In 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published the first of his three-volume narrative history of the Soviet Gulag that also served as an autobiography of his life as an inmate. Solzhenitsyn’s aim in “The Gulag Archipelago” was not only to indict Joseph Stalin, his henchmen, and, before them, Vladimir Lenin for the crime of creating and administering a system that killed one and three-quarters million people. His aim was also to show that the Gulag was an inevitable outcome of the mindset the October Revolution gave rise to.
Naturally, Solzhenitsyn was unable to publish the book in the Soviet Union. In fact, he had to keep the entire project secret for years. (One of those who copied the manuscript hanged herself after revealing its location to the KGB.) Once published in the West, however, “The Gulag Archipelago” was translated into more than 30 languages and became an international bestseller. The worldwide acclaim he received after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature three years earlier — together with the international attention drawn by novels such as “Cancer Ward” and “The First Circle” — meant he couldn’t be jailed again without serious repercussions. Instead, in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was expelled to the West, where he would live for the next 20 years.
That “The Gulag Archipelago” had a major effect on the Soviet Union’s subsequent lifespan is hard to deny. It was evident that the KGB, the Politburo, and Communist Party hierarchy in Moscow thought so. They did everything they could to suppress the circulation of smuggled-in and samizdat (clandestinely copied and circulated) copies of the banned work and to counter its effects, even at great cost to themselves.