Word: solzhenitsyn
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Despite their common struggle against the arbitrariness of the Soviet system, Sakharov and fellow Nobel laureate and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stood far apart on fundamental questions of Soviet life...
...Solzhenitsyn claimed that I had understated Stalin's crimes. According to one estimate, 60 million people had died as a result of terror, famine and associated disease. My figure of 10 million deaths in labor camps was too low. I was also wrong to differentiate Stalin from Lenin: corruption and destruction began the day the Bolsheviks seized power, and have continued ever since. It's a mistake to seek a multiparty system; what we need is a nonparty system...
...continued meeting into the early 1970s, not always amicably. Once, Solzhenitsyn's first wife scolded Sakharov for harping on the issue of Jewish emigration and fretting about the harassment of his wife's children, pointing out that the Russian people faced greater worries. As Sakharov writes, Lusia was "outraged by the lecturing tone" and burst out, "Don't give me that 'Russian people' s---! You make breakfast for your own children, not for the whole Russian people!" Still, the Sakharovs were soon rallying to Solzhenitsyn's defense...
Music and joy have always been "Slava" Rostropovich's great goals, but he is also remarkable for his repeated refusals to bow down before the Kremlin. When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came under fire for his books on the Soviet Gulag, Rostropovich took him into his house. He also wrote a letter attacking the censors who banned Solzhenitsyn's work. "For 48 hours after I wrote that letter," Rostropovich recalls, "Galina did not sleep but cried. She told me, 'You have the right to destroy yourself, but what right do you have to destroy my life and the lives of your daughters...
When the Soviets invited the National Symphony to make its first visit to Moscow, they were also inviting a conductor whom they had stripped of his citizenship in 1978 for "unpatriotic activity." So the Supreme Soviet last month voted to restore that citizenship. Rostropovich considered delaying his return until Solzhenitsyn was similarly exonerated. When he recently visited Solzhenitsyn in Cavendish, Vt., the novelist said he would not return until all his books were available in the Soviet Union. Even Rostropovich cannot consider a permanent return yet. He has concert commitments for at least two years, and also two American grandchildren...