Forty-seven years ago, on December 28, 1973, world renowned Russian writer, dissident and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature Alexandr Solzhenitsyn published the first of his three tomes on “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956,” that detailed the concentration camps’ secret police surveillance and terror in the Soviet Union.
Chronicling the period following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 until Nikita Krushchev’s rise to power, Solzhenitsyn warned “if freedom does not come to my country for a long time,” then the mere reading of this book will be considered a serious crime.