Alexander Solzhenitsyn, RIP

One of the great men of our time is dead.

From the Telegraph:

“Gulag Archipelago” was a three-volume denunciation of Stalin’s system and the ideology that powered it. It was a masterpiece of literary endeavour, language and polemic. Once read, it destroyed any argument for accommodation with the Soviet Union beyond that of realpolitik. That was all that remained until Mikhail Gorbachev ended the need for even that by presiding over the country’s collapse.

Achievements like this would be enough for most lives. (And Solzhenitsyn lived one of the greatest lives of the last century: war service, imprisonment and survival in the Gulag, literary renown, expulsion, exile and then an extraordinary return home to a totally different country.)