Published on this day in 1973, "The Gulag Archipelago" drew on Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's experiences as a political dissident in a prison camp, but it left him deported and stateless for the next two decades
Agents from Smersh, a Soviet spy agency, arrested the 26-year-old, who had been decorated for heroism in battle and was at the time a loyal Communist Party member, because he referred to Joseph Stalin disrespectfully in a letter to an old friend.
A court sentenced him to eight years in the constellation of brutal prison camps across the Soviet Union that he later called the “gulag archipelago.”
Lovely