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Great Period. Solzhenitsyn's ex-wife Reshetovskaya claimed special knowledge of Gulag because she typed part of it. In her interview with Le Figaro, she charged that Gulag is essentially a work of fiction based on "intuition" and not the "scientific and historical" work it purports to be. According to Reshetovskaya, Gulag's exhaustively researched account of terror under Lenin and Stalin misrepresents "a great period in the history of our state."
Her charges were rebutted in London by Solzhenitsyn's friend Geneticist Zhores Medvedev. Said Medvedev: "The Soviet authorities have taken complete control of this vengeful woman." He told TIME that Reshetovskaya confided to him, after the couple's separation in 1970, that she intended to devote herself to "exposing" Solzhenitsyn so that he would be sent back to prison camp and she would go with him as a former "accomplice." "When I last saw her at her dacha near Moscow," he said, "she had constructed a mock grave for Solzhenitsyn in her backyard and pointed to it as the resting place she envisioned for him."
All these charges and countercharges were overshadowed by a formidable defense of Solzhenitsyn by Russia's leading historian of the Stalin era. It came from Marxist Roy Medvedev, the geneticist's twin brother who remained in the U.S.S.R. when Zhores was stripped of his Soviet citizenship while on a trip to England last year. Roy wrote a 6,000-word review of Gulag that was circulated last week among Western correspondents in Moscow. It was the first serious appraisal of the much-defamed book to come out of the Soviet Union. Medvedev's verdict: Gulag is "mercilessly truthful." Although he found some inaccuracies in Gulag, he noted that "these are infinitesimal for such a significant book." Himself the author of Let History Judge, a massive study of the Stalin era, Medvedev wrote that "few people, having read Gulag, will be the same as when they began the first page. In this respect, it seems to me that nothing in Russian and world literature can compare with Solzhenitsyn's book."
At week's end the possibility arose that Soviet authorities might go beyond mere words in their attack on Solzhenitsyn. He was asked to appear before the prosecuting attorney-an "invitation" he ignored. It remains to be seen what the prosecutor's purpose was, but the summons could only be ominous.