SOVIET UNION: Smothering Dissent

As the Soviet press pursued its campaign of vilification against Russian Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn last week, government officials struck out at yet another target: foreign newsmen. The 60 Moscow-based Western correspondents were cautioned about their reporting of Soviet dissent and the raging controversy over Solzhenitsyn's new book, The Gulag Archipelago, an exhaustive study of the Soviet system of terror under Lenin and Stalin. In an article in the Literary Gazette, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Vsevolod Sofinsky warned that foreign correspondents would "create difficulties for themselves" by seeking what Sofinsky called "nonexistent facts and information" about dissenters like Solzhenitsyn. Similar admonitions in the past have often led to police harassment and expulsion of newsmen from the country.

The measures were a gauge of the Kremlin's dismay over the extent of Western press coverage of Gulag since its publication in Paris last December. In an effort to blunt the effect abroad of the book's disclosures of Communist repression, Soviet news stories sent round the world portrayed the author as an opponent of detente, allied with "hawks, Maoists and the followers of Hitler." At home, newspapers, periodicals, radio and TV continued to assault Solzhenitsyn with such epithets as "traitor," "blasphemer," "renegade," "fascist," "counterrevolutionary" and "enemy of the people." Party activists and policemen were out scouring factories and collective farms for signatures to letters expressing patriotic indignation about Gulag. Scores of such letters have already been published by Pravda and other papers calling for Solzhenitsyn's punishment. Many Western experts believe that the final step in this Stalin-era tactic will be an announcement of legal action against Solzhenitsyn, taken in deference to the "will" of the mass of the Soviet people.

Bloody Circle. Few in Russia now dare to publicly support the beleaguered writer, as hundreds have done in the past. Only a dozen brave men could be found to speak up for him in Russia. Among these was Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. With a courage commensurate to Solzhenitsyn's, the physicist told a Swiss journalist that "the spiritual and moral impact of the facts revealed in Gulag will be enormous. Only by becoming conscious of the crimes perpetrated in the recent past can we hope to get out of this bloody circle. I am convinced that this work is of capital importance to our people and to the whole of humanity." The pitifully small showing of support for the renowned writer was a measure of the success of secret police efforts to silence the once vocal dissident movement. Many of its most active members have been dispatched to lunatic asylums, pressured to emigrate abroad, terrorized or imprisoned.

As concern for Solzhenitsyn's safety mounted in the West, publishers were gearing up for a record bestseller. In Paris, the Russian-language edition sold out in three weeks. In New York, bookstores reported that the first copies arriving from France were snapped up by Soviet diplomats. Gulag's Swiss publisher ordered an additional 260,000 printing of the German translation after selling out 50,000 books in a week.