Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on 11 December 1918 in Kislovodsk. A Russian writer and dissident, Solzhenitsyn served as an artillery officer in the Red Army during the Second World War but was arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin in private letters and spent eight years in prison camps and exile. His novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, published in 1962 during the Khrushchev thaw, gave readers inside the Soviet Union their first account of life in the Gulag. His later work The Gulag Archipelago, published in the West in 1973, documented the whole system of repression. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, lived in Vermont, and returned to Russia in 1994.
Before and after
- from December 1918 to August 1919Lithuanian Wars of Independence
- from 1 December 1918 to 27 April 1992Yugoslavia
- from 1 December 1918 to 30 June 1930Occupation of the Rhineland
- from 5 December 1918 to 11 August 1920Latvian War of Independence
- 11 December 1918Birth of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- 21 December 1918Birth of Kurt Waldheim
- 23 December 1918Birth of Helmut Schmidt
- 25 December 1918Birth of Anwar Sadat
- from 31 December 1918 to 5 January 1919Battles for Vilnius
More in Art, literature & culture
The era
This moment belongs to the Modern era (1914 CE to 1945 CE), world wars and a changing world. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.
