This week marked the release of Alexei Navalny’s posthumous memoir, which recounts his life as a leading Russian opposition figure—and later, a political prisoner—up until his death in an Arctic penal colony, in February. The last section of the book, which details Navalny’s final years behind bars, echoes the writing of another famed Russian dissident: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose writings on Stalin-era repression and the Soviet labor system ultimately led to his exile from the Soviet Union, in 1974.

In a 1980 essay for Foreign Affairs, Solzhenitsyn sought to lay bare what he called the “true nature” of the regime whose oppression he had fled six years earlier. Détente with Moscow was impossible, he warned; that Americans believed that they could coexist with the Soviet Union demonstrated that they did not take the threat of communism seriously enough. The ideology was primed to “spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind.” It could be halted, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “only by force from without or by disintegration from within.”

At the same time, Solzhenitsyn noted, Americans should not mistake the Soviet regime that had oppressed, tortured, and imprisoned him for Russia as a people. “‘Russia’ is to the Soviet Union as a man is to the disease afflicting him,” he wrote. The United States misunderstood its adversary at its own peril; its misconceptions about Russia “might have been purely academic in the past,” he cautioned, “but not in the swift-moving world of today.”