Between Two Millstones, Book 2

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did not voluntarily depart for the West in February 1974. He was expelled from the Soviet Union for unleashing that great torrent of truth that was The Gulag Archipelago. That book, one of unparalleled historical and “literary investigation,” did more than any other work in the twentieth century to expose the truth about Communism and to undermine the moral and political legitimacy of one of the most vile regimes in human history. If Solzhenitsyn did not welcome exile, if he felt torn, as always, between the two millstones of the Soviet “Dragon”—as repressive and mendacious as ever—and an uncomprehending and increasingly hostile West, he nonetheless found solitude and happy refuge in his eighteen years in Cavendish, Vermont. It was there that he worked on, and eventually finished, his other great work of historical and literary investigation, The Red Wheel, a momentous ten-volume novel and work of dramatized history, an almost superhuman effort to recover the truth about 1917 and Russia’s descent into the totalitarian quagmire.