Word: solzhenitsyns
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...Soviet campaign against Alexander Solzhenitsyn took a vicious new turn last week: Soviet authorities pressured the Nobel Prizewinning author's former friends and colleagues-and even his ex-wife-into denouncing him. This time the forum for the attacks was not the controlled Soviet press but newspapers in the U.S. and Europe...
...Christian Science Monitor published an interview with a former fellow prisoner who said that Solzhenitsyn was the informer responsible for his being sent to a concentration camp. The leading Parisian daily Le Figaro printed an interview with Natalya Reshetovskaya, Solzhenitsyn's divorced wife. She dismissed Solzhenitsyn's new book, The Gulag Archipelago, a study of Soviet terror, as mere "concentration-camp folklore." In addition, vituperative articles by prominent Soviet writers about Gulag have appeared in the New York Times and France's Le Monde. These and other "exclusives" appearing in the Western press were all arranged...
...Solzhenitsyn's response was quick in coming. In a statement issued to Western correspondents last week, he identified Novosti as a "reliable branch" of the secret police and accused Soviet authorities of "standing on their lies behind a fortress of newsprint." He declared that "world public opinion has thus far kept them from killing the author of Gulag or even from imprisoning him. That would indeed be a confirmation of the book. But there remains the time-honored method of slander and personal vilification that is now being vigorously pursued...
Most galling to Solzhenitsyn was the Christian Science Monitor interview with his boyhood friend Nikolai Vitkevich, who was summoned by Novosti from his home in the Caucasus to Moscow to talk with the Monitor's correspondent. Vitkevich accused Solzhenitsyn of being guilty of the same crime of informing on friends for which the author damns others in Gulag...
...Since Solzhenitsyn refuses to leave Russia, Sovietologists surmise that he might soon be stripped of his nationality and banished to the West as a stateless person. If this should happen, Solzhenitsyn will not become a man without a country; Russia will be a country without...