The Red Wheel (Russian: Красное колесо, Krasnoye koleso) is a cycle of novels by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, retelling and exploring the passing of Imperial Russia and the birth-pangs of the Soviet Union.
When Solzhenitsyn was banished and stripped of his citizenship in 1974, his wife and other associates brought his manuscripts and archive out of the Soviet Union to the West, and he continued working on the novel in exile.
In this year an expanded edition of August 1914 was published by YMCA Press, with additional sections on the revolution of 1905 and the assassination of the Czar's minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1911.
[1] The cycle currently has appeared as: The plan in 1970 was to continue up until at least 1922, the point when the Soviet Union formally came into being and when Lenin had to give up his grip on power due to illness.
The progress of the work beyond 1917 was no doubt also intended to make it complement the research into the roots of the Soviet labour camp system carried out in The Gulag Archipelago, and it is reasonably clear that Solzhenitsyn also would have brought up other instances of the repression during the civil war, for example a peasants' revolt at Tambov in 1921; this is indicated by a list of locations on which the author asked for help with historical settings, pictures and so on (given in the expanded edition of August 1914 in 1984).