World: THE WRITER AS RUSSIA'S CONSCIENCE

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Communist system that they want it overthrown. But in general, the dissenters share three basic aims. They want full exposure of the crimes against the Soviet people during the Stalin era. They want the regime to halt the rehabilitation of Stalin and the restoration of Stalinist methods. Finally, they are outraged at the illegality of the regime's tactics against them: the confinement of dissenters in lunatic asylums, the searches and seizures of private papers, the arrests for circulating manuscripts or for demonstrating peacefully in public assembly.

Their argument is that such things are a violation of the Soviet constitution. Their tactic is essentially an appeal to law, and that in itself represents an advance over the days of Stalin, when such a protest would have been meaningless. That it is not entirely meaningless now is demonstrated by the fact that the secret police are also concerned with fabricating cases that they can prop up in a Soviet court. The KGB effort to peddle Solzhenitsyn's manuscripts abroad is a search for a pretext to arrest him. Stalin's police never required pretexts for anything they did.

Throughout all this, Solzhenitsyn tried to get his works published in Russia. When, after a long battle, permission was refused to print Cancer Ward, he stormed furiously out of the Novy Mir office. A clerk who had helped him wrap up the huge manuscript reported his movements to the secret police, who later seized the book at the house of a friend to whom Solzhenitsyn had given it for safekeeping.

The first political show trial since Stalin's death took place in February of 1966. Two novelists, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, were charged with circulating "anti-Soviet" propaganda after they had sent their novels abroad to be published (under the pen names Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak). They were condemned, under Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Republic, for "dissemination of slanderous inventions" with the purpose of "subverting the Soviet regime." Since then, an even more general law has been passed removing the need to prove subversive purpose. Sinyavsky got seven years' hard labor, Daniel five. Their judge later received the Order of Lenin. But petitions and letters in the writers' support were signed by hundreds of intellectuals.

The forces of repression counterattacked. The then head of the KGB Vladimir Semichastny told a meeting of the Central Committee: "If you will permit me to arrest 1,000 to 1,200 of the most active members of the intelligentsia, I will guarantee absolute tranquillity within the country." He was given at least a partial mandate. A few months later, his men quietly rounded up some 150 to 300 intellectuals in Leningrad. A new, sinister note crept into the charges: "Conspiracy to armed rebellion." The secret police claimed to have smashed an underground terrorist network, extending to arrests of related groups in Sverdlovsk and several towns in the Ukraine.

In September 1967, Solzhenitsyn had a direct confrontation with about 30 functionaries of the Writers' Union, headed by the regime's literary spokesman, Konstantin Fedin. Solzhenitsyn charged anew that his manuscripts had been stolen by the KGB, that publication of Cancer Ward in Novy Mir had been held up so long that there was danger of samizdat copies making