Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, there was a strong temptation toward communism in the West. And this persisted through the first half of the 20th Century, even as evidence grew of the huge failures within the Soviet Union and China. Despite the damning evidence from communist states, the sway of this ideology only increased in the west, culminating in the American counterculture of the 1960s. Throughout this period Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been painstakingly documenting his own, and other’s, experience of communism: stories of unjust imprisonment, forced labor to near death, and some of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century. His writing would become some of the most damning revelations of the Soviet Union, and would alter the course of the Cold War.