Alexander Solzhenitsyn, rest in peace. This man understood that totalitarianism is never total.

You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.

This is obviously true in our own time as well. In early age, his thought was very similar to that of an heretical American preacher.

Before the camps, I regarded the existence of nationality as something that shouldn’t be noticed—nationality did not really exist, only humanity. But in the camps one learns: if you belong to a successful nation you are protected and you survive. If you are part of universal humanity—too bad for you.

He believed

that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

That’s Kinism, folks, plain and simple. And after a long time in America, he returned to his mother Russia.

In Vermont I had wonderful conditions, better than anything Tolstoy ever had… I could have stayed there peacefully and in great happiness. But it would have been running away from my duty not to have come back. I could not escape our people’s pain.

His two-volume history of the Jews in Russia, Two Hundred Years Together, renewed charges of anti-Semitism against him, but if only this were true. He took a Jewess for a second wife, had three sons by her, and those boys were raised in the anti-Christian religion. We don’t know if he regretted this decision, but as a Christian, presumably he did.