Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn arrested - February 12, 1974

On this day in 1974, Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested and charged with treason.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hi everyone, I'm Eves. Welcome to This Day
in History Class, a podcast for folks who can never
have enough history knowledge. Today's February twelve. The day was

(00:24):
February twelve, nineteen seventy four, Russian author Alexander Solja Neetson
was arrested, charged with treason, and stripped of his citizenship.
The year prior, Solja Neetson had published The Gulag Archipelago,
a book on the communist Soviet forced labor camp system.
Solja Neetson was born in nineteen eighteen in Russia, the

(00:48):
year after the Russian Revolution took place and the Russian
Civil War began. He was raised by his mother as
his father was killed in an accident. He studied at
the University of Rostov, majoring in zigs and mathematics. It
was in the nineteen forties when he began to get
negative attention from Soviet authorities. During World War Two, Solja

(01:10):
Neetson was drafted into the Soviet Union's Red Army. In
nineteen he was arrested for writing letters to a friend
that criticized Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. He spent the next
eight years in prison in labor camps for political prisoners.
His sentence ended in nineteen fifty three, and his first

(01:30):
day without armed guard was March five, the same day
that Stalin died. But after he served his sentence, he
was sent into exile for life in Kazakhstan. There he
taught math and physics and wrote poems, plays, sketches, and
a novel. In the following years, Solja Neetson underwent treatment
for cancer and survived. He began writing down the experiences

(01:54):
he had as a prisoner. Nikita Khrushchev, the new Soviet premier,
denounced Dalin. Sol Jannetson was then freed from exile, and
he moved back to Russia, where he continued teaching and writing.
His novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch,
about life in one of Stalin's labor camps, was published

(02:14):
in the Soviet literary journal no Vimir in November of
nineteen sixty two. The novel was popular with Soviet readers
for the way it depicted that everyday struggles of life
in a forced labor camp. The book inspired others to
depict their own hardships in Soviet labor camps and gained
a global audience. It was, however, controversial, as sol Jetson

(02:37):
was accused of being anti Soviet. The book aggravated the
rift between anti Stalinists and conformists. Khrushchev fell from power
in nineteen sixty four, sol Janson was increasingly targeted by
authorities as he continued to write short stories and denounce
government policies. After nineteen sixty seven, his work wasn't wish

(03:00):
again in the Soviet Union until nineteen ninety. For years,
the KGB, the Soviet Union's security agency, collected information about
him and seized his writing as he was deemed an
enemy of the state. In nineteen sixty nine, Soljian Netson
was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. The next year,

(03:20):
Soljia Neatson won the Nobel Prize for Literature for quote
the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable
traditions of Russian literature, but Soviet authorities did not let
him go to the awards ceremony. They continued to harass him,
with the KGB even attempting to assassinate him with rice
in in nineteen seventy one, but he continued to publish

(03:42):
his work. In nineteen seventy three, he published The Gulag
Archipelago abroad after the KGB seized a copy of the
manuscript in the Soviet Union. The word Gulag refers to
the network of labor camps in the Soviet Union. The
book provides a record of the arrest, interrogation, conviction, and

(04:03):
imprisonment of people in the system, along with Soljia Neatson's
personal accounts. The Soviet press denounced him as a trader,
and on February twelveth nineteen seventy four, he was arrested
and charged with treason. The next day, he was exiled
from the Soviet Union. He proceeded to travel throughout Europe,

(04:24):
and by nineteen seventy six he had settled in the US.
He lived in the US until nineteen ninety four, when
he returned to Russia after the Soviet Union dissolved. Back
in Russia, he praised the leadership of President Vladimir Putin.
He died in Moscow in two thousand eight, remembered for
writing works that criticized the Soviet Union and communism and

(04:48):
revealed the conditions people faced in the forced labor camp system.
I'm Eve chef COO and hopefully you know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. If you've
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