The Doomed Cause of a Russian Liberal
Solzhenitsyn’s Sweeping Tale of War and Revolution
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) wrote first for Russians, especially the young. “The recent history of our country is so little known, or taught in such a distorted fashion,” said he, that young Russians more than anyone needed resources to be able to think clearly about what their forebears experienced in the cataclysmic time of his birth. In The Red Wheel, Solzhenitsyn challenged that history with a series of eight novels divided into four groups or “knots.” The image of the red wheel first comes to sight as the giant wheel of a locomotive—big enough to lean on but spine-twisting if it moves. In the…