Solzhenitsyn was man who did one big thing very well. He brought his experiences of Stalin's tyranny to light in extraordinarily well crafted detail. From the end of World War II to the 1970's, defenders of communism were gradually forced to recognize that the Soviet Union had given birth not to any kind of liberation, but to an unrelentingly brutal despotism. Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago made it impossible to believe that Marxism-Leninism had any trace of salvation in it. That had the kind of impact that most writers can scarcely dream of.
But his criticism of Soviet communism was part and parcel of a deep anti-modernism. He stuck fast to a kind of religion that most Americans can hardly imagine. He was no friend of democracy or of Western style pluralism. Like his native land, he survived Stalinism but was never able or inclined to break free of the bonds that continue to hold Russia back to this very day.
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