Hector Tobar worked at the Los Angeles Times for two decades: as a city reporter, national and foreign correspondent, columnist and with the books and culture department. It was so cold here that the people were dying like flies.” People were brought there in the clothes they were wearing when they were detained. “There were barracks with no heating,” a tour guide told Radio Free Europe. But the guides at the city’s museum will tell you about the gulag. He was an unwavering defender of Russian national pride, and he argued that Ekibastuz should have remained in Russia.Īnd the prison camp was long ago leveled to make way for a sports stadium. Solzhenitsyn is not well remembered in Ekibastuz.
In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested and exiled.įor their story on the anniversary of “One Day,” Radio Free Europe sent a correspondent to the site of the infamous prison where Solzhenitsyn wrote the story - in the town of Ekibastuz, in a region that passed into Kazakhstan after the breakup of the Soviet Union. “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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