Pianist and conductor Ignat Solzhenitsyn reflects on growing up in exile as the son of Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, moving from Soviet persecution to a quiet childhood in rural Vermont. Ignat recounts how music, faith, and Russian culture sustained his family far from home, how cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich helped set him on a… Read More Ignat Solzhenitsyn in Conversation with Peter Robinson
“Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good.”— Thomas a Kempis, 15th century
“And fate made everybody equal Outside the limits of the law. Son of a kulak or Red commander, Son of a priest or commissar . . . Here classes were all equalized, All men were brothers, camp mates all, Branded as traitors every one . . . —Alexander Tvardovsky, “By Right of Memory” It all… Read More Lenin’s Pure “Equality”. Three Weeks Before the October Revolution.
Our children are the Guinea Pigs. By Christopher Rufo. First Things Magazine | The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin raised his glass to a group of artists assembled at the home of famed writer Maxim Gorky in 1932. “The ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he said, explaining that the communists… Read More Reengineering the Human Soul
Vaclav Havel waves to crowds in Prague, shortly before becoming Czech president in December 1989. Kamila Valenta writes in America, “I was 17 years old when I heard the Lord’s Prayer spoken in public for the first time. It was in November 1989 during the Velvet Revolution, which brought freedom to Communist Czechoslovakia. The crowd… Read More The Lord’s Prayer, Freedom, and the Spiritual Vaclav Havel
“… The totalitarian movements that have arisen after the First World War are basically religious movements. Their aim is not only to change political and social institutions, but also to remodel the nature of man and society.” — Waldemar Gurian, The Totalitarian State “In the totalitarian movements of the past, this golden age was envisioned… Read More Is Government the New god?
Note / SH: It should go without saying that neither Jew or Gentile, or any race / ethnicity or religion, has a special claim to evil in history: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties– but right through every human heart — and through all… Read More Stalin’s Jews
Catholic Critique 