But how much was really done to unravel the Soviet Union by Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume narrative history of the Soviet Gulag between its publication and the end of Communism in the Soviet Union? Could the works of one author really dissolve a nation? Some might cite the election of the Polish Pope John Paul II in 1978 as making a greater difference. Others might point to U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) or to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika.
Ultimately, the trouble with narrative history – which presents history as a chronologically coherent arc of characters, motives, turning points, and consequences – is that it simply can’t resolve these questions either way. There are too many forces operating on the trajectory of human affairs even to be enumerated. As a result, weighing them against one another is a fool’s errand.