Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in the Soviet gulag system, then wrote about it with such devastating precision that his books cracked the moral legitimacy of the entire Soviet project. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published with Khrushchev’s permission and sent shockwaves through Soviet society. The Gulag Archipelago, smuggled to the West, became the most consequential act of literary witness in the twentieth century.

This episode traces Solzhenitsyn from his arrest for criticizing Stalin in a private letter through the labor camps, the literary sensation of Ivan Denisovich, the Nobel Prize, the forced exile, and the controversial return to post-Soviet Russia.

• Solzhenitsyn’s arrest for a private letter criticizing Stalin and the eight years of imprisonment that followed
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the brief cultural thaw that allowed its publication
• The Gulag Archipelago — smuggled to Paris and published against the Soviet state’s will
• The Nobel Prize, the forced exile, and the complicated return to a Russia that had moved on without him