The other source is Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences from 1945 to 1953. He was one of many millions Russians who were forced by the communist rule into facing the worst unimaginable as a daily experience. He has spent around 11 years in concentration camps, prisons, and in exile in the Soviet Union. In 1945, at the age of 26 and while serving as a decorated artillery officer in the Red Army, he was arrested for having made some unflattering remarks about Stalin in letters to a friend. It was thus as a zek--a convict in the vast "archipelago" of Russia's concentration camp system--that Solzhenitsyn was confirmed in his literary vocation. "Prison released in me the ability to write," he tells and even after his release--for Solzhenitsyn was among
