"It is a marvelous series that should be seen and re-seen in the homes of believers and non-believers."
Review by:
Dr. Ted Baehr, Movie Guide

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, on December 11, 1918, the same year as Billy Graham and Nelson Mandela. His father died six months before he was born in a tragic hunting accident. Solzhenitsyn began life in poverty and remained so through his childhood, though his remarkable intellect insured his place at Russia's prestigious Rostov University, where he majored in mathematics and physics. As a teenager, Aleksandr abandoned the Russian Orthodox faith of his family and embraced atheistic Communism.

At the outbreak of World War II, he volunteered for the army, but physically impaired, he was rejected. But the threatening advance of the German Army toward Moscow gave him the opportunity to prove himself as a soldier. He was decorated in battle for his bravery. But the discovery of letters he had exchanged with a former schoolmate about their mutual disdain for Stalin, led to his arrest on February 9, 1945, where he was given a sentence of eight years imprisonment, light by Stalinist Russian standards. His last years were spent in the isolation of Siberia where he intellectually and spiritually completed a transformation from atheist to devout Christian and came to understand his mission to be that of exposing the evils of the Communist system.

His first book, a novel that painted the daily life of a gulag prisoner in vivid detail, made him instantly famous and controversial. This work and his subsequent writings about the evils of the Communist system are credited with helping to undermine the legitimacy of Communism as a moral and philosophical system and contributing in no small measure to the eventual fall of the Soviet empire. In 1974, the government revoked Solzhenitsyn's citizenship and deported him, whereupon he was welcomed to the United States, where he lived in Vermont until 1994, when his exile was revoked and he was permitted to return to his homeland. By many accounts, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is the greatest Russian author of the twentieth century. Only time will validate that claim.

©2006 American Trademark Pictures