Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“I chose this book because it’s a work of fiction, and fiction is sometimes better at giving you a sense of the man than fact. Lenin, though a historical figure, is also a mythical figure. For many, he was not really a human being. His statue was in every town in the Soviet Union. He became a cult. Whether you love him or hate him he’s a sort of god, and as such he’s very difficult to recover through purely historical materials. What Solzhenitsyn has done is rescue Lenin from that weirdly effacing fame. Of course it isn’t the real Lenin he gives you, but it’s the sense of a real human being, written by a man who had thought about Lenin a great deal.” Read more...

The best books on The Russian Revolution

Roland Chambers, Biographer

“It was a critical book – an entirely objective account of a victim in a labour camp. Just one day in an ordinary labour camp. Not exaggerated, not even a particularly nasty day. The most extraordinary part is how is got printed. It ran contrary to everyone in the Communist Party in Russia, but the Novy Mir editor Tvardovsky snuck a copy in to Khrushchev and said, ‘This is awfully good, you ought to publish it’. And he did. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. And once it was printed, as Galina put it, ‘The Soviet government had let the genie out of the bottle, and however hard they tried later, they couldn’t put it back in’…After One Day in the Life, Solzhenitsyn didn’t publish anything for a long time, but meanwhile he was hoarding the real killer book – The Gulag Archipelago. When he published that, he was arrested and sent to the West in handcuffs. That’s where I met him, in Zurich in 1976.” Read more...

The best books on Communism

Robert Conquest, Historian

“August 1914 is the 20th-century equivalent of War and Peace. But Solzhenitsyn rejects Tolstoy’s belief that individuals can’t change history. Solzhenitsyn viewed 1914 as Russia’s last opportunity to save itself from the Bolshevik horror. It was that moment when people united against a common enemy, but because of political shenanigans, lack of will and incompetence, that was lost. It sounds serious, but he’s quite mocking and joking. It’s a diatribe against Bolshevism and all its horrors and he uses every weapon including humour.” Read more...

The best books on Why Russia isn’t a Democracy

Martin Sixsmith, Foreign Correspondent