(9 of 11)
Fedin demanded that "vou must, above all, protest against the dirty use of your name by our enemies in the West." One writer told Solzhenitsyn to his face that "Cancer Ward makes you throw up when you read it," and urged Solzhenitsyn to follow the critic's own example: "I always try to write only about happy things." Replied Solzhenitsyn: "The task of the writer is to treat universal and eternal themes: the mysteries of the heart and conscience, the collision between life and death, the triumph over spiritual anguish." He told his accusers with bitter humor that he knew very well what such views could mean for him. "I am alone, my slanderers are hundreds," he said. "Naturally I will never succeed in defending myself, and I cannot know in advance of what I will be accused. If they say I am a supporter of Copernicus' solar system, and that I set the fire that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake, I will not be very surprised."
In the next Moscow trial, four young people, including Intellectual Alexander Ginzburg, were charged with circulating underground publications. "I love my country," Ginzburg said, "and I do not wish to see its reputation damaged by the latest uncontrolled activities of the KGB." During the five-day trial, sympathizers gathered outside the courtroom. A letter to "world public opinion" condemning the "witch trials" as "a wild mockery of justice no better than the purge trials of the 1930s" was circulated by Mrs. Yuli Daniel and Pavel Litvinov, grandson of Stalin's Foreign Minister and one of the most daring of the dissidents. Shivering so badly in the January weather that her friends had to hold her to keep her warm, Larisa Daniel was asked why, when her husband was already in a labor camp, she was there. Said she: "I cannot do otherwise." Ginzburg got five years' hard labor; as the defense lawyers left the courtroom for the last time, people in the crowd pinned red carnations on them.
Then, on March 29, in the first pronouncement on cultural policy by a top leader since Khrushchev's fall, Brezhnev attacked "the abominable deeds of these double-dealers," the intellectuals who had protested the writers' trials, and promised that "these renegades" would be punished. Another trial was held in Leningrad, with 17 intellectuals convicted on the bizarre and clearly fabricated charge of conspiracy to replace the Soviet government with a democracy under the Russian Orthodox Church. Mass expulsions from the Writers and Artists Unions began; this meant loss of jobs and apartments. Among those expelled was Solzhenitsyn's close friend from camp days, the critic Lev Kopelev. Even scientists were suddenly no longer immune. Some top mathematicians who signed petitions were thrown out of the party. In the Soviet Union's finest research center, the largely self-governing scientific city of Akademgorodok in Siberia, there has been a threatening crackdown on modern art.
In the 20-month wave of protests, many dissidents had exposed themselves to view while the KGB waited and watched. In April the roundup began. Several hundred protesters were pulled in and