Word: solzhenitsyns
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Newspapers know that making heroes sells copy. Three weeks ago, for example, you could not find a major newspaper or news magazine which did not show the morose portrait of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn staring ominously from its front page. We were presented with a hero--the all-American Russian: a patriot, a defender of the free press, an anti-communist, an international celebrity. But in three weeks, Solzhenitsyn has disappeared from the media. I would not be surprised if Gulag Archipelago gets bad reviews...
...Solzhenitsyn, like all the recent heroes of the establishment press--Sam Ervin, Howard Baker, Lowell Weicker, and so on--is the wrong kind of hero to take hold of America. Those facets of his life which would upset a hero's image stand too close to the surface to be abstracted into a legend. For example, he lives as a millionaire in Switzerland. He calls for the revival of the Russian Orthodox church, a brutal arm of czarist oppression before 1917. He branded former Attorney General Ramsey Clark a "fluttering butterfly" for ignoring Russian dissidents, but visiting POW camps...
...worse, if Solzhenitsyn cannot be legendary, he cannot be one of the people either. His struggle is too far from our everyday lives. His example, if you are responsive to it, is one to respect from a distance, not one you can emulate...
...Although Solzhenitsyn's deportation created scarcely a dent in East-West relations, the Soviets tried to blame possible future disturbance on Solzhenitsyn himself. An 8,000-word article in Literary Gazette last week suggested that the writer and other dissidents must be held responsible for any setbacks in the course of detente. There was, however, little cause for Kremlin concern. Diplomats in most major European capitals generally agreed that the Soviets acted with a degree of restraint in exiling Solzhenitsyn rather than liquidating him, as would have happened under Stalin. One measure of detente, argued a high-ranking State...
...Major Thomas T. Hart, one of the 1,300 Americans still missing in Viet Nam), and some neglected (Marina Oswald is the major biographical subject). An interview section presents a conversation with The Exorcist Author William Peter Blatty. "Out of the Pages" features an eerily prophetic excerpt from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle describing the arrest of a man in Moscow. Black-and-white or monochrome pictures illustrate nearly every story; some items run at around 60 words, and the upper limit for most stories (except biographical pieces) will be 1,500 words...