April 1917

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), Nobel Prize laureate in literature, was a Soviet political prisoner from 1945 to 1953. His story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and The Gulag Archipelago (1973) further unmasked Communism and played a critical role in its eventual defeat. Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974. He ultimately published dozens of plays, poems, novels, and works of history, nonfiction, and memoir, including In the First Circle, Cancer Ward, The Red Wheel epic, The Oak and the Calf, and Between Two Millstones.Clare Kitson is a Russian literary translator. She is co-translator of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2.

"The Red Wheel and The Gulag Archipelago have been called Solzhenitsyn's two 'cathedrals.' You cannot fully understand the horrors of communism and the history of the 20th century without reading them." —New York Journal of Books"Despite its relentless focus on political events, The Red Wheel paradoxically instructs that politics is not the most important thing in life. To the contrary, the main cause of political horror is the overvaluing of politics itself. It is supremely dangerous to presume that if only the right social system could be established, life's fundamental problems would be resolved. Like the great realist novelists of the nineteenth century, Solzhenitsyn believed that." —The New York Review of Books"[A] magisterial depiction of the long, slow collapse of the Tsarist regime in which everybody gets a voice, but nobody feels that he or she can prevent the worst of it. Eerily prescient for the binary confusions of the present." —VoegelinView"This is the principal work of the Nobel laureate's life, to which Solzhenitsyn dedicated several decades and into which poured all his thoughts about the senseless chaos of the modern and postmodern worlds, all told through the prism of that most contingent of events, the Russian Revolution." —The New Criterion"If Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago presented a mindset-changing view of the history of the USSR, the historical novels that make up his epopee The Red Wheel are a counterweight to the heroics of the October Revolution." —The Russian Review"I thoroughly enjoyed this book...both Solzhenitsyn and Kitson, the translator, bring life and eagerness to what could too easily become a dry rendering of history. Instead, it feels alive and vibrant, and has woken my historical interest further." —San Francisco Book Review

• Calendar of RevolutionIntroduction: 11 April – 24 AprilChapters 1 – 825 April – 1 MayChapters 9 – 402 May – 5 MayChapters 41 – 91