Word: solzhenitsyns
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With those dramatic words, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia's greatest living writer, summarized last week the stark fear that follows Soviet intellectuals today. Even as it improves relations with the West, the Soviet Union has embarked on the most ruthless campaign in decades to stifle ideological dissent within its own borders...
...Accident." Solzhenitsyn's fear, he made plain in an interview with the Associated Press and Le Monde, is neither metaphorical nor paranoid. "During the winter of 1971-72," he said, "I was warned through several channels that they [the KGB, the Russian secret police] were preparing to kill me in a 'car accident.' But here we have a peculiarity, I would almost say an advantage of our social structure: not a single hair falls or will fall from my head or from the head of members of my family without the knowledge or approval...
...Solzhenitsyn has spoken out before about his personal disagreement with Soviet officialdom. Never before, though, had he sounded so bitter or linked himself so directly and actively with other Russian dissenters. The reason seems to be twofold. One is that the government has not only surreptitiously threatened Solzhenitsyn's life but has also refused even to let him legally remain with his pregnant wife in Moscow. (He is defying the ban.) The other is that Solzhenitsyn, with a writer's sense of timing and drama, seems to recognize that this is a unique moment of crisis for Russian...
...embarrassing was the protest, not only in the West but in Russia itself, that Medvedev was released from the asylum after 19 days. His latest round with the Soviet government may have been provoked by his plans to publish a "factual tribute" to Solzhenitsyn entitled Ten Years After One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (TIME, May 28). It is a chronicle of the novelist's rise to fame and his later harassment by Soviet authorities after he published his bestselling novel...
Unlike Nobel Prizewinner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, however, Amalrik is virtually unknown in his own country. His two books have been published only in the West-in violation of Soviet law. In the first, Involuntary Journey to Siberia, he gives a spare, vivid account of his exile to a Siberian collective farm for "parasitism" (failure to hold a regular job). Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? is a political treatise that foretells Russia's ultimate disintegration, and predicted in 1969 that the U.S. and China would reach a rapprochement...