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Since the KGB people were incapable of destroying me, they organized on the day of my expulsion a witches' Sabbath at which they conducted a ritual burning of the clothes I had worn at the time of my arrest. Then the KGB dressed me in used clothes. The next day, a confidential order went out for all libraries to burn the few remaining editions of my works and to destroy completely all copies of Novy Mir [the literary magazine] that contained my stories.
Beginning on the day of my expulsion, searches started at homes of my friends. In Ryazan, 14 KGBisti [secret policemen] showed up at the home of Natalya Radugina. There also were searches in other cities where the secret police hoped to find my samizdat [underground press] articles or anything else written by my hand. In Moscow, at the home of Neonell Snesareva, instead of an open search the police staged a fake robbery, a favorite masquerade of the KGBisti. They confiscated everything concerning me and left behind in the typewriter a sneering note: "We love Solzhenitsyn so much that we took along his work."
They have started putting systematic pressure on all people suspected of being my friends or even only acquaintances. The latest case: the persecution of Professor Efim Etkin in Leningrad, who last month was kicked out of the Writers' Union and stripped of his academic title and positions.
Even here in Zurich, the KGB has continued its provocations. Soviet citizens who make no secret of their origins telephone or come uninvited to my home. They warn me to be careful of my children. I first received such threats a year ago in Moscow in letters written to me by mythical Soviet gangsters. But after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, the warnings began to come from Soviet "patriots."
Now these threats are repeated by my Zurich callers as "sympathetic warnings" against Western gangsters. But my experience has proved to me that all the gangsters in my life come from one and the same organization.