“Men have forgotten God”

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.”

(Source: “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”, an address by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn given when he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion on May of 1983).

(Image credit: This is an image from the Nationaal Archief, the Dutch National Archives, and Spaarnestad Photo, accessed on Wikimedia Commons, and used in accordance with Creative Commons 3.0 license).