Most great books are built around a single idea. Even a book of hundreds of pages, like, say, Sophie’s Choice, comes down to one idea: having to choose between your children.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago may have been hundreds of riveting pages long, but I remember a single main point. When asked how Russians allowed themselves to become slaves to communism, he responded: “We loved freedom too little.” Years ago that seemed merely a brilliant insight into the Russian people. Now it seems like a warning to us here in America.
The world has given credit to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Pope Paul VI and even Mikhail Gorbachev for the fall of communism. But the first cracks came from the pen of Solzhenitsyn, who died at 89 in Moscow today.
