Soviet Union. The KGB obtains copies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago following the interrogation of one of the typists who had assisted the writer. The woman commits suicide out of remorse. Solzhenitsyn decides the time has come to publish. In December, the YMCA publishes the first part of the book. The New York Times publishes it shortly thereafter. The writer is arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union. He travels to Frankfurt, then Zurich, and finally, in 1976, Vermont. He also goes there to collect the Nobel Prize he had been awarded in 1970. In 1994, having returned to settle in Russia (no longer the USSR), he speaks to the Duma in Moscow. He dies on August 3, 2008. In 2010, The Gulag Archipelago was adopted as a school text (recommended, not required) in the abridged version prepared by his widow.
