Word: solzhenitsyns
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From that perspective, the Solzhenitsyn case has long been regarded by the Nixon Administration as troublesome for the course of detente, however just the writer's case and criticisms of the Soviet regime. In turn, Solzhenitsyn has often been cited by opponents of East-West accommodation as the symbol and proof of the Kremlin's resistance to any ideological or social change...
...retribution against him. By all accounts, apparently not. He has never directly engaged in polemics about detente, unlike his friend and fellow dissident, Physicist Andrei Sakharov, who appealed to the U.S. Congress last year to make democratization of the U.S.S.R. a precondition for expanding trade relations with Russia. Solzhenitsyn's concerns have always been less political than moral. In his Nobel Prize lecture, he wrote: "The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all. People in the East should without exception be concerned with what people are thinking in the West; people in the West should...
Though provoked by Solzhenitsyn's defiance, the Soviet leaders' action against him was doubtless calculated to deprive the dissident movement within Russia of its spiritual leader while further intimidating the regime's remaining critics. About 50 dissidents have been detained and interrogated in the past three weeks, and many feared that Sakharov might soon be deported too. "We now feel very naked, very alone," a young liberal intellectual told Correspondent John Shaw in Moscow last week...
Nonetheless, Solzhenitsyn's example may in fact hearten rather than discourage Russia's libertarians. Last week Sakharov and nine other prominent dissenters issued an impassioned defense of Solzhenitsyn's actions: "His so-called 'treason' consists of his disclosure to the whole world, with shattering force, of the monstrous crimes committed in the U.S.S.R. not very long ago." They demanded the publication of Gulag in the Soviet Union and called for an international investigation of the crimes against innocent Soviet citizens...
...what now of Solzhenitsyn in exile? From a financial standpoint, at least, he has no worries. Swiss banks have custody of anywhere from $2 million to $6 million in royalties on his books?money that he had earmarked for "humanitarian purposes." Part of this could justifiably be used to ensure his family's future. Ironically, a new life of freedom might expose Solzhenitsyn to a hazard he never faced in Moscow: the constant, distracting attention of paparazzi and other celebrity seekers. So far he seems to be tolerating, if not actually enjoying the novelty. On arriving in Zurich, he smilingly...