Excerpt from John McCain and Mark Salter’s Hard Call: The Art of Great Decisions: 

The writing began in fits and starts. Another round of cancer treatment interrupted him. And he had doubts that, lacking any access to official records, his own experiences — what he “was able to take away from the archipelago on the skin of my back and with my eyes and ears” — provided sufficient material on which to base such an immense undertaking. He set it aside. But after the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn began to receive hundreds of letters from Gulag survivors, and the letters and accounts obtained in conversations and memoirs from a total of 227 witnesses gave him the material necessary to complete the work.

In 1964, he began to work diligently on The Gulag Archipelago, writing sixteen hours a day in two eight-hour shifts. He completed the second draft in two and a half months, from late 1966 to early 1967. In the spring of 1968 he wrote feverishly to finish and microfilm the work in anticipation of sending it abroad for publication. On June 2,1968, it was done. One week later a friend carried the microfilm rolled in a capsule to Paris. Five years were to pass before it was published.

Solzhenitsyn had to make three decisions before The Gulag Archipelago and its truths, which were to wreak enormous damage on the Soviet system of oppression and hasten the demise of the entire postwar balance of power, would be available to the world. The first, of course, was the decision to write it. Even had the period of cultural liberalization in the Soviet Union lasted indefinitely, Solzhenitsyn’s truths would still have greatly offended Stalin’s successors. Among them were the accusation that Lenin shared culpability for the Gulag; and the recognition that the Soviet people themselves, not only Stalin and other Soviet leaders, must accept part of the responsibility for these crimes. His second decision was to send the manuscript abroad for publication, knowing that he would never receive permission to publish it in the Soviet Union. The third decision was to order its publication.

Solzhenitsyn’s death comes at a time when Russia is busy restoring the reputation of Josef Stalin, indirectly, by tarnishing the reputation of Nikita Khrushchev, the first Soviet leader to publicly denounce Stalin.

Some members of the Khrushchev family and others say the persistent rumor is part of a quiet battle of political symbols, in which the champions of a strengthened state have tried to weaken democratic institutions.

The aim, they say, is to burnish the reputation of strong leaders, such as former President Vladimir Putin and Stalin, by tarnishing that of Khrushchev — who denounced Stalin’s mass arrests, executions and deportations in a secret 1956 speech to the Communist Party leadership that later became public.

…Still, the celebration of state power has been a major theme in Russian arts and education in recent years. The country’s film industry, largely state-subsidized, has produced thrillers showing Russia under siege from the West, protected only by decisive czars, steely Communist Party first secretaries and vigorous modern presidents — essentially, Putin.

New textbooks praise Putin’s concentration of power and laud Stalin as a successful if brutal leader. Last year, Putin told history teachers that no one could make Russians feel guilty about Stalin’s crimes because “in other countries even worse things happened.”

Amazing.

Psychopath Stalin killed more than 20 million Soviet citizens via slave labor, execution, or forced starvation. But don’t let that besmirch his name — others did worse. Is that your point, Putin?

Then there’s this from John Derbyshire at The Corner:

Back in the 1970s, Solzhenitsyn inspired me to dig out all the Soviet truth-tellers I could find. The truly dismaying thing was how many of them there were: Anatoli Granovsky, Viktor Kravchenko, Victor Serge … This stuff goes back to the 1920s. It subtracts nothing from Solzhenitsyn’s suffering, work and achievements to note that the West had to be ready for him.

The truth about Leninism was there from the beginning. Reading Lenin’s pre-1917 works, in fact, you could say it was there from before the beginning. Perceptive observers didn’t need telling. Bertrand Russell went to Lenin’s Russia in 1920, saw through the whole thing, wrote a book about it (The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism, 1920), and lost half his friends. The young Vladimir Nabokov, whose family fled for their lives from the Leninists, was at Cambridge University 1919-20, baffled by his fellow-students’ inability to grasp what he was telling them about the new regime. They just listened politely and smiled indulgently. They knew better!

T.S. Eliot’s “humankind cannot bear very much reality” doesn’t tell the half of it. Humankind in general loathes reality, and will escape from it through any hatch that can be kicked open.