Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was one of the great souls of the twentieth century. A survivor of World War II, cancer, and 11 years in captivity in the Soviet Gulag, he not only survived but went on to expose for the free Western countries what the true nature of the Soviet regime was with his breakout work One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), as well as In the First Circle (1968),Cancer Ward (1968), and the monumental Gulag Archipelago (three volumes, 1973-78). As the historian and political journalist Richard Brookhiser observed, what Solzhenitsyn taught the West was the word “gulag” and its meaning: that Communism was not the path to freedom but the way of ideological lies, slavery, and violence.

This lesson was important for Westerners to hear. After decades of lies from Western journalists and intellectuals about what life in Communist regimes entailed, this was a man who lived and documentedthe Communist reality. “One word of truth outweighs the whole world,” Solzhenitsyn declared in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture. It seemed in the early 1970s that his many words of truth had caused a miracle even greater than Archimedes’ lever: He had changed the minds of...