By rights, Solzhenitsyn should have died on the front lines of
World War II, like so many of his generation. He should have
died on one of the thousand islands of the Gulag Archipelago, or
in a Cancer Ward after being diagnosed with near-terminal
stomach cancer. But he survived. Solzhenitsyn’s samizdat
manuscript of SHCH-854, later to be known as One Day in the Life
of Ivan Denisovich, should have died "in the drawer," on the
desk of Novy Mir editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky, or at the hands of
Glavlit -- the main organ of Soviet censorship. But it survived.
Inside the Soviet Union, the Politburo had never encountered a
creature like Solzhenitsyn. After his expulsion to the West in
1973, the West soon realized that they had also, had never
encountered a creature like Solzhenitsyn. George Orwell once
asked, “Where is Ghandi in Stalin’s Russia?” The answer, of
course, is that Ghandi is dead in the snow. Not all tyrants are
as kind as the British Empire. The tyranny which Solzhenitsyn
opposed turned all of its oppone