Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 2000 Photo: IC

Published 40 years ago in Paris, Russian dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, revealed the shocking truth about Soviet terror and changed the way the USSR was viewed in the West.

When Solzhenitsyn's mammoth tome hit bookshops on December 28, 1973 the shock was enormous as it brought to light the horrific scale of the repression under Joseph Stalin.

The word "gulag" - a Russian­ acronym for Main Camp Directorate - refers to the vast prison system that left millions dead, and has become synonymous in all languages with brutal detention­ camps.

First published by YMCA-Press, the Soviet emigrant publishing house, the book was translated into 40 languages­ and some 10 million copies were printed around the world.

"Judged by how much impact a book has on the course of world history, this is certainly the most influential book of the 20th century," said French publisher Claude Durand, Solzhenitsyn's literary­ agent.

"Solzhenitsyn's book was a shock to us," Nobel Peace Prize winner and Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, who died in 1989, wrote in his memoir.

"From the first pages arose the sinister world of grey camps surrounded by barbed wire, torture chambers... Millions of our citizens vanished in glacial mines of Kolyma."

It did not take long for the Kremlin to retaliate. Two months after the book's publication, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his citizenship and expelled from the USSR.

He returned to Russia in 1994, after 20 years in exile.

Until the fall of the Communist regime, Solzhenitsyn spent all the revenues from the book's sales helping Soviet­ political prisoners.

AFP