the gulagempire that played a historic role in Joseph Stalin’s era of
terror. See alsoBELOMOR CANAL; FRENKEL, NAFTALII.SOLZHENITSYN, ALEKSANDR ISAYEVICH (1918– ).Arrested
while serving as an artillery captain at the front in 1945, Solzhenitsyn
was sentenced to eight years imprisonment for his criticism of
Joseph Stalin. Over the next eight years, he served his sentence in
jails and forced labor camps in Central Asia and Siberia. In 1952 he
was released and sentenced to internal exilein Kazakhstan, where he
found work as a mathematics teacher and began to write. After being
amnestied, Solzhenitsyn returned to the Moscow region as a teacher
and developed as a writer. In 1962 his novella One Day of Ivan
Denisovichwas published in Novy Mir, the preeminent Soviet liter-
ary journal, with the permission of Nikita Khrushchev. The novella
chronicled one day in the life of an ordinary political prisoner, and it
was embraced as a masterpiece of Russian fiction within and outside
the Soviet Union. The Soviet political scene in the early 1960s was
becoming increasingly reactionary, however, and Solzhenitsyn was
able to publish only one more piece legally in the Soviet media.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Solzhenitsyn began to write about
the Stalinist terror and the forced labor camps. Several novels were
smuggled abroad and published to critical acclaim, but the author
was now under the scrutiny of the KGB. KGB Chair Yuri An-
dropov and his deputies saw Solzhenitsyn as a major threat to the
regime and authorized close surveillanceof him and his few sup-
porters. The KGB code name for him was “Pauk” (Spider). Solzhen-
itsyn’s few friends were the target of surveillance and torture: the in-
terrogation of one of Solzhenitsyn’s secretaries led to the woman’s
suicide. With rumors that Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece, The Gulag
Archipelago, a history of the gulag, or forced labor camp system,
was about to be published in the West, Andropov successfully lob-
bied the Communist PartyPolitburo for the author’s arrest and ex-
ile from the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn settled in the United States and continued to write.
He was a difficult émigré, misunderstood by many liberals, who
were offended by his criticism of American society. It also was hard
for Westerners to understand that Solzhenitsyn had not written out
of a desire for fame or glory. Rather, as he explained in The OakSOLZHENITSYN, ALEKSANDR ISAYEVICH (1918– ) • 24506-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 245