There is a certain organization that has no obvious claim to tutelage over the arts, that you may think has no business at all supervising literature—but that does these things. This organization took away my novel and my archive…. Even so, I said nothing, but went on working quietly. However, they then made use of excerpts from my papers, taken out of context, to launch a campaign of defamation against me…. What can I do about it? Only defend myself! So here I am!8
The audience was at first stunned by the apparently suicidal courage of the speaker in front of them. It was unheard of for anyone to attack the KGB in such terms from a public platform in the Soviet Union. It simply wasn’t done. It was courage beyond the call of duty and beyond the bounds of safety, courage that the faint-hearted would call foolhardy. Yet Solzhenitsyn had just said these words in front of their disbelieving ears. With a growing sense of exhilaration, the audience listened as Solzhenitsyn began to read from The First Circle, the “forbidden” novel that the KGB had confiscated. This time, unlike the readings from the novel he had given at the Kurchatov Institute, which had been tame by comparison, he deliberately read the most provocative chapters, the most political ones. Solzhenitsyn was intoxicated by the freedom of expression and would always look back with pleasure to “that hour of free speech from a platform with an audience of five hundred people, also intoxicated with freedom”.9
Within days, the five hundred people had set off a chain reaction of gossip around Moscow that set the city buzzing with the news of Solzhenitsyn’s daring defiance of the KGB. The legend of Solzhenitsyn was being born.
Yet at the beginning of December, even as his escapades were being discussed in countless homes around Russia’s capital, Solzhenitsyn shaved off his beard so that he would be more difficult to recognize and slipped out of the city to one of his hideaways to continue work on The Gulag Archipelago. Commenting on the legend that was beginning to surround Solzhenitsyn, Michael Scammell writes that he was “not so much a musketeer as a pimpernel” who was “beginning to live a life… that far surpassed, in excitement and danger, the lives of his fictional heroes”.10
Between December 1966 and February 1967, Solzhenitsyn worked on the second draft of the first six parts of The Gulag Archipelago, revising and retyping over fifteen hundred pages in only two and a half months. To achieve this superhuman task, he worked sixteen hours a day in two eight-hour shifts and completed the work on February 22. On that day, he penned the afterword that appeared at the end of the third volume of the published edition in which he expressed his surprise that he had managed to finish it safely: “I have several times thought they would not let me.” Indeed, if the communist authorities had realized he was working on such a devastating expose of the Soviet prison system, it is certain they would not have let him. As it was, the fact that he had completed the work safely was a tribute to his own cautious and secretive endeavor and that of the small handful of people who had helped him. “I am finishing it”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “in the year of a double anniversary (and the two anniversaries are connected): it is fifty years since the revolution which created Gulag, and a hundred since the invention of barbed wire (1867). This second anniversary will no doubt pass unnoticed.”11
Having completed work on The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn moved back on to the offensive in his struggle against Soviet repression. On May 16, he wrote an open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress, ensuring that copies were sent to the editors of literary newspapers and magazines. The target of his ire was “the no longer tolerable oppression, in the form of censorship, which our literature has endured for decades”. This censorship “imposes a yoke on our literature and gives people unversed in literature arbitrary control over writers…. Works that might express the mature thinking of the people, that might have a timely and salutary influence on the realm of the spirit or on the development of a social conscience, are proscribed or distorted by censorship on the basis of considerations that are petty, egotistical, and—from the national point of view—shortsighted.”12
After giving a full exposition of the case against censorship in principle, Solzhenitsyn proceeded to examine the cases of various writers who had suffered censorship and persecution at the hands of the Soviet regime in previous decades. He concluded with an examination of his own case, detailing the plight of each of his works that had been “smothered, gagged, and slandered” at the hands of the censors. “In view of such flagrant infringements… will the Fourth Congress defend me—yes or no? It seems to me that the choice is also not without importance for the literary future of several of the delegates.” He ended on a note of defiance: “I am of course confident that I will fulfil my duty as a writer in all circumstances…. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.”13
Solzhenitsyn’s calculated gamble in going public with his protestations to the Writers’ Union appeared to have paid off. Within days, a letter of support signed by eighty members of the Writers’ Union was sent to the Presidium of the Fourth All-Union Soviet Writers’ Congress. This stated that Solzhenitsyn’s letter confronted the Writers’ Union and each one of its members with questions of vital importance. It was impossible to pretend that the letter did not exist and simply take refuge in silence. To keep silent “would inevitably do grave damage to the authority of our literature and the dignity of our society”.14 The eighty writers insisted that only a full and open discussion of Solzhenitsyn’s letter could serve as a guarantee for the healthy future of literature, which had been called upon to be the conscience of the people. This was not the only expression of support for Solzhenitsyn’s open letter. A number of other writers sent letters or telegrams to the Presidium of the Writers’ Congress calling for a full discussion of the issues raised.
In a crass disregard for its members’ wishes, the Presidium proceeded with the congress without even mentioning Solzhenitsyn’s letter, and only one delegate had the courage to challenge the leadership’s conspicuous silence on the matter. A writer named Vera Ketlinskaya complained that it was intolerable to ignore someone completely and pretend he did not exist, as the speakers had done with regard to Solzhenitsyn. She was greeted with loud applause, but apart from this one embarrassing moment, the powers that be succeeded in conducting the entire congress without any reference to the open letter.
On June 12, Solzhenitsyn heard from Tvardovsky of an apparent climbdown by the union’s leadership, and, along with Tvardovsky himself, he was invited to a meeting with four members of the union’s secretariat. Solzhenitsyn was surprised to find that his erstwhile adversaries were both polite and conciliatory. The secretariat members were concerned about the number of copies of Cancer Ward circulating in samizdat; there were rumors that copies might even have found their way to the West. Solzhenitsyn simply stated that if this was so he was not to blame. At this point, Tvardovsky seized the opportunity to extract concessions. “That’s just why I say that Cancer Ward must be published immediately. That will put a stop to all the hullabaloo in the West and prevent its publication there. We must put excerpts in the Literaturnaya Gazeta two days from now, with a note that the story will be published in full.”15 To Solzhenitsyn’s astonishment, the members of the secretariat agreed, and he left the meeting with a feeling of elation that he had at last beaten the ban on his work.