"I found Solzhenisan's portrait more effective and more effective," he says. "The rest of the book is about the utter horror and human debasement that Stalin was perpetrating on his fellow citizens" The author wanted a country based on morality, not solely or predominantly based on the law in post-Soviet Russia. He argued many years before the Soviet regime fell that the West could not universalize itself.
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.