Alexander Solzhenitsyn

PEOPLE knew it was there: the vast amazing country of Gulag which, “though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in the psychological sense, fused into a continent—an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country.” Trains went in, and people were sent to administer it from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But until Alexander Solzhenitsyn had spent eight years there, laying bricks and smelting metal in the intensest heat and cold, hearing fellow-inmates, like rats, stealing his food in the dark, wearing wrist-crushing handcuffs for the least infraction, this land was not fully revealed to the outside world. “The Gulag Archipelago” was a book carried out of the camps “on the skin of my back”, to bear witness on behalf of everyone still inside.

Its appearance, in 1973, immediately led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. But his work was done. He had exposed the fissures in the system, a truth-telling that had begun, 11 years earlier during the Khrushchev thaw, with the publication in Novy Mir of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. That tale began with the cacophony of reveille for the prisoners, “sounded by the blows of a hammer on a length of rail” through windows coated in frost two fingers thick. With that banging, even through their imperviousness, the Russian people began to stir to the evils of the cult of personality under which they had lived for too long; after this, though with desperate slowness, the disintegration of the Soviet state was only a matter of time.