Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies age 89

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' appeared in the thick monthly literary magazine Novy Mir back in November of 1962, taboos were shattered. Buried secrets were unearthed. And the Soviet Union was shaken to its foundations.

Solzhenitsyn's short novel described a single day in the life of a carpenter caught up in the Soviet Union's secret network of slave labor camps, where starvation, bitter cold and punishing work regimes were the rule and, it has been said, the average life expectancy was one winter.

The author was working as a provincial math teacher, and his greatest work, "The Gulag Archipelago," was still to come. But "One Day" was to shock the USSR and the world.
Some of the crimes of the dictator Josef Stalin were exposed and denounced following a secret speech by Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, as part of his short-lived campaign to reform the brutal Soviet system.

But Solzhenitsyn's novel, based on the seven years he spent as a prisoner, was the first real expose of the gulag — a word derived from the Russian "Glavnoe Upravelenie Lagerei," or Main Camp Administration.

Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature but was exiled from his homeland because of his work, died of heart failure on the 3rd August at age 89, his son Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press.