The elation was premature. No statement from the Writers’ Union appeared in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, nor did the promised extract from Cancer Ward. The proposal had been vetoed by the cultural department of the Central Committee.
Three months later, on September 12, 1967, Solzhenitsyn resumed his offensive, writing a letter to all members of the secretariat of the Writers’ Union. He complained that his open letter had still neither been published nor answered, even though supported by more than a hundred writers. His principal purpose, however, was to complain at the persistent stalling tactics being employed to prevent publication of Cancer Ward. His novel had been in the same equivocal state—no direct prohibition, no direct permission—for over a year, since the summer of 1966. He reiterated the desire of Novy Mir to publish the story even though it still lacked permission to do so. “Does the Secretariat believe that my novel will silently disappear as a result of these endless delays, that I will cease to exist…? While this is going on, the book is being read avidly everywhere. At the behest of the readers, it has already appeared in hundreds of typewritten copies.” He reminded the members of the secretariat of their discussion on June 12, and the concerns expressed that Cancer Ward might be published in the West if the censorship persisted in the Soviet Union. Then, in a brilliant coup de grace intended to raise the stakes and step up the pressure, he suggested that publication in the West “will clearly be the fault (or perhaps the wish?)” of the secretariat who were ultimately responsible for the senseless delay of many months in gaining the permission required for Soviet publication. “I insist that my story be published without delay.”16
The letter had the desired effect. Ten days later, Solzhenitsyn attended a meeting of the secretariat, at which some thirty secretaries of the Writers’ Union were present, along with a representative of the cultural department of the Central Committee.
From the outset, the meeting was highly charged. The chairman commenced proceedings plaintively, stating that Solzhenitsyn’s recent letter had been an insult to the collective and that it contained something in the nature of a threat. It was offensive, “like a slap in the face”, suggesting that members of the secretariat were “reprobates and not representatives of the creative intelligentsia”. Another member demanded to know how the contents of Solzhenitsyn’s first letter had been broadcast over the radio in the West and asked why he had not dissociated himself from this “licentious bourgeois propaganda”. Solzhenitsyn responded that he was not a schoolboy who was required to jump up obediently to answer every question. Later he responded to the complaint of some members of the secretariat that his recent letter amounted to an ultimatum: either print the story or it would be printed in the West. “It isn’t I who presents this ultimatum to the secretariat”, he replied. “Life presents this ultimatum to you and me both.” Hundreds of typewritten copies of Cancer Ward were now circulating around Russia, he explained, and it was only a matter of time before some of these copies made their way to the West. Whether he liked it or not, there was nothing he could do to stop this from happening. Neither was he impressed by the complaints that his letter had failed to treat the members of the secretariat as “brothers in writing and labor”. “Well, the fact of the matter is that these brothers in writing and labor have for two and a half years calmly watched me being oppressed, persecuted, and slandered…. [A]nd newspaper editors, also like brothers, contribute to the web of falsehood that is woven around me by not publishing my denials.”17
The enmity between the “brothers” became increasingly apparent as the meeting progressed, or rather regressed into the rut of entrenched positions. Utterly unconcerned by Solzhenitsyn’s libelous treatment at the hands of the Soviet press, one of the secretaries demanded that he speak out publicly against Western propaganda. Another stated that Cancer Ward must not be published because it would be used against the Soviet regime: “The works of Solzhenitsyn are more dangerous to us than those of Pasternak: Pasternak was a man divorced from life, while Solzhenitsyn, with his animated, militant, ideological temperament, is a man of principle.”18
Finding himself hopelessly isolated in the midst of a hostile audience, several members of which had already called for his expulsion from the union, Solzhenitsyn, the dangerous man of principle, struck back:
I absolutely do not understand why Cancer Ward is accused of being anti-humanitarian. Quite the reverse is true—life conquers death…. By my very nature, were this not the case, I would not have undertaken to write it. But I do not believe that it is the task of literature, with respect to either society or the individual, to conceal the truth or to tone it down…. The task of the writer is to select… universal and eternal questions, the secrets of the human heart and conscience, the confrontation between life and death, the triumph over spiritual sorrow, the laws in the history of mankind that were born in the depths of time immemorial and that will cease to exist only when the sun ceases to shine.19
Solzhenitsyn’s restatement of eternal verities fell on deaf ears. His audience believed that the laws governing the history of mankind had only been discovered a hundred years earlier by a German émigré living in London. Now it had fallen to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to be the infallible guardians of that absolute truth. To the secretaries of the Writers’ Union, Solzhenitsyn was simply a heretic who must be silenced. The meeting ended acrimoniously with the secretaries demanding that Solzhenitsyn renounce his role as leader of the political opposition, “the role they ascribe to you in the West”, to which Solzhenitsyn replied that his role as a writer was above politics. Solzhenitsyn left the meeting in the knowledge that his lonely battle with totalitarianism had entered a new and dangerous phase.
Toward the end of the meeting, Solzhenitsyn had remarked defiantly that although he was unable to reply to the slander being spread about him, especially if the Writers’ Union refused to help him refute the false allegations, he derived comfort from the knowledge that he would never suffer from such slander because he had been strengthened in the Soviet camps. Painfully aware that he lacked allies and that his enemies were preparing the next stage of their war on him, he braced himself for another wave of slander. It came on October 5 in a vicious attack by Mikhail Zimyanin, the editor of Pravda, during a speech at the Press House in Leningrad.
“At the moment,” Zimyanin began, “Solzhenitsyn occupies an important place in the propaganda of capitalist countries. He… is a psychologically unbalanced person, a schizophrenic…. Solzhenitsyn’s works are aimed at the Soviet regime in which he finds only sores and cancerous tumours. He doesn’t see anything positive in our society…. Obviously we cannot publish his works. Solzhenitsyn’s demands that we do so cannot be met. If he writes stories which correspond to the interests of our society, then his works will be published.”20
In the same month that Zimyanin was making these unjust attacks on him, Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter on the subject of justice to three students who had visited him previously. He equated justice with conscience, stating that there was nothing relative about justice, as there is nothing relative about conscience. Indeed, justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice. The obverse was equally true, that those sufficiently corrupted that they have ceased following the dictates of conscience are those most susceptible to the perpetration of acts of injustice. “Convictions based on conscience are as infallible as the internal rhythm of the heart (and one knows that in private life it is the voice of conscience which we often try to suppress).”21