Beyond Endurance

"For many years I have borne in silence the lawlessness of your employees," Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote to no less a personage than Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, the dread Soviet secret police. In a letter that first circulated among his friends and then reached the West last week, the beleaguered Nobel-prizewinning writer complained that his mail had been confiscated, his telephone tapped, his apartment--and even his garden--bugged. KGB officials had also been slandering him publicly. "Now I will no longer be silent," he wrote to Andropov.

What drove Solzhenitsyn beyond endurance was a recent KGB raid on the one-room shack that he had built with his own hands in the village of Rozhdestvo, 25 miles southwest of Moscow. The author often takes refuge there, to write and enjoy the peace of the countryside. That peace was abruptly broken two weeks ago by KGB agents who arrived at the shack in Solzhenitsyn's absence, apparently to set up a bugging apparatus and search for documents that they hoped might incriminate him. But a friend of the writer's, Alexander Gorlov, surprised them on the job. A grotesque scene ensued. Wrote Solzhenitsyn: "In the small structure, where three or four can barely turn around, there were about ten of them. They bound Gorlov, dragged him face down into the woods, and beat him cruelly. Simultaneously, others were running by a roundabout route through the bushes, carrying away packages, papers and objects--perhaps parts of the apparatus they had brought with them."

Act of Defiance. The KGB men tried to prevent Gorlov from telling Solzhenitsyn about the raid. They threatened to destroy his career as an engineer, and even to imprison him. Although viciously mauled, Gorlov refused to give in. So did Solzhenitsyn. In his letter to Andropov he demanded an investigation of the whole sinister affair, adding in a note to Premier Aleksei Kosygin that he held the KGB chief "personally responsible."

It was the great writer's boldest act of defiance thus far; his letter struck at the heart of the Kremlin's most ruthless and most secret instrument of terror. Specialists in the West speculated that the KGB, unused to such challenges, might well be tempted to retaliate by permanently ensuring Solzhenitsyn's silence. As a KGB officer told Gorlov: "We are on an operation, and on an operation we can do anything."

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