The Red Wheel (Russian: Кра́сное колесо́, Krásnoye kolesó) is a cycle of novels by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, retelling and exploring the passing of Imperial Russia and the birth-pangs of the Soviet Union. Though Solzhenitsyn says he conceived the idea in 1938 and gathered notes for Part 1, August 1914 (which is about the disastrous opening of World War I from a Russian perspective) in the weeks when...