Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a Russian novelist, historian, and former Gulag prisoner who became the most powerful moral witness against Soviet totalitarianism. Arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin, he spent years in labor camps—an experience that shaped works like The Gulag Archipelago, which exposed the spiritual and human cost of communist rule. Later in life, when asked why the 20th century had been so uniquely brutal—why the Soviet Union arose, why tens of millions died, and why Christian traditions were systematically destroyed—Solzhenitsyn offered a stark answer drawn from hard-won reflection: “Men have forgotten God” For him, the unprecedented evil of the modern age was not merely political or economic, but spiritual—a civilization that severed itself from God inevitably unmoored itself from conscience, truth, and restraint, making mass cruelty not only possible but inevitable.