Stalin critic reveals gulag secrets

A former Nobel prize winner, and one of the Soviet Union’s most famous dissident writers, has released a biography about his life opposing Stalin. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in a labour camp for criticising the Russian leader.

Previously he wrote several books condemning the horrors of Soviet prisons.

His unpublished manuscripts were smuggled to the West and secured him international recognition.

His Nobel Prize for Literature was denounced by the Soviet government as a politically hostile act.

Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 – returning to Russia twenty years later.

The 89-year-old now lives and works in Moscow.

At the book launch of the biography RT caught up with writer's wife, Natalia Solzhenitsyna.