“a state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny” – alexander solzhenitsyn
writer who shone light on gulag dies
from ap: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, has died at 89. Son Stepan said his father died of heart failure.
Solzhenitsyn’s unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union’s slave labour camps riveted his countrymen, whose secret history he exposed.
It earned him 20 years of bitter exile but international renown, and inspired millions.
Beginning with the 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about a carpenter struggling to survive a Soviet labour camp, Solzhenitsyn described the human “meat grinder” that had caught him and millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and absurd reasons, followed by slave labour camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.
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