Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights:#1 The nine months between the murder of the tsar and the birth of Solzhenitsyn were a period of massive change in Russia. The Bolshevik government, led by Lenin, had fled from St. Petersburg in March, and had established Moscow as the new capital. They had destroyed their socialist rivals in a wave of repression known as the Red Terror.#2 The Bolshevik government passed legislation in 1918 stipulating that those deprived of freedom who are capable of labor must be recruited for physical work on a compulsory basis. The camps originated from this particular instruction.#3 Taissia Solzhenitsyn, the mother of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was a French and English speaker who learned stenography and typing. She was constantly discriminated against because of her social origin. She had little option but to seek extra work in the evenings and do her housework late at night when she got home.#4 In 1919, the White armies of Denikin and Wrangel liberating the south from the Bolsheviks, hope was in the ascendancy. In 1920, the famine was even worse in other parts of Russia, such as the Volga area. Soviet Russia was economically devastated, and the Bolsheviks found themselves confronted with worker unrest.