Lashing Back at Gulag

After a stolid five-day silence, the Soviet government last week lashed out at Alexander Solzhenitsyn's sensational new book, The Gulag Archipelago (TIME, Jan. 7). It called the work "an anti-Soviet lampoon sent abroad by Mr. Solzhenitsyn in the guise of a New Year gift." Far from being a lampoon, the book is a meticulously documented account of the agony of millions of innocent people who, like Solzhenitsyn himself, were imprisoned in the vast "archipelago" of slave-labor camps.

In its diatribe against him, the official Soviet news agency Tass made no attempt to counter Solzhenitsyn's harrowing documentation. Instead, the agency wrongly quoted the author as writing that the Czarist regime was "liberal and loving," and Nazi rule "gracious and merciful," in contrast with the Soviet treatment of its people. Then, a nationwide TV program accused him of "malicious slander." The attacks seemed to presage yet another massive Soviet press campaign against the persecuted Nobel-prizewinning writer. Still, Tass did stop short of calling for Solzhenitsyn's arrest.

The reason for Tass's hesitancy, Western experts surmise, is that the Kremlin leaders are now agonizing over how to deal with the Soviet system's most eloquent critic. Their dilemma is acute. If they arrest Solzhenitsyn, they can expect an unprecedented storm of protest from abroad. This, they know, would endanger Soviet hopes for Western economic aid. On the other hand, the Politburo can scarcely ignore Solzhenitsyn's defiance, as scores of U.S., European and Asian newspapers begin serializing extracts from the book.

Soon millions of Soviet citizens will also be informed. Next week Radio Liberty will start broadcasting to the U.S.S.R. the entire text of Gulag in Russian, and, later, extracts will be beamed in 17 other Soviet languages. Moreover, the 606-page paperback Russian-language edition, printed in Paris on onionskin paper, and only % 1/2 in. thick, could pass unnoticed through Soviet customs in the vest pockets of Western travelers.

Underlying the Kremlin's dilemma is Gulag's unanswerable challenge to the authority, indeed the legitimacy of the post-Stalin regime. This challenge is implicit in Solzhenitsyn's call for the punishment of the more than 250,000 people that he estimates are guilty of the crimes he details in his book. Responsibility reaches far beyond former concentration-camp guards. By implication, myriad Soviet bureaucrats in the entire present-day chain of command are culpable. Recalling the punishment inflicted on prisoners like himself, Solzhenitsyn writes of those accountable: "We must be generous and not shoot them . . . not grip their skulls in steel bands, not shut them up where they will lie on each other like baggage. No, none of that should be done. But the guilty must be tried and made to admit: 'Yes, I was an executioner and a criminal.' "

As the Politburo ponders such passages in Gulag, at least one of its members has cause to demand reprisals against the author. This is Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, the only present Kremlin leader named by Solzhenitsyn as being personally responsible for a Stalin-era crime. Solzhenitsyn charges that Gromyko was implicated in the tragic case of a Swedish army officer, whom the author encountered in a concentration camp on the Volga in 1950. The Swede told his fellow prisoner that he had first met Gromyko socially, when the then Soviet delegate to the U.N. was entertained by the Swede's wealthy father in Stockholm. Later, in 1948, the young man was abducted and taken to Moscow, where Gromyko, "in return for his father's hospitality," tried to persuade him to defect. When the Swede persistently refused to cooperate, he was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor. Solzhenitsyn has no idea whether Gromyko's victim survived the ordeal.

Besides these grave indictments, the Kremlin must also contend with the book's sequel. For Gulag consists of only the first two sections of a seven-part work dealing with Soviet terror. If Solzhenitsyn should be arrested or murdered, he declared last year, his Western representatives would dispatch these hitherto unpublished writings "throughout the length and breadth of Russia."

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