Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer and prominent Soviet dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system.
Solzhenitsyn in 1974
Solzhenitsyn (right) and his long-time friend Mstislav Rostropovich (left) at the celebration of Solzhenitsyn's 80th birthday
Solzhenitsyn with Heinrich Böll in Langenbroich [de], West Germany, 1974
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn looks out from a train, in Vladivostok, summer 1994, before departing on a journey across Russia. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after nearly 20 years in exile.
Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term dissident was used in the Soviet Union (USSR) in the period from the mid-1960s until the Fall of Communism. It was used to refer to small groups of marginalized intellectuals whose challenges, from modest to radical to the Soviet regime, met protection and encouragement from correspondents, and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities. Following the etymology of the term, a dissident is considered to "sit apart" from the regime. As dissenters began self-identifying as dissidents, the term came to refer to an individual whose non-conformism was perceived to be for the good of a society. The most influential subset of the dissidents is known as the Soviet human rights movement.
Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn in 1974; a Russian writer, Soviet dissident and author of the acclaimed series The Gulag Archipelago, which documents forced penal labour in the Gulag prison system and political repression in the Soviet Union.
Moscow Helsinki Group members Yuliya Vishnevskya, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Dina Kaminskaya, Kronid Lyubarsky in Munich, 1978
A Chronicle of Current Events No 11, 31 December 1968 (front cover)
Yelena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov after their arrival for the conferment of the honorary doctorate in law from the University of Groningen, 15 June 1989