Discover the Story Behind a Legendary Exposé of the Brutality of the Soviet Union

By 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was already “Russia’s pre‐eminent living writer,” according to the New York Times. His novels, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, were well regarded, especially in the West. He had even won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature for “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”

But The Gulag Archipelago, published on December 28, 1973, by YMCA-Press in Paris, stood alone. Solzhenitsyn called it his “main” work, threading personal experience, history and literature into a sprawling 300,000-word narrative of Soviet prison camps. His broaching of this taboo topic, however, came at a great personal cost.

Solzhenitsyn’s troubles with Soviet authorities began in 1945. He was a member of the Soviet Army at the time, stationed in East Prussia as World War II drew to a close. Agents from Smersh, a Soviet spy agency, arrested the 26-year-old, who had been decorated for heroism in battle and was at the time a loyal Communist Party member, because he referred to Joseph Stalin disrespectfully in a letter to an old friend.

A court sentenced him to eight years in the constellation of brutal prison camps across the Soviet Union that he later called the “gulag archipelago.”

“This Archipelago crisscrossed and patterned that other country within which it was located, like a gigantic patchwork, cutting into its cities, hovering over its streets,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in the preface to The Gulag Archipelago, which he composed between 1958 and 1968. “Yet there were many who did not even guess at its presence and many, many others who had heard something vague. And only those who had been there knew the whole truth.”

As Solzhenitsyn suggested, writing about the gulag system was verboten in large part because Soviet authorities sought to deny or obfuscate its very existence. Forced labor camps in the Soviet Union began in 1919 under Vladimir Lenin, but their population ballooned into the millions when Stalin rose to power. Under Stalin, more and more intellectuals, dissidents, prisoners of war, rich farmers and innocent people were persecuted, arrested and purged.

In the three-volume book, Solzhenitsyn offered a sweeping story of the Soviet prison system—from arrest to torture, execution, starvation and long hours of toil in the camps. He drew from his personal experience and interviews with hundreds of survivors. The New York Times called the text “a heroic accomplishment.”

Its official reception in the Soviet Union, however, was less enthusiastic due to Solzhenitsyn’s argument that the gulag system was not just an aberration under Stalin, but embedded deep in the rotting core of Soviet ideology.

In the aftermath of The Gulag Archipelago’s publication, Solzhenitsyn was deported from the USSR and stripped of his citizenship. At first he went to West Germany and stayed with leading postwar German author Heinrich Böll. After brief stints in Zurich and Canada, he and his family settled in Cavendish, a village in rural Vermont. In exile—yet close to Dartmouth College’s extensive library—the author labored away on his epic multi-volume novel about the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel.

Solzhenitsyn’s exploration and critique of Soviet history and authoritarian power never ceased. Neither did his desire to return home from an long exile that began with his arrest in 1945—the moment when, he wrote, “the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.”

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Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.