This included support such as donating household goods for those in exile, helping relatives who faced expulsion from work, or offering places to stay in Moscow for wives who journeyed to visit their husbands in remote Siberian camps.
After Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR in 1974 following the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, he set up a fund in Switzerland, donating all present and future international royalties for the book to it.
For this, groups of people, unknown to one another, collected information on the existence and whereabouts of political prisoners across the Soviet Union and distributed funds and other material support to them and their families.
[1] The administrators of the fund ensured that the money was sent legally to banks in Moscow; after the state had taken one third in tax, what remained was distributed in roubles.
The KGB then attempted to halt its distribution by telling the families of political prisoners that, if money were accepted, their loved ones would endure even worse conditions in the camps.