Alexander Archipelago

Alexander Archipelago , island group off SE Alaska. The islands are the exposed tops of the submerged coastal mountains that rise steeply from the Pacific Ocean. Deep, fjordlike channels separate the islands and cut them off from the mainland; the northern part of the Inside Passage threads its way among the islands. The largest islands are Chichagof, Admiralty, Baranof, Wrangell , Revillagigedo, Kupreanof, Mitkoff, and Prince of Wales . All the islands are rugged, densely forested, and have an abundance of wildlife. The Tlingit are native to the area. Ketchikan on Revillagigedo and Sitka on Baranof are the main centers of population. Lumbering, trapping, fishing, and canning are the main industries. The archipelago was visited by the Russians in 1741 and was later explored by Britain, Spain, and the United States.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Isayevich (1918– ), Russian prose writer. He joined the Red Army in 1941. Arrested in 1945 for remarks critical of Stalin, he was sent to a labour camp where in 1952 he developed stomach cancer. In 1953 he was released into ‘administrative exile’. In 1956 he returned to Ryazan, in central Russia, to work as a teacher. His first published story, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), caused a sensation through its honest and pioneering description of camp life. His major novels, Cancer Ward (1968) and The First Circle (1969), could only be published abroad, and in late 1969 he was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The appearance abroad of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago (1973–5), an epic ‘history and geography’ of the labour camps, caused the Soviet authorities to deport Solzhenitsyn to West Germany on 13 February 1974. He settled in the United States, where he continued a series of novels begun with August 1914 (1971), offering an alternative picture of Soviet history. He returned to Russia in 1994.

Gulag a system of labour camps maintained in the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1955 in which many people died. Besides ordinary criminals, inmates included dissident intellectuals, political opponents, and members of ethnic minorities; the word became widely known in the west in the 1960s and 1970s with the translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's works, notably The Gulag Archipelago.

The word is Russian, from G(lavnoe) u(pravlenie ispravitel′no-trudovykh) lag(ereĭ) ‘Chief Administration for Corrective Labour Camps’.