Varlam Shalamov

Shalamov was first arrested in 1929 for possessing banned Trotskyist literature and again in 1937, this time sentenced to the gold mines of Kolyma in the Soviet Far East, the deadliest camp system in the Gulag. Basic paramedic training he picked up along the way got him transferred out of the mines into camp infirmaries, work that likely saved his life through his later years of imprisonment.

Released in 1951 but barred from leaving the region for years afterward, he didn't return to Moscow until 1953, and spent decades methodically writing the stories that became Kolyma Tales, drafts he knew could never be published at home. He fell out publicly with Solzhenitsyn over how the camps should be represented, going blind and deaf in his final years, and died in 1982 in a Soviet psychiatric institution after being declared incompetent.