Good afternoon,

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is most famous for his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, but he also wrote a few other stinging critiques of his Soviet homeland including his fictional work, In the First Circle. As the name implies, the story is oniony.

Near the central layer of the vast Soviet empire a group of scientists struggle in an inner city gulag, trying to build the technology to trace a phone call. But sandwiched in among the plot’s main characters, two brief chapters take us inside comrade Stalin’s office, and then even inside his head. In effect, after thousands of purges, and waves of paranoia, at the very core of the prison state, Stalin himself is trapped and alone in his own protected lair. Alone in his head, he’s convinced that he holds the world on his shoulders, physically and intellectually.

“Stalin felt so lonely because he had no one to try out his thoughts on. No one to measure himself against. Still, half the universe was there in his breast, all order and clarity.“

That kind of unearned certainty would ultimately bring down the regime, as a succession of leaders evolved into so many Marie Antonettes, but without the pretty hair. Later Gorbachev and co. would be utterly surprised at how much venom the populace had built up against the Party’s systemic oppression (oh how the term tables...).

Eerily Real: Another extreme example of central planning’s ill effect is seen in the current heap of Chinese real estate, moldering empty, as the Middle Kingdom crawls out of Mao’s insomniac ideals and into Xi’s ordered dream.

As noted below, the scale of this particular ghost project is stunning enough. But when we consider that this is just one of many such failed ventures it all morphs into a seeming dystopian graphic novel.