Word: solzhenitsyns
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After a massive, three-week Soviet press campaign against him, Alexander Solzhenitsyn last week raised his voice in counterattack. In a statement issued to foreign newsmen from his Moscow home, the besieged writer defied the Kremlin to refute the charges made in his new book, The Gulag Archipelago. He accused the Soviets of damning Gulag 's description of Leninist and Stalinist terror out of "an animal fear of disclosure." To his critics he said: "You liars!" It was an unprecedented moment of confrontation between the Soviet state and a lone, heroic...
...Solzhenitsyn's outburst was sparked by charges in Pravda that his new book was "slanderous," "counterrevolutionary" and "treasonable." In support of these contentions, other Russian newspapers weighed in with quotations allegedly drawn from the Russian text of Gulag, which was published in Paris last month. All the Soviet accounts of his book, Solzhenitsyn said, were distortions designed to conceal its real content from Russian readers. Thus do Soviet leaders show, he declared, "how tenaciously they cling to the bloody past and how they want to drag it with them, like a sealed up sack, into the future...
...here are the prevarications of Literary Gazette. I am supposed to have said that 'the Soviet people are fiends.' Cite the page, liars! This is how I am quoted in order to incite my uninformed countrymen against me: 'Solzhenitsyn equates the Soviet people with the Nazi murderers.' That was a neat bit of word juggling. Yes, I did equate Nazi murderers with the murderers from the Cheka, the G.P.U. and the N.K.V.D. [secret police under Lenin and Stalin]. But Literary Gazette substitutes 'the Soviet people' for the police, so our own executioners can hide...
...Jewish minority--make congenial copy for western newspapers. But President Nixon's idea of detente--which didn't extend to letting the Chilean people choose a government without interference--evidently includes muting American criticism of East European governments. Radio Free Europe won't even be broadcasting Alexander Solzhenitsyn's new book, though a few years back it would have been all over the airwaves. It's a small thing, maybe, and probably doesn't make much difference, but it's typical of Nixon's support for totalitarianism around the world...
Underlying the Kremlin's dilemma is Gulag's unanswerable challenge to the authority, indeed the legitimacy of the post-Stalin regime. This challenge is implicit in Solzhenitsyn's call for the punishment of the more than 250,000 people that he estimates are guilty of the crimes he details in his book. Responsibility reaches far beyond former concentration-camp guards. By implication, myriad Soviet bureaucrats in the entire present-day chain of command are culpable. Recalling the punishment inflicted on prisoners like himself, Solzhenitsyn writes of those accountable: "We must be generous and not shoot them...