Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece
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Building on his valuable overview of those volumes of The Red Wheel published in English as of January 2021 (i.e., through March 1917, Book 2), the estimable Robert D. Kaplan continues to engage with the argument and action of Solzhenitsyn’s great work on the Russian Revolution now that Book 3 of March 1917 is out.
“But did it have to happen as it happened? Solzhenitsyn does not say it, but if the royal family had not been executed — and if a quasi-constitutional monarchy had been established — the twentieth century would have been far less bloody. Instead, the abdication and subsequent arrest of Nicholas II and his family led to a vacuum of authority. The worse the anarchy, the worse the solution. Meanwhile, Lenin, brooding in his Zurich exile, had his mind fixed on the mistakes of the Paris Commune (the insurrection that followed France’s defeat by Prussia in the war of 1870-71). As Solzhenitsyn inhabits the thoughts of Lenin, the leader of the October Revolution-yet-to-come condemns all displays of weakness and humanity. We must seize the banks. We must not be magnanimous. Don’t save people in order to re-educate them; conduct cellar executions instead: “The proletariat had to be taught pitiless mass methods!”
And so it happened thus. As each new book in the series appears in translation, Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel is emerging as the ultimate monument to the perils of illusion and disorder.”