Solzhenitsyn was born one year after the Russian Revolution. In Soviet Russia, Christians were among the millions who suffered persecution. Solzhenitsyn reached adulthood during the years that Joseph Stalin's "purges" killed tens of thousands of people. Solzhenitsyn served in World War II in the Soviet Army. Arrested in 1945 for criticizing Stalin, Solzhenitsyn spent the next eight years in prison camps. There he encountered Orthodox Christians whose tenacious faith inspired him to accept Christianity. In 1962, after release from prison and near death from cancer, Solzhenitsyn published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; this book exposed the brutal conditions in the Soviet labor camps. Further writings were smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and was exiled in 1974. While living in the U.S. he spoke not only against communism, but against western materialism and decadence. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994.