After serving out his complete eight-year sentence, plus one month, and having had a cancer operation, which he miraculously survived, Solzhenitsyn was released but was forced to live in Siberia, where he found a position as a high school mathematics teacher.
In 1957, Solzhenitsyn was permitted to return to European Russia in connection with a decree of the Twentieth Congress of the Russian Communist Party. He settled down in Ryazan, some 100 miles southeast of Moscow, and continued to teach physics and mathematics until the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the November 1962 issue of the literary magazine Novy Mir (New World). The novel catapulted him to national and international fame.
The reason for the Soviet regime's acquiescence to the publication of One Day was Premier Nikita Khrushchev's attempt to expose some of the horrors of Stalin's reign of terror in order to assert himself in the power struggle following the dictator's death. It was during this brief period of the so-called Khrushchev "thaw" that Solzhenitsyn was allowed to publish his works in the Soviet Union.
The end of 1964 marked the end of the de-Stalinization efforts of Khrushchev, and it also signaled the end of Solzhenitsyn's being officially tolerated. The praise for One Day and for his other popular short prose piece, "Matryona's Home," soon turned to criticism and to threats. His candidacy for the Lenin Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the USSR, was defeated, and after he had managed to smuggle a manuscript of his novel The First Circle out of the country, his private papers were confiscated in 1965 by the secret police. Subsequently, after much controversy and many debates inside the Soviet Union and in the West, Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers — thus, in practice, withdrawing all publication privileges from him and forcing him to publish his work abroad by smuggling the manuscripts out of the country. The First Circle, Cancer Ward, August 1914, and The Gulag Archipelago were published in this fashion.
