Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the most famous dissident to defect from behind the Iron Curtain. After serving in Stalin’s Red Army, Solzhenitsyn himself became a victim of Stalin’s paranoia, sent to a science-based gulag camp in Soviet Central Asia. There, he met many other dissidents purged by the totalitarian Soviet state, and rediscovered his own belief in God as his belief in the Soviet ideal withered away.

Later, he would come to America and publish The Gulag Archipelago, a stunning, damning expose on the gulag system, bringing Western attention to the full depths of Stalin’s crimes.