Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn died on August 3, 2008.  To commemorate his life I would like to share his controversial commencement speech he gave at Harvard in 1978.  This speech caused much consternation for many listening at Harvard and for many people in the United States.

They expected to hear the horrors of Soviet Communism and the praise of Western Culture.  Instead, the people heard criticism of modern western culture.  Solzhenitsyn called the west spiritually sick.  His greatest criticism of the west was about the rise of secular humanism, decline of moral values, hyper-individualism, and excessive freedom.

To be sure Solzhenitsyn did continue to criticize communism and he continued to criticize western culture for the rest of his life.  The summary of what is wrong in communism and western culture according to Solzhenitsyn is, “Men have forgotten God.”

In his acceptance of the 1983 Templeton Foundation Award, he says,

“Over a half-century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process, I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

Solzhenitsyn was an intellectual giant of our age.  As a young author and intellectual in the Soviet Union he was very critical of communism in general and of Joseph Stalin in particular.  In 1945 he was arrested and sentenced to 8 years in the Gulag.  After his sentence was finished he was exiled to South Kazakhstan.  He was later forced to West Germany where he became known for his advocacy against communism.

I invite you to listen to this historic speech.  If you learned something let me know!

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash