Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russian-author-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-dies-at-89 Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Acclaimed Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote extensively about the gulag prison system and won the Nobel literature prize for his books on abuses in the Soviet Union, died Sunday at age 89 after a reclusive life fraught with challenges. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JEFFREY BROWN: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was first a prisoner in the Soviet Union's vast Gulag system and then a writer who exposed the horrors of that system to the world.He was born into the first generation following the 1917 Russian revolution and served in the Red Army during World War II. But in 1945, he was arrested by Joseph Stalin's secret police. His crime: disparaging the Soviet dictator in a letter to a friend.In 1962, during the short-lived liberalization under Nikita Khrushchev, Solzhenitsyn was permitted to publish "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." The searing tale of the struggle to survive a winter day's imprisonment drew international acclaim.Solzhenitsyn would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, but renewed scrutiny and then censorship from the soviet state. His most famous work, "The Gulag Archipelago," part memoir, part history of the prison system in which millions of Russians lost their lives, was smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm and first published in the West.One of Solzhenitsyn's sons spoke today of his father's motivation in writing.STEPAN SOLZHENITSYN, Son of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The misery of people here and the lack of freedom under the Soviet regime, their impoverishment after the Soviet regime was always a source of great pain to him. That is why he opposed the Soviet regime. JEFFREY BROWN: Solzhenitsyn was charged with treason in 1974 and forced to leave his country. He lived in the United States for almost 20 years and continued to write about the Soviet Union, while also criticizing what he saw as the failings of the West.In 1994, he received a hero's welcome upon return to his native land. It was there that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday, outside Moscow, as his wife said he had wished: at home in the summer. He was 89 years old.