My intellectual heroes in my teenage years were not unusual for a young right-winger: George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Friedrich Hayek.

NPR: Book Argues for Retaking the 'Conservative Soul'

Only when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's searing novels were published in the 1960s were Western sympathizers forced to acknowledge the frightful scale of Stalin's evil.

FORBES: Fact and Comment

Michelangelo was the son of a local official and had the Pope for a patron, while Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn grew up fatherless and was sent by the state to prison camps.

FORBES: Thought Leaders

Effectively making use of the testimony of others, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Amis strips away the flimsy rationalizations of Stalin's Western sympathizers, apologists and those best labeled as anti-anti-Communists, people who seemed to dislike outspoken opponents of the Soviet Union more than they did the Soviet system itself.

FORBES: Fact and Comment