28 Dec 1973
The first volume of The Gulag Archipelago has been published by YMCA-Press in Paris. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. As early as January, the book began being read on Radio Liberty—in excerpts, half an hour a day. The reading took three months.
This archipelago, in a striped manner, cut and dotted the other, inclusive country, it crashed into its cities, hung over its streets - and yet others had no idea at all, many heard something vaguely, only those who had been there knew everything
Solzhenitsyn conceived the idea for an epic novel about the repressions in the USSR from 1918 to 1956 in 1958. After Novy Mir published "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" four years later, letters poured in for Solzhenitsyn.
Letters to me exploded from all over Russia, and in the letters people wrote about what they had experienced... Everyone asked me, the author of the first camp story, to write more and more, to describe this entire camp world.
The work is based on the memoirs, letters, and oral histories of 257 prisoners—"witnesses of the Archipelago" (as the author titled the list of names in the last edition of the novel published during his lifetime). It also draws on Solzhenitsyn's personal experience. A decorated officer (he rose to captain during the war), he was sentenced in 1945 to eight years in a labor camp for "anti-Soviet activities." He was careless enough to keep a diary at the front, calling Stalin "the boss" and the system he established "serfdom."
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
Solzhenitsyn was assisted in his work on The Gulag Archipelago by "invisible people." Secret assistants, whom he never identified by their real names, retyped, hid, and stored the collected materials. Among the most active were philologists. Natalia Anichkova, who served 10 years under Article 58, and Nadezhda Levitskaya, A high school student, the daughter of an arrested cytogeneticist and associate of Vavilov, who was sent to a camp as an "accomplice of the occupiers," saved her family from starvation during the occupation by working as a translator in the local government office.
Artistic research is such a use of factual (not transformed) life material that from individual facts, fragments, connected by the artist’s capabilities, the general idea would emerge with full evidence, no weaker than in scientific research
"The Gulag Archipelago" was completed in 1968. Publication in the USSR was out of the question. The manuscripts were hidden.
A system that is constantly afraid of information loves to deceive itself
On August 23, 1973, the day Solzhenitsyn gave a long interview to foreign journalists, one of his assistants, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya (a typist who, together with her granddaughter, Korney Chukovsky by Elena Voronyanskaya, who was retyping the final version of the book, was detained by KGB officers. Her apartment was searched, "with wallpaper being stripped and floors being broken." The 67-year-old woman was taken away for questioning for the second time in a month (previously, after five days of mass interrogation, she had already attempted suicide). Voronyanskaya discovered the buried copy of the manuscript, returned home, and hanged herself.
Upon learning of the incident, Solzhenitsyn gave permission for The Gulag Archipelago to be published abroad. The book became a "political bomb."
In many ways, it was she who weaned the West away from the temptations of communism.
(Alexander Genis)
A campaign of persecution against the "literary Vlasovite" unfolded in the USSR. In February 1974, he was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and deported to West Germany.
Every important public event in the USSR is destined to one of two fates: either it will be hushed up, or it will be slandered.
"The Gulag Archipelago" was translated into dozens of languages. Royalties from sales went to the Solzhenitsyn Foundation and were secretly transferred to the USSR to aid political prisoners.
The same hands that tightened our handcuffs now hold out their palms in a conciliatory gesture: "No need!.. No need to stir up the past!.. He who brings up the past will lose an eye!" However, the proverb concludes: "And he who forgets will lose two!"
The novel was published in its entirety in its homeland in 1990.
Blessed are not victories in wars, but defeats in them! Governments need victories, people need defeats. After victories, you want more victories, after defeat, you want freedom—and usually you achieve it.
