 The Red Wheel

The Red Wheel (, "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 he led a Red Army unit into Eastern Prussia, the location of much of that part, in 1945, it was only in early 1969 that he actually sat down to write this historical novel.