Word: gulag
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...Soviet press pursued its campaign of vilification against Russian Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn last week, government officials struck out at yet another target: foreign newsmen. The 60 Moscow-based Western correspondents were cautioned about their reporting of Soviet dissent and the raging controversy over Solzhenitsyn's new book, The Gulag Archipelago, an exhaustive study of the Soviet system of terror under Lenin and Stalin. In an article in the Literary Gazette, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Vsevolod Sofinsky warned that foreign correspondents would "create difficulties for themselves" by seeking what Sofinsky called "nonexistent facts and information" about dissenters like Solzhenitsyn. Similar admonitions...
...measures were a gauge of the Kremlin's dismay over the extent of Western press coverage of Gulag since its publication in Paris last December. In an effort to blunt the effect abroad of the book's disclosures of Communist repression, Soviet news stories sent round the world portrayed the author as an opponent of detente, allied with "hawks, Maoists and the followers of Hitler." At home, newspapers, periodicals, radio and TV continued to assault Solzhenitsyn with such epithets as "traitor," "blasphemer," "renegade," "fascist," "counterrevolutionary" and "enemy of the people." Party activists and policemen were out scouring factories...
...brave men could be found to speak up for him in Russia. Among these was Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. With a courage commensurate to Solzhenitsyn's, the physicist told a Swiss journalist that "the spiritual and moral impact of the facts revealed in Gulag will be enormous. Only by becoming conscious of the crimes perpetrated in the recent past can we hope to get out of this bloody circle. I am convinced that this work is of capital importance to our people and to the whole of humanity." The pitifully small showing of support...
...concern for Solzhenitsyn's safety mounted in the West, publishers were gearing up for a record bestseller. In Paris, the Russian-language edition sold out in three weeks. In New York, bookstores reported that the first copies arriving from France were snapped up by Soviet diplomats. Gulag's Swiss publisher ordered an additional 260,000 printing of the German translation after selling out 50,000 books in a week...
Solzhenitsyn challenged the Soviets to expose and punish those responsible for the mass slavery and murder he describes in Gulag. "What a catharsis that would be for the country!" he exclaimed. "Yet they say not a word, utter no moral judgment on all the executioners, the inquisitors and the informers." Instead, he said, "as soon as the West German radio announced that Gulag would be broadcast for a half-hour daily, they frantically rushed to jam it. Not a single word of this book must penetrate our country. As if they could stop...