Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was a Russian novelist, historian and dissident, awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. His writings — from the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to the monumental Gulag Archipelago, as well as Cancer Ward and August 1914 — exposed the Soviet prison system to the world.

A former artillery officer imprisoned in labour camps in the late Gulag years, Solzhenitsyn survived cancer while in exile in Kazakhstan. Exiled by the Soviet state in 1974, he returned to Russia after the fall of communism, remaining the conscience of a people through his insistence that the truth, however terrible, must be spoken.