Word: solzhenitsyns
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Once again, Russia's heavy artillery was rolled out against that nation's greatest living novelist last week. In a major policy pronouncement, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda vowed that vigilance would henceforth be exercised to "sweep away" Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other "wretched renegades." The author's banned novels, Cancer Ward and The First Circle, which were bestsellers in the West, were excoriated by Pravda as "lampoons on the Soviet Union which blacken the achievements of our fatherland and the dignity of the Soviet people...
Even more ominously, the paper equated Solzhenitsyn with dissidents, like Andrei Amalric, who are now serving sentences in concentration camps for precisely the offenses Pravda attributes to Solzhenitsyn. So menacing was Pravda's denunciation that many Sovietologists fear for the writer's physical safety. They believe that Soviet hardliners, angered by the Nobel Prize award to Solzhenitsyn this month, have increased the pressure to bring the beleaguered author to trial...
...Figure. Solzhenitsyn's arrest would be the cruel but logical culmination of a three-year effort by the KGB, the Soviet secret police, to fabricate a case against him based on Article 70 of the Russian criminal code. That article makes it a crime, punishable by seven years' imprisonment, for a writer deliberately to "disseminate slander" about the Soviet system in Russia or abroad. In order to build a case that could appear plausible in court, the KGB has planted Solzhenitsyn's forbidden manuscripts, together with spurious "authorizations," on unsuspecting Western publishers. Many Sovietologists believe that...
Licko first met Solzhenitsyn in 1967, when he called on the writer at his former home in Ryazan, a city that is out of bounds to foreigners. Unaware that Licko had held a top post in the Slovak Central Committee during the Stalinist terror. Solzhenitsyn accorded him an interview-the first he had ever given a foreigner. On the strength of the interview, which was published in several European countries, Licko later visited London, where he boasted of his supposed intimacy with Solzhenitsyn; he also signed an affidavit saying that the author had entrusted him with a manuscript of Cancer...
...seems likely that the Soviet authorities either had denied him a visa for Sweden or had refused to guarantee that he could return home after the ceremony. In spite of the ban on his writings and the abuse poured on him in Russia, friends in Moscow report that Solzhenitsyn considers it "unthinkable" that he could live or work anywhere in the world except in his beloved country...