Solzhenitsyn’s treatment at the hands of Western communists during this period prompted a bitter response in his autobiography, where he complained that “under the laws of leftist topsyturvydom, red sinners are always forgiven, red sins are soon forgotten. As Orwell writes, those very same Western public figures who were outraged by individual executions anywhere else on earth applauded when Stalin shot hundreds of thousands; they grieved for starving India, but the devastating famine in the Ukraine went unnoticed.”13 By the early seventies, the red sins carried out by the Soviet government may not have been as brutal as those perpetrated under Stalin’s murderous regime, but the red sinners of the KGB were still as active as ever. On August 8, 1971, KGB agents sought to assassinate Solzhenitsyn as he queued in a department store in Novocherkassk. According to a later confession by Lieutenant Colonel Boris Ivanov, one of the KGB operatives involved in the plot, the “whole operation lasted two or three minutes” and involved the surreptitious administering of a deadly poison to the intended victim’s skin. As Solzhenitsyn left the shop, completely oblivious of the deadly toxin that had been administered, the KGB agents assumed that he had only a short time to live. “It’s all over”, the officer-in-charge of the operation informed Ivanov. “He won’t live much longer.”14
Recalling the incident many years later, Solzhenitsyn told Russian journalists that he had been feeling well and that he and a friend had “visited the cathedral and the shops”. He went on to describe the effects of the toxin: “I don’t remember any injection, I certainly didn’t feel it, but by mid-morning the skin on my left side suddenly started to hurt a great deal. Towards evening (we had stopped to see people we knew), I continued to deteriorate and had a very large burn. The following morning I was reduced to a terrible state: my left hip, left side, stomach and back were covered with blisters, the largest of which were fifteen centimeters in diameter.”15
Alya told a Western journalist that her husband had “a strange, inexplicable disease” and that it took him months to recover, often being barely able to get out of bed or write.16 The doctors who examined him could not fathom the cause of the affliction, though some surmised that he had suffered a severe allergic reaction. Years later, in 1992, after the assassination plot was reported in the Russian newspaper, Sovershenno Sekretno (Top Secret), it was disclosed, after consultation with a respected toxicologist, that the substance employed by the KGB was probably ricin.17
Oleg Kalugin, a high-profile KGB defector, confirmed the assassination attempt had been made and claimed that the KGB “had a laboratory that invented new ways of killing people”. These included “poisons that could be slipped into drinks to jellies that could be rubbed on a person to induce a heart attack”. According to Kalugin, “a KGB agent rubbed such a substance on Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a store in Russia in the early 1970s, making him violently ill but not killing him.”18 Although Kalugin did not specify that ricin was the toxin used in the jelly, the fact that ricin can cause heart attacks would seem to confirm the toxicologist’s conclusion. Kalugin’s claims also throw into question the exact means by which the toxin was administered. It has generally been reported that Solzhenitsyn had been “stabbed . . . with a poisoned needle”19 or that the assassination attempt had been made “by poking him with a sharp instrument tipped with poison”,20 yet Solzhenitsyn did not feel anything, reinforcing Kalugin’s claim that it had been rubbed onto the skin as a jelly. Even so, one wonders how such jelly had been rubbed onto the skin, under the layers of clothing, without the victim’s knowledge. Such mysteries will probably remain unanswered, but the fact that the KGB had tried to take Solzhenitsyn’s life would appear to be confirmed by the evidence.
A few years later, the KGB seems to have perfected this particular method of assassination. In 1978, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London after being surreptitiously “shot” with a modified umbrella using compressed gas to fire a tiny pellet contaminated with ricin into his leg. He died a few days later, the ricin pellet being discovered during an autopsy. Since Georgi Markov had defected from Bulgaria in 1969 and had subsequently written books and made radio broadcasts that were highly critical of the Bulgarian communist regime, the prime suspects would appear to have been the Bulgarian secret police. It was widely believed, however, that Bulgaria would not have been able to produce the pellet, and that it must have been supplied by the KGB. Needless to say, the KGB denied any involvement, but Oleg Kalugin and another KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky, would later confirm its involvement.
On August 12, 1971, four days after the failed assassination attempt, Alexander Gorlov, a friend of Solzhenitsyn, was beaten brutally when he surprised a group of KGB officers in the process of searching Solzhenitsyn’s country cottage at Rozhdestvo. Finding the plain-clothed intruders in the house, Gorlov had demanded their identification, to which the intruders had responded by knocking him to the ground, tying him up, and dragging him face down into the woods where he was viciously assaulted. Gorlov, his face mutilated and his suit torn to ribbons, was then bundled into a car and driven off to the local police station. The KGB officers demanded that he sign an oath of secrecy, but Gorlov adamantly refused. “If Solzhenitsyn finds out what took place at the dacha,” he was told, “it’s all over with you. Your official career will go no further. . . . This will affect your family and children, and, if necessary, we will put you in prison.” In defiance of all these threats, Gorlov informed Solzhenitsyn of all that had happened as soon as he was released. The next day Solzhenitsyn wrote an open letter to Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB.
For many years, I have borne in silence the lawlessness of your employees: the inspection of all my correspondence, the confiscation of half of it, the search of my correspondents’ homes, and their official and administrative persecution, the spying around my house, the shadowing of visitors, the tapping of telephone conversations, the drilling of holes in ceilings, the placing of recording apparatuses in my city apartment and at my garden cottage, and a persistent slander campaign against me from speakers’ platforms when they are offered to employees of your Ministry. But after the raid yesterday, I will no longer be silent.21
After detailing the brutal nature of Gorlov’s treatment and the threats made against him, Solzhenitsyn demanded that Andropov publicly identify the intruders, oversee their punishment as criminals, and offer an explanation of why the incident had occurred. “Otherwise,” Solzhenitsyn concluded, “I can only believe that you sent them.” Solzhenitsyn sent a copy of the letter to Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, stating that he considered Andropov “personally responsible for all the illegalities mentioned” and that if the government wished to distance itself from such actions it should conduct an investigation into the matter.22
Far from distancing itself, the government awarded Andropov with a place on the Politburo two years later. This was the beginning of his rise to supreme power within the Soviet Union. On the death of Brezhnev in 1982, he became General Secretary of the Communist Party, consolidating his power in June of the following year with his election to the presidency. Thus the head of the hated KGB became the head of state.
On August 23, 1973, Solzhenitsyn gave an interview to the Associated Press news agency and Le Monde, in which he detailed death threats he had received. He was convinced that these were the work of the KGB. He had also heard from sources allegedly within the KGB that there had been a plan to kill him in a car accident. Even as he was speaking to these Western journalists, the KGB was being implicated in the death of Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, a frail sixty-seven-year-old woman who was one of Solzhenitsyn’s most devoted supporters. Over the years, she had typed up many of his works and was known to be one of his confidantes. She was arrested by the KGB and broke down under interrogation, divulging the whereabouts of a hidden copy of The Gulag Archipelago. Racked with guilt, she returned home on August 23 and apparently committed suicide by hanging herself, though there were rumors that the KGB had a direct
hand in her death. Such rumors were fueled by the fact that her body was taken to the Leningrad morgue in strictest secrecy and was not shown even to the family before being sealed in a coffin for burial. There seems to be no doubt that the KGB was at least indirectly responsible for the death of this elderly woman.
Solzhenitsyn had done everything in his power to keep the existence of The Gulag Archipelago a secret from the authorities. Now that they had a copy in their possession he had no choice but to order publication in the West as soon as possible. He announced the existence of the book, and his decision to publish it, to Western correspondents in Moscow. If the cat was out of the bag, the whole world and not just the KGB ought to know about it.
A few weeks later, on September 24, there was an enigmatic meeting between Solzhenitsyn and Natalya on a station platform that seemed to bear all the hallmarks of KGB involvement. The unhappily married couple, who for several years had not lived as man and wife in anything but pretence, had finally divorced six months earlier, and Solzhenitsyn had married Alya soon afterward. Relations between Natalya and her former husband had been strained, and Solzhenitsyn was surprised when she phoned to arrange the meeting. He deduced from the tone of her voice that her motives were not merely personal, and he reluctantly agreed to meet up with her at the neutral location of the Kazan station. Natalya told him that she had been speaking to “certain people” and had come to discuss the publication of some of Solzhenitsyn’s suppressed works, particularly Cancer Ward. The prospect of finally having Cancer Ward published in the Soviet Union was certainly alluring, but there was something in the nature of his former wife’s offer that aroused his suspicions. She told him that he was wrong to keep attacking the security organs. It was the Central Committee that was persecuting him, not the KGB. She announced that she had recently made many new and influential friends in high places, and that they were far cleverer than Solzhenitsyn realized. If these people had been searching for his manuscripts, Solzhenitsyn had only himself to blame: “You tell the world that your most important works are still to come, that the flow will continue even if you die, and that way you force them to come looking.” It was then that Natalya had mentioned what these certain people evidently wanted her to convey, no doubt with the threatened publication of The Gulag Archipelago in mind. “Why don’t you make a declaration that all your works are in your exclusive possession and that you won’t publish anything for twenty years?”23 So that was it. If he agreed to block publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the West, Natalya’s influential friends would agree to the publication of Cancer Ward in the Soviet Union. Insisting that her only aim was to help him, Natalya asked cautiously whether he would agree to talk to someone a little higher up. Solzhenitsyn replied that he would speak only to the Politburo and “only about the nation’s destiny, not my own”.24
In fact, although he conveyed no details to Natalya, Solzhenitsyn had taken steps only weeks earlier to do just as he said. On September 5, he had written a letter of constructive criticism to the leaders of the Soviet Union, in the hope of evoking some sort of positive response from them about the nation’s destiny. As a sign of good faith, he had not treated it as an open letter and did not release it to his friends or to the press. On the contrary, he had endeavored to keep its very existence a secret, dispatching individual copies to leading figures in the Soviet government. It was a genuine attempt at dialogue.
Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to Soviet Leaders was in many respects a visionary document, detailing the way in which civilization in both the East and the West was in peril—the peril of “progress”.
How fond our progressive publicists were, both before and after the revolution, of ridiculing those retrogrades. . . who called upon us to cherish and have pity on our past, even on the most god-forsaken hamlet with a couple of hovels . . . who called upon us to keep horses even after the advent of the motor car, not to abandon small factories for enormous plants and combines, not to discard organic manure in favour of chemical fertilizers, not to mass by the million in cities, not to clamber on top of one another in multi-storey blocks.25
The world had been “dragged along the whole of the Western bourgeois-industrial and Marxist path” only to discover
what any village greybeard in the Ukraine or Russia had understood from time immemorial . . . that a dozen maggots can’t go on and on gnawing the same apple forever; that if the earth is a finite object, then its expanses and resources are finite also, and the endless, infinite progress dinned into our heads by the dreamers of the Enlightenment cannot be accomplished on it. . . . All that “endless progress” turned out to be an insane, ill-considered, furious dash into a blind alley. A civilization greedy for “perpetual progress” has now choked and is on its last legs.26
Solzhenitsyn’s visionary rhetoric was not aimed solely at condemning past crimes but was an urgent effort to convince the Soviet government of its responsibility as the guardian of the future: “We have squandered our resources foolishly without so much as a backward glance, sapped our soil . . . and contaminated belts of waste land around our industrial centres—but for the moment, at least, far more still remains untainted by us, which we haven’t had time to touch. So let us come to our senses in time, let us change our course!”27 To secure the future and create a land of clean air and clean water for our children, he went on, it was necessary to overcome the dictatorship of short-term economic considerations and to renounce many forms of industrial production that result in toxic waste.28
Amidst the political polemics, the text of the Letter to Soviet Leaders was enlivened by the aesthetic ruminations of a literary master. Thus a discourse on the need for disarmament concluded with a plea for peace—not the peace of the politician but the peace of the poet:
In reducing our military forces we shall also deliver our skies from the sickening roar of aerial armadas—day and night, all the hours that God made, they perform their interminable flights and exercises over our broad lands, breaking the sound barrier, roaring and booming, shattering the daily life, rest, sleep and nerves of hundreds of thousands of people, effectively addling their brains by screeching overhead. . . . And all this has been going on for decades and has nothing to do with saving the country—it is a futile waste of energy. Give the country back a healthy silence, without which you cannot begin to have a healthy people.29
A similar observation offered an alternative to the utterly unnatural life people were forced to endure in modern cities. Against the huge industrial conurbations, Solzhenitsyn contraposed life in the “old towns—towns made for people, horses, dogs . . . towns which were humane, friendly, cosy places, where the air was always clean, which were snow-clad in winter and in spring redolent with garden aromas streaming through the fences into the streets. . . . An economy of non-giantism with small-scale though highly developed technology will not only allow for but will necessitate the building of new towns of the old type.”30
At the conclusion of his heartfelt address, Solzhenitsyn pleaded for equally fair treatment for all ideological and moral currents, in particular between all religions. He stated that personally he considered Christianity the only living spiritual force capable of undertaking the spiritual healing of Russia but proposed no special privileges for it, simply that it should be treated fairly and not suppressed. Besides the freedom to worship, he called for “a free art and literature . . . allow us philosophical, ethical, economic and social studies, and you will see what a rich harvest it brings and how it bears fruit—for the good of Russia”.31
Although Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to Soviet Leaders was written specifically from a Russian perspective, there were remarkable parallels between its central message and that of the radical economist E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, which was being published almost simultaneously in the West. Schumacher’s book was destined to have a dramatic impact on Western thought; its publication served to bolster the environmentalist lobby and launch the “green” movement. Schumacher’s call for sustaina
ble development, eco-friendly economics, and human-scale enterprises echoed Solzhenitsyn’s own thoughts. “I came to the same conclusions in parallel with him but independently”, Solzhenitsyn stated. “If you have read my Letter to Soviet Leaders you will see that I say much the same thing as he did at about the same sort of time.”32
There were other parallels with Schumacher. Like Solzhenitsyn, Schumacher believed that economic activity subsisted within a higher moral, and ultimately religious, framework. Like Solzhenitsyn, he had made his first public profession of faith the previous year, in his case with his reception into the Roman Catholic Church. There was, however, one notable difference. Whereas Schumacher was lauded and applauded by Western leaders, including American President Jimmy Carter, Solzhenitsyn received nothing but a wall of silence in response to his Letter to Soviet Leaders. In 1974, Schumacher was awarded the CBE by the British government for his services to economics. In the same year, Solzhenitsyn was exiled by the Soviet government as a traitor.
In the last quarter of 1973, Solzhenitsyn remained preoccupied with the subject of Russia’s reconstruction along the lines he had outlined in his Letter to Soviet Leaders. Specifically, he was in the process of editing a collection of eleven essays, later to be published as From under the Rubble, which was intended to stir debate on matters of fundamental principle concerning the contemporary state of Russian life. Each essay sought to shed light both on the present evils and on possible future long-term solutions. Solzhenitsyn wrote three essays for the collection, the first of which, entitled “As Breathing and Consciousness Return”, included a reiteration of the thoughts on nationhood he had elucidated in his Nobel Lecture: “In spite of Marxism, the twentieth century has revealed to us the inexhaustible strength and vitality of national feelings and impels us to think more deeply about this riddle: why is the nation a no less sharply defined and irreducible human entity than the individual? Does not national variety enrich mankind as faceting increases the value of a jewel? Should it be destroyed? And can it be destroyed?”33
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