During the last years of WWII Solzhenitsyn wrote letters to a school friend criticizing Stalin in veiled references. Solzhenitsyn was arrested upon the discovery of these letters and thrown in Lubyanka prison in Moscow. He was sentenced to eight years of hard labor and worked on building projects in Moscow but his mathematics background got him transferred to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of State Security (MVD-MOB) research institute where he taught for four years. In 1950 for the last four years of his sentence he was sent to a "Special Camp" for political prisoners in Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan where he once again worked as a common laborer.

The camp in Ekibastuz inspired Solzhenitsyn to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich but it was also where he developed the cancer that nearly killed him. One month after his eight-year sentence had been completed in 1953, and even though Stalin had died, Solzhenitsyn was exiled, as a matter of common practice with political prisoners, for life to Kok-Terek in southern Kazakhstan. For the next 3 years Solzhenitsyn taught school and wrote in private. He was declared "rehabilitated" by the Soviet state in 1956 and allowed to eventually return to Moscow where his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which told of a prisoner's typical day inside a Soviet labor camp, was a sensation because it admitted for the first time the existence of such camps. The book was also seen as a weapon against Stalin's memory. Although it's publication made Solzhenitsyn famous both in the USSR, Europe, and America, in 1964 Solzhenitsyn began to experience censorship and trouble again culminating in the confiscation of all his manuscripts in 1965 by the secret police.

In 1968 both novels were published unauthorized in Western Europe and England and Solzhenitsyn, who was now looked upon as subversive, was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union. In 1970 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he did not accept in person. In 1973 he published in Western Europe the first of three volumes of his greatest work, The Gulag Archipelago, which chronicled the abusive history of the Soviet system of labor and prison camps from 1917 on. Because he dared to expose the lies behind the Soviet system, Solzhenitsyn was arrested for treason on February 12, 1974 and sent into exile to Western Germany the next day.

In the later part of 1974 Solzhenitsyn collected his Nobel Prize and published the second and third volumes of his The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn became an outspoken critic of the Soviet communists, published profusely, and eventually moved to the United States to settle in Vermont until the 1990s when he regained his Soviet citizenship. He returned to Russia in 1994 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.