Brave words broke taboos and shook Soviet empire

WHEN Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the literary magazine Novy Mir back in November 1962, taboos were shattered. Secrets were unearthed. And the Soviet Union was shaken to its foundations.

Solzhenitsyn’s novel described a day in the life of a carpenter in the Soviet Union’s secret network of slave labour camps, where starvation, bitter cold and punishing work regimes were the rule.

The author was working as a provincial maths teacher, and his greatest work, The Gulag Archipelago, was still to come. But One Day was to shock the USSR and the world.