Remembering The Gulag

Lileks reminisces:

I got all three volumes from the drugstore - which should have told me something about the land in which I lived, that one could buy this work from a creaky wire rack at the drugstore - and it taught me much about the Soviet Union and the era of Stalin. After that I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.

Indeed.