Like the griffins of myth, The Red Wheel is a synthesis of living parts. Solzhenitsyn’s multivolume “epopee” (his preferred designation) of World War I and the Russian Revolution is a historical novel, docudrama, film treatment, and academic treatise. It deconstructs and recombines these genres in a manner that can only be described as modernist: John Dos Passos’s trilogy USA, sections of which Solzhenitsyn read in the Gulag, was an acknowledged influence. March 1917, Book 2, covers the three days of the February Revolution, which is shown as an immense national unraveling that corrupted public morality and destroyed social cohesion, often with sadistic brutality, and that inevitably led to the Bolshevik takeover eight months later. This historical catastrophe, Solzhenitsyn believed, was due to the fecklessness of the imperial elites all the way up to the terminally mediocre Czar Nicholas II; the revolutionaries’ blind lust for destruction; and the estrangement of the bulk of the people from God and country. Book 2 ends with Nicholas’s abdication, as the czar weeps at the enormity of what he has done and reels before “the whirlwinds of Judgment Day.” Russia’s apocalypse is at hand.
