A prophet has died. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident, writer and Nobel Prize winner, will be remembered as the man who revealed the horror of Stalin's brutal labour camps, where tens of millions perished, to the world.

Like the best prophets, he spoke with moral authority not because of his eloquent speech or giant intellect but because he had personally experienced persecution and the crisis of exile. His 1962 masterpiece One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich vividly described the network of communist prison camps and earned him considerable notoriety.

It is The Gulag Archipelago, however, written in secrecy in the Soviet Union and published in Paris in three volumes between 1973 and 1978, which stands as the definitive work on Stalin’s camps. Shortly after its publication, Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his citizenship and exiled.

The wisdom of Solzhenitsyn is desperately needed today, not least in international politics. In a world which all too easily divides people into groups of 'us' and 'them', it was he who understood that "the line separating good from evil runs not between states, not between classes, and not between parties – it runs through the heart of each and every one of us".

Solzhenitsyn's prophetic rebuke was not confined to the evils of Stalinism. It was also directed against the west. Speaking at Harvard in 1978, he savagely criticised the west's system of 'legalistic righteousness', observing that:

"The defence of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenceless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

He went on:

"Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defence against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil."

Solzhenitsyn was not perfect. No prophet is. In his latter years, he failed to criticise Putin's authoritarian regime or the revival of censorship that he had once written to Soviet leaders to protest against. However, he knew more than most the nature of true freedom and the traditions required in order to preserve it. In acknowledging his courage in exposing Stalin's camps, we should resist the temptation to ignore either his critique of the west or the importance of his religious faith in directing the analysis he gave. It was his Orthodox Christianity which taught him to suffer persecution and denounce injustice even to the point of death.

Solzhenitsyn's legacy to the world is a great one. We must now decide the nature of our response.

Paul Woolley is Director of Theos.