Word: solzhenitsyns
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With those words, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia's greatest living novelist, last week lashed out at what has become perhaps the most sinister aspect of the current Soviet crackdown on internal dissent: the confinement of dissidents in mental institutions on the grounds that they are mentally unbalanced. Said Solzhenitsyn in his protest statement, which was circulated to Western newsmen in Moscow: "If this were only the first case! But it has become a fashion, a devious method of reprisal without determining guilt when the real cause is too shameful to be stated...
...Solzhenitsyn's protest was prompted by the case of Dr. Zhores Medvedev, a prominent Soviet geneticist who last month was locked up in a mental institution. Nine months ago Medvedev lost his job as head of a radiological institute in Obninsk. Reason: the publication in the West of a book, in which he charged that Stalin's pet scientist, Trofim Lysenko, had thwarted the advancement of Soviet biological research. Medvedev attacked Lysenko for distorting facts for political reasons, and for imposing "demagoguery and intimidation" on Soviet science, leading to "scientific bankruptcy." In line with Communist ideology, Lysenko taught...
Chalked Appeal. Other outstanding Russian scientists and intellectuals shared Solzhenitsyn's outrage. The day after Medvedev's incarceration four well-known Russian scientists-Andrei Sakharov, Pyotr Kapitsa, Vladmir En-gelgardt and Boris Astaurov-sent protest telegrams to the mental institution. In front of a classroom of students, Sakharov, the author of a brilliant essay on the inevitability of the convergence of American and Russian systems, who lectures at the Lebedev Institute of Physics in Moscow, chalked on the blackboard a plea for signatures on a protest petition. Other intellectuals, including Alexander Tvardovsky, the ousted editor of Novy...
...Another official removed from his post was Aleksei Romanov, chairman of the State Cinematography Committee, better known as the former Soviet intelligence officer who denounced Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1945 and was thus responsible for sending the great novelist to prison and exile for eleven years...
...enough job in the new government. Grass denies that. As proof, he holds up not only his work in progress but a completed body of writing, some of it done during his political period in the past five years, that has placed him beyond Mailer and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, at least in creative range and staying power...