Alexander Solzhenitsyn survived a Stalinist labor camp, wrote a book about it, and that book changed the way the world thinks about the twentieth century.
He was born in Kislovodsk in 1918. He fought in the war as an artillery officer, and in 1945 he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend — eight years in the camps, followed by permanent exile. In the camp he developed cancer and survived; the experience became Cancer Ward. Of the camps themselves he wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the story Khrushchev allowed into print in 1962 as a blow against Stalinism.
The Gulag Archipelago, his three-volume study of the Soviet camp system, he wrote in secret over many years. In 1973 the KGB found the manuscript; he had it passed to the West. In 1974 he was stripped of his citizenship and expelled. He settled in Vermont and worked on The Red Wheel, his epic of the revolution.
In 1994 he returned to Russia. What he found there did not make him happy. He died in 2008, convinced that Russia had lost its spiritual way. But he had written One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matryona's House, In the First Circle — books that will last as long as the Russian language does.