Question by Jaizu: Christians: Did the Russian people deserve communism?
In one of his books, the first volume of “Gulag Archipelago”, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about how the communists in Russia were able to maintain their grip on all of Russia by keeping the Russian majority, which hated them, too frightened to resist. Solzhenitsyn writes of the period in 1934 and 1935, when the commissar Genrikh Yagoda headed the Soviet secret police, and Yagoda’s black vans went out every night in St. Petersburg, known then as Leningrad, to round up “class enemies”: former members of the aristocracy, former civil servants, former businessmen, former teachers and professors and professional people, any Russian who had graduated from a university. A quarter of the population of the city was arrested and liquidated by Yagoda during this two-year period.
And Solzhenitsyn laments that the citizens of St. Petersburg cowered behind their doors when the black vans pulled up at their apartment houses night after night to arrest their neighbors. If only the decent Russians had fought back, Solzhenitsyn says, if only they had ambushed some of these secret police thugs in the hallways of their apartments with knives and pickaxes and hammers, if only they had spiked the tires of the police vans while the thugs were in the apartments dragging out their victims, they could easily have overwhelmed Yagoda’s forces and forced an end to the mass arrests. But they didn’t fight back, and the arrests and liquidations continued. And so, Solzhenitsyn concludes, because of their cowardice and their selfishness the Russians deserved what the communists did to them.
Answers and Views:
Answer by m92
66 million russian orthodox christians died under the soviet (1917-1991), so no, nobody deserves it…And as for why, because anyone who opened his/her mouth got sent to the Gulags or executed…
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JulieSacredHeart says
NOBODY deserves communism!
I think what he's really saying here is just a long form of the old adages, "You reap what you sow" and "we get the leadership we deserve." I don't think he's speaking literally, but rather, pointing to the reality that those who remain silent give consent, and thereby they "deserve" what they have sown through their refusal to stand up for what is right.
By the same token, the same could be said in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, etc., during WWII as their Jewish neighbors' rights were ripped from them bit by bit, finally ending in the mass murder of thousands upon thousands. But did Germany, Poland, the Netherlands et. al. deserve Nazism? CERTAINLY NOT!
A lot of times you have to read things such as "Gulag Archipelago" critically and not literally – look at what he's really saying, which isn't necessarily the literal approach.
Ruth says
Solzhenitsyn had a point. I see it in the Christian people. They let a small minority of Americans tell us what our schools will teach. Tell us there will be gay marriage.We must support abortion through taxation. On and on.
If you don't stand up and say NO you have no one else to blame.
Jesus A$$Clown says
I'd rather be a commy… Maybe you should ask yourself – did the communists deserve christianity?