Solzhenitsyn wrote a couple of really important novels on the labor camps from firsthand experience. In 1970, he won the Nobel Prize in literature for these novels. The big impact came from the Gulag Archipelago, which would be published not in the Soviet Union, but abroad. That book was one of the main ways in which many people began to see that the regime was rotten in its roots.
Historian and author Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the historical significance of the life and work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Solzhenitsyn's birth.