Russia: Behind a Desperate Escape

In his second week after defecting to the West, Soviet Author Anatoly Kuznetsov continued to detail his grim account of what it means to be a writer in the Soviet Union. "It is a frightful story," the novelist wrote in a copyrighted article in London's Sunday Telegraph. It is the story of a man haunted and hounded by Russia's massive secret security apparatus, the KGB. It is the painful record of an individual who, because he was expected to inform on friends, was forced into one moral crisis after another. Determined to escape, he finally resorted to an act of sheer desperation. It was, he says, "the animal instinct for self-preservation, probably—I was at least a living being."

"I do not know a single writer in Russia who has not had connection with the KGB," declares Kuznetsov. The connection, he explains, takes one of three forms: direct collaboration, limited cooperation, or a refusal to collaborate (in which case a writer is usually not published). The intimacy of the association depends largely on the writer's principles. For years, Kuznetsov chose the middle course, promising to report any "anti-Soviet activities" that he witnessed but refusing to spy on other writers. Once, after Kuznetsov had listened to a disillusioned scientist complain about being forced to work out mass-kill formulas on a missile project, the writer found himself summoned to a meeting on a park bench. "It was one of the 'comrades' [secret police]," he says. The agent repeated the conversation and demanded to know why Kuznetsov had not reported it. "I tremble when I write now about that conversation," he confesses. "I was forgiven and allowed to go, but was warned."

On his first trip abroad, another "comrade" pressured him to "see how people behave" in his travel group while visiting France. Though only politically reliable Russians are allowed to travel abroad, they are still forced to spy on one another. Says Kuznetsov: "If five people are traveling abroad, at least two of them are informers."

At home, Kuznetsov became convinced that his mail, reading matter and telephone were constantly monitored; there was one almost comic episode in which a voice on the other end of his line told him that he could not use his phone until the recording machine had been changed. After a mysterious fire in his study, he began to bury manuscripts. He suspected that every acquaintance was an informer. And he admits that he turned down his one chance to protest. When Novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn asked him to sign the famous letter denouncing Soviet censorship that was presented at the 1967 Writers' Congress, Kuznetsov refused. "I could not find the courage, and I probably fully deserved Solzhenitsyn's contempt," he admits.