It helped me throw off the last vestiges of leftie indoctrination from the college days. I had already cast my first vote for Reagan for his first term, but Solzhnetsyn helped me realize just how right Reagan was in calling them the evil empire.
Solzhenitsyn would have been a FReeper. Also, Reagan was right when he named the Soviet Union the Evil Empire, but that’s still to narrow a definition. Just as America is more an idea than a physical place, the Soviet Union is a concept in which the elites use whatever political expediency to accrue to themselves power and the wealth that comes with it. It’s a kakocracy.