You know how people who write unfavorably of the Russian government tend to disappear? That’s nothing new. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a decorated Red Army Captain fighting the fucking Nazis in World War II, but a private letter that criticized Stalin got him eight years in the Gulag. It didn’t stop him from writing, and he eventually won the Nobel Prize in literature.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 8, 1970--
WWII was only a couple of months from ending, and after seeing tons of his friends die Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter to a friend saying Stalin did a shitty job managing the war. The letter ended up in the hands of Red Army secret police and they said Gulag for you, eight years. After the eight years were up it was “internal exile” in Kazakhstan. The punishment for being critical of his nation’s government was intended to shut him up. It did not.
Stalin went off to murderous-commie-dictator hell in 1953 and three years later Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a “secret speech” that ended up accidentally becoming very public, saying yeah Stalin was kind of a dick and we need to chill a bit on that totalitarianism shit. This led to Solzhenitsyn being released from exile and exonerated.
Not excited to do another stint in a labor camp, he kept his writing secret, not even daring to show it to friends, believing none of it would ever be read. But in 1962 his first novel about life in a labor camp was published and he actually had Khrushchev’s blessing to do so, and it was a major hit. In 1968 his semi-autobiographical book Cancer Ward was published and was even more critical of the Soviet Union. It became an international hit and on October 8, 1970, Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. But he couldn’t go accept it in person because his government was pissed at him for exposing its dirty laundry and he worried he’d not be allowed back home if he went to Sweden for the ceremony.
Despite the threats, he didn’t shut up. Through the 1960s he’d been working on a mega tome published in three volumes titled The Gulag Archipelago. Published beginning in 1973, it was a nonfiction analysis of life in the Soviet labor camp system. It has sold over 30 million copies and been translated into numerous languages. It also got Solzhenitsyn accused of being a traitor and kicked out of the country in 1974.
Stripped of his Soviet citizenship, he spent the next two decades in the U.S., but wasn’t all America fuck yeah this place his awesome. He criticized American vapidity and materialism as much as he exposed the flaws of his homeland. Speaking of, the Soviets launched a major propaganda campaign against Solzhenitsyn to discredit his writings.
With the fall of the Soviet Union Solzhenitsyn had his citizenship restored and he returned home in 1994. He died in 2008 at the age of 89.
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