The Soviet campaign against Alexander Solzhenitsyn took a vicious new turn last week: Soviet authorities pressured the Nobel Prizewinning author's former friends and colleagues-and even his ex-wife-into denouncing him. This time the forum for the attacks was not the controlled Soviet press but newspapers in the U.S. and Europe
The Christian Science Monitor published an interview with a former fellow prisoner who said that Solzhenitsyn was the informer responsible for his being sent to a concentration camp. The leading Parisian daily Le Figaro printed an interview with Natalya Reshetovskaya, Solzhenitsyn's divorced wife. She dismissed Solzhenitsyn's new book, The Gulag Archipelago, a study of Soviet terror, as mere "concentration-camp folklore." In addition, vituperative articles by prominent Soviet writers about Gulag have appeared in the New York Times and France's Le Monde. These and other "exclusives" appearing in the Western press were all arranged by the Soviet news agency Novosti in an obvious attempt to discredit Gulag.
Solzhenitsyn's response was quick in coming. In a statement issued to Western correspondents last week, he identified Novosti as a "reliable branch" of the secret police and accused Soviet authorities of "standing on their lies behind a fortress of newsprint." He declared that "world public opinion has thus far kept them from killing the author of Gulag or even from imprisoning him. That would indeed be a confirmation of the book. But there remains the time-honored method of slander and personal vilification that is now being vigorously pursued."
Most galling to Solzhenitsyn was the Christian Science Monitor interview with his boyhood friend Nikolai Vitkevich, who was summoned by Novosti from his home in the Caucasus to Moscow to talk with the Monitor's correspondent. Vitkevich accused Solzhenitsyn of being guilty of the same crime of informing on friends for which the author damns others in Gulag.
In reality, Solzhenitsyn and Vitkevich had exchanged letters criticizing Stalin when both were Red Army officers in World War II. Solzhenitsyn writes in Gulag that this was the cause of their imprisonment in 1945. After being confronted with the letters, Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to eight years of hard labor, plus "perpetual exile"; Vitkevich got ten years, without exile. But last week Vitkevich claimed that Solzhenitsyn had betrayed him and three other people, including the writer's own wife, in order to get "a lighter sentence." As proof, Vitkevich alleged that when he was released in 1957, he was shown part of the record of Solzhenitsyn's 1945 interrogation, bearing notes in Solzhenitsyn's handwriting.
Solzhenitsyn retorted in his detailed statement that "for 29 years Vitkevich did not ever reproach me for my behavior at the investigation-but how convenient it is now to have him join the general chorus." The reliability of Vitkevich's belated accusations appeared questionable. Experts noted that handwritten notations were never permitted on the record of a prisoner's interrogations. Moreover, Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered the destruction of the dossiers of all rehabilitated prisoners in the early 1950s.