Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, serving as an artillery captain in the Great Patriotic War, was arrested at the front in February 1945 for criticizing Stalin in coded language in letters to a friend. Sentenced to eight years, he passed through the prison research institute (sharashka) at Marfino near Moscow and finished his term in the special camp at Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, then suffered cancer in internal exile. That experience later became The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and one day in the life of the bricklayer Ivan Denisovich.

In November 1962, issue No. 11 of the journal Novy Mir, edited by Tvardovsky, carried One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The publication of this novella, which rendered a single camp day evenly and without rhetoric from a prisoner's eye level, was pushed through the party Presidium by Khrushchev personally. On the de-Stalinization course begun at the Twentieth Congress, this was the moment the party itself brought the subject of the camps into official literature. The issue sold out instantly, and an unknown provincial teacher became a national writer overnight.

From this archive's perspective the publication carries a double meaning. It showed that the Soviet system of the Thaw could bring the dark chapters of its own history into public discussion by its own hand; and it was also the starting point from which control of that discussion soon left the party's hands and moved toward other political destinations.

In December 1973 the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in Paris. This vast "experiment in literary investigation", woven from the testimony of 227 witnesses and his own experience, laid the interior of the camp world before Western readers, and in February 1974 Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of citizenship, and deported to West Germany. The book's worldwide echo was one of the defining events in Cold War perceptions of the USSR.

Literary testimony and statistics, however, must be distinguished. Writing without any access to archives, Solzhenitsyn relied on the extrapolations of the emigre statistician Kurganov and spoke of victims in the tens of millions; the figures in The Gulag Archipelago rest on that basis. The NKVD and Gulag records opened after 1991 show different magnitudes. According to the work of Zemskov, Getty, and Rittersporn, some 18 million people passed through Gulag camps and colonies between 1930 and 1953; death sentences for political offenses in that period totaled about 786,000, of which the great majority, about 682,000, were concentrated in the Terror years 1937–38; and documented deaths in the camps number about 1.6 million. These figures are heavy historical facts in their own right, but they differ from Solzhenitsyn's scale by an order of magnitude.

The trajectory after expulsion also belongs in the record. In his 1978 Harvard address he startled American opinion by attacking Western liberalism and materialism with equal severity, and he leaned toward a Russian nationalism grounded in Orthodoxy and the rural commune. Returning in 1994, he called the privatization and oligarchic rule of the Yeltsin years a great catastrophe for Russia, refused a state decoration in 1998, and in old age reconciled with the Putin government, accepting the State Prize in 2007. He died in Moscow in August 2008. A writer who raised the monument of camp literature; an author whose numbers were corrected by the archives; a nationalist disillusioned once more by the successor order of the system he had helped bring down: a fair record writes down all three layers together.