Exiled Russian novelist, political activist and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn brought the horrors of the Soviet labor camps to the attention of the world in his 1973 The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the Soviet police state resulted in his exile for almost two decades, but he returned home to Russia in 1994 and was elected as a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Solzhenitsyn died yesterday, August 3, 2008. He was 89 years old.
From Solzhenitsyn:
“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.”