The Mergui Archipelago

The Ksamil Archipelago in Albania

The archipelago of Fernando de Noronha

An archipelago ( /ɑrkɨˈpɛləɡoʊ/ ark-i-PEL-ə-goh), sometimes called an island group, is a chain or cluster of islands. The word archipelago is derived from the Greek ἄρχι- – arkhi- ("chief") and πέλαγος – pélagos ("sea") through the Italian arcipelago. In Italian, possibly following a tradition of antiquity, the Arcipelago (from medieval Greek *ἀρχιπέλαγος) was the proper name for the Aegean Sea and, later, usage shifted to refer to the Aegean Islands (since the sea is remarkable for its large number of islands). It is now used to refer to any island group or, sometimes, to a sea containing a large number of scattered islands such as the Aegean Sea.^[1]

Types of archipelago[link]

Archipelagos may be found isolated in bodies of water or neighboring a large land mass. For example, Scotland has more than 700 islands surrounding its mainland which constitute an archipelago. Archipelagos are often volcanic, forming along island arcs generated by subduction zones or hotspots, but may also be the result of erosion, deposition and land elevation.

By its geological origin, islands forming archipelagos can be referred to as oceanic islands, continental fragments and continental islands^[2]. Oceanic islands are mainly of volcanic origin. Continental fragments correspond to land masses that have separated from a continental mass due to tectonic displacement. Finally, sets of islands formed close to the coast of a continent are considered continental archipelagos when they form part of the same continental shelf so islands are just exposed continental shelf.

The five largest modern countries that are mainly archipelagos are Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The largest archipelagic state in the world, by area and population, is Indonesia.^[3] The archipelago with the most islands is the Archipelago Sea in Finland.

See also[link]

Geography portal

• Island arc
• Geography
• Earth science
• Geomorphology
• List of landforms
• Plate tectonics
• Island country
• Earthsea
• The World (archipelago)
• List of archipelagos by number of islands
• List of archipelagos
• List of islands

References[link]

External links[link]

Look up archipelago in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Archipelagoes

•  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Archipelago". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• 30 Most Incredible Island Archipelagos

Tom Vasel (born on September 8, 1976) is a well known podcaster and reviewer of board games.^[1][2] Vasel co-hosts a long-running and popular^[3] gaming podcast titled The Dice Tower, and as of 2011^[update] has posted over 1200 reviews on the internet database BoardGameGeek.^[4]

As of August 2003^[update], Vasel taught mathematics at the International Christian School in Uijeongbu. He assumed the role of Pastor of Uijongbu Baptist Church, succeeding Pastor Rick Kelley in March 2007. After leaving South Korea, he has worked as a teacher in Florida.

The Dice Tower[link]

Since May 2005, Vasel has co-hosted The Dice Tower, a podcast about board games and wargames. Originally, Vasel represented players who prefer designer games, while Joe Steadman advocated for those who prefer wargames. Steadman left the show in May 2006 after the 50th episode. Vasel, hosting alone with occasional input from Sam Healey for a few shows, rearranged the format to include recorded segments by guest reviewers and players. Gradually Healey began to take a larger role and was eventually promoted to co-host. Healey has since left the show and been replaced by the show's voice-over man, Eric Summerer.

Each episode of the podcast includes several regular segments and several occasional segments. The core of every episode is the "Gaming Top Ten", where Vasel and Summerer provide their top ten games in a particular category. Most shows start with Vasel and Summerer discussing the games that they have recently played. News from the boardgaming world usually follows, which is in turn followed by a segment from German contributor Moritz Eggert. The podcast also features frequent contests, where listeners can enter to win one or more games from a sponsoring company.

The Dice Tower web site features past top-ten lists and Vasel's in-depth reviews of boardgames. Vasel's reviews are also used by board game publishers and retailers for promotion of their games.^[5][6]

The Jack Vasel Memorial Fund[link]

Following the loss of his infant son Jack Vasel at the end of 2010, Tom Vasel established the Jack Vasel Memorial Fund, at www.jackvasel.org. The fund is a not-for-profit with a simple goal: raising and distributing funds to help gamers in their hour of need.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Tom Vasel's blog at The Dice Tower
• Tom Vasel at BoardGameGeek

This board game-related article or section is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

This biographical article about a United States activist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Tom Hiddleston
Hiddleston at the Avengers Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in NY, April 2012
Born	Thomas William Hiddleston (1981-02-09) 9 February 1981 (age 31) Westminster, London, England
Alma mater	Eton College The Dragon School University of Cambridge RADA
Occupation	Actor
Years active	2001–present
Relatives	Emma Hiddleston (sister)

Thomas William "Tom" Hiddleston (born 9 February 1981)^[1] is an English film, television, radio, and stage actor. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), and he rose to prominence through a number of TV roles and more recently major film roles. He played Loki in the 2011 Marvel Studios film Thor, Captain Nicholls in Steven Spielberg's World War I film War Horse (2011), and also Freddie Page in the British drama The Deep Blue Sea, alongside Rachel Weisz. He played author F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris (2011). He returned to his role as Loki in The Avengers (2012) and is set to reprise the character again for Thor 2 (2013).

Early life and education[link]

Hiddleston was born in Westminster, London,^[1] to parents Diana Patricia (née Servaes), a former stage manager and arts administrator, and James Norman Hiddleston, a scientist in physical chemistry who was the managing director of a pharmaceutical company.^[2] His father is from Greenock, Scotland and his mother from Suffolk, England.^[3] He is the middle child with two sisters, Sarah (oldest), a journalist in India,^[4] and Emma (youngest), is also an actor. He was raised in Wimbledon, in his early years, and later in Oxford.^[3] When Hiddleston was 13, he boarded at Eton College, at the same time that his parents were going through a divorce. "I think I started acting because I found being away at school while my parents were divorcing really distressing." He went on to act at The Dragon School^[5] in Oxford, then continued on to the University of Cambridge, where he earned a double first.^[6] He graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2005.

Career[link]

During Hiddleston's second term at Cambridge, he was seen in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire by talent agent Lorraine Hamilton, of Hamilton Hodell. While still doing student plays, he began doing British television, landing parts in Stephen Whittaker’s adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby for ITV^[7] the BBC/HBO co-production Conspiracy, and as Randolph Churchill, the son of Winston Churchill, inthe BBC/HBO drama The Gathering Storm.

On graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Hiddleston won his first film role, playing Oakley in Joanna Hogg’s first feature, Unrelated. He also appeared in the leading role of Edward in Joanna Hogg's second feature, Archipelago, and had leading roles in Declan Donnellan's company Cheek by Jowl's productions The Changeling, and Cymbeline. His Donmar Warehouse credits include Cassio in Michael Grandage's production of Shakespeare's Othello alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor to critical acclaim^[8][9][10] and later Lvov in their West End revival of Chekhov's Ivanov.

His TV credits include Magnus Martinsson in the BBC detective drama Wallander, Bill Hazledine in Suburban Shootout, John Plumptre in the BBC costume drama TV film Miss Austen Regrets and William Buxton in the BBC drama series Return to Cranford.

He is best known for his portrayal of Loki in the 2011 Marvel Studios film, Thor. He was invited to audition by Kenneth Branagh, the film's director, after having previously worked with Branagh on Ivanov and Wallander. "Ken has had a life-changing effect. He was able to say to the executives, 'Trust me on this, you can cast Tom and he will deliver'. It was massive and it's completely changed the course of what is available to me to do. Ken gave me my break."^[11] In the beginning, he originally auditioned for the part of Thor. "I initially auditioned to play Thor. That was what I was being considered for, because I’m tall and blonde and classically trained, and that seemed to be the mold for what Thor was, he was to be a classical character. And it was in my auditions. I owe this entirely to Marvel and their open-mindedness, they saw something that they thought was interesting. They saw some temperament that they liked."^[12] The casting director gave Hiddleston six weeks to bulk up, so he went on a strict diet and gained twenty pounds of muscle. In the end, Branagh decided he was more suitable as the antagonist and cast him as Loki. To prepare for his role as Loki, Hiddleston trained in the Brazilian martial art of capoeira.^[13]

In 2011, he portrayed novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in writer-director Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. The noble Captain Nicholls in War Horse, a film based on the 1982 novel by Michael Morpurgo, directed by Steven Spielberg. And Freddie Page, a RAF pilot in the British drama The Deep Blue Sea, alongside Rachel Weisz.

He reprised his role as the supervillain Loki in the 2012 movie The Avengers. While filming a scene with Chris Hemsworth, who plays Thor, the film's director, Joss Whedon told the fighting duo that the scene didn't look real enough, so Hiddleston told Hemsworth to really hit him for the fight scene. "I said to Chris, 'Dude, just hit me. Just hit me because I'm protected here and it's fine.' He's like, 'Are you sure?' I was like, 'Yeah, it will look great. Just go for it.'"^[14] Hiddleston is scheduled to reprise his Loki role again in Thor 2, which is set to start filming in August 2012.^[15]

In 2012, he will portray Prince Hal in the TV-movie adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1 & 2 and Henry V in Henry V. Other scheduled projects include Jim Jarmusch's film Only Lovers Left Alive, set to shoot in 2012,^[16] and the film adaptation of Elliott Chaze's 1953 crime novel Black Wings Has My Angel, co-starring Anna Paquin and Elijah Wood.^[17]

Hiddleston narrated the audio book The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner,^[18] poetry for iF Poems on iTunes,^[19] for the British Museum on the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, and was the voiceover for BBC's documentary on the Galapagos Island.^[20]

Awards and nominations[link]

Awards:

• 2012 Glamour Awards, Man of the Year ^[21]
• 2012 Jameson Empire Awards, Best Male Newcomer, for, Thor ^[22]
• 2012 Richard Attenborough UK Regional Film Critics' Awards, Rising Star Award, for, War Horse, Thor, The Deep Blue Sea, Midnight in Paris and Archipelago ^[23]
• 2009 Whatsonstage.com Theatregoers' Choice Award, Best Supporting Actor in a Play, for, Othello and Ivanov ^[24]
• 2008 Laurence Olivier Award, Best Newcomer in a Play, for Cymbeline ^[25]
• 2007 Ian Charleson Awards Third Prize, for, Othello ^[26]

Nominations:

• 2012 Saturn Awards, Best Supporting Actor ^[27]
• 2012 London Evening Standard British Film Awards, Best Actor Award ^[28]
• 2012 BAFTA Awards, the Orange Wednesdays Rising Star Award ^[29]
• 2012 Phoenix Film Critics Society Awards, Best Ensemble Acting ^[30]
• 2012 SAG Awards, Best Ensemble Acting ^[31]
• 2011 My Cinema Awards, Best Supporting Actor in a Drama, Action or Horror Award ^[32]
• 2010 ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards, Best Supporting Actor ^[33]

Filmography[link]

Hiddleston at a press conference for Thor in April 2011

Film[link]

Theatre[link]

Radio[link]

Video game[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tom Hiddleston

• Tom Hiddleston at the Internet Movie Database

Joanna Hogg (born 20 March 1960, London) is a British film maker and screenwriter. She made her directorial and screenwriting feature film debut in 2007 with Unrelated.

Early TV Work[link]

After leaving school in the late 1970s, Hogg worked as a photographer and began to make experimental super 8 films after borrowing a camera from Derek Jarman, who became an early mentor after a chance meeting in Patisserie Valerie in Soho.^[1] One of these, a film about a kinetic sculpture by artist Ron Haselden, won her a place to study direction at the National Film and Television School. Her graduation piece Caprice starred a then unknown Tilda Swinton.^[2] On graduation, Hogg directed several music videos for artists such as Alison Moyet, and won her first television commission writing and directing a programme segment for Janet Street Porter's Channel Four series Network 7, Flesh + Blood. In the 1990s, Hogg directed episodes of London Bridge, Casualty and London's Burning. She also directed the EastEnders special EastEnders: Dot's Story (2003).

Film[link]

Hogg has said that "I wanted to make a film doing everything I was told not to do in television".^[2] She shot her first feature, Unrelated (2008) in Tuscany. It tells the story of a childless woman, Anna (Kathryn Worth) of around forty who goes on holiday to Italy with her friend Verena (Mary Roscoe) and her teenage family. Over the course of the holiday, tensions emerge as Anna spends less time with the 'grownups' and is drawn towards the teenage crowd and the attractions of Verena's teenage nephew (Tom Hiddleston).

The film received critical acclaim,^[3] premiering at the London Film Festival in 2007 and winning the FIPRESCI International Critics Award. It also won the Guardian First Film Award in 2008 and the Evening Standard British Film Awards 'Most Promising Newcomer' Award in 2009, as well as being nominated for their Best Film Award and earning Hogg a nomination for the Critics Circle^{[disambiguation needed ]} 'Breakthrough Filmmaker' Award in 2009.

Her second film Archipelago had its UK premiere at the 2010 London Film Festival, where it was nominated in the Best Film category. It was released in the UK on 4 March 2011 by Artificial Eye.^[4].

Hogg's style is influenced by European and Asian directors such as Eric Rohmer and Yasujirō Ozu,^[5] using extended takes and minimal camera movement. She takes the unusual approach of casting a mixture of actors and non-professional actors in her films, such as the landscape painter Christopher Baker in Archipelago. Her depiction of unarguably middle-class characters has prompted some commentators to see her work as spearheading a new type of social realism in British film.^{[6] [7]}

Television Credits[link]

• Flesh + Blood (miniseries for Network 7) Channel Four (1988)
• Kersplat (six episodes) Channel Four (1991)
• Dance Eight BBC (1992)
• Going Underground Carlton Television (1992)
• Oasis (10 part drama) Carlton Television (1992)
• London Bridge Carlton Television (16 episodes 1995-1996)
• Staying Alive (two episodes) LWT (1997)
• Casualty (TV series) BBC (1997-1998)
• London's Burning LWT (1999)
• Reach For The Moon (three episodes) LWT (2000)
• EastEnders:Dot's Story BBC (2003)

Filmography[link]

• Caprice (1988)
• Unrelated (2008)
• Archipelago (2010)

References[link]

External links[link]

• Joanna Hogg at the Internet Movie Database

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
After returning to Russia from exile in 1994.
Born	Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-12-11)11 December 1918 Kislovodsk, Russian SFSR
Died	3 August 2008(2008-08-03) (aged 89) Moscow, Russia
Occupation	Novelist, soldier, teacher
Ethnicity	Russian, Ukrainian
Citizenship	USSR, Russian Federation
Alma mater	Rostov State University
Notable work(s)	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, The Cancer Ward, The Gulag Archipelago, The Red Wheel
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1970 Templeton Prize 1983 Laureate of the International Botev Prize 2008
Spouse(s)	Natalia Alekseyevna Reshetovskaya (1940–52; 1957–72) Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova (1973–2008)
Children	Yermolai Solzhenitsyn (born 1970), Ignat Solzhenitsyn (born 1972), Stepan Solzhenitsyn (born 1973) (all by Natalia Svetlova)
www.solzhenitsyn.ru

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn ( /soʊlʒəˈniːtsɨn/;^[1] Russian: Алекса́ндр Иса́евич Солжени́цын, pronounced [ɐlʲɪˈksandr ɪˈsaɪvʲɪtɕ səlʐɨˈnʲitsɨn]; 11 December 1918 – 3 August 2008)^[2] was a writer, who, through his often-suppressed writings, helped to raise global awareness of the gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, two of his best-known works. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 but returned to Russia in 1994 after the Soviet system had collapsed.

In the Soviet Union[link]

Early years[link]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, RSFSR (now in Stavropol Krai, Russia). His mother, Taisiya Solzhenitsyna (née Shcherbak) was Ukrainian.^[3] Her father had apparently risen from humble beginnings, as something of a self-made man. Eventually, he acquired a large estate in the Kuban region in the northern foothills of the Caucasus. During World War I, Taisiya went to Moscow to study. While there she met and married Isaakiy Solzhenitsyn, a young officer in the Imperial Russian Army of Cossack origins and fellow native of the Caucasus region. The family background of his parents is vividly brought to life in the opening chapters of August 1914, and in the later Red Wheel novels.

In 1918, Taisia became pregnant with Aleksandr. Shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed, Isaakiy was killed in a hunting accident. Aleksandr was then raised by his widowed mother and aunt in lowly circumstances. His earliest years coincided with the Russian Civil War. By 1930 the family property had been turned into a collective farm. Later, Solzhenitsyn recalled that his mother had fought for survival and that they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. His educated mother (who never remarried) encouraged his literary and scientific learnings and raised him in the Russian Orthodox faith;^[4] she died in 1944.^[5]

As early as 1936, Solzhenitsyn was developing the characters and concepts for a planned epic work on World War I and the Russian Revolution. This eventually led to the novel August 1914 – some of the chapters he wrote then still survive.^{[citation needed]} Solzhenitsyn studied mathematics at Rostov State University. At the same time he took correspondence courses from the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History, at this time heavily ideological in scope. As he himself makes clear, he did not question the state ideology or the superiority of the Soviet Union until he spent time in the camps.^{[citation needed]}

World War II[link]

During the war Solzhenitsyn served as the commander of a sound-ranging battery in the Red Army,^[6] was involved in major action at the front, and twice decorated. A series of writings published late in his life, including the early uncompleted novel Love the Revolution!, chronicles his wartime experience and his growing doubts about the moral foundations of the Soviet regime.^[7]

Imprisonment[link]

In February 1945, while serving in East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing derogatory comments in letters to a friend, Nikolai Vitkevich,^[8] about the conduct of the war by Joseph Stalin, whom he called Khozyain" ("the master"), and "Balabos", (Yiddish rendering of Hebrew baal ha-bayiθ for "master of the house").^[9] He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of "founding a hostile organization" under paragraph 11.^[10] Solzhenitsyn was taken to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where he was beaten and interrogated. On 7 July 1945, he was sentenced in his absence by Special Council of the NKVD to an eight-year term in a labor camp. This was the normal sentence for most crimes under Article 58 at the time.^[11]

The first part of Solzhenitsyn's sentence was served in several different work camps; the "middle phase," as he later referred to it, was spent in a sharashka (i.e., a special scientific research facility run by Ministry of State Security), where he met Lev Kopelev, upon whom he based the character of Lev Rubin in his book The First Circle, published in a self-censored or "distorted" version in the West in 1968 (an English translation of the full version was eventually published by Harper Perennial in October 2009).^[12] In 1950, he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners. During his imprisonment at the camp in the town of Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, he worked as a miner, bricklayer, and foundry foreman. His experiences at Ekibastuz formed the basis for the book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. One of his fellow political prisoners, Ion Moraru, remembers that Solzhenitsyn spent some of his time at Ekibastuz writing.^[13] While there he had a tumor removed, although his cancer was not diagnosed at the time.

In March 1953 after the expiry of Solzhenitsyn's sentence, he was sent to internal exile for life at Kok-Terek in the northeastern region of Kazakhstan, very close to the current border with Russia, as was common for political prisoners. His undiagnosed cancer spread until, by the end of the year, he was close to death. However, in 1954, he was permitted to be treated in a hospital in Tashkent, where his tumor went into remission. His experiences there became the basis of his novel Cancer Ward and also found an echo in the short story "The right hand." It was during this decade of imprisonment and exile that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and developed the philosophical and religious positions of his later life; this turn has some interesting parallels to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's time in Siberia and his quest for faith a hundred years earlier. Solzhenitsyn gradually turned into a philosophically minded Christian as a result of his experience in prison and the camps.^[14][15] He repented for some of his actions as a Red Army captain, and in prison compared himself to the perpetrators of the Gulag: "I remember myself in my captain's shoulder boards and the forward march of my battery through East Prussia, enshrouded in fire, and I say: 'So were we any better?'" His transformation is described at some length in the fourth part of The Gulag Archipelago ("The Soul and Barbed Wire"). The narrative poem The Trail (written without benefit of pen or paper in prison and camps between 1947 and 1952) and the 28 poems composed in prison, forced-labor camp, and exile also provide crucial material for understanding Solzhenitsyn's intellectual and spiritual odyssey during this period. These "early" works, largely unknown in the West, were published for the first time in Russian in 1999 and excerpted in English in 2006.^[16][17]

Marriages and children[link]

On 7 April 1940, while at the university, Solzhenitsyn married Natalia Alekseevna Reshetovskaya.^[18] They had just over a year of married life before he went into the army, and then to the Gulag. They divorced in 1952, a year before his release, because wives of Gulag prisoners faced loss of work or residence permits. After the end of his internal exile, they remarried in 1957 ^[19]. They divorced in 1972.

The following year (1973) he married his second wife, Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova, a mathematician who had a son from a brief prior marriage.^[20] He and Svetlova (born 1939) had three sons: Yermolai (1970), Ignat (1972), and Stepan (1973).^[21]

After prison[link]

Photo of Solzhenitsyn in 1953, right after his release from the special Gulag camp at Ekibastuz.

After Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956 Solzhenitsyn was freed from exile and exonerated. After his return to European Russia, Solzhenitsyn was, while teaching at a secondary school during the day, spending his nights secretly engaged in writing. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he wrote that "during all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared this would become known."^[22]

In the 1960s, while he was publicly known to be writing Cancer Ward, he was simultaneously writing The Gulag Archipelago. The KGB found out about this. Finally, aged 42, he approached Aleksandr Tvardovsky, a poet and the chief editor of the Noviy Mir magazine, with the manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was published in edited form in 1962, with the explicit approval of Nikita Khrushchev, who defended it at the presidium of the Politburo hearing on whether to allow its publishing, and added: "There's a Stalinist in each of you; there's even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil."^[23] The book became an instant hit and sold-out everywhere. During Khrushchev's tenure, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was studied in schools in the Soviet Union as were three more short works of Solzhenitsyn's, including his acclaimed short story Matryona's Home, published in 1963. These would be the last of his works published in the Soviet Union until 1990.^{[citation needed]}

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich brought the Soviet system of prison labor to the attention of the West. It caused as much of a sensation in the Soviet Union as it did in the West—not only by its striking realism and candour, but also because it was the first major piece of Soviet literature since the 1920s on a politically charged theme, written by a non-party member, indeed a man who had been to Siberia for "libelous speech" about the leaders, and yet its publication had been officially permitted. In this sense, the publication of Solzhenitsyn's story was an almost unheard of instance of free, unrestrained discussion of politics through literature. Most Soviet readers realized this, but after Khrushchev had been ousted from power in 1964, the time for such raw exposing works came quietly, but perceptibly, to a close.^{[citation needed]}

Later years in the Soviet Union[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2011)

Solzhenitsyn made an unsuccessful attempt, with the help of Tvardovsky, to get his novel, The Cancer Ward, legally published in the Soviet Union. This had to get the approval of the Union of Writers. Though some there appreciated it, the work ultimately was denied publication unless it was to be revised and cleaned of suspect statements and anti-Soviet insinuations (this episode is recounted and documented in The Oak and the Calf).

The publishing of his work quickly stopped; as a writer, he became a non-person, and, by 1965, the KGB had seized some of his papers, including the manuscript of The First Circle. Meanwhile Solzhenitsyn continued to secretly and feverishly work upon the most subversive of all his writings, the monumental The Gulag Archipelago. The seizing of his novel manuscript first made him desperate and frightened, but gradually he realized that it had set him free from the pretenses and trappings of being an "officially acclaimed" writer, something which had come close to second nature, but which was becoming increasingly irrelevant.

After the KGB had confiscated Solzhenitsyn's materials in Moscow, during 1965–1967 the preparatory drafts of The Gulag Archipelago were turned into finished typescript in hiding at his friends' homes in Estonia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had befriended Arnold Susi, a lawyer and former Estonian Minister of Education in a Lubyanka Prison cell. After completion, Solzhenitsyn's original handwritten script was kept hidden from the KGB in Estonia by Arnold Susi's daughter Heli Susi until the collapse of the Soviet Union.^[24][25]

In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Writers. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He could not receive the prize personally in Stockholm at that time, since he was afraid he would not be let back into the Soviet Union. Instead, it was suggested he should receive the prize in a special ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Moscow. The Swedish government refused to accept this solution, however, since such a ceremony and the ensuing media coverage might upset the Soviet Union and damage Sweden's relations with the superpower. Instead, Solzhenitsyn received his prize at the 1974 ceremony after he had been deported from the Soviet Union.

The Gulag Archipelago was composed during 1958–1967. This work was a three-volume, seven part work on the Soviet prison camp system (Solzhenitsyn never had all seven parts of the work in front of him at any one time). The Gulag Archipelago has sold over thirty million copies in thirty-five languages. It was based upon Solzhenitsyn's own experience as well as the testimony of 256^[26] former prisoners and Solzhenitsyn's own research into the history of the penal system. It discussed the system's origins from the founding of the Communist regime, with Lenin himself having responsibility, detailing interrogation procedures, prisoner transports, prison camp culture, prisoner uprisings and revolts, and the practice of internal exile.

The Gulag Archipelago's rich and varied authorial voice, its unique weaving together of personal testimony, philosophical analysis, and historical investigation, and its unrelenting indictment of communist ideology made The Gulag Archipelago one of the most consequential books of the 20th century.^[27]

The publishing of The Gulag Archipelago book was met with controversy, with extensive criticism of Solzhenitsyn and his work in the Russian media. In an editorial published in Pravda by I. Solovyev on 14 January 1974, Solzhenitsyn was criticized for how his literature "declares that the Hitlerites were 'lenient' and 'kind' to the enslaved peoples, and that the Soviet Army won the Battle of Stalingrad thanks to penal battalions...he mocks the sacrifices the Soviet people incurred in the war against fascism and makes excuses for the crimes of the Vlasovites and Bandera gangs." Solzhenitsyn's statement in The Gulag Archipelago' that the war demonstrated how "...to be a Russian is the worst thing on earth." drew criticism for disloyalty to the country. The editorial concluded that Solzhenitsyn was "choking with pathological hatred for the country where he was born and grew up, for the socialist system, and for Soviet people."^[28]

During this period, he was sheltered by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who suffered considerably for his support of Solzhenitsyn and was eventually forced into exile himself.^{[citation needed]}

In August 1971 the KGB allegedly made an attempt to assassinate Solzhenitsyn using an unknown biological agent (most likely ricin) with an experimental gel based delivery method. The attempt left him seriously ill but ultimately was not successful.^[29][30]

In the West[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2011)

On 12 February 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and deported the next day from the USSR to Frankfurt, West Germany and stripped of his Soviet citizenship. The KGB had found the manuscript for the first part of The Gulag Archipelago and, less than a week later, Yevgeny Yevtushenko suffered reprisals for his support of Solzhenitsyn. U.S. military attache William Odom managed to smuggle out a large portion of Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and Second World War military citations; Solzhenitsyn subsequently paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir "Invisible Allies" (1995).^[31]

In Germany, Solzhenitsyn lived in Heinrich Böll's house in Cologne. He then moved to Zurich, Switzerland before Stanford University invited him to stay in the United States to "facilitate your work, and to accommodate you and your family." He stayed on 11th floor of the Hoover Tower, part of the Hoover Institution, before moving to Cavendish, Vermont in 1976. He was given an honorary Literary Degree from Harvard University in 1978 and on Thursday, 8 June 1978 he gave his Commencement Address condemning, among other things, materialism in modern western culture.

Over the next 17 years, Solzhenitsyn worked on his cyclical history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, The Red Wheel. By 1992, four "knots" (parts) had been completed and he had also written several shorter works.

Despite spending two decades in the United States, Solzhenitsyn did not become fluent in spoken English. He had, however, been reading English-language literature since his teens, encouraged by his mother^{[citation needed]}. More importantly, he resented the idea of becoming a media star and of tempering his ideas or ways of talking in order to suit television. Solzhenitsyn's warnings about the dangers of Communist aggression and the weakening of the moral fiber of the West were generally well received in Western conservative circles (e.g. Ford administration staffers Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated on Solzhenitsyn's behalf for him to speak directly to then-President Gerald Ford about the Soviet threat^[32]), prior to and alongside the tougher foreign policy pursued by U.S. President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, liberals and secularists became increasingly critical of what they perceived as his reactionary preference for Russian nationalism and the Russian Orthodox religion. Solzhenitsyn also harshly criticised what he saw as the ugliness and spiritual vapidity of the dominant pop culture of the modern West, including television and much of popular music: "...the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits ... by TV stupor and by intolerable music". Despite his criticism of the "weakness" of the West, Solzhenitsyn always made clear that he admired the political liberty which was one of the enduring strengths of western democratic societies. In a major speech delivered to the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein on 14 September 1993, Solzhenitsyn implored the West not to "lose sight of its own values, its historically unique stability of civic life under the rule of law—a hard-won stability which grants independence and space to every private citizen."^[33]

In a series of writings, speeches, and interviews after his return to his native Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn spoke about his admiration for the local self-government he had witnessed first hand in Switzerland and New England during his western exile.^[34][35] He "praised 'the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities.'"^[36]

Return to Russia[link]

In 1990, his Soviet citizenship was restored, and, in 1994, he returned to Russia with his wife, Natalia, who had become a United States citizen. Their sons stayed behind in the United States (later, his oldest son Yermolai returned to Russia to work for the Moscow office of a leading management consultancy firm). From then until his death, he lived with his wife in a dacha in Troitse-Lykovo (Троице-Лыково) in west Moscow between the dachas once occupied by Soviet leaders Mikhail Suslov and Konstantin Chernenko. A staunch believer in traditional Russian culture, Solzhenitsyn expressed his disillusionment with post-Soviet Russia and called for a restoration of the Russian monarchy.^[37] After returning to Russia in 1994, Solzhenitsyn published eight two-part short stories, a series of contemplative "miniatures" or prose poems, a literary memoir on his years in the West (The Grain Between the Millstones) among many other writings.

All of Solzhenitsyn's sons became U.S. citizens. One, Ignat, has achieved acclaim as a pianist and conductor in the United States.^{[citation needed]}

Death[link]

Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure near Moscow on 3 August 2008, at the age of 89.^[38][39] A burial service was held at Donskoy Monastery, Moscow, on Wednesday, 6 August 2008.^[40] He was buried on the same date at the place chosen by him in Donskoy necropolis.^[41] Russian and world leaders paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn following his death.^[42]

Legacy[link]

Solzhenitsyn with Vladimir Putin.

The most complete 30-volume edition of Solzhenitsyn's collected works is soon to be published in Russia. The presentation of its first three volumes, already in print, recently took place in Moscow. Unhappy with the economic and social malaise of the Yeltsin era, Solzhenitsyn expressed his admiration for President Vladimir Putin's attempts to restore a sense of national pride in Russia. Putin signed a decree conferring on Solzhenitsyn the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his humanitarian work and personally visited the writer at his home on 12 June 2007 to present him with the award. Like his father, Yermolai Solzhenitsyn has translated some of his father's works. Stephan Solzhenitsyn lives and works in Moscow. Ignat Solzhenitsyn is the music director of The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.

Solzhenitsyn continues to be met with controversy in Russia. In February 2010, young left-wing activists in Moscow organized protests against measures by the government in renaming the Great Communist Street in Moscow in honor of Solzhenitsyn. The protesters cited the activities and literature of Solzhenitsyn for their position.^[43]

KGB operations against Solzhenitsyn[link]

On 19 September 1974, Yuri Andropov approved a large-scale operation to discredit Solzhenitsyn and his family and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. The plan was jointly approved by Vladimir Kryuchkov, Philipp Bobkov, and Grigorenko (heads of First, Second and Fifth KGB Directorates).^[44] The residencies in Geneva, London, Paris, Rome and other European cities participated in the operation. Among other active measures, at least three StB agents became translators and secretaries of Solzhenitsyn (one of them translated the poem Prussian Nights), keeping KGB informed regarding all contacts by Solzhenitsyn.^[44]

KGB sponsored a series of hostile books about Solzhenitsyn, most notably a "memoir published under the name of his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, but probably mostly composed by Service", according to historian Christopher Andrew.^[44] Andropov also gave an order to create "an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion between PAUK^[45] and the people around him" by feeding him rumors that everyone in his surrounding was a KGB agent and deceiving him in all possible ways. Among other things, the writer constantly received envelopes with photographs of car accidents, brain surgery and other frightening illustrations. After the KGB harassment in Zurich, Solzhenitsyn settled in Cavendish, Vermont, reduced communications with others and surrounded his property with a barbed wire fence. His influence and moral authority for the West diminished as he became increasingly isolated and critical of Western individualism. KGB and CPSU experts finally concluded that he alienated American listeners by his "reactionary views and intransigent criticism of the US way of life", so no further active measures would be required.^[44]

Accusations of collaboration with NKVD[link]

In his book The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn states that he was recruited to report to the NKVD on fellow inmates and was given a code-name Vetrov, but due to his transfer to another camp he was able to elude this duty and never produced a single report.^[46]

In 1976, after Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union a report signed by Vetrov surfaced. After a copy of the report was obtained by Solzhenitsyn he published it together with a refutation in the Los Angeles Times (published 24 May 1976^[46]). In 1978 the same report was published by journalist Frank Arnau in a socialist Western German magazine Neue Politik.^[47] However, according to Solzhenitsyn the report is a fabrication by the KGB. He claimed that the report is dated 20 January 1952 while all Ukrainians were transferred to a separate camp on 6 January and they had no relation to the uprising in Solzhenitsyn's camp on 22 January. He also claimed that the only people who might in 1976 have access to a "secret KGB archive" were KGB agents themselves. Solzhenitsyn also requested Arnau to put the alleged document to a graphology test but Arnau refused.^[46]

In 1990 the report was reproduced in Soviet Voyenno-Istoricheskiy Zhurnal among the memoirs of L.A. Samutin,^[48] a former ROA soldier and GULAG inmate who was an erstwhile supporter of Solzhenitsyn, but later became his critic. According to Solzhenitzyn, publication of the Samutin memoirs was canceled at the request of Samutin's widow, who stated that the memoirs were in fact dictated by the KGB.^[46]

Views on atheism, history, and politics[link]

Atheism[link]

Regarding atheism, Solzhenitsyn declared:

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."^[49]

On Russia and the Jews[link]

Solzhenitsyn also published a two-volume work on the history of Russian-Jewish relations (Two Hundred Years Together 2001, 2002). This book stirred controversy and caused Solzhenitsyn to be widely accused of anti-Semitism.^{[51][52][53][54]}

The book became a best-seller in Russia. Solzhenitsyn begins this work with a plea for "patient mutual comprehension" on the part of Russians and Russian Jews. The author writes that the book was conceived in the hope of promoting "mutually agreeable and fruitful pathways for the future development of Russian-Jewish relations".^[55]

There is sharp division on the allegation of anti-Semitism. From Solzhenitsyn's own essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations",^[56] he calls for Russians and Jews alike to take moral responsibility for the "renegades" from both communities who enthusiastically supported a Marxist dictatorship after the October Revolution. At the end of chapter 15, he writes that Jews must answer for the "revolutionary cutthroats" in their ranks just as Russian Gentiles must repent "for the pogroms, for those merciless arsonist peasants, for...crazed revolutionary soldiers." It is not, he adds, a matter of answering "before other peoples, but to oneself, to one's consciousness, and before God."^[57] Writing of Solzhenitsyn's novel, August 1914 in the New York Times on 13 November 1985, the American historian Richard Pipes commented: "Every culture has its own brand of anti-Semitism. In Solzhenitsyn's case, it's not racial. It has nothing to do with blood. He's certainly not a racist; the question is fundamentally religious and cultural. He bears some resemblance to Dostoyevsky, who was a fervent Christian and patriot and a rabid anti-Semite. Solzhenitsyn is unquestionably in the grip of the Russian extreme right's view of the Revolution, which is that it was the doing of the Jews".^[58]

According to D. M. Thomas, Elie Wiesel said Solzhenitsyn is not an anti-Semite. "he is too intelligent, too honest, too courageous, too great a writer." He says he wishes Solzhenitsyn were more sensitive to Jewish suffering, but believes the insensitivity is unconscious. This statement however predates the publication in 2001 of "200 Years Together" by at least 3 years.^[59]

Similarities between Two Hundred years together and an anti-Semitic essay titled "Jews in the USSR and in the Future Russia", attributed to Solzhenitsyn, has led to inference that he stands behind the anti-Semitic passages. Solzhenitsyn himself claims that the essay consists of manuscripts stolen from him, and then manipulated, forty years ago.^[60][61] However, according to the historian Semyon Reznik, textological analyses have proven Solzhenitsyn's authorship.^[62]

In 1984 Solzhenitsyn was interviewed by Nikolay Kazantsev, a monarchist Russo-Argentine journalist, for Nasha Strana, a Russia-language newspaper based in Buenos Aires. In the interview he said: "We (Russia) are walking a narrow isthmus between Communists and the World Jewry. Neither is acceptable for us... And I mean this not in the racial sense, but in the sense of the Jewry as a certain world view. The Jewry is embodied in "Fevralism" (i.e. democracy). Neither side is acceptable to us in the case the War breaks out." He also described the United States as a "province of Israel".^[63]

Russian dissident writer Vladimir Voynovich, interviewed for Radio Liberty on the first anniversary of Solzhenitsyn' death, has said^[64] that Solzhenitshyn harbored anti-Semitic sentiments all his life, as attested by the 1964 manuscript he later developed into "200 Years Together". Voynovich further alleged that Solzhenitsyn deliberately concealed this anti-Semitism, because he knew this would have prevented him from receiving the Nobel Prize.

On new Russian "democracy"[link]

In some of his later political writings, such as Rebuilding Russia (1990) and Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn criticized the oligarchic excesses of the new Russian 'democracy,' while opposing any nostalgia for Soviet Communism. He defended moderate and self-critical patriotism (as opposed to radical nationalism), argued for the indispensability of local self-government to a free Russia, and expressed concerns for the fate of the 25 million ethnic Russians in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union. He sought to protect the national character of the Russian Orthodox church and fought against the admission of Catholic priests and Protestant pastors to Russia from other countries. For a brief period, he had his own TV show, where he freely expressed his views. The show was cancelled because of low ratings, but Solzhenitsyn continued to maintain a relatively high profile in the media.^{[citation needed]}

The West[link]

Delivering the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, he called the United States spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, suffered from a "decline in courage" and a "lack of manliness." Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its "hasty" capitulation in the Vietnam War. He criticized the country's music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy. He said that the West erred in measuring other civilizations by its own model. While faulting Soviet society for denying fair legal treatment of people, he also faulted the West for being too legalistic: "A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities."^[65]

Shortly after Solzhenitsyn's death, Richard Pipes, a history professor at Harvard, wrote of him: "Solzhenitsyn blamed the evils of Soviet communism on the West. He rightly stressed the European origins of Marxism, but he never asked himself why Marxism in other European countries led not to the gulag but to the welfare state. He reacted with white fury to any suggestion that the roots of Leninism and Stalinism could be found in Russia's past. His knowledge of Russian history was very superficial and laced with a romantic sentimentalism. While accusing the West of imperialism, he seemed quite unaware of the extraordinary expansion of his own country into regions inhabited by non-Russians. He also denied that Imperial Russia practiced censorship or condemned political prisoners to hard labor, which, of course, was absurd.".^[66]

Russian culture[link]

In his 1978 Harvard address, Solzhenitsyn argued over Russian culture, that the West erred in "denying its autonomous character and therefore never understood it "^[65]

Communism, Russia and nationalism[link]

Solzhenitsyn emphasized the significantly more oppressive character of the Soviet totalitarian regime, in comparison to the Russian Empire of the House of Romanov. He asserted that Imperial Russia did not practice any real censorship in the style of the Soviet Glavlit,^[67] that political prisoners typically were not always forced into labor camps,^[68] and that the number of political prisoners and exiles was only one ten-thousandth of those in the Soviet Union. He noted that the Tsar's secret police, or Okhrana, was only present in the three largest cities, and not at all in the Imperial Russian Army.^{[citation needed]}

In a speech commemorating the Vendée Uprising, Solzhenitsyn compared Lenin's Bolsheviks with Jacobins of the French Revolution. However, he commented that, while the French Reign of Terror ended with the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, its Soviet equivalent raged unabated from 1917 until the Khrushchev thaw in the 1950s.^{[citation needed]}

According to Solzhenitsyn, Russians were not the ruling nation in the Soviet Union. He believed that all ethnic cultures have been oppressed in favor of an atheistic Marxism. Russian culture was even more repressed than any other culture in the Soviet Union, since the regime was more afraid of ethnic uprisings among Russian Christians than among any other ethnicity. Therefore, Solzhenitsyn argued, Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church should not be regarded as a threat by the West but rather as allies.^[69]

Solzhenitsyn said that for every country, great power status deforms and harms the national character and that he has never wished great power status for Russia. He rejected the view that the USA and Russia are natural rivals, saying that before the [Russian] revolution, they were natural allies and that during the American Civil War, Russia supported Lincoln and the North [in contrast to Britain and France, which supported the Confederacy], and then they were allies in the First World War. But beginning with Communism, Russia ceased to exist and the confrontation was not at all with Russia but with the Communist Soviet Union.

World War II[link]

Solzhenitsyn criticized the Allies for not opening a new front against Nazi Germany in the west earlier in World War II. This resulted in Soviet domination and oppression of the nations of Eastern Europe. Solzhenitsyn claimed the Western democracies apparently cared little about how many died in the East, as long as they could end the war quickly and painlessly for themselves in the West. While stationed in East Prussia as an artillery officer, Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes against the civilian German population by Soviet "liberators" as the elderly were robbed of their meager possessions and women were gang-raped to death. He wrote a poem entitled "Prussian Nights" about these incidents. In it, the first-person narrator seems to approve of the troops' crimes as revenge for German atrocities, expressing his desire to take part in the plunder himself. The poem describes the rape of a Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers mistakenly thought to be a German.^[70]

Stalinism[link]

In his The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn rejected the view that it was Stalin who created the Soviet totalitarian state. He argued that it was Lenin who started the mass executions, created a planned economy, founded the Cheka which would later be turned into the KGB, and started the system of labor camps later known as Gulag.

Mikhail Sholokhov[link]

Solzhenitsyn was the most prominent of the Nobel Laureate Mikhail Sholokhov's many detractors. He alleged that the work which made Sholokhov's international reputation, And Quiet Flows the Don was written by Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and Anti-Bolshevik, who died in 1920, possibly in retaliation for Sholokhov scathing opinion re One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.^[71] Solzhenitsyn claimed that Sholokhov found the manuscript and published it under his own name.^[72] These rumors first appeared in the late 1920s, but an investigation upheld Sholokhov's authorship of And Quiet Flows the Don and the allegations were denounced as malicious slander in Pravda.^[73]

A 1984 monograph by Geir Kjetsaa and others demonstrated through statistical analyses that Sholokhov was indeed the likely author of Don. And in 1987, several thousand pages of notes and drafts of the work were discovered and authenticated.^[74][75]

During the second world war, Sholokhov's archive was destroyed in a bomb raid, and only the fourth volume survived. Sholokhov had his friend Vassily Kudashov, who was killed in the war, look after it. Following Kudashov's death, his widow took possession of the manuscript, but she never disclosed the fact of owning it. The manuscript was finally found by the Institute of World Literature of Russia's Academy of Sciences in 1999 with assistance from the Russian Government. An analysis of the novel has unambiguously proved Sholokhov's authorship. The writing paper dates back to the 1920s: 605 pages are in Sholokhov's own hand, and 285 are transcribed by his wife Maria and sisters.^[75]

The Sino-Soviet Conflict[link]

In 1973, near the height of the Sino-Soviet conflict, Solzhenitsyn sent a Letter to the Soviet Leaders to a limited number of upper echelon Soviet officials. This work, which was published for the general public in the Western world a year after it was sent to its intended audience, beseeched the Soviet Union's authorities to

Give them their ideology! Let the Chinese leaders glory in it for a while. And for that matter, let them shoulder the whole sackful of unfulfillable international obligations, let them grunt and heave and instruct humanity, and foot all the bills for their absurd economics (a million a day just to Cuba), and let them support terrorists and guerrillas in the Southern Hemisphere too if they like. The main source of the savage feuding between us will then melt away, a great many points of today's contention and conflict all over the world will also melt away, and a military clash will become a much remoter possibility and perhaps won't take place at all [author's emphasis].^[76]

Vietnam war[link]

Once in America, Solzhenitsyn urged the United States to reconsider its attitudes to the Vietnam War (which had ended in April 1975). In his commencement address at Harvard University in 1978 (A World Split Apart), Solzhenitsyn alleged that many in the U.S. did not understand the Vietnam War. He rhetorically asks if the American Anti-War Movement ever realized the effects their actions had on Vietnam: "But members of the U.S. antiwar movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there?"^[65]

During his time in the United States, Solzhenitsyn made several controversial public statements: notably, he accused Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg of treason.

Kosovo War[link]

Solzhenitsyn strongly condemned the bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, saying "there is no difference whatsoever between NATO and Hitler."^[77]

The Holodomor[link]

Solzhenitsyn has stated that the ongoing Ukrainian effort to have the 1930s famine, the Holodomor, recognized as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people is in fact historical revisionism. According to Solzhenitsyn, the famine was caused by the nature of the Communist regime which was governed by the Jewish Russian society, under which all the peoples suffered and especially the Christian people of the Soviet bloc. As such, it was not an assault by the Russian people against the Ukrainian people, it was economic demand from the ruling Bolsheviks to get the new state of Ukraine under control, during the winter of '32/33, Stalin received a note from Kaganovich that situation in Ukraine is getting out of control and serious steps have to be taken.^{[citation needed]}

Solzhenitsyn's views on this matter are in line with those of several historians of the period (such as Dmitri Volkogonov and Aleksandr Bushkov) as well as the official stance of the Russian government. This view suggests that policies of collectivization and mass seizure of property that led to the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s were a result of the political (communist) and economic (favoring rapid industrial growth over consumption) policies of the Soviet Union, and not racial hatred against the Ukrainians.^[78]

Published works and speeches[link]

• The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, edited by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney, ISI Books (2009)
• A Storm in the Mountains
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962; novella)
• An Incident at Krechetovka Station (1963; novella)
• Matryona's Place (1963; novella)
• For the Good of the Cause (1964; novella)
• The First Circle (1968; novel). Translated into English by Henry Carlisle and Olga Carlisle.
• Cancer Ward (1968; novel)
• The Love-Girl and the Innocent (1969; play), a.k.a. The Prisoner and the Camp Hooker or The Tenderfoot and the Tart.
• Nobel Prize delivered speech (1970)The speech was delivered to the Swedish Academy in writing and not actually given as a lecture.
• August 1914 (1971). The beginning of a history of the birth of the USSR in an historical novel. The novel centers on the disastrous loss in the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, and the ineptitude of the military leadership. Other works, similarly titled, follow the story: see The Red Wheel (overall title).
• The Gulag Archipelago (three volumes) (1973–1978), not a memoir, but a history of the entire process of developing and administering a police state in the Soviet Union. Translated into English by Henry Carlisle and Olga Carlisle.
• Prussian Nights (Finished in 1951, first published in 1974; poetry)
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, 10 December 1974
• Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, A Letter to the Soviet leaders, Collins: Harvill Press (1974), ISBN 0-06-013913-7
• The Oak and the Calf (1975)
• Lenin in Zürich (1976; separate publication of chapters on Lenin, none of them published before this point, from The Red Wheel. They were later incorporated into the 1984 edition of the expanded August 1914.)
• Warning to the West (1976; 5 speeches (translated to English), 3 to the Americans in 1975 and 2 to the British in 1976)
• Harvard Commencement Address (1978) link
• The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America (1980)
• Pluralists (1983; political pamphlet)
• November 1916 (1983; novel in The Red Wheel sequence)
• Victory Celebration (1983)
• Prisoners (1983)
• Godlessness, the First Step to the Gulag. Templeton Prize Address, London, 10 May (1983)
• August 1914 (1984; novel, much-expanded edition)
• Rebuilding Russia (1990)
• March 1917 (1990)
• April 1917
• The Russian Question (1995)
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr (1997). Invisible Allies. Basic Books. ISBN 978-1-887178-42-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=5yYBZ35HPo4C&dq. 
• Russia under Avalanche (Россия в обвале,1998; political pamphlet) (Complete text in Russian:^[79])
• Two Hundred Years Together (2003) on Russian-Jewish relations since 1772, aroused ambiguous public response.^[80][81][82]

TV documentaries on Solzhenitsyn[link]

In 1998, Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov shot TV documentary Besedy s Solzhenitsynym (The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn) of four parts. The documentary shot in Solzhenitsyn’s home shows his everyday life and covers his reflections on Russian history and literature.^[83]

• The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn, part 1, 45 min (in Russian) on YouTube
• The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn, part 2, 44 min (in Russian) on YouTube
• The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn, part 3, 48 min (in Russian) on YouTube
• The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn, part 4, 50 min (in Russian) on YouTube

On 12 December 2009, the Russian channel Rossiya K showed the French television documentary L'Histoire Secrète de l'Archipel du Goulag^[84] made by Jean Crépu and Nicolas Miletitch^[85] and translated into Russian under the title Taynaya Istoriya “Arkhipelaga GULAG” (Secret History: The Gulag Archipelago). The documentary covers events related to creation and publication of The Gulag Archipelago.^[84]

• Secret History: The Gulag Archipelago (online in Russian)
• Secret History: The Gulag Archipelago (online in English)

See also[link]

Novels portal

• Alexander Dolgun
• Alexander Galich
• Mask of Sorrow
• Lydia Chukovskaya
• Harry Wu

Notes[link]