The first step to tyranny

Men forgetting God

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older 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 fifty 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 sixty 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.

What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”. Templeton Prize Lecture, London, 10 May 1983.)

Nobel laureate, Orthodox Christian author, and Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, gave an address when he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1983. In that address, of which I’ve quoted here the beginning, he explained that Godlessness is the first step towards tyranny and oppression.

I have great respect for what Solzhenitsyn endured, and what he wrote. No one can accuse him of just theorising from a comfy university professorship - he went through the fire and survived to warn us about it.

As we are talking about totalitarianism in the current age I thought this might be a good theme to ponder. After all, the collective West has had doubts about God for a while now…

TIME magazine’s cover from April 8, 1966, that became an icon of the period’s social and religious transformations. The article, by religion editor John T. Elson, attempted to capture the shift from complacent faith of the 1950s to the metaphysical confusion of the mid-1960s.

And if many, as it seems, answered the Times article in the affirmative, then we could, according to Solzhenitsyn, have ourselves a primary cause of the madness.