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The Silence. No other first novel has ever had such an exclusive private printing, or such an exclusive first audience. Khrushchev wanted to use the book as a weapon in his own power struggle with the hardliners, Mikhail Suslov and Frol Kozlov. By Khrushchev's order, the script was set in type and 20 copies were run off on the Swedish-built presses the Kremlin reserves for state documents. The copies were distributed to members of the Presidium. Then, at Khrushchev's summons, the Presidium met. The members sat at a long table, each with his copy of the novel in front of him. Khrushchev came in. He was greeted by silence.
"Comrades: it's a good book, isn't it!"
He was answered by silence.
"There's a Russian proverb, 'Silence is consent.' " He strode directly out.
The silence did not last. The top of the Soviet hierarchy erupted into controversy over Khrushchev's plan to publish the book, but at his direct authorization the novel appeared in the November issue of Novy Mir. The 95,000-copy press run sold out within days, as did the 100,000 copies in book form that quickly followed; by now, millions of Russians have read it, although it is no longer in bookstores and is gradually disappearing from library shelves.
Unmistakable Signal. One Day was the high point in a year of unparalleled triumph for Russia's liberals in all the arts. The euphoria came to an abrupt end soon after. The failure of Khrushchev's Cuban missile adventure was the last in a series of catastrophes in foreign and domestic policy that put him under increasing pressure from political opponents. Freeze-and-thaw was replaced by steadily deepening freeze. Khrushchev began a partial rehabilitation of Stalin that his successors continued and added to.
The unmistakable signal of what was in store for the liberals came in May of 1965, when Brezhnev cited Stalin, who had become virtually an unperson, favorably in a public speech. A day later, Stalin's picture flashed on Moscow television screens for the first time in nine years. The initial effect was to arouse and unify the liberal intelligentsia as never before, a unity that has largely managed to hold through the ensuing crackdown.
A large number of the dissenters are, like Solzhenitsyn, writers. But artists, critics, musicians, lawyers, mathematicians have also joined ranks with the writers to protest any return to the moral squalor of Stalinism. Particularly important has been the willingness of noted scientists, such as Andrei Sakharov, who helped build the Soviet H-bomb, to speak out (TIME, Aug. 2).
Among the dissenters and their audience there are, of course, all shades of protest. Some are mainly concerned with the quick elimination of censorship. At the other extreme, there are a few so dissatisfied with the entire Soviet