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Inevitably, questions arise as to whether he had any sort of political strategy plotted out in the timing of Gulag's publication, which seemed to force the pace of retribution against him. By all accounts, apparently not. He has never directly engaged in polemics about detente, unlike his friend and fellow dissident, Physicist Andrei Sakharov, who appealed to the U.S. Congress last year to make democratization of the U.S.S.R. a precondition for expanding trade relations with Russia. Solzhenitsyn's concerns have always been less political than moral. In his Nobel Prize lecture, he wrote: "The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all. People in the East should without exception be concerned with what people are thinking in the West; people in the West should without exception care about what is happening in the East. Literature, one of the most sophisticated and sensitive instruments available to human beings, has been one of the first to pick up and to join in expressing this feeling of the growing unity of mankind."
Though provoked by Solzhenitsyn's defiance, the Soviet leaders' action against him was doubtless calculated to deprive the dissident movement within Russia of its spiritual leader while further intimidating the regime's remaining critics. About 50 dissidents have been detained and interrogated in the past three weeks, and many feared that Sakharov might soon be deported too. "We now feel very naked, very alone," a young liberal intellectual told Correspondent John Shaw in Moscow last week.
Nonetheless, Solzhenitsyn's example may in fact hearten rather than discourage Russia's libertarians. Last week Sakharov and nine other prominent dissenters issued an impassioned defense of Solzhenitsyn's actions: "His so-called 'treason' consists of his disclosure to the whole world, with shattering force, of the monstrous crimes committed in the U.S.S.R. not very long ago." They demanded the publication of Gulag in the Soviet Union and called for an international investigation of the crimes against innocent Soviet citizens.
But what now of Solzhenitsyn in exile? From a financial standpoint, at least, he has no worries. Swiss banks have custody of anywhere from $2 million to $6 million in royalties on his books—money that he had earmarked for "humanitarian purposes." Part of this could justifiably be used to ensure his family's future. Ironically, a new life of freedom might expose Solzhenitsyn to a hazard he never faced in Moscow: the constant, distracting attention of paparazzi and other celebrity seekers. So far he seems to be tolerating, if not actually enjoying the novelty. On arriving in Zurich, he smilingly acknowledged cheers from the waiting crowds.
The larger question, though, is whether his work might suffer now that he has been cut off from his native language. Solzhenitsyn certainly is aware of the difficulty: a character in The First Circle refers to exile in the West as "spiritual castration." Most experts, though, believe that he will survive as a creative force, even though he will have lost his unique platform in Russia.