Solzhenitsyn writes of the dramatic importance of the two months he spent in 1976 examining the enormously rich document collections at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California, bearing on the events in the Russia of 1917. For the first time, he discovered the full truth about the February revolution of 1917: rather than being a liberating outburst of freedom as he and so many other historians had supposed, he came to see nothing but “baseness, meanness, hypocrisy, plebeian uniformity, and suppression of people with other points of view” that took place. The first February revolution of
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