The first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, a history and memoir of life in a Soviet Union prison camp, written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was first published in Paris in the original Russian on Dec 28, 1973. “… authorized for Western publication only after the Soviet secret police seized a copy of the manuscript last August, …” The Soviets arrested Solzhenitsyn on February 12, 1974 taking away his citizenship and deporting him. Solzhenitsyn warned the Russian people, citizens of a severely, censorial, 1973 Russia, in the preface of his book The Gulag Archipelago (a three-volume work), that they must consider the reading of his writings as a “very dangerous” act. Learn more about life in Stalin’s Gulag.