I did read Solzhenitsyn. A lot of his stuff, mostly decades ago. I read Gulag but also some of his fiction, like First Circle. I think it’s in First Circle where he does this magnificent imaginative description of Stalin, unable to sleep, wakes up at 3am and starts working. But he can’t work properly without his various ministers so he picks up the phone and wakes them up. They immediately jump up and come in to the office (fear of Stalin being literally akin to fear of the devil) and if THEY are coming to work there’s no way their underlings are going to sleep. And as each level of supervisory underling is summoned into the office they all call THEIR underlings in, and of course no one at any level even thinks of not answering the call. An hour after Stalin has stirred from his insomnia, the entire city of Moscow is awake, with lights blazing from the windows of a hundred office buildings.
I’m doing this from memory. The original description by Solzhenitsyn is brilliant. Like a kind of dark poetry.