Solzhenitsyn was indeed caught “between two millstones”: a totalitarian regime in the East that posed a grave and immediate threat to humanity, and the often frivolous forces of Western “freedom” that had lost a sense of dignity and high purpose. He had a new tension-ridden mission: to write with force, clarity, and artfulness about the Russian twentieth century while doing his best to warn the West about the pitfalls of a free society caught up in the cult of comfort and increasingly unwilling to defend itself against the march of evil.
