Rod Dreher: Communist Dissidents Have a Message for the West
10th April 2025
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested on Feb. 12, 1974, for speaking out about the evils of Soviet communism. The next day, he was exiled to the West and would not touch Russian soil again for more than 15 years.
On the day of his arrest, Solzhenitsyn published an essay titled “Live Not by Lies.” The four-page essay was a call for civic courage: The end of Soviet totalitarianism would begin only when the Russian people refused to accept the regime’s lies.
Solzhenitsyn’s essay inspired the title of Rod Dreher’s 2020 book “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” Almost five years later, Angel Studios has turned Dreher’s book into a four-part documentary series focusing on the stories of the brave souls that stood up to communist regimes. Dreher joined “The Signal Sitdown” to give a behind-the-scenes look at the Angel Studios project.
Dreher started working on “Live Not by Lies” when he received a shocking phone call.
“I got a call from a doctor in the Midwest who had reached out to me through a mutual friend. He said, ‘I have to tell somebody what’s going on,’” Dreher recalled. “What he said was his elderly mother, who lived with him and his wife, had been a political prisoner in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. They imprisoned her—the communists did—because she was a spy for the Vatican, meaning she wouldn’t stop going to church when they told her to.”
“But in 2015, she told her son, ‘The things I see happening in this country, the United States, remind me of what it was like when the communists first came to power in Czechoslovakia,’” Dreher said.
Even Dreher was skeptical. “I thought it was a little extreme at first, but the more I started talking to people—when I would go to conferences or travel—people who had come to America to escape Soviet communism, I would just ask them, ‘Do you see parallels to what you left behind?’”
“Every single one of them said yes, and if you talked to them long enough, they would get really angry that Americans didn’t take them seriously,” Dreher said.