“Where an open war is impossible, oppression can continue quietly behind the scenes. Terrorism. Guerrilla warfare, violence, prisons, concentration camps. I ask you: Is this peace?The true antipode of peace is violence. And those who want peace in the world should remove not only war from the world but also violence. If there is no open war but there is still violence, that is not peace.”

Soviet and Russian author and dissident

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was a Soviet and Russian author and dissident. He is known for drawing world attention to political repression in the Soviet Union, especially the Gulag prison system, and for receiving the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature. His nonfiction book The Gulag Archipelago confronted the Soviet state directly and reached a vast readership. The work made his critique of repression widely known and confirmed his place as a major voice in Russian letters.