Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don, where he studied mathematics. A Red Army artillery officer in the Second World War, he was arrested in 1945 for private letters criticizing Stalin and spent eight years in labor camps, followed by internal exile. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) made him famous, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. After The Gulag Archipelago appeared abroad in 1973, he was stripped of citizenship and expelled in 1974, living mostly in Vermont. He returned to Russia in 1994 and died near Moscow in 2008.

Solzhenitsyn is widely credited with exposing the Soviet labor camp system to the world, and The Gulag Archipelago sold tens of millions of copies and shaped Western views of communism. The Nobel committee honored the ethical force of his work. His later views divided admirers. Conservatives and religious thinkers welcomed his critique of secular materialism, while liberals and secularists criticized his Russian nationalism and Orthodox faith. He called the idea of a separate Ukrainian people a recent invention, and historians such as Laura Engelstein judged his book on Russian-Jewish relations, Two Hundred Years Together, to be antisemitic. Some historians have also questioned the methods and figures in The Gulag Archipelago. Vladimir Putin praised him as a patriot and unveiled a monument to him in 2018.