Elizaveta Voronyanskaya

Who is Elizaveta Voronyanskaya?

Elizaveta Denisovna Voronyanskaya was a typist for the manuscript of The Gulag Archipelago, first published 26 December 1973, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The manuscript for The Gulag Archipelago had already been smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm. This work, a history of the Gulag prison camps, was ready for publication in New York and Paris by 1973 but Solzhenitsyn had wished for first publication in the Soviet Union.

These plans were upset by the KGB which tortured Voronyanskaya; the KGB managed to uncover the hiding place of the manuscript. Voronyanskaya then hanged herself. Solzhenitsyn was arrested on 12 February 1974 and forced into exile in the West until his return to Russia two decades later.