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Alexander Solzhenitsyn buried in Moscow

Written by Michael Ireland, ASSIST

Wednesday, 06 August 2008

MOSCOW, RUSSIA (ANS) -- The body of Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn has been laid to rest at a funeral service held at Moscow's Donskoi monastery.
President Dmitry Medvedev joined the writer's family, friends and hundreds of mourners at the monastery's cathedral, near the city center, says a report posted to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website.

Before entering the church to attend the service on Wednesday morning, Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of the Russian capital, said of Solzhenitsyn: "He was one of our strongest personalities, a unique person."

Inside, Mr Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalya, her sons and the rest of the Solzhenitsyn family sat in the front row of the church where more than 100 people had crowded.

The BBC said the Nobel prize-winning author lay in an open coffin with a wooden cross on his chest, surrounded by hundreds of candles. After the service, priests followed the coffin outside the cathedral, chanting and singing, before a gun salute was fired and a military band played as the coffin was lowered into the grave.

Mrs Solzhenitsyn and her sons then scattered handfuls of earth over the coffin, before it was covered over, leaving one large black and white photograph as a final memory at the graveside.

The BBC said Solzhenitsyn had sought special permission to be buried at Donskoi monastery -- the final resting place of a number of poets, philosophers and historians, many leading anti-Soviet figures -- from the Russian Orthodox Church leadership, reports say.

According to the BBC, thousands of mourners had paid tribute to the writer as his body lay in state inside the Russian Academy of Sciences. A night-long vigil was then held on Tuesday.

Among those who paid their respects was former Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the Soviet era, he was an officer in the KGB secret police.

In later televised remarks, Mr Putin said: "Through his works and his entire life he inoculated our society against tyranny in all its forms."

The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia from exile in 1994.

Solzhenitsyn's writing exposed Stalin's prison system and earned him 20 years in exile from the former Soviet Union. The writer died on Sunday of heart failure at his home near Moscow, aged 89.

Responding to Solzhenitsyn 30 Years Later

In an article written with Anne Morse posted this week to Christianity Today, former Nixon White House aide and Prison Fellowship Founder Charles Colson asks: "Three decades after Solzhenitsyn's speech, where do we find ourselves?"

He writes: "Thirty years ago this summer, a 59-year-old bearded dissident, whose writings helped expose and eventually bring down Soviet tyranny, stood facing rows of robed faculty and graduates at Harvard's historic Yard for its 327th commencement. Expectations ran high."

Colson says Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was admired for his literary achievements and lionized by the faculty, if not for his outspoken views on Communism, at least for the fact that he was an oppressed intellectual.

He continues: "Solzhenitsyn delivered each line in his high-pitched voice in Russian. The translation blunted the impact somewhat-in fact, there were even sporadic bursts of applause. But soon enough, outraged professors realized that Solzhenitsyn was charging them with complicity in the West's surrender to liberal secularism, the abandonment of its Christian heritage, and with all the moral horrors that followed.

"As it happened, this summer I was reading a tattered copy of Solzhenitsyn's speech at the same time I was studying Jeremiah in my devotions. I was struck by the chilling parallels between the dissident's words and Jeremiah's warning to the Israelites."

For example, he says, describing the Western worldview as "rationalistic humanism," Solzhenitsyn decried the loss of "our concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility." Man has become "the master of this world . who bears no evil within himself," he announced. "So all the defects of life" are attributed to "wrong social systems."

Colson says Solzhenitsyn also argued that this moral impoverishment had led to a debased definition of freedom that makes no distinction between "freedoms for good" and "freedoms for evil."

"Our founders, he reminded us, would scarcely have countenanced 'all this freedom with no purpose' but for the 'satisfaction of one's whims'; they demanded that freedom be granted conditionally upon the individual's constant exercise of his religious responsibility," Colson writes.

He continues: "Solzhenitsyn could hardly have imagined that just 14 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court would enshrine this radical definition of freedom: 'At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.'"

Colson also says that Solzhenitsyn also foresaw the rise of political correctness: "Fashionable trends of thoughts and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable." He predicted this would lead to "strong mass prejudices" with people being "hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad."

He asks: Could even Solzhenitsyn have imagined that sexual rights would eventually triumph over free expression, that academia would impose rigid speech codes, or that churches would be threatened with loss of their tax-exempt status for opposing homosexual marriage?

Colson continues: "Perhaps the hardest for the crowd to accept was his charge that the West had lost its 'civic courage . particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites.' After all, he said, with 'unlimited freedom on the choice of pleasures,' why should one risk one's precious life in defense of the common good, particularly when one's nation must be defended in distant lands? He even predicted Americans would care more about the rights of terrorists than their evil deeds-a prophecy fulfilled by the Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush, granting terror suspects access to U.S. courts-exactly 30 years to the week after Solzhenitsyn's speech."

How has America responded to Solzhenitsyn's words? Just look at what remains of the Bush administration, which, following September 11, boldly confronted evil. Public support for the President's military policies has waned, ushering in a new wave of American isolationism, Colson suggests.

He adds: "The condition Solzhenitsyn diagnosed was identical to that of the ancient Israelites. God spoke through Jeremiah with biting sarcasm, warning the Israelites of where this kind of 'freedom' leads: It would be freedom 'to fall by the sword, plague, and famine.' Jeremiah's prophecy all too soon came to pass; the Israelites fell into Babylonian captivity.

Three decades after Solzhenitsyn's speech, where do Americans find themselves? In the grip of a similar captivity: violent and pornographic "entertainment," growing censorship of unfashionable ideas, and a spiritually exhausted citizenry, Colson states.

Solzhenitsyn did not leave Harvard that warm, June day without offering a solution: a "spiritual blaze" was needed to recover our footing. Have we listened? Do we see signs of awakening?

Colson's conclusion: "My summer study left me with a haunting question for the church: Is there still time to renew ourselves out of our spiritual exhaustion?"