You only have power over people so long as you do not take everything away from them. But when you have robbed man of everything, he is no longer in your pocket—he is free.

Born this day in 1918, Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—best known for The Gulag Archipelago, which chronicles the U.S.S.R.’s vast system of prisons and labour camps—received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1970.