Word: writers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hour behind schedule, Aeroflot Flight 031 last week touched down at London's Heathrow Airport. One of the passengers from Moscow had very special reasons for his trip. To his superiors in the Soviet Writers' Union, Author Anatoly Kuznetsov, 39, had explained that he needed to visit London in order to conduct research for a book on Lenin, who lived there in 1902. Actually, Kuznetsov had a much more compelling motive. Four days after his arrival in London, he managed to evade his Soviet-assigned traveling companion and flee to freedom. Seeking refuge in the home...
...increasingly repressive intellectual climate, Kuznetsov remained in good standing in official circles. Unlike Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose works are banned in the Soviet Union, or Poet Andrei Voznesensky, who is forbidden to travel abroad, Kuznetsov seemed to enjoy the privileges and prerogatives that come to an obedient Soviet writer. He has been a member of the Communist Party since 1955. Only last month, after Poet Evgeny Evtushenko and two other liberals were purged from the editorial board of Yunost (Youth), a big Soviet monthly, Kuznetsov was given one of the posts...
Secretly, Kuznetsov was desperately unhappy. For him the final blow was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which, he says, turned Russia's intelligentsia against the Soviet regime. He began planning his escape. His pretext for traveling abroad was perfect. How could Moscow deny a Soviet writer the opportunity to research a book on Lenin's stay in Britain? Kuznetsov transferred his Russian royalty payments to his wife and nine-year-old son. After photographing the pages of his unpublished works, he sewed the 35-mm. film into the lining of his coat. Into his suitcase Kuznetsov crammed copies...
Floyd telephoned Kuznetsov's plea for asylum to the Home Office. A short time later, an official auto picked up the Russian writer at Floyd's residence and whisked him to a government-owned "safe house" in the suburbs. While British intelligence agents began an interrogation, Home Secretary James Callaghan conferred with Prime Minister Harold Wilson about the case. Their decision: to grant Kuznetsov an unlimited residence visa...
...should a writer whose books have sold millions of copies, and who is extremely popular and well-off in his own country, suddenly decide not to return to that country, which, moreover, he loves...