If you are under 40, it may be hard to understand the edgy back-and-forth theatre of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union.

Between the frightening rhetoric from both sides: the brinkmanship, the proxy wars, and the build up and stockpiling of nuclear and chemical weapons, it's a wonder we're here at all.

Few people gave us as much insight into the psyche of a totalitarian state as Alexander Solzhenitsyn in "Gulag Archipelago," an account of his life in Soviet work camps.

It was a fate Solzhenitsyn endured with an estimated 60 million of his comrades, mostly under the Stalin years.

While Hitler and the Nazi regime have often been portrayed as the height of evil, Stalin and his thugs were, in many respects, worse. There was something inhuman about Stalin; his era lasted longer, and his cruelty was inflicted on his own people - mostly for political purposes.

Imprisonment was not the point, according Solzhenitsyn.

The gulag, Solzhenitsyn wrote, was frozen tundra where dissidents were sent to live and work in kind of a suspended state; a place where their thoughts could not be a threat to the architects of control.

When "Gulag" first appeared on bookshelves decades ago, it was part great literature in the Russian tradition, and part anathema to the West - a kind of real-life horror, no less shocking at the time than Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." There were stories, there were reports, but nobody really knew what went on inside the far reaches of the Soviet Union.

"Gulag" serialized the dismemberment of the human spirit.

Solzhenitsyn was able to return to Russia in the mid-90's. Despite his critical analysis of Soviet politics, his love for "Mother Russia" was always evident in every word.

Solzhenitsyn, a great man, a great artist. May he rest in peace.