It’s the birthday of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, born in Kislovodsk, Russia in 1918 who was thrown into the gulag as a young man for saying that Stalin wasn’t Marxist enough in one of his personal letters. But the Gulag changed his life, because in a strange way, it was only in the Gulag that Russians spoke freely about their political beliefs. Solzhenitsyn later wrote, “You can have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power.” (Writer’s Almanac)
