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His Mission. Britain's leading specialist in Soviet literature, Max Hayward, points out that "Solzhenitsyn is already a fully formed, great writer who has completed many major works in Russia. Exile is hardly likely to affect him now as a writer." Leonard Schapiro of the London School of Economics adds that "even if he is cut off from the living speech of Russia, he is now engaged in writing historical works, and there is no doubt that he has a tremendous gift of bringing history alive that is denied to us mere historians."
Before his exile, Solzhenitsyn spoke of his "relief and calmness" in the accomplishment of his mission. This he perceives as a memorial to the dead of the archipelago. But his books are also Solzhenitsyn's gift to the living. Mindful of George Orwell's dictum that he "who controls the past controls the future," he has already wrested Soviet history from those bent on obliterating it and restored it to his people. In the future, he may also succeed in quickening the conscience of both the oppressed and the oppressors in his unhappy country. For, as he wrote in his Nobel Prize lecture, "The persuasiveness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable; it prevails even over a resisting heart."
* Nikolai Yezhov, head of the secret police from 1936 to 1938; he was replaced by Lavrenty Beria.
* A phantom "army" led by ex-Red Army General Andrei Vlasov. Two Russian divisions in the Wehrmacht were formed in 1944 under him. These units switched sides in 1945 and helped liberate Prague from the German army.