Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the most prominent figures in the history of cultural opposition in the Soviet bloc. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer and novelist whose book The Gulag Archipelago - which was inspired by and documents his own imprisonment in Stalin's labour camps - was one of the most widely distributed literary works via transnational samizdat/tamizdad networks. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970 and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974.