In the 1920s, there were a lot of apologists who believed or hoped that the Soviet system was creating a new man. They were eager to believe that something new and better was going on. There became an awareness somewhere between 1935 and 1955 that something was very rotten there. Solzhenzyn's first hand accounts in the Gulag Archipelago made his story even more important than Walter Durandi had previously thought.
Historian and author Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the historical significance of the life and work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's birth.