# Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Russian novelist, historian, and dissident whose [[The Gulag Archipelago]] (1973) provided the definitive literary indictment of the [[Soviet Union]]'s labor camp system and became the single most influential anti-communist text of the Cold War. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1970. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, lived in Vermont until 1994, then returned to Russia. Solzhenitsyn matters to the vault beyond his anti-Soviet legacy because he has been adopted by the contemporary American right — particularly the [[National Conservatism]] and post-liberal movements — as a prophet of Western cultural decline. His 1978 Harvard commencement address attacking Western materialism, moral relativism, and the "tilt of freedom in the direction of evil" anticipated by decades the critiques that NatCon intellectuals and [[Christian Nationalism]] advocates now make. Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, and other post-liberal thinkers cite Solzhenitsyn as a foundational influence. His combination of anti-communism, Russian Orthodox Christianity, and cultural conservatism makes him a rare figure claimed by both Cold War hawks and post-liberal communitarians. ## See Also - [[The Gulag Archipelago]] — his masterwork - [[Soviet Union]] — the system he exposed - [[Political Repression]] — the subject of his life's work - [[National Conservatism]] — the movement that adopted him as intellectual ancestor