Forty-seven years ago, on December 28, 1973, world renowned Russian writer, dissident and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature Alexandr Solzhenitsyn published the first of his three tomes on “The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956,” that detailed the concentration camps’ secret police surveillance and terror in the Soviet Union.
Chronicling the period following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 until Nikita Krushchev’s rise to power, Solzhenitsyn warned “if freedom does not come to my country for a long time,” then the mere reading of this book will be considered a serious crime.
In 260,000 words, the first book is based on Solzhenitsyn’s nine-year incarceration in concentration camps and those of 277 other former inmates with whom the writer came in contact. The book contains detailed accounts of how the Soviet police system worked, their methods of extracting confessions of uncommitted crimes and tortures used in the prison camps. He stated that this form of torture still existed in the camp at the time of the book’s publication.
Western analysts called the book Solzhenitsyn’s most explosive work and would undoubtedly cause a great deal of friction between him and Soviet officials, in addition to a great deal of discussion in the West.
Soviet news agency TASS released an official communique dated January 2, 1974, in which Soviet authorities harshly denounced Solzhenitsyn for his book and labeled it “a blanket slander of the Soviet people.” The New York Times ran an additional release on January 3 of that year by TASS, which did not deny any of the accusations described in the book, but noted “in some points Solzhenitsyn went further than before,” referring to praises of the tsarist regime and to the comparison of Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. Soviet officials explained that the book “only sows mistrust” between the USSR and the rest of the world, and aids in “prolonging the Cold War.”
Solzhenitsyn, who was among the most outspoken critics of Soviet internal policies, hesitated in publishing the book when a close associate of his, Yelizaveta Voronyanskaya, was arrested by the KGB, tortured until she revealed the location of a copy of the manuscript given to her by the author, and eventually committed suicide.
This led him to publish the book at Editions YMCA-Press, a Paris-based Russian language publisher. The book would be translated and published in English by Harper and Row in April 1974. Excerpts from the book had been printed at the time on the pages of The New York Times and other American newspapers.
By February 1974, the author was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship and deported, eventually settling in the U.S. In the 1980s he refused Mikhail Gorbachev’s offer to reinstate his Soviet citizenship, though in 1994 he did return to live in Russia. He died of heart failure in Moscow in 2008 at the age of 89.
He drew criticism from Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians and Kazakhs in his latter days, after he promoted a Slavic revival based on Russian Orthodoxy, and his public statements fanned the flames of Russian chauvinism, nostalgic for the days of the Russian Empire. He also angered Ukrainians (he was ethnically Ukrainian on his mother’s side) when he denied the genocidal nature of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 that killed millions.
Source: “Solzhenitsyn exposes Soviet terror system,” The Ukrainian Weekly, January 5, 1974.