 The story of the uprising was first committed to history in "The Gulag Archipelago", a work by former prisoner and Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.A year before the uprising, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin died.His death raised great hopes among the prisoners of amnesty or, failing that, prison reform, and this hope was further emboldened by the subsequent downfall of Stalin's right-hand man and state security chief, Lavrenty Beria.