Then, soon after, rose Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. All three had a native understanding of the deep inhumanity at the center of the materialist myth, the deepest repugnance at the brutality it unleashed, and the courage to fight its defenders to the last man. Perhaps most important was that each of these leaders knew the struggle was primarily a moral one which explains that despite great opposition they persevered — and won.

We witnessed a bloodless revolution that freed half of Europe. World War II ended the day the Berlin Wall fell. I was in seminary at the time and remember that I wished I was a wealthy man so I could fly to Berlin and see this end first-hand.

The moral courage Pope John Paul gave to the Poles will be seen by history as the turning point of the Communist regime, the day that the foundation started to crumble. “Be not afraid!” he exhorted his countrymen. They listened and in the face of this courage the corrupt began to flee. He was a great man.

But so too Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. I’m privileged to have as a friend one of Ronald Reagan’s advisers. He tells me stories and the one that impressed me was what Reagan did after losing Iowa. After Reagan’s loss, when it looked like his campaign lay in ruin, he pulled his closest confidants together and promised them that if he won, his highest priority would be to free the people of Eastern Europe. “Were they on board?” he asked them. To a man they said yes.

You see, they too read Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn’s words shaped, framed, and informed their native sense of obligation to their fellow man in a way that great good could be done. And they accomplished the great good.

Much of this history is still clouded in the press of everyday events. When the dust settles and historians go about the business of making sense of the last four decades, the defeat of Communism will be seen as the great moral victory that it was.

As for grad school students and professors, the joke is that the only place you find a committed Marxist today is in an American university. Only the coddled still believe the myth.

He was an amazing man and eloquent spokesman who spoke of the horrors of totalitarianism. I know people (a former student of mine) whose lives were changed because of his writings. He moved beyond the facile assumptions of most Americans about the nature of the Soviet union. Unfortunately, many Americans still have not grasped the significance of the left in politics, and treat them as a benign influence in the world. How do we brush aside the horrors of the Soviet Union and the atrocities in other communist countries. Seems easy for academics to do and to repeat the same cliches they learned in graduate school. Sorry for the rant.