Solzhenitsyn for the Win

On October 8, 1970, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in literature. In his acceptance speech, given after his deportation from the USSR, he said 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.” In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev had allowed Solzhenitsyn’s short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch to be published, and defended the novel at the presidium of the Politburo, claiming that there is “a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.” Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn’s works were not published in the Soviet Union from 1964 through 1989. Stalinists won, for a time, with Solzhenitsyn being deported to West Germany in February 1974.