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The Brutal Showdown. Recently, dissenters in Russia have sounded the alarm that a return to mass terror is at hand. So far, however, the leaders have confined themselves to selective terror in an attempt to silence the most outspoken writers and intellectuals and to curb their influence on public opinion. Still, the regime finds itself in an impossible dilemma. Without a return to mass police terror, new voices will be raised in dissent as soon as others are stilled. But the regime knows too that the cost of restoring Stalin's terror would be incalculably high. It would reverse the effect of all Soviet policies designed to bring Russia into competition with the modern world, by destroying the individual initiative of every Soviet citizen, from the simple worker to the great scientist who is crucial to the development of Soviet technology. And, perhaps most important, the powerful secret-police organization needed to impose terror might well devour the political leaders who had revived it.
* Literally, "self-publishing," a pun on Gosizdat, the acronym for State Publishing House. † TIME's quotations are taken from the Collins edition. * The counterintelligence organization popularized by Ian Fleming. Its name is an acronym from the Russian words for "death to spies." The man who denounced Solzhenitsyn was Alexei Romanov, now chairman of the State Cinematography Committee.