My fascination with soviet history continues with Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize winning damning inditement of the brutal forced labour camps of the gulag system. Although a work of fiction, Solzhenitsyn himself spent many years in such a camp for merely making a derogatory remark about Stalin and indeed many would argue that the character of Ivan Denisovich is modelled around Solzhenitsyn himself and his personal experiences. The book was released eight years after Stalin’s death and the brutal and shocking glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world. Solzhenitsyn was denounced by hardliners but the damage had already been done.
