An e-mail:

I don’t know how typical I am of my generation (I’m 55), but, more than anyone else, Solzhenitsyn convinced me of the brutality and immorality of Communism. This is probably remarkable given
that my father was similarly such a victim. Briefly, my father was born in the Ukraine in 1911. During his life, he witnessed the confiscation of his family’s farm, the death of most of his siblings and step-siblings due to famine, incarceration in several of Stalin’s labor camps, and the opening moments of Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. He ended up being captured by the Germans and forced to work for them in Germany. He met the woman who was to become my mother in the waning days of World War II and, together with their two young children whom they had while living in a Displaced Persons camp, emigrated to the U.S. in 1951. I was born a year later in a small, peaceful New England town.
Yet, during my rebellious years, I discarded most of what my father told me about his upbringing and the first 30 years of his life. Raised in a free society, I couldn’t imagine any government doing what he claimed was done to him. Even if it did happen as my father described, surely the post-Stalin era had softened the Soviets, I thought.
Then I read Solzhenitsyn. His descriptions of the Gulag weren’t a revelation as they were a confirmation of what my father told me. Later on, I discovered Robert Conquest, and soon, I was able to merge the historical with the personal.
I pray that what Solzhenitsyn taught us is not lost to future generations. He is a great man for giving voice to the untold millions who suffered and died at the hands of the Soviet system.