We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

American diplomat George Kennan, himself one of the chief architects of American policy during the Cold War, would describe “The Gulag Archipelago” as “the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.” The Times of London went so far as to speculate, “The time may come when we date the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union from the appearance of Gulag.”

Solzhenitsyn would outlive the Soviet Union by 17 years. He died on Sunday of complications from heart disease at age 89. As he had declared when he was expelled from his homeland in 1974, he died on Russian soil.

He was a man of contradictions or, as Joseph Pearce argues, a man of paradox. In any event, he was a man of great moral vision who revealed the brutality of the Soviet regime and contributed greatly to its collapse. Edward E. Erickson, who wrote two major works on Solzhenitsyn, argues that the key to understanding Solzhenitsyn is Christianity—the Russian Orthodox faith that framed Solzhenitsyn’s worldview. Erickson argued that “in a day when secular humanism flourishes among the cultural and intellectual elite, he holds fast to traditional Christian beliefs.”

Indeed, Solzhenitsyn railed against the secularism and spiritual weakness of the West, even as he took refuge in Cavendish, Vermont for the years of his exile. In his famous 1978 Harvard University commencement address, “A World Split Apart,” Solzhenitsyn pointed to the moral and spiritual crisis in the West. He declared that America’s experiment with democracy was being undermined by secularism:

However, in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even 50 years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer.

He was a man of massive courage and literary ability—a central character of the 20th century. He was a moralist to the core, affirming human dignity against Communist oppression and Stalin’s murder of millions. Even so, he carried on an affair with the woman who became his second wife and the mother of his sons. He seemed ungrateful to America, but he also saw what many Americans, blinded by historical optimism, could not or would not see in the weakness of the West.

He returned to Russia a prophet, but also a man who seemed strangely out of his times. In his case, a great life of the 20th century lingered awkwardly into the 21st. Nevertheless, his great courage and his literary achievement remain a tribute to the human spirit. Even more, Solzhenitsyn’s moral vision serves as a reminder that Christianity alone provides an adequate grounding for human dignity.

When asked once about the force of his writings, Solzhenitsyn explained: “The secret is that when you’ve been pitched head first into hell you just write about it.” The world was changed because he did just that.