In February of 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was taken away in handcuffs. Soviet military counterintelligence had intercepted his letters to a childhood friend. They had criticized Stalin, calling him “the boss” in coded language. For this crime under Article 58, “Counterrevolutionary activity,” Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years of hard labor in the gulag. He spent three of those years at Ekibastuz labor camp in northeastern Kazakhstan, working as a stonemason laying bricks in below-zero