Solzhenitsyn's Bill of Indictment

Once again last week Russia's greatest living writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, hurtled forward on a collision course with the Kremlin leaders. Heroically disregarding official threats, the Nobel-prize winning novelist authorized publication in the West of by far his most explosive work. It was Solzhenitsyn's first nonfiction book, a 600-page documentation of the entire Soviet system of mass police terror from 1918 to 1956.

Titled The Gulag Archipelago,* the book is based on Solzhenitsyn's eleven years in prisons, concentration camps and exile, as well as letters that he received from ex-prisoners and interviews that he conducted with 227 survivors of slave-labor camps. Last week, as the Russian text appeared in Paris, and the New York Times began syndicating a 10,000-word excerpt, Gulag struck its early readers as both a literary masterwork and an unparalleled indictment of the Soviet regime.

Striking at Lenin. The power and substance of Solzhenitsyn's condemnation seemed likely to bring down the Kremlin's wrath on the already beleaguered author (see BOOKS). In contrast to his novels One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward and The First Circle, which dealt only with Stalin's terror, Gulag strikes out at the officially idolized figure of Lenin. Solzhenitsyn rejects the Kremlin's thesis that Stalin alone was responsible for the "excesses" of his time. Instead, Solzhenitsyn devastatingly demonstrates that the imprisonment of millions under Stalin was made possible by Lenin's establishment of a ruthless police state. He ascribes the confessions wrung from government leaders at Stalin's purge trials to the work of professional hypnotists recruited under Lenin. Weaving personal testimonies with historical data, he records Leninist purges, Leninist concentration camps and Leninist mass executions.

Gulag also recounts the better-known horrors of the Stalin era while adding some sensational disclosures and intimations. Solzhenitsyn suggests, for example, that Stalin was an undercover agent of the Okhrana (the Czarist secret police) in the disguise of a Bolshevik revolutionary--thus reinforcing the suspicions of several Western scholars. Gulag also says that Stalin planned a large-scale "massacre" of Jews that was thwarted by his death in 1953. In that year the arrest of several Jewish physicians, accused of plotting to assassinate high government officials, unleashed a wave of antiSemitism.

Writes Solzhenitsyn: "According to Moscow rumors, Stalin's plan was this: at the beginning of March, 1953, the 'doctor-murderers' were to be hanged on Red Square. Aroused patriots, naturally led by instructors, were to rush off to in cite an anti-Jewish pogrom. And at this point . . . the government would intervene generously to save the Jews from the wrath of the people. On that very same night it would remove them from Moscow to the Far East and Siberia, where barracks were already prepared for them."

Equally inflammatory, from the Soviet point of view, are Solzhenitsyn's meticulously documented comparisons of Czarist authoritarianism and Communist dictatorship. In terms of numbers of arrests and executions, and lengths of prison terms, he declares, the Soviet regime has exceeded imperial rule by factors ranging from 10 to 1 to 1,000 to 1. Solzhenitsyn also asserts that the Soviets killed and imprisoned far more people than the Nazis did, excluding wartime casualties on both sides. He estimates that in any one year of the Stalin era, 12,000,000 people were held in prison. "As some departed beneath the sod," he adds, "the 'machine' kept bringing in replacements." He eloquently calls for punishment of all those responsible for such 'crimes against the Soviet people, noting that post-Hitler Germany has convicted more than 78,000 persons of brutality and murder. Post-Stalin Russia, however, has tried only two dozen of its former executioners.

Perhaps Solzhenitsyn's boldest and most dangerous assertion concerns a former Red Army general who is anathema to the Soviets. He was Andrei Vlasov, who commanded Russian units in the German army after 1942. Although Solzhenitsyn does not condone Vlasov's wartime defection, he praises him as "one of the most talented" of the Soviet generals who conducted the earlier defense of Moscow in 1941.

The history of the manuscript of Gulag is nearly as tragic as its subject matter. Although Solzhenitsyn had begun researching the book in 1958, he did not start writing it until 1964, just as official Soviet acceptance of his works had be gun to wane. The 1962 publication in Russia of One Day, by Premier Nikita Khrushchev's order, had prompted hundreds of former prisoners to write to Solzhenitsyn, detailing their own experiences. Deeply moved, Solzhenitsyn shut himself up in a ramshackle dacha to work. He completed Gulag four years later. Solzhenitsyn was then unwilling to risk endangering his correspondents and those he had interviewed by allowing Gulag to be published in the West. Instead, he entrusted parts of his manuscript to close Russian friends. Later, he sent the manuscript abroad by unknown means.

Last fall one of his friends yielded to five days of brutal KGB interrogation; after giving up a copy of the manuscript, she hanged herself (TIME, Sept. 17). Once Gulag was in the hands of the security police, Solzhenitsyn could no longer protect his informants, most of whom are named in the book. In the preface, he explains his decision to publish: "For years I have with reluctant heart withheld from publication this already completed book. My obligation to those who are still alive outweighed my obligation to those who are dead. But now that State Security has seized the book anyway I have no alternative but to publish it immediately."

Surprise Publication. Plans for publication of Gulag were kept secret by the author's Swiss lawyer. Though ru mors about the work had circulated for several years, its existence was denied by everybody close to Solzhenitsyn. Thus the announcement of imminent publication by Harper & Row and four European publishers took the world by surprise last week -- as did the serialization of excerpts by the New York Times.

The secrecy was intended to prevent the Soviets from attempting to stop publication of Gulag. Still, there were signs that KGB intelligence had penetrated the camouflage. A week before Gulag's appearance in Paris, the head of a new Soviet copyright organization, Boris Pankin, announced that his agency would henceforth sue foreign publishers who brought out proscribed works by Soviet authors like Solzhenitsyn. Pankin added that Soviet citizens who send manuscripts out of the country would be arrested, presumably on charges of smuggling. For that, Solzhenitsyn could spend as long as ten years in prison and five years in exile.

* Gulag is an acronym for the dread Central Corrective Labor Camp Administration. To Solzhenitsyn, the title suggests that the territory of the U.S.S.R. was dotted with myriad islands of concentration camps--an archipelago that was "psychologically fused into a continent inhabited by prisoners."

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