Word: solzhenitsyns
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...Harvard, the incident would have restored prestige to the sagging reputation of the University's Commencement address. When Gen. George Marshall took the Tercentenary Theater podium in 1947, he used the occasion to announce the European recovery plan that came to bear his name. Alexsander I. Solzhenitsyn, the expatriate Russian novelist, spoke at the 1978 ceremonies, issuing a ringing and internationally publicized decrial of the West's decline. His two successors were scarcely less illustrious: Helmut Schmidt, then Chancellor of West Germany, and Cyrus Vance, who had only weeks before left the Carter Administration in protest of its handling...
Although he did not mention him by name, Solzhenitsyn sharply attacked Protestant Evangelist Billy Graham, last year's Templeton prizewinner, for "his deplorable statement that he had not noticed the persecution of religion in the U.S.S.R." during a visit last year. Solzhenitsyn also accused the World Council of Churches for seeming "to care more for the success of revolutionary movements in the Third World" than for denouncing religious persecution in the U.S.S.R...
...subsequent meeting with several journalists, Solzhenitsyn offered the most detailed account he has yet given of his own religious pilgrimage. His first memory is of being hoisted above the heads of adults during an Orthodox service so that he could see what was happening: "Through a crowded church passed a number of men from the Cheka, the early form of security services, in their high, triangular caps, of course without taking their hats off as is the custom in any church. They tramped through all the way to the altar and began grabbing all the sacred vessels...
...youth, I was harassed and persecuted for my belief in God," said Solzhenitsyn, who resisted atheist indoctrination until age 15. In later years, "I considered myself as a Marxist, but deep inside me the attachment to the church, to the faith that I had always had as a child, lived...
Shortly after the 1962 release of his first work, the prison-camp novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn composed a prayer-poem, which became part of the body of work honored by the Templeton Foundation. Solzhenitsyn recalled last week, "I was being subjected to increasing pressure and harassment. At this time I experienced a feeling that I had support-supernatural support. I wrote [the prayer] in the consciousness of the various outcomes that could be called my fate: maybe this is the last moment. Maybe this is it." But it was only the beginning...