Russian novelist and historian whose The Gulag Archipelago (3 vols., 1973–78) did more, in the end, to discredit Soviet communism in the eyes of Western intellectuals than any other single book of the 20th century. Solzhenitsyn was an artillery captain on the German front in 1945 when letters he had written criticizing Stalin were discovered; he spent the next eight years in the camp system he would later document, and most of his life afterward either writing about it or living with the consequences of having written about it.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), the short novel that Khrushchev personally cleared for publication as part of de-Stalinization, was the first detailed account of the camps to appear legally in the Soviet Union; it made Solzhenitsyn internationally famous overnight. The thaw did not last. The First Circle (1968) and Cancer Ward (1968) had to be smuggled out for foreign publication. The 1970 Nobel Prize had to be received in absentia. The Gulag Archipelago — based on the testimony of 227 former prisoners, written in secret in the late 1960s, smuggled to the West on microfilm, published in Paris in December 1973 — precipitated his arrest, loss of Soviet citizenship, and exile (February 1974).
He spent eighteen years in Vermont writing The Red Wheel, his enormous multi-volume historical cycle on the Russian Revolution, and returned to Russia in 1994. The later Solzhenitsyn — Orthodox, Russian nationalist, critical not only of Soviet communism but of Western liberal democracy (the famous 1978 Harvard Commencement Address), occasionally anti-Semitic in ways that are hard to explain away — disappointed many of the Western liberals who had championed him in exile. It is possible to take the later disappointment seriously and still understand that Gulag is one of the indispensable books of the century.