THE WRITER AS RUSSIA'S CONSCIENCE

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. --Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

The masters of the Kremlin have long been troubled by the challenge of great writers. When Tolstoy spoke out against famine or religious persecution in 19th century Russia, his voice so carried around the world that the czars took heed. In the early years of Communist rule, Maxim Gorky wielded his renown to save and protect people, until he died a mysterious death probably arranged by Stalin. Boris Pasternak constituted an invisible government that the regime could never quite overthrow. Khrushchev could make Pasternak give up his Nobel Prize, but no one could erase the protest he raised in his masterwork, Doctor Zhivago: "They only ask you to praise what you hate most and to grovel before what makes you most unhappy."

The authority of the writer has always been immense in Russia, particularly when his fame abroad was such that the Kremlin had to think twice before destroying him. Under despotism, the writer's voice can assume resonances unknown in the freer societies of the West. Without formal institutions through which protest can be expressed, it is often only the writer who can dare to ask the questions and articulate the agonies of millions. So long as he is not cut down, he contains in his own person the alternative to unthinking obeisance, the witness that conscience and courage still count.

The man who, above all others, fulfills this dangerous role in Soviet society today is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia's greatest living prose writer. The world knows him largely through a single work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his short, searing novel of life in Stalin's labor camps.

To his friends, he is a vigorous, burly, bearded man with a booming voice--possessed equally by his love for Russia and his passion for freedom. To the Stalinists, his enemies, he is the arch-accuser, the self-appointed prosecutor, blackening Russia's name abroad. His works blaze with the indignation of a man who knows his enemy: he spent eleven years in prison, slave-labor camps and exile. His books, as one of the establishment's tame writers once charged, are "more dangerous for us than those of Pasternak. Pasternak was a man detached from life, while Solzhenitsyn is combative, determined." In a time of unprecedented dissent in Russia, Solzhenitsyn stands at the moral center of the movement to cleanse Russia of the spirit of Stalinism. His role is symbolic, since he himself is not an activist but a loner, aloof except where his own works are involved. But he understands as well as any of Russia's great writer-dissenters of the past what he is about. He could be speaking of himself: "One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, raise the official hierarchy above the throne of the Almighty, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable spiritual superiority of certain human beings."

Chain-Letter Effect. Those lines have not been published in the Soviet Union. But they are nonetheless read and passed from hand to hand in samiz-dat,* the readers' answer to Soviet censorship. Manuscripts are copied and recopied laboriously by typewriter, since any mechanical reproduction, even mimeograph, is illegal. Eventually the chain-letter effect produces literally thousands of surreptitious editions of a work. Such copies of the manuscripts of Solzhenitsyn's two most recent novels have inevitably reached the West.

This fall a flurry of competitive editions are coming out in Europe and the U.S., over Solzhenitsyn's bitter and repeated public protests and disavowals. One is his novel The First Circle, rushed into print by Harper & Row in a translation that is often unreadable and sometimes ludicrously inaccurate. It will also appear as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in November. In the original, The First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a scathing, ironic portrayal of life in Russia in 1948 and its concentric circles of hell expanding out from Stalin, who has never been made so frighteningly real. Next month, Collins of London is bringing out a far better translation of The First Circle ./- The second novel is Cancer Ward, based on the author's own struggle with cancer. It employs the familiar device of the hospital as microcosm of a sick world. Versions are being published in Britain by the Bodley Head and in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Dial Press. The appearance of these works is a literary event of the first magnitude--and inevitably a major political event as well.

Solzhenitsyn's role in the consciousness--and conscience--of Russia began with One Day, which was published in 1962 on Khrushchev's order, for political reasons of his own. The book quickly took on an independent life. In cutting away the barbed wire of myth, in piercing the silence around the Stalin era, the book opened up the first frank discussion not only of the Soviet past but its present and future.

Essentially, Freedom. That book, and all of Solzhenitsyn's life and work, place him at the passionate focal point of the major issue that inflames dissent and frightens the men in the Kremlin today. The issue is Stalinism, the "past that is clawing to pieces our present days," as Soviet Writer Lydia Chukovskaya expressed it in a letter which circulated underground earlier this year.

Russia's present masters do not rule like Stalin; the camps of which Solzhenitsyn writes are mostly gone. But more and more Russians are beginning to realize that these men did share complicity in Stalin's crimes. And thousands of ordinary Russians were touched by guilt, because they let friends, neighbors, and members of their own families be taken away in the night without protesting. Could anything have been done to stop Stalin's police? Probably not.

But there is the larger, guilt-laden problem of explaining to oneself how this could have happened in a revolutionary state created to end, in theory, the inhumanity of man to man. For this Russia, Solzhenitsyn's novels are both painful and healing. They expose every layer of Stalinist repression. And they are addressed, above all, to Russia and her people. Solzhenitsyn's world is one of almost private Russian concern and grief, which no Westerner may lightly enter or vulgarize in glib anti-Communist terms. Those who have not been through the agonies of the camps, the shocks of alternating liberalization and repression can scarcely pass judgment. This is why Solzhenitsyn did not want his work published abroad, lest it be abused for political purposes. But Solzhenitsyn brings the reader, any reader, closer to the truth. Essentially, his books are about freedom--including the freedom that sometimes can be found only when a man has been stripped of everything.

Solzhenitsyn knows exactly that freedom: all his work is intensely autobiographical, and large parts were even composed in his head and memorized during the years that took him through every circle of the Stalinist hell before casting him loose, sick with cancer. Solzhenitsyn tells it photographically, with the careful interlocking of closely observed detail, and with total recall that stretches back to childhood.

Only Stalin Stood to Gain. Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 in Kislovodsk, a spa in the mountains of the central Caucasus, when the Bolshevik revolution was barely a year old and civil war was raging. He grew up in South Russia, in Rostov-on-the-Don. His father, an office worker, died while Alexander was still a boy, as Stalin's repressions were beginning. Gleb Nerzhin, a prisoner who is a counterpart of Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle, recalls that "he had been twelve when he first opened the huge pages of Izvestia and had read about the trial of some engineers accused of sabotage. The young Gleb did not believe a word of it; he did not know why, but he saw quite clearly that it was all a pack of lies. Several of his friends' fathers were engineers and he simply could not imagine people like that sabotaging things; their job was building things."

Solzhenitsyn took a degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Rostov in 1941; during his last two years at the university, he was also taking a correspondence course at the Institute of Philosophy and Literature in Moscow. For a time he was stage-struck and wanted to become an actor. When he failed his tryouts, he then dreamed of being a playwright. Friends report that he still loves to do imitations--with uproarious gusto and very badly. His three plays, all unpublished, are said to be poor theater.

Master and Busybody. Solzhenitsyn and his wife Natalya had not long been married when war broke out. He joined the army in 1941, got himself transferred to artillery school, graduated in 1942 and was sent to the front.

Solzhenitsyn commanded a battery at the Leningrad front and was twice decorated. Near the end of the war, Solzhenitsyn and a friend in another unit discussed how badly Stalin was conducting the war--and how badly he wrote the Russian language. Foolishly, they continued such comments in letters, lightly disguising their references to Stalin by calling him khozyain, "master," or balabos, an Odessan Yiddish slang word meaning "busybody."

SMERSH* read the letters. In February of 1945, having fought his way through Poland and into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, interrogated, beaten, and taken to the Greater Lyubyanka prison in Moscow.

Consigned to Limbo. Solzhenitsyn entered that hell whose torments his novels describe. One of Stalin's notorious three-man tribunals sentenced him without a hearing to eight years. He was first put to work laying the parquet flooring of a Moscow apartment building for secret police officials. Twenty years later, when some of the apartments had been turned over to high-ranking scientists, Solzhenitsyn was invited to visit a friend in that same building. He was proud to discover that his floors did not squeak.

Solzhenitsyn believes that his mathematics saved him: he was next sent to Mavrino, a prison research institute outside Moscow. Mavrino is the setting of The First Circle. The title comes from Dante's Inferno, where the first circle of hell is peopled by the great men of antiquity--Homer, Socrates, Plato--who, too valuable to be thrown into the pit, were consigned to limbo. Mavrino is an institute carrying out KGB research projects, and as a prison it is bearable. There is meat. There is some comfort. There are even women. Yet this is still slave labor of the mind, and transfer to the labor camps can happen at the whim of an "administrative decision."

Into four days at Mavrino a dozen parallel lives are laid. The characters are borne along on the conveyor belts of terror. They are tormented by problems of conscience, and by the knowledge that if they make the morally right choice--to support a friend, to oppose a foolish order--they will be crushed in the machinery.

Innokenti Volodin, an effete young Russian diplomat, phones a warning to a friend, is tracked down by the secret police with the aid of a "voiceprinter" devised at the prison's laboratories.

Aware that the police may be after him, he moves through the upper echelons of Moscow; his fears alternate with moments of euphoric hope, counterpointing the luxurious world around him. Seized and taken to Lyubyanka, in three brilliant matter-of-fact chapters he begins to be stripped down to the inner core of his being. Thus begins the process by which, in Solzhenitsyn's moral order, the most perceptive prisoners have learned to be free men.

The descriptions are chilling: "It was there, on the steps of the last flight of stairs, that Innokenti noticed how deeply the steps were worn. He had never seen anything like it in his life before.

From the edges to the center they were worn down in oval concavities to half their thickness. He shuddered. How many feet must have trodden them in 30 years, how many footsteps must have scraped over them to wear out the stone to such a depth! Of every two who had passed that way one had been a warder, the other--a prisoner."

Another major protagonist is Lev Rubin, the philologist who develops the voiceprinter. Though a prisoner, he is still a convinced Communist. With sympathy and remarkable subtlety, Solzhenitsyn makes clear the process of self-brainwashing by which such a man can sustain such a moral paradox--and can even convince himself that it is right and his duty to help trap Volodin and condemn him to the labor camps.

Gleb Nerzhin, in many ways a stand-in for Solzhenitsyn himself, makes an opposite choice to Rubin's. By refusing to work on a new bugging device, he condemns himself to Siberia. He is the character most conscious of the paradox that pervades the novel: that in Stalin's Russia only those in prison are truly free to be honest with one another. "When you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power --he's free again."

The prison themes that were presented with piercing simplicity in One Day here return with a sweep that the author himself has described as polyphonic. It is in its references to the labor camps, "the Auschwitzes without ovens" as Dissenter Alexander Ginzburg called them, that The First Circle is most harrowing. Solzhenitsyn writes of one of these camp complexes as "a kingdom bigger than France." Each camp bore a bucolic code name such as Lake Camp, Steppe Camp, Sandy Camp. "You'd think there must be some great, unknown poet in the secret police, a new Pushkin," writes Solzhenitsyn. "He's not quite up to a full-length poem, but he gives these wonderful poetic names to concentration camps." These passages obviously parallel Solzhenitsyn's own experiences; after his years in Mavrino, he was sent to such a camp in Kazakhstan, part of a complex called Karlag, which was indeed as large as France. So many prisoners were in the camps that it was widely fantasied among them that no free men were left outside.

The prisoners were not expected to survive. Yet Solzhenitsyn also knows, as he says in The First Circle, that "descriptions of prison life tend to overdo the horror of it. Surely it is more frightening when there are no actual horrors; what is terrifying is the unchanging routine year after year. The horror is forgetting that your life--the only life you have--is destroyed, is in your willingness to forgive even some ugly swine of a warder, is in being obsessed with grabbing a big hunk of bread in the prison mess or getting a decent set of underwear when they take you to the bathhouse."

Solzhenitsyn's account of the fate of prisoners' wives is the most sorrowing part of The First Circle. His cool realism is suffused with a rush of personal grief as he describes Gleb Ner-zhin's Nadya: waiting outside prisons for a glimpse of her husband, allowed rare letters and rarer visits, herself persecuted whenever her relationship to a prisoner is discovered--and, finally, driven to divorce in self-defense. (Solzhenitsyn's own wife, Natalya, divorced him at his urging while he was in prison. She remarried and bore two children, but after his release she divorced her second husband and rejoined him in his Siberian exile.) The book's anger never falters, but there is control as well: Solzhenitsyn sees these characters with a cold and merciless clarity that lets each one burn in his own flame.

There is also some wild black humor, notably one episode that is a bitter comment on the outside world's long gullibility about Soviet Russia. Two prisoners invent a fantasy about a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt to Moscow's Butyrki Prison, just after the war. Inmates are washed in "Lilac Fairy" soap, offered wigs to cover their shaved heads. Their cells are temporarily transformed into elegant salons with foreign magazines on their coffee tables. When Mrs. Roosevelt picks out at random a man and asks what he is being punished for, the prison governor replies that he was a Gestapo agent who burned down a Russian village, raped Russian girls and murdered innumerable Russian babies. "Wasn't he sentenced to be hanged?" exclaims Eleanor. "No," is the straight-faced reply. "We hope to reform him."

To Banish Kapitalizm. Solzhenitsyn is a rare master of the Russian language --not the debased, impenetrably formula-ridden Russian produced by two decades of Stalinist newspapers, schoolbooks and speeches, but the rich mother Russian that calls on all the ancient, all the regional, and all the poetic resources of that difficult, plastic language. Ivan Denisovich's speech is essentially free of foreign-derived words, as is the entire book. One of the prisoner-scientists in The First Circle insists on attempting what he calls "plain speech," in which non-Russian words are banished, even if puzzling archaisms must be substituted. For example, he replaces the Latin-root word kapitalizm with the old Russian word for usury, tolstosumstvo (literally, "moneybaggism"). Solzhenitsyn himself has proposed that Russian be purified in this way. His strongly held views on language not only contribute great power and control to his writing but are also typical of other attitudes that pervade his work and his life: he is profoundly attached to all things traditionally Russian, is indeed a patriot of an old-fashioned kind, an instinctive Slavophile who distrusts all things Western.

Irreparably Deluded. Solzhenitsyn escaped his prison hell on March 5, 1953, when he was released after serving his eight-year sentence. On the first day of his freedom, the local radio carried the bulletin announcing Stalin's death. Even though out of the camp, he still had to live in exile in Siberia. He began putting down on paper the stories he had worked over in his mind during his imprisonment.

While in prison he had undergone a rough-and-ready operation for cancer. The disease now became acute again. Near death, he made his way to a hospital in Tashkent, where the tumor was arrested. The experience gave rise to Cancer Ward, a weaker book than his others. Yet the book rises toward the end to Solzhenitsyn's most direct statement of the complicity of everyone in the guilt of the past: "It's shameful, why do we take it calmly until we ourselves or those who are close to us are stricken? ... If no one is allowed for decade after decade to tell it as it is, the mind becomes irreparably deluded, and finally it becomes harder to comprehend one's own compatriot than a man from Mars."

Though his cancer was arrested by modern methods, he has an abiding nostalgia for old Russian peasant remedies, and a distrust of medical intervention as destructive of the organic relation of man to nature. He was officially rehabilitated in 1957. He found a job teaching mathematics in Ryazan, 120 miles southeast of Moscow. It was harder finding a house. Finally he built one atop a garage, using three walls of surrounding buildings for his own walls and adding a front and a roof.

There he continued to write. One Day went through four drafts, becoming leaner and simpler in each. The agony of One Day comes from the spectacle of a simple man, laboring and suffering with naive good humor, and all for nothing. For Russian readers this agony is redoubled. Russians have always loved innocents in literature, and the carpenter Ivan is a peasant innocent in direct descent from Tolstoy's Platon Karataev in War and Peace. His meekness is in jarring contrast to the degradation of the camp--where an extra bowl of mush makes a day "almost happy," and where your most important possessions are your felt boots, a spoon you made from aluminum wire, a needle and thread hidden in your cap.

In the fall of 1962, an editorial associate put the manuscript of One Day in with a portfolio of others for the editor in chief of the literary magazine Novy Mir, the adept establishment liberal Alexander Tvardovsky. He took the manuscripts home to read in bed, tossed them one by one aside. Then he picked up Solzhenitsyn's novel and read ten lines. As he later told a friend, "Suddenly I felt that I couldn't read it like this. I had to do something appropriate to the occasion. So I got up. I put on my best black suit, a white shirt with a starched collar, a tie, and my good shoes. Then I sat at my desk and read a new classic." Tvardovsky sent the manuscript to Khrushchev.

The Silence. No other first novel has ever had such an exclusive private printing, or such an exclusive first audience. Khrushchev wanted to use the book as a weapon in his own power struggle with the hardliners, Mikhail Suslov and Frol Kozlov. By Khrushchev's order, the script was set in type and 20 copies were run off on the Swedish-built presses the Kremlin reserves for state documents. The copies were distributed to members of the Presidium. Then, at Khrushchev's summons, the Presidium met. The members sat at a long table, each with his copy of the novel in front of him. Khrushchev came in. He was greeted by silence.

"Comrades: it's a good book, isn't it!"

He was answered by silence.

"There's a Russian proverb, 'Silence is consent.' " He strode directly out.

The silence did not last. The top of the Soviet hierarchy erupted into controversy over Khrushchev's plan to publish the book, but at his direct authorization the novel appeared in the November issue of Novy Mir. The 95,000-copy press run sold out within days, as did the 100,000 copies in book form that quickly followed; by now, millions of Russians have read it, although it is no longer in bookstores and is gradually disappearing from library shelves.

Unmistakable Signal. One Day was the high point in a year of unparalleled triumph for Russia's liberals in all the arts. The euphoria came to an abrupt end soon after. The failure of Khrushchev's Cuban missile adventure was the last in a series of catastrophes in foreign and domestic policy that put him under increasing pressure from political opponents. Freeze-and-thaw was replaced by steadily deepening freeze. Khrushchev began a partial rehabilitation of Stalin that his successors continued and added to.

The unmistakable signal of what was in store for the liberals came in May of 1965, when Brezhnev cited Stalin, who had become virtually an unperson, favorably in a public speech. A day later, Stalin's picture flashed on Moscow television screens for the first time in nine years. The initial effect was to arouse and unify the liberal intelligentsia as never before, a unity that has largely managed to hold through the ensuing crackdown.

A large number of the dissenters are, like Solzhenitsyn, writers. But artists, critics, musicians, lawyers, mathematicians have also joined ranks with the writers to protest any return to the moral squalor of Stalinism. Particularly important has been the willingness of noted scientists, such as Andrei Sakharov, who helped build the Soviet H-bomb, to speak out (TIME, Aug. 2).

Among the dissenters and their audience there are, of course, all shades of protest. Some are mainly concerned with the quick elimination of censorship. At the other extreme, there are a few so dissatisfied with the entire Soviet Communist system that they want it overthrown. But in general, the dissenters share three basic aims. They want full exposure of the crimes against the Soviet people during the Stalin era. They want the regime to halt the rehabilitation of Stalin and the restoration of Stalinist methods. Finally, they are outraged at the illegality of the regime's tactics against them: the confinement of dissenters in lunatic asylums, the searches and seizures of private papers, the arrests for circulating manuscripts or for demonstrating peacefully in public assembly.

Their argument is that such things are a violation of the Soviet constitution. Their tactic is essentially an appeal to law, and that in itself represents an advance over the days of Stalin, when such a protest would have been meaningless. That it is not entirely meaningless now is demonstrated by the fact that the secret police are also concerned with fabricating cases that they can prop up in a Soviet court. The KGB effort to peddle Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts abroad is a search for a pretext to arrest him. Stalin's police never required pretexts for anything they did.

Throughout all this, Solzhenitsyn tried to get his works published in Russia. When, after a long battle, permission was refused to print Cancer Ward, he stormed furiously out of the Novy Mir office. A clerk who had helped him wrap up the huge manuscript reported his movements to the secret police, who later seized the book at the house of a friend to whom Solzhenitsyn had given it for safekeeping.

The first political show trial since Stalin's death took place in February of 1966. Two novelists, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, were charged with circulating "anti-Soviet" propaganda after they had sent their novels abroad to be published (under the pen names Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak). They were condemned, under Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Republic, for "dissemination of slanderous inventions" with the purpose of "subverting the Soviet regime." Since then, an even more general law has been passed removing the need to prove subversive purpose. Sinyavsky got seven years' hard labor, Daniel five. Their judge later received the Order of Lenin. But petitions and letters in the writers' support were signed by hundreds of intellectuals.

The forces of repression counterattacked. The then head of the KGB Vladimir Semichastny told a meeting of the Central Committee: "If you will permit me to arrest 1,000 to 1,200 of the most active members of the intelligentsia, I will guarantee absolute tranquillity within the country." He was given at least a partial mandate. A few months later, his men quietly rounded up some 150 to 300 intellectuals in Leningrad. A new, sinister note crept into the charges: "Conspiracy to armed rebellion." The secret police claimed to have smashed an underground terrorist network, extending to arrests of related groups in Sverdlovsk and several towns in the Ukraine.

In September 1967, Solzhenitsyn had a direct confrontation with about 30 functionaries of the Writers' Union, headed by the regime's literary spokesman, Konstantin Fedin. Solzhenitsyn charged anew that his manuscripts had been stolen by the KGB, that publication of Cancer Ward in Novy Mir had been held up so long that there was danger of samizdat copies making their way West. "All my life is here," he said, "the homeland--I listen only to its sadness, I write only about it."

Fedin demanded that "vou must, above all, protest against the dirty use of your name by our enemies in the West." One writer told Solzhenitsyn to his face that "Cancer Ward makes you throw up when you read it," and urged Solzhenitsyn to follow the critic's own example: "I always try to write only about happy things." Replied Solzhenitsyn: "The task of the writer is to treat universal and eternal themes: the mysteries of the heart and conscience, the collision between life and death, the triumph over spiritual anguish." He told his accusers with bitter humor that he knew very well what such views could mean for him. "I am alone, my slanderers are hundreds," he said. "Naturally I will never succeed in defending myself, and I cannot know in advance of what I will be accused. If they say I am a supporter of Copernicus' solar system, and that I set the fire that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake, I will not be very surprised."

In the next Moscow trial, four young people, including Intellectual Alexander Ginzburg, were charged with circulating underground publications. "I love my country," Ginzburg said, "and I do not wish to see its reputation damaged by the latest uncontrolled activities of the KGB." During the five-day trial, sympathizers gathered outside the courtroom. A letter to "world public opinion" condemning the "witch trials" as "a wild mockery of justice no better than the purge trials of the 1930s" was circulated by Mrs. Yuli Daniel and Pavel Litvinov, grandson of Stalin's Foreign Minister and one of the most daring of the dissidents. Shivering so badly in the January weather that her friends had to hold her to keep her warm, Larisa Daniel was asked why, when her husband was already in a labor camp, she was there. Said she: "I cannot do otherwise." Ginzburg got five years' hard labor; as the defense lawyers left the courtroom for the last time, people in the crowd pinned red carnations on them.

Then, on March 29, in the first pronouncement on cultural policy by a top leader since Khrushchev's fall, Brezhnev attacked "the abominable deeds of these double-dealers," the intellectuals who had protested the writers' trials, and promised that "these renegades" would be punished. Another trial was held in Leningrad, with 17 intellectuals convicted on the bizarre and clearly fabricated charge of conspiracy to replace the Soviet government with a democracy under the Russian Orthodox Church. Mass expulsions from the Writers and Artists Unions began; this meant loss of jobs and apartments. Among those expelled was Solzhenitsyn's close friend from camp days, the critic Lev Kopelev. Even scientists were suddenly no longer immune. Some top mathematicians who signed petitions were thrown out of the party. In the Soviet Union's finest research center, the largely self-governing scientific city of Akademgorodok in Siberia, there has been a threatening crackdown on modern art.

In the 20-month wave of protests, many dissidents had exposed themselves to view while the KGB waited and watched. In April the roundup began. Several hundred protesters were pulled in and interrogated. Some were put into asylums and jails. On Aug. 25, in what may well be the last public demonstration of its kind, a small group unfurled banners on Red Square, demanding HANDS OFF CZECHOSLOVAKIA and declaring SHAME ON THE OCCUPIERS. They were arrested. Among them: Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Daniel.

Plausible Case. Last week Alexander Solzhenitsyn was still a free man. He is rarely glimpsed in Moscow. He is an irreverent individualist. He wears good clothes, bought with the East European royalties of One Day, but in haphazard combinations: round fur hat, shiny green Finnish car coat, smart imported trousers and enormous Soviet-made leather clodhoppers. At a bus stop in Moscow, where people are chronically short of small coins for the ticket machines, he will give out dozens of five-kopeck pieces, laughing exuberantly. But at his back, the shadow of the camps lingers. Once, after handing in his coat at a Moscow restaurant, he showed the claim check sadly to his companion. "I shall never escape that number." It was 232, the same number he had borne in the labor camps.

The appearance of his books in the West has put him in an extremely dangerous position. KGB agents have peddled some of his manuscripts. If the KGB were to fabricate a plausible case that Solzhenitsyn has had a part in getting the works abroad, he might be tried on the same charge of distributing "anti-Soviet literature" that was used against Sinyavsky and Daniel.

As recently as April 21, Solzhenitsyn again protested against the publication of his banned works abroad. This time he singled out the British publisher, the Bodley Head, which together with Farrar, Straus & Giroux had publicly claimed that they had authorization from an "accredited representative" of the author. Harper & Row has made a similar claim for The First Circle. In a letter to Moscow's Literaturnaya Gazeta and to French and Italian newspapers, Solzhenitsyn denied that any foreign publishers obtained the manuscript of Cancer Ward, or authorization to publish it, from him. "I have already seen how all the translations of One Day were spoiled because of haste. Evidently this fate also awaits Cancer Ward. But over and above money, there is literature too."

Professor Kathryn Feuer, head of the Slavic department at the University of Toronto, has put the case most tactfully against those Western publishers who are claiming authorization. "How tragic, if accustomed to operating in a free society, they have misjudged the situation and are playing into the hands of Solzhenitsyn's enemies while thinking to serve freedom and literature. Solzhenitsyn has already done more than most men for both causes. If he must be sacrificed, we in the West should at least leave him free to choose his own martyrdom." To which can be added only the hope that the worldwide respect for his work, and attention to his danger, will help somewhat to protect Alexander Solzhenitsyn--as Pasternak was similarly protected--from the Stalinists' determination to punish him for his great talent and raw courage.

The intellectuals' dissent should not be overestimated. Russia's millions are by and large indifferent to the issues that unite the intelligentsia. Only a few hundred people at most have been bold enough to demonstrate; only a few thousand at most have written letters or signed petitions.

The Brutal Showdown. Recently, dissenters in Russia have sounded the alarm that a return to mass terror is at hand. So far, however, the leaders have confined themselves to selective terror in an attempt to silence the most outspoken writers and intellectuals and to curb their influence on public opinion. Still, the regime finds itself in an impossible dilemma. Without a return to mass police terror, new voices will be raised in dissent as soon as others are stilled. But the regime knows too that the cost of restoring Stalin's terror would be incalculably high. It would reverse the effect of all Soviet policies designed to bring Russia into competition with the modern world, by destroying the individual initiative of every Soviet citizen, from the simple worker to the great scientist who is crucial to the development of Soviet technology. And, perhaps most important, the powerful secret-police organization needed to impose terror might well devour the political leaders who had revived it.

* Literally, "self-publishing," a pun on Gosizdat, the acronym for State Publishing House. /- TIME's quotations are taken from the Collins edition. * The counterintelligence organization popularized by Ian Fleming. Its name is an acronym from the Russian words for "death to spies." The man who denounced Solzhenitsyn was Alexei Romanov, now chairman of the State Cinematography Committee.

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