Ruthless Campaign

"If I am declared killed or suddenly mysteriously dead, you can infallibly conclude, with 100% certainty, that I have been killed with the approval of the KGB or by it."

With those dramatic words, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia's greatest living writer, summarized last week the stark fear that follows Soviet intellectuals today. Even as it improves relations with the West, the Soviet Union has embarked on the most ruthless campaign in decades to stifle ideological dissent within its own borders.

"Car Accident." Solzhenitsyn's fear, he made plain in an interview with the Associated Press and Le Monde, is neither metaphorical nor paranoid. "During the winter of 1971-72," he said, "I was warned through several channels that they [the KGB, the Russian secret police] were preparing to kill me in a 'car accident.' But here we have a peculiarity, I would almost say an advantage of our social structure: not a single hair falls or will fall from my head or from the head of members of my family without the knowledge or approval of the KGB. That is the extent to which we are observed, shadowed, spied upon and listened to."

Not that his death would make the authorities very happy, the author added. For the first time, he mentioned the existence of unpublished works, presumably embarrassing to the Soviet state, that will be released in the West according to the terms of his will.

Solzhenitsyn has spoken out before about his personal disagreement with Soviet officialdom. Never before, though, had he sounded so bitter or linked himself so directly and actively with other Russian dissenters. The reason seems to be twofold. One is that the government has not only surreptitiously threatened Solzhenitsyn's life but has also refused even to let him legally remain with his pregnant wife in Moscow. (He is defying the ban.) The other is that Solzhenitsyn, with a writer's sense of timing and drama, seems to recognize that this is a unique moment of crisis for Russian intellectuals and that his voice, amplified in the West, may force the authorities to back away from their program of persecuting other dissenters. Among them:

> Historian Pyotr Yakir and Economist Viktor Krasin went on trial in Moscow last week charged with subversion. No foreign observers were allowed in the courtroom. Tass reported that both men had freely confessed--in a manner that sounded reminiscent of Stalin's farcical purge trials of the '30s --to various acts against the state. In what seemed an attempt by the authorities to discredit Solzhenitsyn, their testimony supposedly described him as a sympathetic reader of a banned underground newspaper.

> Physicist Andrei Sakharov, who helped to develop the Russian hydrogen bomb, last week disclosed that he had been officially warned not to make contact with foreign journalists. In previous interviews with Western reporters, Sakharov has made several appeals in behalf of political prisoners. After he made the warning public, Sakharov was denounced by 40 members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, to which he belongs. The only surprise in the denunciation was the fact that it was signed by so few of the academy's 248 members, indicating that if they could not defend Sakharov, most of the scientists would at least not attack him.

> Historian Andrei Amalrik, one of the most eloquent of the dissenters, was sentenced to a second term in a Siberian prison for "defaming the Soviet state" in his private diaries. In last week's interview, Solzhenitsyn confirmed what had long been privately known: the KGB was determined that Amalrik would never again be free.

> Biologist Zhores Medvedev was stripped of his passport while on a visit to Britain earlier this summer, forcing him into involuntary exile. Speaking of the Medvedev case, Solzhenitsyn said bitterly: "Citizenship in our country is not an inalienable natural right for every human being born on its soil. But it is a kind of coupon that is kept by an exclusive clique of people who in no way have proved that they have a greater right to Russian soil. And this clique can, if it does not approve of some citizen's convictions, declare him deprived of his homeland. I leave it to you to find a word yourselves for such a social structure."

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