Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia in 1918. As a youth, Solzhenitsyn became interested in literature and history. Serving as a commander during WWII, Solzhenitsyn began to experience doubts about the Soviet regime. In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and imprisoned in a labor camp for eight years after writing derogatory comments about the Soviet Union in a private letter to a friend. He wrote the books The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich about these experiences, though many of his writings were suppressed. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn won the Novel Prize in Literature. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned 20 years later, after the USSR’s dissolution.