This day in history

Two decades after being expelled from the USSR, Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returns to Russia in an emotional homecoming.

In 1945, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years of hard labour for criticising Stalin in a letter to a friend. His prison experiences formed the basis for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his famous first novel. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and began work on The Gulag Archipelago, his vast history of the Soviet totalitarian system, from Lenin's ascension to the denunciation of Stalin. Foreign publication of this work led to his expulsion from the USSR in 1974, and he settled in the United States. Soviet officials dropped charges of treason against Solzhenitsyn in 1990, and four years later he returned home.

He has continued writing and often publicly criticises the post-Soviet Russian government.
 

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is indicted for war crimes by The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
 

Tsar Peter the Great founds St Petersburg and proclaims it to be the new capital of Russia.