The photos of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev "inspecting" a Pittsburgh factory in 1959 on his visit to America combined with the TV images of a sincere Vice President Richard Nixon confronting the burly Communist in Moscow during the bizarre "kitchen debates" that year were the few encounters most Americans had with the mysterious enemy behind the Iron Curtain.

"A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" punched a big hole in that curtain in 1962. It was the Russian novel that spoke frankly about the U.S.S.R.'s penal colonies and found sympathetic international readers, thanks to that same Khrushchev who allowed the work by an obscure writer named Alexander Solzhenitsyn to reach the world.

It was Khrushchev who exposed the dirty secrets of Josef Stalin years earlier, that maze of murderous paranoia that created the labor camps where Mr. Solzhenitsyn, a decorated World War II veteran, was sent because he dared to criticize the Russian leader.

Appearing during a so-called "thaw" of the Cold War, the novel only fueled further suspicion and disgust with the Soviet Union in the year that culminated with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

After "Ivan Denisovich," any illusions about the virtues of communism vanished. When details of Mr. Solzhenitsyn's suffering in the camps, soon to be known as the "gulag," emerged, the foundations of a literary hero were laid.

His struggles with the Kremlin worsened after Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, proof that the communist system was as bad as the writer said it was.

For the generations of Americans born after World War II, Mr. Solzhenitsyn came to represent the noble role of a rebel defying a repressive regime and his status became even loftier because of the dangers he faced in his country.

His privately circulated writings, called "samizdat," were compared to the call to arms by such American revolutionaries as Thomas Paine and inspired other Russian writers to brave the system. However, few understood then that Mr. Solzhenitsyn was really a reactionary who favored an autocratic system for his homeland.

Yet, he educated the world about the corruption, ineptitude and cruelty of Russian authority, including the Czarist period, in his scathing attack on the government in "1914," a historical work that laid bare the inadequacy of the Russian military in the opening days of World War I.

His massive three-part work, "The Gulag Archipelago," written largely in his exile in Vermont after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, remains his most enduring work. It's a detailed account of the prison camp system, including his own eight-year imprisonment.

With the collapse of the Soviet system in 1989, the role of the dissident writer took on a new cast.

This collapse "has deprived the region's writers of a noble possibility, that of dissidence," wrote John Updike. "As long as their totalitarian states sought to maintain a monopoly on the truth, enlisting culture as a branch of propaganda, individual truth tellers ... enacted a heroic role." Young rebels would have to look elsewhere for examples.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's return to Moscow in 1994 signaled an end to that literature of rebellion from behind the Iron Curtain. His writing lost its sense of danger and courage as he redirected his attention to his countrymen and sought to exclude "outsiders."

"We should clearly understand that only the voluntary and conscientious acceptance by a people of its guilt can ensure the healing of a nation," he said last year. "Unremitting reproaches from outside, on the other hand, are counterproductive."

The writer who gave the West the ammunition for those "reproaches" and became a hero because of it was now telling us the sins of Russia were none of our business.