Great Regulars: Alexander Solzhenitsyn was easy to admire

and difficult to read.

The Russian writer, who died Sunday at 89, was a figure of enormous moral and physical courage whose book "The Gulag Archipelago" exposed the brutal, capricious nature of the penal system in the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn spent seven years in a labor camp and three more in internal exile for writing a letter to a friend that, among other things, referred to Stalin as "the man with the mustache."

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: One Russian's difficult legacy

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