Alexander Solzhenitsyn On The New Russia

The world has been paying its last respects to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian who exposed the horror of the Soviet prison labor camps and gave new meaning to the word "gulag."

Solzhenitsyn, who died Aug. 3 of heart failure at age 89 in Moscow, spent eight years in those camps. That experience was the basis of his novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which was published in 1962 during the brief post-Stalin thaw.

Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 and three years later published his historical masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, which led to his expulsion and 20 years in exile. He returned to his beloved Russia only in 1994, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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