Word: solzhenitsyn
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After a stolid five-day silence, the Soviet government last week lashed out at Alexander Solzhenitsyn's sensational new book, The Gulag Archipelago (TIME, Jan. 7). It called the work "an anti-Soviet lampoon sent abroad by Mr. Solzhenitsyn in the guise of a New Year gift." Far from being a lampoon, the book is a meticulously documented account of the agony of millions of innocent people who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, were imprisoned in the vast "archipelago" of slave-labor camps...
...diatribe against him, the official Soviet news agency Tass made no attempt to counter Solzhenitsyn's harrowing documentation. Instead, the agency wrongly quoted the author as writing that the Czarist regime was "liberal and loving," and Nazi rule "gracious and merciful," in contrast with the Soviet treatment of its people. Then, a nationwide TV program accused him of "malicious slander." The attacks seemed to presage yet another massive Soviet press campaign against the persecuted Nobel-prizewinning writer. Still, Tass did stop short of calling for Solzhenitsyn's arrest...
...reason for Tass's hesitancy, Western experts surmise, is that the Kremlin leaders are now agonizing over how to deal with the Soviet system's most eloquent critic. Their dilemma is acute. If they arrest Solzhenitsyn, they can expect an unprecedented storm of protest from abroad. This, they know, would endanger Soviet hopes for Western economic aid. On the other hand, the Politburo can scarcely ignore Solzhenitsyn's defiance, as scores of U.S., European and Asian newspapers begin serializing extracts from the book...
Orchestrated Mail. After Khrushchev, the new Soviet leaders took up repression again in a serious way - isolating the rebellious, taking away their jobs, jailing them, sending them to asylums. Lesser-known dissidents were easily silenced. The better known, like Solzhenitsyn, have tried to save themselves with publicity. Yet in May 1972, says Medvedev, it seemed that the stage had been set to charge Russia's greatest living writer with defaming the Soviet state. Richard Nixon was then on his way to Moscow, however. As Medvedev dryly relates: "An agreement was expected, amongst many others, on cultural and scientific affairs...
Medvedev knows his way around the Soviet bureaucracy, and it is in that sort of expertise that his book is most interesting. He understands how campaigns of public opinion are mounted, as when Pravda presented an outpouring of orchestrated "mail" against awarding Solzhenitsyn the Lenin Prize. There is a cold fascination in learning that Glavlit-the machinery of hacks that controls censorship-could overrule even First Secretary Khrushchev about what should be published. More recently, Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov (Quiet Flows the Don) had to delete a chapter from a new novel called They Fought for the Motherland at the censors...