He served as an officer in the Red Army during the Second World War. Arrested in 1945 because he criticized Stalin in his private correspondence, he was sentenced to spend eight years in a Soviet concentration camp. As a result of this experience, he started his career as a writer. Soviet censorship fell on many of his works and in 1974 he was expelled from the URSS. In his The Gulag Archipelago (1973) he gave a pivotal representation of the Soviet concentration camps’ system. He could return to Russia in 1994.