With the members unmoved by Solzhenitsyn’s words, a previously prepared draft resolution was read out: “The meeting considers that Solzhenitsyn’s conduct is anti-social in character and is radically in conflict with the aims and purposes of the USSR Union of Writers. In view of his anti-social behaviour… the writer Solzhenitsyn is hereby expelled from the USSR Union of Writers. We request that the Secretariat endorse this decision.” In the vote that followed, only one member voted against the resolution.2
The decision to expel Solzhenitsyn from the Writers Union was duly endorsed by the secretariat and was reported in the Literaturnaya Gazeta on November 12. The Gazeta reminded its readers that Solzhenitsyn’s works had been actively used by hostile bourgeois propaganda for a campaign of slander against his country and that Solzhenitsyn’s own actions and statements had substantially helped to fan the flames of anti-Soviet sensationalism around his name.
Solzhenitsyn’s letter of protest, sent to the secretariat of the Writers Union, was a masterpiece of invective, venting his spleen on his would-be silencers:
Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you—you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside. It is no longer that stifling, that sombre, irrevocable time when you expelled Akhmatova in the same servile manner. It is not even that timid, frosty period when you expelled Pasternak, whining abuse at him. Was this shame not enough for you? Do you want to make it greater? But the time is near when each of you will seek to erase his signature from today’s resolution.3
There followed an attack on the blind tribalism of the Cold War and a warning about the environmental disasters it could bring:
You could not live without “enemies”; hatred, a hatred no better than racial hatred, has become your sterile atmosphere. But in this way a sense of our single, common humanity is lost and its doom is accelerated. Should the antarctic ice melt tomorrow, we would all become a sea of drowning humanity, and into whose heads would you then be drilling your concepts of “class struggle”? Not to speak of the time when the few surviving bipeds will be wandering over radioactive earth, dying.4
Solzhenitsyn reminded his persecutors that they belonged first and foremost to humanity, that what was required was freedom of thought and freedom of speech: “Openness, honest and complete openness—that is the first condition of health in all societies, including our own. And he who does not want this openness for our country cares nothing for his fatherland and thinks only of his own interest. He who does not wish this openness for his fatherland does not want to purify it of its diseases, but only to drive them inwards, there to fester.”5
Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion caused a storm of protest from the West. David Carver and Pierre Emmanuel, in their respective capacities as secretary and president of the International PEN Club, sent a telegram to Konstantin Fedin, chairman of the Soviet Writers Union, on November 18, stating that they were appalled and shocked at the expulsion of the “great and universally respected writer”. Carver and Emmanuel called on Fedin to intervene personally to restore Solzhenitsyn’s membership. By doing so, he would be helping to combat the “much deplored prolonged persecution” of one of “our most eminent colleagues”. Fedin’s reply was terse in the extreme, calling Carver’s and Emmanuel’s telegram an unprecedented interference in the internal affairs of the Writers Union of the USSR. In response, Carver and Emmanuel expressed their regret at the tone and content of Fedin’s telegram, reiterating their view that a writer of Solzhenitsyn’s caliber would be welcome anywhere and that the Soviet Writers Union should feel honored to have him as a member.6
More worrying for the Soviet authorities must have been the strong criticism from socialist fellow travelers in the West who would normally be sympathetic to Soviet policy. Typical of the outrage on the Left in the wake of Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion was a statement by the French National Writers Committee. Signed by sixteen prominent French writers, including Louis Aragon, Michel Butor, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the statement expressed concern that Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion “constitutes in the eyes of the whole world a monumental mistake which not only does harm to the Soviet Union but helps confirm the view of socialism as propagated by its enemies”. Despite this “mistake”, the writers remained confident of the essential political correctness of the Soviet regime, stating that “we still wish to believe that… there will be found in the high councils of the nation, to whom we owe the Dawn of October and the defeat of Hitlerian fascism, men capable of realizing the wrong that has been done and of putting it right.” The statement was signed in the name of “the common cause for which we live, fight and die”.7
More impressive still was a letter addressed to Konstantin Fedin on December 3 from a group of prominent international figures. “We reject the conception that an artist’s refusal humbly to accept state censorship is in any sense criminal in a civilized society, or that publication by foreigners of his books is ground for persecuting him…. We sign our names as men of peace declaring our solidarity with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s defense of those fundamental rights of the human spirit which unite civilized people everywhere.” It was signed by Arthur Miller, Charles Bracelen Flood, Harrison Salisbury, John Updike, John Cheever, Truman Capote, Richard Wilbur, Jean-Paul Sartre, Carlos Fuentes, Yukio Mishima, Igor Stravinsky, Gunter Grass, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Heinrich Boll, Kurt Vonnegut, and Mitchell Wilson.8
On December 16, The Times published a letter signed by thirty well-known writers, condemning the silencing of a writer of Solzhenitsyn’s stature as a crime against civilization. Among the signatories were W. H. Auden, A. J. Ayer, Brian Glanville, Gunter Grass, Graham Greene, Julian Huxley, Rosamond Lehmann, Arthur Miller, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Spark, Philip Toynbee, and Bernard Wall.
As the world’s literati lined up to denounce the Soviet Union as an enemy of civilization, it must have been clear to all but the most blind of Soviet officials that the efforts to crush Solzhenitsyn through the crude expedient of expulsion from the Writers Union had been a woeful error of judgment. He had become an international cause célèbre, a living symbol of the struggle for human rights in the face of state censorship. If there was any doubt remaining about Solzhenitsyn’s triumphant emergence from this latest bout of persecution, it was dispelled on October 8, 1970, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”.9
Predictably, the official Soviet reaction to the award of the world’s most prestigious literary prize to Solzhenitsyn was one of outrage. On October 10, Izvestia, after claiming that Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion from the Writers Union had been actively supported by the entire public of the country, declared that the award was a further example of Solzhenitsyn’s work being used by reactionary circles in the West for anti-Soviet purposes. On October 14, the neo-Stalinist newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya described it as a purely political act, which was in its essence a provocation and another international act of an anti-Soviet character. On the same day, the Literaturnaya Gazeta accused the Nobel committee of succumbing to anti-Soviet trends. Soviet Weekly, on October 17, derided the award by stating that it was “not a real literary award, but a maliciously prepared sensation”. Having dismissed the award, the paper dismissed Solzhenitsyn himself as a run-of-the-mill writer: “He must surely realize himself that his literary gifts are not only below those of the giants of the past, but also inferior to many of his Soviet contemporaries—writers the West choose to ignore because they find the impact of the truth in their writing most unpalatable.”10