Aleksander Solzhenitsyn — writer with roots in the USSR
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk on 11 December 1918, to Taisia and Isaaki Solzhenitsyn; his father was killed in an accident before he was born. He served in the Red Army during the Second World War as an officer, rising to captain and receiving decorations, with his unit fighting in Poland in 1944 and into East Prussia in January 1945.
In February 1945 he was arrested for remarks about Stalin in private letters to a friend and sentenced to eight years in labour camps and prisons, including a prison research institute and the camp at Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan. He was released on 5 March 1953, the day Stalin died, and spent the next three years in internal exile in Kazakhstan before Khrushchev's reforms allowed him to return to central Russia in 1956, where he worked as a schoolteacher.
In 1962 the journal Novy Mir published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a single day in a camp inmate's life, with Khrushchev's personal approval. Only four further stories appeared in the Soviet Union; The First Circle and Cancer Ward were published abroad in 1968, and in 1969 he was expelled from the Writers' Union. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 but did not travel to Stockholm, fearing he would not be allowed back.
On 12 February 1974, weeks after the first part of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in Paris, he was arrested, charged with treason, deprived of his citizenship and flown to Frankfurt. That December he received his Nobel Prize in Stockholm. After a period in Zurich he settled in 1976 in Cavendish, Vermont, where he and his family lived for eighteen years and where he wrote much of The Red Wheel, his cycle of novels on the Revolution.
The treason charge was dropped in September 1991. In May 1994 he returned to Russia by way of Vladivostok and travelled across the country, then lived near Moscow, where he continued to write. He died at Troitse-Lykovo, near Moscow, on 3 August 2008, aged eighty-nine.
"Deprived of Soviet citizenship and sent to Frankfurt in February 1974; lived in Zurich, then from 1976 in Cavendish, Vermont; returned to Russia via Vladivostok in May 1994."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kislovodsk
Born in Kislovodsk in 1918, he was a Soviet citizen until his expulsion in 1974. He lived in the United States from 1976 to 1994, then returned to Russia, where he died in 2008.
Kislovodsk. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
""The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.""