Solzhenitsyn The Eye Of The Storm
By Al Cronkrite The Covenant News ~ July 03, 2006
“The Soviets killed and exiled millions in their drive to demolish the Old Order. They ruined old churches, uprooted peasants and supported uniformity as much as their American antagonists. The Nazis unleashed the most horrible war on the world and killed millions of Slavs and Jews. Now, the Judeo-American forces have been unhinged by the completeness of their victories in 1945 and in 1991. They understand it as a licence to drive the world to perdition. Their programme of globalisation would eliminate all beauty and specific quality of the world, kill the spirit, undermine art, wipe out spirit, destroy nature, undo social achievements, divide mankind into Masters and Slaves. Wherever they go, old cafès and restaurants disappear and Starbucks and McDonalds take over. Workers lose their working places, museums are filled with trash, art is replaced by TV.” Israel Shamir, “A Yiddishe Medina”
At 86 years of age Solzhenitsyn is again embroiled in a tempest over a book he published in 2001 entitled Two Hundred Years Together.
Jewish reviewers are almost uniformly critical with spurious accusations of anti-Semitism and poor scholarship. This inordinate prejudice has prevented the book from being inked in America. Balanced reviews describe it as a fair description of the 200 year history of the relationship between Russians and Jews.
This is my third essay on Alexander Solzhenitsyn (See end of article). He is of particular interest as a Christian and as one who tears the veil from the evil that pervades our world with a tenacious temerity. Ian Hunter picks him as the most influential person of the past fifty years. This writing will include some additional details of his tumultuous life and also attempt to outline some of the parallels between what he so vividly described in Communist Russia with the current state of affairs in the United States.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a survivor. He has survived a single parent home; an education in a genre not to his primary liking (mathematics); wartime combat; prison (The Gulag); two marriages to the same women, Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaia; two divorces and a lasting alliance with his current spouse, Natalia Svetlova, by whom he has fathered three children; exiles in Switzerland and United States; a return to Russia; two heart attacks; and the disapproval of thousands whose malfeasances he has eloquently confronted.
Months before Solzhenitsyn was born his father was killed in a hunting accident. He was raised by his mother in modest circumstances and though educated in mathematics he always wanted to be a writer. For writing a letter critical of Joseph Stalin he was sentenced to an eight year prison term. At the time of his arrest he was an officer in the Russian Army and an avid Marxist. During the years in the Gulag which included a near fatal battle with cancer he became a Christian.
His Christianity appears to be Pietistic and fails to support either a Biblical legal structure or a doctrine of exclusivity. He seems to have an abiding faith in the ability of good people to govern other good people and is a supporter of the illegitimate Nation of Israel.
These theological aberrations notwithstanding, his life has been devoted to confronting falsehood with truth and evil with righteousness. He is a talented scholar and writer and this coupled with a gift to speak truth to power makes him unique in contemporary Christendom.
For several decades now Solzhenitsyn has carried on a verbal battle with Russian born artist and writer, Olga Andreyev Carlisle. He met Carlisle in Moscow in 1967 following the KGB seizure of the manuscript for “The Gulag Archipelago” and she agreed to smuggle copies out of the country and publish them in America. He wanted to have the book published quickly hoping it might help alleviate the oppressive Russian regime.
Carlisle is the grand-daughter of famous Russian author Leonid Andreyev and has been married for over fifty years to Henry Carlisle, a San Francisco novelist and publisher.
Solzhenitsyn believes commercial considerations delayed publication of the Gulag from 1968 till 1973. He is angry with Carlisle for striking a poor deal with Harper and Row and for producing a translation that often fails to properly convey the intent of the original manuscript. (This writer is in at least partial agreement with Solzhenitsyn - the English translation is sometimes poorly written.)
It is The Gulag Archipelago with which this writing will be concerned.
He brings the hidden into the light with the detail of the written word and his descriptions of his arrest and his life in the Gulag pin point the insanity of humanistic government. He writes, “Power is a poison well know for a thousand years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. (His prejudiced opinion is questionable.) For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.”
In describing the procedures involved in the hundreds of thousands of arrests and genocides characteristic of Stalin’s tyrannical rule, he recorded some of the codified legal standards. Article 111 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure reads: “The interrogator is obliged to establish clearly all the relevant facts, both those tending toward acquittal and any that might lessen the accused measure of guilt.” Article 136 states “The interrogator does not have the right to extract testimony or a confession from an accused by means of compulsion and threats.” and Article 139 says, “The accused has the right to set forth his testimony in his own hand and to demand the right to make corrections in the disposition written by the interrogator.”
As the cacophony of random arrests and torture spread throughout Russia, those who referred to the Russian Code of Criminal Justice were suspected of anti-government activity in much the same way Constitutionalists are suspect in United States. The siren of power intoxicated government officials and laws protecting the rights of citizens were considered anachronistic.
Progressive torture was used in the Gulags . Often new prisoners were forced into claustrophobic enclosures called “boxes” and kept in solitary confinement for a day or more. The jarring procedures began by confusing the subject through interrogations conducted during the dead of night. Persuasion was the initial instrument, followed by humiliation, foul language, and psychological ploys. Family members would be threatened and false promises made of special treatment in return for quick confessions. Prisoners might be subjected to loud noises and confusing light patterns. (Similar measures were employed at the Davidian Compound at Waco.)
Solzhenitsyn describes the overwhelming advantage enjoyed by interrogators when a victim is arrested, held in solitary confinement, and suddenly subjected to aggressive interrogation about an accusation that may not even be understood. He mentions the intention to keep the subject ignorant of legal rights and to use lies and distortions to confuse and intimidate them. Some of those arrested by the NKVD eagerly signed confessions just to be relieved of the oppression solitude and the harassment of ruthless interrogators.
Americans are deceived in thinking that our government provides them with freedom and justice. The same interrogation techniques used in the Russian Gulags are regularly used not only in the military but by our own local police departments.
When the mild tortures of solitary confinement and sleep deprivation failed to gain confessions, the satanic natures of sovereign interrogators would invariably turn to more diabolical means. For Americans, the Waco killing of the Branch Davidians should clearly show that powerful individuals are often quick to retaliate and just as quick to resent resistance, upping the ante till submission is complete. Beginning with local police departments American law enforcement demands obedience and will quickly stomp on all forms of resistance. Official government operatives are sanctioned to imprison those who resist their will.
In the Gulags, a more severe form of coercion involved forcing prisoners to stand on their knees with their backs straight for 24 or 48 hours or just to stand up on their feet for a similar period of time. The standing might be continued for several days without water and with sharp kicks used to prod the victim to maintain an erect position.
If all this failed, salt water might be injected into the victim’s throat and he might be thrown into the box to suffer from thirst for 24 hours or more. Needles might be pushed under his fingernails or he might be inflated with water like a balloon. Some were forced to lie on their stomachs while a tormentor sat astride their back and pounded their sciatic nerve with a one and a half inch diameter rubber truncheon. Others were forced onto their back with their legs akimbo. Their interrogators, sometimes women, gradually with increasing pressure crushed their testicles to the floor.
Reading these horrific descriptions quickly brings to mind the nature of the tortures used by American forces at Abu Ghraib and probably at Guantanamo. The terror of being hooded had apparently not yet been invented by the Russians. Sleep deprivation, standing and kneeling for long periods, merciless interrogations, humiliations, and indefinite imprisonment, all acceptable by our American Government were considered torture in “The Gulag Archipelago”.
Show trials were common in Stalin’s Russia. The verdict was determined before the trial was held. “If it is necessary to shoot you then you will be shot even if you are innocent. If it is necessary to acquit you, then no matter how guilty you are you will be cleared and acquitted.” One thinks of the trial of Ken Lay of Enron or Martha Stewart or Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Melosevic; show trials in which the verdict was determined before the trial began. Then, one thinks of the failure to hold anyone responsible for the death of Randy Weaver’s wife and baby daughter or for the deaths of over 80 men, women, and children at the Branch Davidian Compound at Waco, Texas.
Every American should be concerned about the denigration and marginalization of the Christian religion. As early as 1922 Russians who resisted the installation of the government controlled “Living Church” were arrested and imprisoned. Prayer was allowed as long as “only God could hear”. Public proclamation of Christianity and other religions became illegal and thousands of religious leaders were arrested and sent off to prison. Religious prisoners were never allowed to return to their homes and families.
Citizens were sentenced to death not only for what they had done but for what they might do in the future. Whole groups became enemies of the state and were arrested; many were shot.
The Russian Revolution was a secular event and Christianity as well as other religions became enemies of the state. During the period immediately following the revolution the Tsarist laws were suspended and the courts became the sole arbiters of legality. The government and the perceived rights of the masses took precedence and the slightest danger or potential danger to the integrity of the revolution was considered grounds for death. Prosecutors were only accountable to political authorities and had god-like powers over citizens brought before them. Life, death, torture, and prison were arbitrary decisions made by unrestrained, power-mad, often sadistic, tyrants.
Communism became the new religion in Russia and the Communist god is a jealous god seeking death for all who are opposed.
As America’s Christians are entertained in their churches they have allowed The One True God to be relegated to a mute presence and vanquished from the social order. As in Communist Russia prayer is now only allowed when only God can hear.
Our American courts function on the same level as the revolutionary Russian courts. The Constitution and immutable codified legal codes are disregarded in favor of the opinions of judges allowing our jails to be filled to overflowing with the innocent, the illegitimately guilty, and the genuinely guilty. Though some of our laws have already been changed, The New World Order waits with bated breath to complete the legal transition.
Christianity which has been the standard in our United States is being changed to conform to the secular dictates of globalism and law is the instrument of change.
Our choice was between two legal systems: God’s Laws and human opinion. Americans have acquiesced to the latter.
Solzhenitsyn’s book “Two Hundred Years Together” , a best seller in Russia, documents the heavy involvement of Russian Jews in the Revolution and in the pogroms that followed. Zionist Jewish organizations are fighting to keep the facts from being published. Russian-Jewish influence at the time of the Revolution compares favorably with the heavy Jewish influence involved in the moral deterioration of America. Even though Solzhenitsyn is favorably inclined toward the nation of Israel and reportedly divides Jews by those who integrated and those who didn’t (he liked that latter and is suspicious of the former.) Jewish forces in America seek to suppress the truth.
Man is forever endowed with a sinful nature and truth is always controversial since it is God‘s righteous yardstick. Those that have confidence in human government do not yet understand the depth of human depravity; those that do seek theonomy.
Solzhenitsyn is unique in our generation. Throughout his long life he has fought to bring out the truth and has been graced with the ability to withstand the tremendous pressure dark forces bring to hide it. Valiant confronters are vitally needed in our time. The internet has provided a venue for many but few, if any, approach the stature of Solzhenitsyn.