The Dissident

By: Stephen Brown

... Arguably the greatest of the anti-Soviet dissidents, and certainly the best known, Solzhenitsyn strode across the world at the height of the Cold War, urging presidents and prime ministers to stand up to the communist menace. Armed only with a pen, he defied one of history’s most brutal tyrannies and revealed its horrors to a world that was not always ready to believe. ....

In The Gulag Archipelago, he recounted what set him on the road to conversion. “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political classes either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.” ...