Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn decides the time has come to publish The Gulag Archipelago. A few months earlier, the KGB had obtained copies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book following the interrogation of one of the typists who had assisted the writer. The woman committed suicide out of remorse. On December 28, the YMCA published the first part of the book. The New York Times published it shortly thereafter. The writer was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union. He went to Frankfurt, then Zurich, and finally, in 1976, to Vermont. He also went 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 spoke to the Duma in Moscow. He died on August 3, 2008. In 2010, The Gulag Archipelago was adopted as a school textbook (recommended, not mandatory) in the shortened version prepared by his widow.
