February 14, 1974
The Soviet authorities formally charged Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn with treason one day after expelling him from the country. The writer, 55, who had already spent ten years in prison under Stalin for his dissident writings, had been under investigation for six weeks after his novel Gulag Archipelago, depicting life in the labor camps, was published in the West. He lived in exile in Switzerland until 1976 when he and his family went to live in Vermont. With the collapse of the Soviet system, the charges against Solzhenitsyn were dropped, but he didn’t return to his homeland until 1994.
