Solzhenitsyn's Counterattack

After a massive, three-week Soviet press campaign against him, Alexander Solzhenitsyn last week raised his voice in counterattack. In a statement issued to foreign newsmen from his Moscow home, the besieged writer defied the Kremlin to refute the charges made in his new book, The Gulag Archipelago. He accused the Soviets of damning Gulag 's description of Leninist and Stalinist terror out of "an animal fear of disclosure." To his critics he said: "You liars!" It was an unprecedented moment of confrontation between the Soviet state and a lone, heroic man.

Solzhenitsyn's outburst was sparked by charges in Pravda that his new book was "slanderous," "counterrevolutionary" and "treasonable." In support of these contentions, other Russian newspapers weighed in with quotations allegedly drawn from the Russian text of Gulag, which was published in Paris last month. All the Soviet accounts of his book, Solzhenitsyn said, were distortions designed to conceal its real content from Russian readers. Thus do Soviet leaders show, he declared, "how tenaciously they cling to the bloody past and how they want to drag it with them, like a sealed up sack, into the future."

He ticked off some of the Russian press's misrepresentations of Gulag. "I am alleged to have written that 'Hitler's Nazis were gracious and merciful to enslaved peoples.' All lies, Pravda comrades! Point out the exact pages! Tass says that in my autobiography I admitted my hatred of the Soviet system and people. My autobiography was published by the Nobel Foundation in 1970. It is available for the whole world to see how insolently Tass lies.

"And here are the prevarications of Literary Gazette. I am supposed to have said that 'the Soviet people are fiends.' Cite the page, liars! This is how I am quoted in order to incite my uninformed countrymen against me: 'Solzhenitsyn equates the Soviet people with the Nazi murderers.' That was a neat bit of word juggling. Yes, I did equate Nazi murderers with the murderers from the Cheka, the G.P.U. and the N.K.V.D. [secret police under Lenin and Stalin]. But Literary Gazette substitutes 'the Soviet people' for the police, so our own executioners can hide more easily in the crowd."

Solzhenitsyn challenged the Soviets to expose and punish those responsible for the mass slavery and murder he describes in Gulag. "What a catharsis that would be for the country!" he exclaimed. "Yet they say not a word, utter no moral judgment on all the executioners, the inquisitors and the informers." Instead, he said, "as soon as the West German radio announced that Gulag would be broadcast for a half-hour daily, they frantically rushed to jam it. Not a single word of this book must penetrate our country. As if they could stop it!"

Solzhenitsyn also responded to charges that his purpose in authorizing the publication of Gulag in Paris last December was to disrupt East-West relations. Actually, he said, the secret police had forced his hand. He recalled that they had extorted the manuscript of Gulag from a friend to whom he had entrusted it. After five days of brutal treatment she handed it over, then hanged herself (TIME, Sept. 17). "And still they dare say that world reactionaries chose the publication date of Gulag to frustrate detente. In fact, it was our State Security--the main reactionary force in the world today--which chose the date. If the police cherish international detente, why did they spend five days in August wringing out the manuscript from that poor woman?"

In the final passage of his statement, he recalled a prophecy from Shakespeare about the fate of murderous monarchs:

Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsi-nanehill Shall come against him.

"I saw the hand of God in the seizure of my manuscript," the writer concluded. "The time is here. As was forecast in Macbeth: Birnam wood shall come. . ."

Such utterances gave rise to widespread speculation that the Kremlin would retaliate by arresting Solzhenitsyn, confining him in a prison psychiatric hospital, or banishing him to Siberian exile or deportation to the West. All these possibilities had been implicit in the angry Soviet press attacks on him. Another, more sinister alternative was suggested in phone calls received by the writer's family. One caller identified himself as an undertaker and asked if the Solzhenitsyns had any business for him.

Still, TIME Moscow Correspondent John Shaw reported late last week that Solzhenitsyn, his wife Natalya and their three sons, Yermolai, Ignat and Stepan, were calmly going about their lives in their Moscow apartment, showing no outward anxiety about their fate. The couple were busy taking down the decorations from their Christmas tree, which by tradition had remained standing until the Russian Epiphany last week. Shaw asked Solzhenitsyn whether he thought any action would be taken against him. His reply: "I am making no predictions. My family and I are ready for anything. I have fulfilled my duty to the dead, and this gives me relief and calmness. Once the truth seemed doomed to die. It was beaten. It was drowned. It had turned to ashes. But now the truth has come alive. No one will be able to destroy it."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.