Abruptly released by the KGB and sent to the West, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was like a man who emerged from a dark room into the blinding light of high noon. In the early chapters of Between Two Millstones, a memoir of exile, the Russian author is buffeted by crazies on all sides while sustained by acts of kindness and respect. Reporters hounded him and his surly unresponsiveness was the unfiltered response of a man who didn’t care to manufacture a media image. Many commentators who weighed in on him barely knew their own history and society, much less Russia’s. Despite being misunderstood, Solzhenitsyn became a critic not only of the brutal system he escaped but of a Western society grown fat and complacent, “moving ever farther from natural human experience.”
