ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN (December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008)

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a novelist, dramatist and historian whose often-suppressed writings greatly enhanced the world’s awareness of the Soviet Gulag. Author of “The Gulag Archipelago” and “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. Expelled from the USSR in 1974, in June of 1975 he electrifiecd an audience at an AFL/CIO luncheon in Washington when he stated that not only Raoul Wallenberg but American prisoners from the Viet Nam War were being held in Soviet captivity. “These are your heroes, your best men, but they will never again come out into the world because they will tell such stories as the human mind cannot accept.”

Solzhenitsyn had his own personal Gulag history. Accused of ani-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of “founding a hostile organization’ under Paragraph 11, Solzhenitysn was taken to Lubyanka prison in Moscow where he was beaten and interrogated. On July 7, 1945, when it is now known that Raoul Wallenberg was also in Moscow prisons, he was sentenced in abstentia by MGO/NKVD to eight years in a labor camp. At the conclusion of his sentence, he was sent into internal exile in Southern Kazakhstan where he emerged victorious from a bout with cancer. During this time he renounced his Marxist principles and developed his own principles as a philosopher and Christian.

The Gulag Archipelago was composed between 1958-1967. It exists in seven parts. Because of the tremendous need for secrecy and to protect the manuscript, the author never had all seven parts with him at any one time. The book, which has sold over 30,000,000 copies was based on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences as well as the testimony of 256 foreign prisoners and the author’s own research into the history of the penal system. The book’s rich inter-weaving of personal testimonies, philosophical analysis and historical research makes it one of the most significant books of the 20th century.

After two decades in international exile, Solzhenitsyn returned to the former Soviet Union in 1994, after his Soviet citizenship was restored in 1990. On 5 June 2007, he was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his humanitarian work by then President Vladimir Putin. Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008 of heart failure and is buried in the Donsky Monastery cemetery.