ON THIS DAY WITH SHAUN WALLACE

February 12, 1974

NObel-winning writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union. Born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, close to the Georgian border, six months after his father’s death, his mother raised him alone.

Despite her being the daughter of a wealthy landowner, their property was seized by the state and he was brought up in penury.

He studied maths at Rostov University and served in the Red Army in the Second World War, when he was twice decorated for his bravery.

But while serving he criticised Stalin in a letter to a friend. He was jailed for eight years in various prison camps and on release was exiled to Kazakhstan.

He was finally freed in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev criticised the rule of his predecessor Stalin. This period of captivity reshaped his views. He became more religious and more critical of the state.

In 1962 One Day In The Life Of Ivan

Denisovich was published, detailing the brutality of the camp system. Khrushchev himself defended it, telling the Politburo: “There’s a Stalinist in each of you – there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.” But when Khrushchev was ousted in 1964 the political climate changed again.

Despite being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, Solzhenitsyn became a de-facto “non-person” in his homeland.

He wrote The Gulag Archipelago largely in secret and it wasn’t published until 1973, in France. The exposé of the gulag regime sparked a huge international reaction.

US diplomat George Kennan described it as “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime levied in modern times”.

Solzhenitsyn was followed by the KGB, which had made an attempt on his life three years earlier. The Politburo said he could leave the USSR if the West would have him. West Germany agreed and he was deported.

He did return to Russia in 1994 and died near Moscow in 2008, aged 89.

Question: Which US president was born in Kentucky on this day in 1809?

Last week I asked: Which former dictator was indicted for drug and money laundering on February 5, 1988? Panama’s MANUEL NORIEGA.