The Unexpected Perils of Freedom

As Alexander Solzhenitsyn prepared to make the best of his enforced exile from Russia last week, he encountered an unexpected peril in his newfound freedom. It was the inescapable presence of Western journalists, news photographers and TV cameramen, who threatened to engulf the writer at every step. Long accustomed to a cloistered existence in a hostile environment, he was at first bewildered and then angered by the sudden glare of world publicity. Although he insisted that he would give no interviews, newsmen dogged him from Germany to Switzerland, hoping for some exclusive pose or pearl of wisdom.

Part of the trouble was Solzhenitsyn's incomprehension of the fiercely competitive character of the Western press. One day last week he turned to the dozens of TV crewmen jostling for position and inquired: "Why do you fight so much?" Puzzled by the complaint of a Reuters correspondent that the rival Associated Press man had been granted a statement, Solzhenitsyn offered meager consolation: "Don't worry. Soon everyone will get the whole text from the A.P."

He bristled as journalists pressed, 60 strong, onto a Zurich tramcar with him. He was visibly annoyed when, at Sunday Mass in the Benedictine abbey in Einsiedeln, photographers darted among chanting monks to get pictures of the deeply religious writer. Finally, Solzhenitsyn's patience snapped. When two French photographers zeroed in for closeups on the street, he exploded: "You are worse than the KGB [Soviet secret police]!" He was further enraged by an inaccurate report that a newsman had brought him a letter from his wife in Moscow. "I am accustomed to all kinds of slander in the Soviet press that no one in the country has the power to correct or refute," he said, "but I never expected such irresponsibility in the West."

In Zurich, he managed a temporary escape. On a stroll with the wife of his Swiss lawyer, Fritz Heeb, he dismissed newsmen by saying that he was simply going to buy some vegetables. He then fled to the railway station and took a train to Copenhagen. Solzhenitsyn was en route to Norway to find a house for himself and his family, probably one that was deep in the remote and inaccessible countryside.

In spite of his unsuccessful struggle for privacy, Solzhenitsyn expressed measured optimism about his exile in the West. "It is not hopeless," he told one reporter. "Even old trees, when they are transplanted, take root in a new place." Mainly he was concerned about his family. He phoned his wife Natalya in Moscow every day, as she prepared to join him, together with their three sons, Stepan, 5 months, Ignat, 16 months, and Yermolai, 3, plus her son by a previous marriage, Dmitri, 12, her mother, and Solzhenitsyn's 80-year-old aunt. Although Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin had publicly stated that there would be no obstacles to the family's departure, Solzhenitsyn was worried about the precious collection of books and documents he had left behind in Russia. He needed the material to complete the cycle of historical novels he began with August 1914. Their loss would mean "spiritual murder," he said, warning that if he should thus be prevented from writing about the past, he would write about the present. "For that," he added, "I need no archives."

Increased Alarm. Now even more than before his exile, Solzhenitsyn is determined that The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental study of Soviet repression, should reach the Soviet people. Just before his deportation, he taped an excerpt from an unpublished part of Gulag for a BBC broadcast to the U.S.S.R. Last week he met with his Paris publisher to arrange for publication of the whole seven-part work, of which only two sections have appeared in the West. At the same time, the Kremlin was showing increasing alarm at the spread of Gulag in the Soviet Union via Western shortwave radio broadcasts, smuggled copies and unofficial samizdat (self-published) underground circulation.

To help Party activists counter the effects of Gulag's revelations, the Soviet authorities printed what amounted to an official samizdat edition. Thousands of copies of Gulag were distributed to top Party officials, newspaper editors and other ideological apparatchiks, who presumably will use them to better prepare their rebuttal. Meanwhile press attacks on Solzhenitsyn continued. Letters published in all the Soviet papers branded him a "traitor," while the head of the Russian Writers Union confidently asserted that Solzhenitsyn was headed for "inglorious oblivion" in the West.

Merely possessing a copy of Gulag has become a dangerous offense for ordinary Soviet citizens, and dissidents who have defended Gulag may soon be punished. Western experts believe that Physicist Andrei Sakharov and Historian Roy Medvedev may be forced into exile for their praise of the book. One of Solzhenitsyn's more obscure defenders, Writer Vladimir Voinovich, a former railway worker, has been expelled from the Soviet Writers Union.

Timid Choice. One Russian writer who rather surprisingly came to Solzhenitsyn's defense was Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the angry Establishment poet who has been notably servile toward the Kremlin in recent years. After learning of Solzhenitsyn's arrest, Yevtushenko sent what he described as "a polite and mild" telegram to Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. In it, he expressed his anxiety about the writer's fate and how it might affect the U.S.S.R.'s prestige.

As a result, a scheduled Soviet TV show about Yevtushenko was canceled and he was given an angry summons from the Writers Union. Yevtushenko refused the union's demand that he publicly denounce Solzhenitsyn. Instead, he circulated a letter of protest about the cancellation of his show, in which he expressed "bitter disagreement" with parts of Gulag. Yet he argued for disclosure of "the bloody crimes of the Stalin era documented in the terrifying pages" of Gulag. Echoing one of Solzhenitsyn's recent appeals, the poet wrote: "In our timidity, let each of us make a choice whether to consciously remain a servant of falsehood or to cast off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect by our children and our contemporaries."

Although Solzhenitsyn's deportation created scarcely a dent in East-West relations, the Soviets tried to blame possible future disturbance on Solzhenitsyn himself. An 8,000-word article in Literary Gazette last week suggested that the writer and other dissidents must be held responsible for any setbacks in the course of detente. There was, however, little cause for Kremlin concern. Diplomats in most major European capitals generally agreed that the Soviets acted with a degree of restraint in exiling Solzhenitsyn rather than liquidating him, as would have happened under Stalin. One measure of detente, argued a high-ranking State Department official, is "that Solzhenitsyn is now speaking to the Western press and is not in Siberia or in prison."

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