Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk. He became a Soviet and Russian author and dissident whose work helped raise global awareness of political repression in the Soviet Union, particularly the Gulag prison system. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature." His nonfiction work The Gulag Archipelago became one of his most significant contributions, amounting to what observers described as a head-on challenge to the Soviet state. The book sold tens of millions of copies and became instrumental in documenting the realities of Soviet imprisonment and labor camps. He died on August 3, 2008, in Moscow.