The Truth That Could Not Be Buried

In the summer of 1973, Soviet secret police hauled in Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, a sixty-seven-year-old typist in Leningrad, and interrogated her for days. They wanted one thing: the location of a hidden manuscript. Under relentless pressure, she broke and revealed where a copy was concealed. Days later, she was found dead by hanging. The manuscript the KGB so desperately feared was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago — a searing, 1,800-page documentation of the Soviet forced labor camp system, drawn from the testimony of 227 witnesses and his own eight years of imprisonment.…