Word: solzhenitsyns
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Increased Alarm. Now even more than before his exile, Solzhenitsyn is determined that The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental study of Soviet repression, should reach the Soviet people. Just before his deportation, he taped an excerpt from an unpublished part of Gulag for a BBC broadcast to the U.S.S.R. Last week he met with his Paris publisher to arrange for publication of the whole seven-part work, of which only two sections have appeared in the West. At the same time, the Kremlin was showing increasing alarm at the spread of Gulag in the Soviet Union via Western shortwave radio broadcasts...
...effects of Gulag's revelations, the Soviet authorities printed what amounted to an official samizdat edition. Thousands of copies of Gulag were distributed to top Party officials, newspaper editors and other ideological apparatchiks, who presumably will use them to better prepare their rebuttal. Meanwhile press attacks on Solzhenitsyn continued. Letters published in all the Soviet papers branded him a "traitor," while the head of the Russian Writers Union confidently asserted that Solzhenitsyn was headed for "inglorious oblivion" in the West...
Merely possessing a copy of Gulag has become a dangerous offense for ordinary Soviet citizens, and dissidents who have defended Gulag may soon be punished. Western experts believe that Physicist Andrei Sakharov and Historian Roy Medvedev may be forced into exile for their praise of the book. One of Solzhenitsyn's more obscure defenders, Writer Vladimir Voinovich, a former railway worker, has been expelled from the Soviet Writers Union...
Timid Choice. One Russian writer who rather surprisingly came to Solzhenitsyn's defense was Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the angry Establishment poet who has been notably servile toward the Kremlin in recent years. After learning of Solzhenitsyn's arrest, Yevtushenko sent what he described as "a polite and mild" telegram to Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. In it, he expressed his anxiety about the writer's fate and how it might affect the U.S.S.R.'s prestige...
...result, a scheduled Soviet TV show about Yevtushenko was canceled and he was given an angry summons from the Writers Union. Yevtushenko refused the union's demand that he publicly denounce Solzhenitsyn. Instead, he circulated a letter of protest about the cancellation of his show, in which he expressed "bitter disagreement" with parts of Gulag. Yet he argued for disclosure of "the bloody crimes of the Stalin era documented in the terrifying pages" of Gulag. Echoing one of Solzhenitsyn's recent appeals, the poet wrote: "In our timidity, let each of us make a choice whether to consciously...