Solzhenitsyn survived eight years in the Soviet Gulag and used literature as testimony. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in the USSR with Khrushchev's permission, was the first crack in the wall of silence about the camps. The Gulag Archipelago, smuggled to the West, demolished Western illusions about Soviet socialism and contributed to the moral collapse of Communist ideology. He was expelled from the USSR in 1974 and lived in Vermont until returning to Russia in 1994.

• Nationality: RU
• Roles: writer