Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

Of course, the popular naïveté preceding World War I is an old story that is the stuff of many books. But Solzhenitsyn goes on to illuminate in his saga how the same innocence will carry through the entire revolutionary process in Russia, in which words like “war” and “revolution” mean very different things to a people whose frame of reference extended only to the end of the 19th century. Thus they had no conception of how history could wildly swerve in a new technological age. They would not know that the new military conflict would be nothing like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, or that the revolution to come would yield nothing like the French revolution of 1789, which even with its Reign of Terror was altogether benign compared to what was in store for Russia.