In February of 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was taken away in handcuffs. Soviet military counterintelligence had intercepted his letters to a childhood friend. They had criticized Stalin, calling him “the boss” in coded language. For this crime under Article 58, “Counterrevolutionary activity,” Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years of hard labor in the gulag. He spent three of those years at Ekibastuz labor camp in northeastern Kazakhstan, working as a stonemason laying bricks in below-zero

The Gulag was the Soviet Union's sprawling network of forced labor camps that imprisoned millions between 1930 and 1953. Under Joseph Stalin's rule, this system combined political repression with brutal economic exploitation. Approximately 14 million people passed through the labor camps and another 4 million through labor colonies during this period. Prisoners faced starvation rations, extreme weather, exhausting work quotas, and summary executions. Between 1.5 and 1.7 million prisoners died in