Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system. He was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature". His nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago "amounted to a head-on challenge to the Soviet state" and sold tens of millions of copies. December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008; died at 89. Alive at the same time as Barack Obama, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Pope Francis, and Neil Armstrong. Wiki link