we see by looking at Russia today, the lesson of Solzhenitsyn is already being forgotten.