The fall of totalitarian regimes are often influenced by internal issues or people in the regime who unintentionally break it down by looking for personal gain. In C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, the authoritarian organization NICE falls from power after an “attack” from Merlin, but also due to some of the top people in charge killing and pushing away other members they felt were a threat to their own standings. In That Hideous Strength, NICE is ultimately brought down by the disembodied “head” of NICE, therefore showing the relationship between the destruction of NICE and the fall of the Soviet Union, which was partially caused by the country’s exposure in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
The end of That Hideous Strength begins with Merlin joining the Ransom, Jane, and the others at St. Annie’s. He then travels to the headquarters of NICE, where he attends a banquet under a false name. During the banquet, he sneaks away and releases all of the animals that NICE was experimenting on, which break into the banquet and wreck havoc. In the confusion, the figurehead leader of NICE is shot, with other antagonists dying as well. The director of NICE, Wither, escapes with two others powerful NICE members where he travels to the room of the head that they take orders from. The head, which is really dark forces, demands a sacrifice and Wither kills the other two members. After the sacrifices, Wither is stopped by a bear, released by Merlin. Lewis states that Wither knew “that he was on the very frontier of a world where such things could happen” before he was killed by the bear (353). Lewis means that Wither knew the world had become overwhelmed with forces from other worlds, and that the end of NICE, and himself, was near.
The Soviet Union that Solzhenitsyn describes in The Gulag Archipelago is a reflection of NICE. The Soviet Union falls in the same way: with influence from “other worlds” (western countries) as well as damage from within. In Chapter 4, Solzhenitsyn discusses the people who worked for the Soviet Union and why they might have done it. He states that the police, who took people to jail either “forced themselves not to think… and simply accepted that this was the way it had to be and that the person who gave them their orders was always right…” (67). Solzhenitsyn means that it was either fear, blindness, or personal gain that resulted in people working for the Union. This is like NICE, who had people such as Mark and Wither, who acted for personal gain until the end. With Mark’s “end” being when he left and fought NICE and Wither dying because of his greed. Solzhenitsyn’s book influenced the fall of the Soviet Union by showing how the government did not care about the people, like the NICE “head” allowed for the death of the three most powerful NICE members, who were blinded by personal gain instead of saving the entire organization.