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Solzhenitsyn’s History of Russia
In The Red Wheel, a novelistic history of the Russian Revolution, the fictional Colonel Georgi Vorotyntsev speaks for Solzhenitsyn or, better put, is Solzhenitsyn. We know this because “in childhood he had been obsessed with Russia’s history and felt a premonition that his own future life would be bound up with it”. From his youth on, he “had craved one thing above all else: to influence his country’s history for the good, to drag or hustle uncouth Russia along the road to better things”. That effort, he believed, could succeed only if his country repented of its sins.
There was a time, according to Solzhenitsyn, when Russia remained true to the Orthodox Faith that endowed her with the gift of repentance, “which more than anything else distinguishes man from the animal world”. Not for nothing is Forgiveness Sunday (the final Sunday before Great Lent when all ask forgiveness from all) a high point on the Orthodox calendar. Dostoevsky put it this way: “We are each responsible to all for all.”
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