I read a lot of Solzhenitsyn in college as part of my course work. Powerful stuff.
I read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” while in the eighth grade (not assigned) in 1969. That and the invasion after the Prague Spring convinced me about Communism being just a form of brutal state control. I got in a lot of arguments with an uncle who is a hard lefty, and is just about disowned by much of the family (lot of Polish and Lithuanian).