The gulag to which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sentenced in 1945 was incalculably worse than any czarist prison camp. His famous history of the gulag prison camp system, The Gulag Archipelago, shocked Western readers who had had only a vague idea of how horrible that system was. It made the czarist prison camps, described by Dostoyevsky in his The House of the Dead, look like a vacation resort by comparison. And yet those extreme conditions led Solzhenitsyn and some others to look inward and find faith. For the epigraph to Part IV of The Gulag Archipelago (“The Soul and Barbed Wire”), he selected 1 Corinthians 15:51: “Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” Prison changed Solzhenitsyn. As he tells the story, it led him from self-congratulatory materialism to repentance and faith.

As a prisoner in the gulag, the great Russian author discovered a hard truth about good and evil.