On March 29, 1974, prominent Soviet author, historian and political dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is reunited with his family after being exiled from his home country. Publication of The Gulag Archipelago, his detailed history of the Soviet Union's vast system of prisons and labor camps, helped raise global awareness of the communist nation's rampant political repression. Its publication led Soviet authorities to arrest him for treason, strip him of his citizenship and physically expel him from the U.S.S.R. in February 1974.
One of the country's most visible and vocal dissidents, Solzhenitsyn had served an eight-year prison term after WWII for making critical remarks about Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in a letter, followed by permanent internal exile. He came to prominence as a dissident author during a post-Stalin "thaw" with his 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which details the daily routine of life in a Siberian labor camp, drawn from his personal experience. Subsequent novels Cancer Ward and In the First Circle further expanded his reputation as an author and historian of the brutal Soviet system. Soviet authorities prevented the author from accepting the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature, and he survived a KGB assassination attempt using the poison ricin the following year. He finally traveled to Geneva to receive the prize in December 1974, after his expulsion.
Solzhenitsyn spent almost all of his 20 years in exile in a small town in Vermont, where he continued to write. In 1994, he returned to Russia, three years after the charges of treason against him had been lifted—and after the Soviet Union had been dissolved. Active in literary and political circles, he died in 2008 at the age of 89.
