The death of a Russian legend.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn has passed away at 89 in Moscow. He is famous for exposing the horrors of Stalin's slave labor camps to the world, and establishing the word "gulag" in the popular lexicon. His most famous work, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", chronicles the sufferings of an inmate of Stalin's prison system. Khrushchev ordered him to be published in 1962, as a way to break from the horrors of Stalinism, but later rulers banned his works and eventually deported him to the West. He eventually returned to Russia as a hero, where he continued to be a harsh critic of both Russian leadership and Western government as a model for everyone else, contradictory positions that reflect the nationalism of a man who loved his country, even after his own harsh treatment. He also won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. The world owes him a debt for having the courage to chronicle some of the worst aspects of Stalinism, which prior to that time was still seen as some sort of socialist paradise by many left-leaning intellectuals in the US and Europe. His publications underscored how indefensible their positions really were.