Bowed Knees in the Gulag

In 1945, Soviet secret police arrested Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and sentenced him to eight years in the labor camps. The gulag was engineered to break men — starvation rations, forced labor in Siberian cold, and relentless pressure to become an informant. Compliance meant survival. Resistance meant suffering.

Solzhenitsyn entered the camps as an atheist. But amid the brutality, something unexpected happened. He watched fellow prisoners — ordinary believers with calloused hands and quiet faith — endure unimaginable hardship with a peace he could not explain. Their witness cracked him open. Slowly, painfully, he surrendered his life to God.

That surrender changed everything. When interrogators pressured him to betray fellow prisoners, he refused. When the system demanded his conscience, he held firm. He later wrote that the line between good and evil runs not between nations or parties, but through every human heart — and that only by submitting to the Almighty could he resist the evil pressing in from every side. The regime that terrorized millions could not break one man who had already given himself to a higher Authority.

James 4:7 names the exact sequence: "Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." Solzhenitsyn discovered what every believer must learn — resistance to evil does not begin with clenched fists. It begins with bowed knees. When we surrender to God first, we find the strength to stand against everything the enemy throws at us.