Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008) was aRussian novelist, dramatist and historian. Through his writings, he made the world aware of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system, and for these efforts Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.

During World War II he served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army was involved in major action at the front, and twice decorated.

In 1945, he was arrested for writing derogatory comments in letters to a friend, about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin He was beaten and interrogated. and was sentenced in his absence to an eight-year term in a labor camp.

Released in 1956 Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated by Nikita Khrushchev. At age 42 , he approached Alexander Tvardovsky, editor of Noviy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Khrushchev, who defended it. The book became an instant hit and sold-out everywhere.

Solzhenitsyn tried, with the help of Tvardovsky, to get his novel, The Cancer Ward, legally published in the Soviet Union, The work was denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of anti-Soviet insinuations The publishing of his work stopped; and as a writer, he became a non-person,.

After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965-1967 the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends homes in Estonia

Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union of Writers in 1969, although the following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. He received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he left Russia.

The Gulag Archipelago was a three-volume work on the Soviet prison camp system. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 227 former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the penal system. The appearance of the book in the West guaranteed swift retribution from the Soviet authorities. On February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and on the next day he was deported from the Soviet Union to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.

In 1990, his citizenship was restored, and he returned to Russia in 1994. He died of heart failure near Moscow in 2008, at the age of 89.

Source - Wikipedia