Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn documented the Soviet camp system and was expelled from his country for it. Born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, six months after his father's death, he was raised in poverty by his mother, studied mathematics at Rostov because there was no literature faculty, and served as an artillery officer through the war, twice decorated. He was arrested in February 1945 in East Prussia for remarks about Stalin in letters to a friend, and sentenced to eight years. He served them in labour camps and in a sharashka, a research institute staffed by prisoners, and then in internal exile in Kazakhstan, where he was treated for cancer. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in Novy Mir in 1962 with Khrushchev's personal approval, and was the first open account of the camps to appear in the Soviet Union. It made him famous and the thaw did not last. His later manuscripts circulated in samizdat and were published abroad — The First Circle, Cancer Ward — and he was expelled from the Writers' Union in 1969 and awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, which he did not travel to collect for fear of not being let back. The Gulag Archipelago, assembled from his own experience and the testimony of 227 others, was seized by the KGB in 1973 and published in Paris. He was arrested, stripped of citizenship and deported in February 1974. He lived twenty years in Vermont, criticised the West as sharply as the East, and returned to Russia in 1994. He died in 2008.

• Lived: 1918 CE – 2008 CE
• Nationality: Russian
• Roles: writer