One half a century ago, while I was a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ” Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this happened.” Since then, he explained, he had spent nearly half a century researching the history of the Russian Revolution which had swallowed up sixty million of our people, but if he was asked to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of all that had happened he could not put it more accurately than to repeat the same words. And if I were called to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise than to repeat once again:
Men have forgotten God.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)