Alexander Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. On 12 February he was arrested after the KGB discovered material connected with The Gulag Archipelago; the following day he was deported to Frankfurt, West Germany, and stripped of his Soviet citizenship.
The expulsion followed years of official harassment. Solzhenitsyn’s writing exposed political repression and the Soviet prison-camp system, first gaining international attention through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. The publication of The Gulag Archipelago abroad in 1973 intensified the authorities’ response.
The year is sometimes confused with 1970, when Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He did not travel to Stockholm to receive it because he feared the Soviet government would prevent his return. After his deportation, he accepted the prize at the 1974 ceremony.
Solzhenitsyn initially lived in West Germany, later moving to Switzerland and then the United States. He returned to Russia in 1994, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of his citizenship.