The Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died at the age of eighty-nine. In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years in jail for criticizing Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. He later wrote about the prison conditions under Stalin in his famous work The Gulag Archipelago. In 1970, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Four years later, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and forced into exile. After two decades in exile, he returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, but he was deeply critical of the new Russia.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “What we have today could in no way be described as a democracy. Today, we have an oligarchy, power limited to a closed circle.”