As Soviet forces closed in on victory in Europe, SMERSH counterintelligence officers arrested Captain Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a decorated artillery officer, for letters criticizing Stalin and Soviet conduct of the war. He was stripped of rank and sent to labor camps for eight years, an ordeal that would furnish the raw material for 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' and 'The Gulag Archipelago.'
Solzhenitsyn had fought with distinction, commanding a sound-ranging artillery battery and earning decorations for bravery. But in letters to a friend, he had made indiscreet remarks questioning Stalin's leadership and comparing Soviet tactics unfavorably to those of the tsarist army, unaware that Soviet censors were reading his mail.
SMERSH agents, the ruthless military counterintelligence service whose name meant 'death to spies,' pulled him from his post near the East Prussian front just as the war in Europe was ending. He was taken to Moscow's Lubyanka prison and interrogated, then sentenced to eight years in labor camps under Article 58 for anti-Soviet propaganda.
The arrest, absurdly timed just days before Germany's surrender, transformed a promising military career into a life sentence of witness. Solzhenitsyn's years in the camps, including a stint in a special prison for scientists that inspired 'The First Circle,' gave him material no censor could invent. He emerged in 1953 to eventually become the Soviet Union's most devastating internal critic, and his 1970 Nobel Prize and subsequent exile trace back directly to the moment counterintelligence officers read one indiscreet letter from a frontline artillery captain.
Key people: Alexander Solzhenitsyn