“This story was a huge event.” The thaw was short-lived. “For us, Solzhenitsyn was like a comet that fell from the sky,” the literary critic Benedikt Sarnov told the wire service AFP. Solzhenitsyn’s story was the first public acknowledgment of their suffering. Millions of Soviet citizens had either been incarcerated or had a loved one who was. “If Khrushchev hadn’t attacked Stalin at precisely that moment, my story would have never been published,” Solzhenitsyn, who died in 2008, later wrote. But with Khrushchev’s explicit approval, the novel was published, as part of Khrushchev’s official criticism of the “excesses” of Stalin’s reign.
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