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Biography
Elizaveta Denisovna Voronyanskaya (died September 1973) was an assistant of the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and typist for the manuscript of his book The Gulag Archipelago (1973), a history of the Gulag forced-labour camps in the Soviet Union.
The manuscript had been smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm and was ready for publication in New York and Paris, but Solzhenitsyn had wished for first publication within the Soviet Union. His plans were upset by the KGB, who tortured Voronyanskaya and uncovered the hiding place of the manuscript. Voronyanskaya was then found hanged in her apartment, allegedly as a result of suicide. Solzhenitsyn went ahead with publication, and a Russian-language edition of the book was published in Paris on 26 December 1973.
Solzhenitsyn was arrested on 12 February 1974 and deported to Germany. He lived in exile in the West until his return to Russia two decades later.