Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A decorated artillery officer, Solzhenitsyn was arrested in 1945 for mocking Stalin in a private letter to a friend, intercepted by censors, and sentenced to eight years in the camps followed by internal exile, where he was also treated for the cancer that became the subject of Cancer Ward. Khrushchev personally approved One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for publication during a brief political thaw, and it made him famous within the Soviet Union almost overnight.

The thaw closed quickly. The KGB seized his manuscripts and archive, and The Gulag Archipelago, his vast documentary history of the camp system, reached the West only via microfilm smuggled out ahead of the raids. Stripped of citizenship and deported in 1974, he spent two decades in Vermont writing before returning to Russia in 1994, after the state that exiled him had ceased to exist.