The media were telling us the Russians were to be feared. I never believed their scaremongering.
This novel by Solzhenitsyn – who proved to be one of, if not the best, novelists of the second half of the twentieth century – helped put a clearer perspective of what was happening in Soviet society, which was not very different to what we are experiencing in so-called Western democracies right now.
I know, because later I went there to find out for myself – was present at the time of its collapse, and have written about it in:
