Irish Examiner view: Navalny trials

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is serving sentences totalling 11 and a half years. Picture: AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko, File

It is 50 years ago that the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published his eviscerating real-life accounts of servitude in the Russian forced labour camps. The Gulag Archipelago defined the state’s comprehensive and systematic use of terror and repression against its own people.

Post-publication, the Nobel literature prize winner lost his Soviet citizenship and relocated via West Germany to the US. He returned to Russia in 1994 before dying in 2008.