How Times Have Changed

By Bruce W. Nelan

The formidably confident Mikhail Gorbachev showed a touch of meekness when the Norwegian ambassador called on him last week. "He came very gently toward us and asked if he could really believe the rumors," Dagfinn Stenseth recalled. "I told him if he was thinking of the Nobel Peace Prize, he could." A smiling Gorbachev later said that he was "deeply moved and excited" and that the honor would provide "support and inspiration" at a critical time in his reform efforts.

Nobel awards have not always been so well received in Moscow. The only other Soviet Peace Prize laureate was the physicist and human-rights activist Andrei Sakharov, who was honored in 1975. One Soviet newspaper called that award "political pornography," and a statement by 72 of Sakharov's colleagues in the Soviet Academy of Sciences accused him of activities "aimed to undermine peace." The government refused to let him travel to Oslo for the ceremony, but his wife Yelena Bonner attended for him.

Even Nobel Prizes for Literature have produced political storms. When Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, was named in 1958, the official press labeled the decision "a hostile political act." The vilification became so intense that Pasternak declined the prize. He died in 1960, and his son claimed the medal on his behalf only last year.

One of the Kremlin's least favorite writers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, won the literature award in 1970. He decided he would not attend the presentation for fear of being refused permission to return home. He was probably correct: four years later he was exiled from the Soviet Union. Soviet-born poet Joseph Brodsky was already in exile in New York City when he won the prize for literature in 1987. Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov thought it was "a good thing" that world attention would be focused on Russian poetry, but he was sour about Brodsky, who had been sentenced to a work camp in 1963 for the crime of "parasitism." "The tastes of the Nobel Committee are strange sometimes," said Gerasimov.

Before last week's announcement, one Nobel selection that warmed the Kremlin's heart was that of Mikhail Sholokhov, the court novelist who received the Literature Prize in 1965. He was allowed to go to Stockholm and deposit his check in a bank there. But in 1974 the exiled Solzhenitsyn accused Sholokhov of plagiarism. He claimed Sholokhov had based portions of his epic of the Russian Revolution and civil war, The Quiet Don, on a manuscript written just after World War I by a Cossack, Fyodor Kryukov.

Thanks to increases and an improved exchange rate for the Norwegian krone, the prize is worth about $710,000, or about eight times Gorbachev's annual salary. It is a sum that would see any Soviet citizen through a lifetime of shortages, but the President plans to donate the money to charity. One likely recipient: a fund for young victims of the Chernobyl disaster.