A Fortress of Newsprint

The Soviet campaign against Alexander Solzhenitsyn took a vicious new turn last week: Soviet authorities pressured the Nobel Prizewinning author's former friends and colleagues-and even his ex-wife-into denouncing him. This time the forum for the attacks was not the controlled Soviet press but newspapers in the U.S. and Europe

The Christian Science Monitor published an interview with a former fellow prisoner who said that Solzhenitsyn was the informer responsible for his being sent to a concentration camp. The leading Parisian daily Le Figaro printed an interview with Natalya Reshetovskaya, Solzhenitsyn's divorced wife. She dismissed Solzhenitsyn's new book, The Gulag Archipelago, a study of Soviet terror, as mere "concentration-camp folklore." In addition, vituperative articles by prominent Soviet writers about Gulag have appeared in the New York Times and France's Le Monde. These and other "exclusives" appearing in the Western press were all arranged by the Soviet news agency Novosti in an obvious attempt to discredit Gulag.

Solzhenitsyn's response was quick in coming. In a statement issued to Western correspondents last week, he identified Novosti as a "reliable branch" of the secret police and accused Soviet authorities of "standing on their lies behind a fortress of newsprint." He declared that "world public opinion has thus far kept them from killing the author of Gulag or even from imprisoning him. That would indeed be a confirmation of the book. But there remains the time-honored method of slander and personal vilification that is now being vigorously pursued."

Most galling to Solzhenitsyn was the Christian Science Monitor interview with his boyhood friend Nikolai Vitkevich, who was summoned by Novosti from his home in the Caucasus to Moscow to talk with the Monitor's correspondent. Vitkevich accused Solzhenitsyn of being guilty of the same crime of informing on friends for which the author damns others in Gulag.

In reality, Solzhenitsyn and Vitkevich had exchanged letters criticizing Stalin when both were Red Army officers in World War II. Solzhenitsyn writes in Gulag that this was the cause of their imprisonment in 1945. After being confronted with the letters, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years of hard labor, plus "perpetual exile"; Vitkevich got ten years, without exile. But last week Vitkevich claimed that Solzhenitsyn had betrayed him and three other people, including the writer's own wife, in order to get "a lighter sentence." As proof, Vitkevich alleged that when he was released in 1957, he was shown part of the record of Solzhenitsyn's 1945 interrogation, bearing notes in Solzhenitsyn's handwriting.

Solzhenitsyn retorted in his detailed statement that "for 29 years Vitkevich did not ever reproach me for my behavior at the investigation-but how convenient it is now to have him join the general chorus." The reliability of Vitkevich's belated accusations appeared questionable. Experts noted that handwritten notations were never permitted on the record of a prisoner's interrogations. Moreover, Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered the destruction of the dossiers of all rehabilitated prisoners in the early 1950s.

Great Period. Solzhenitsyn's ex-wife Reshetovskaya claimed special knowledge of Gulag because she typed part of it. In her interview with Le Figaro, she charged that Gulag is essentially a work of fiction based on "intuition" and not the "scientific and historical" work it purports to be. According to Reshetovskaya, Gulag's exhaustively researched account of terror under Lenin and Stalin misrepresents "a great period in the history of our state."

Her charges were rebutted in London by Solzhenitsyn's friend Geneticist Zhores Medvedev. Said Medvedev: "The Soviet authorities have taken complete control of this vengeful woman." He told TIME that Reshetovskaya confided to him, after the couple's separation in 1970, that she intended to devote herself to "exposing" Solzhenitsyn so that he would be sent back to prison camp and she would go with him as a former "accomplice." "When I last saw her at her dacha near Moscow," he said, "she had constructed a mock grave for Solzhenitsyn in her backyard and pointed to it as the resting place she envisioned for him."

All these charges and countercharges were overshadowed by a formidable defense of Solzhenitsyn by Russia's leading historian of the Stalin era. It came from Marxist Roy Medvedev, the geneticist's twin brother who remained in the U.S.S.R. when Zhores was stripped of his Soviet citizenship while on a trip to England last year. Roy wrote a 6,000-word review of Gulag that was circulated last week among Western correspondents in Moscow. It was the first serious appraisal of the much-defamed book to come out of the Soviet Union. Medvedev's verdict: Gulag is "mercilessly truthful." Although he found some inaccuracies in Gulag, he noted that "these are infinitesimal for such a significant book." Himself the author of Let History Judge, a massive study of the Stalin era, Medvedev wrote that "few people, having read Gulag, will be the same as when they began the first page. In this respect, it seems to me that nothing in Russian and world literature can compare with Solzhenitsyn's book."

At week's end the possibility arose that Soviet authorities might go beyond mere words in their attack on Solzhenitsyn. He was asked to appear before the prosecuting attorney-an "invitation" he ignored. It remains to be seen what the prosecutor's purpose was, but the summons could only be ominous.

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