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- Vera realizes that intellectuals profess beliefs that “had been implanted from outside.” In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn used this phrase to describe the moment when he realized that he did not really believe what he thought he believed. Recognizing his convictions were not his own but had been “implanted from outside,” he began the arduous process of rethinking. He asks his readers to understand that once one professes whatever one is supposed to, one has agreed in advance to literally anything. The result was the totalitarianism of the twentieth century, a horror that threatens to return unless people learn to resist the spell of approved opinion. In both The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel, the supreme value is individual conscience.