Underground Notes

By LANCE MORROW

TEN YEARS AFTER IVAN DENISOVICH by ZHORES MEDVEDEV 202 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

Last August while Russian Geneticist Zhores Medvedev was working in Britain -- with his government's permis sion -- Soviet authorities canceled his passport and revoked his citizenship, making him an involuntary emigre. Medvedev, who now lives in London, cannot have been surprised. The Soviets had tried to subdue him before, once locking him in an insane asylum for 19 days until worldwide protests embarrassed the government into releasing him. Medvedev's indignant dissidence (expressed in The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko and A Question of Madness) had marked him as a troublesome enemy of partiinost, that spirit of party orthodoxy that so many other Russian intellectuals, such as Pasternak, Daniel and Sinyavski, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, have been un able to accommodate. Medvedev's twin brother Roy, author of a massive anti-Stalinist work called Let History Judge, has also proved difficult. When Zhores Medvedev's Ten Years After Ivan Denisovich appeared in England last spring (TIME, May 28), it was apparently the guarantee of his exile.

Now published in the U.S., Ten Years is a crisp, contemptuous and sometimes sardonic record of Russia's intellectual life in the decade since Nikita Khrushchev's temporary thaw allowed Alexander Solzhenitsyn to publish his novel about life in a Stalinist work camp. At first Khrushchev praised One Day, but in March 1963 he told a meeting of party leaders and intellectuals: "Take my word for it, this is a very dangerous theme. It's a kind of stew that will attract flies like a carcass; all sorts of bourgeois scum from abroad will come crawling all over it."

Orchestrated Mail. After Khrushchev, the new Soviet leaders took up repression again in a serious way -- isolating the rebellious, taking away their jobs, jailing them, sending them to asylums. Lesser-known dissidents were easily silenced. The better known, like Solzhenitsyn, have tried to save themselves with publicity. Yet in May 1972, says Medvedev, it seemed that the stage had been set to charge Russia's greatest living writer with defaming the Soviet state. Richard Nixon was then on his way to Moscow, however. As Medvedev dryly relates: "An agreement was expected, amongst many others, on cultural and scientific affairs, and reprisals against Solzhenitsyn would not sound quite the right harmonious note."

Medvedev knows his way around the Soviet bureaucracy, and it is in that sort of expertise that his book is most interesting. He understands how campaigns of public opinion are mounted, as when Pravda presented an outpouring of orchestrated "mail" against awarding Solzhenitsyn the Lenin Prize. There is a cold fascination in learning that Glavlit--the machinery of hacks that controls censorship--could overrule even First Secretary Khrushchev about what should be published. More recently, Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov (Quiet Flows the Don) had to delete a chapter from a new novel called They Fought for the Motherland at the censors' insistence because it dealt with prison-camp tortures. In its place, Sholokhov substituted a discussion of fishing techniques.

The poet Alexander Tvardovsky, Solzhenitsyn's great patron, was forced in disgrace from the editorship of Novy Mir. Soon afterward, he had a stroke, but the official word came down that he had cancer; as one literary figure said: "The word thrombosis might be connected with the Novy Mir business, but cancer--that's from God."

The campaign against Solzhenitsyn was systematic. "From the beginning of 1966," writes Medvedev, "the name of Solzhenitsyn was no longer mentioned in articles of literary criticism." The secret police confiscated Solzhenitsyn's personal papers and records and made off with the typescript of his novel The First Circle. He found evidence that an electronic bug was installed in his house. Solzhenitsyn accepted speaking dates for various professional and cultural groups, often in confidence, and then found that every one of them had been mysteriously canceled, sometimes hours before the event.

Martyred Presence. A rumor was floated that Solzhenitsyn, an almost obsessively ascetic man, was giving drunken parties. An ideological lecturer put it out that "the person known to you as Solzhenitsyn is really Solzhenitser, and he's a Jew." The deputy editor in chief of Pravda, M.V. Zimyanin, declared Solzhenitsyn "ab normal, a schizophrenic," and added: "[He seeks] only to find sores and cancerous tumors. He notices nothing positive in our society."

Medvedev is hard on Westerners too. He criticizes many slovenly translations and the exploitation of Solzhenitsyn's works by Western publishers. The Swedes come off, with some justification, as villains for awarding Solzhenitsyn the Nobel Prize and then clouding his efforts to accept it in person. Medvedev's book is a lucid and partisan document over which Solzhenitsyn presides as a martyred presence.

Medvedev, whose father died in Stalin's camps, has earned his partisanship, and so has Solzhenitsyn; a favorable Western reception for Ten Years is unlikely to diminish the official harassment. In the Nobel lecture he could not deliver for fear he might become exiled as surely as Medvedev now is, Solzhenitsyn wrote: "Woe betide the nation whose literature is interrupted by force. It is the incarceration of the nation's heart, the amputation of the nation's memory . . . The lie has no way of maintaining itself except by violence."

.Lance Morrow

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