Death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died on 3 August 2008 in Moscow, aged 89. 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.

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