Alya told a Western journalist that her husband had “a strange, inexplicable disease” and that it took him months to recover, often being barely able to get out of bed or write.16 The doctors who examined him could not fathom the cause of the affliction, though some surmised that he had suffered a severe allergic reaction. Years later, in 1992, after the assassination plot was reported in the Russian newspaper, Sovershenno Sekretno (Top Secret), it was disclosed, after consultation with a respected toxicologist, that the substance employed by the KGB was probably ricin.17
Oleg Kalugin, a high-profile KGB defector, confirmed the assassination attempt had been made and claimed that the KGB “had a laboratory that invented new ways of killing people”. These included “poisons that could be slipped into drinks to jellies that could be rubbed on a person to induce a heart attack”. According to Kalugin, “a KGB agent rubbed such a substance on Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a store in Russia in the early 1970s, making him violently ill but not killing him.”18 Although Kalugin did not specify that ricin was the toxin used in the jelly, the fact that ricin can cause heart attacks would seem to confirm the toxicologist’s conclusion. Kalugin’s claims also throw into question the exact means by which the toxin was administered. It has generally been reported that Solzhenitsyn had been “stabbed… with a poisoned needle”19 or that the assassination attempt had been made “by poking him with a sharp instrument tipped with poison”,20 yet Solzhenitsyn did not feel anything, reinforcing Kalugin’s claim that it had been rubbed onto the skin as a jelly. Even so, one wonders how such jelly had been rubbed onto the skin, under the layers of clothing, without the victim’s knowledge. Such mysteries will probably remain unanswered, but the fact that the KGB had tried to take Solzhenitsyn’s life would appear to be confirmed by the evidence.
A few years later, the KGB seems to have perfected this particular method of assassination. In 1978, the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London after being surreptitiously “shot” with a modified umbrella using compressed gas to fire a tiny pellet contaminated with ricin into his leg. He died a few days later, the ricin pellet being discovered during an autopsy. Since Georgi Markov had defected from Bulgaria in 1969 and had subsequently written books and made radio broadcasts that were highly critical of the Bulgarian communist regime, the prime suspects would appear to have been the Bulgarian secret police. It was widely believed, however, that Bulgaria would not have been able to produce the pellet, and that it must have been supplied by the KGB. Needless to say, the KGB denied any involvement, but Oleg Kalugin and another KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky, would later confirm its involvement.
On August 12, 1971, four days after the failed assassination attempt, Alexander Gorlov, a friend of Solzhenitsyn, was beaten brutally when he surprised a group of KGB officers in the process of searching Solzhenitsyn’s country cottage at Rozhdestvo. Finding the plain-clothed intruders in the house, Gorlov had demanded their identification, to which the intruders had responded by knocking him to the ground, tying him up, and dragging him face down into the woods where he was viciously assaulted. Gorlov, his face mutilated and his suit torn to ribbons, was then bundled into a car and driven off to the local police station. The KGB officers demanded that he sign an oath of secrecy, but Gorlov adamantly refused. “If Solzhenitsyn finds out what took place at the dacha,” he was told, “it’s all over with you. Your official career will go no further…. This will affect your family and children, and, if necessary, we will put you in prison.” In defiance of all these threats, Gorlov informed Solzhenitsyn of all that had happened as soon as he was released. The next day Solzhenitsyn wrote an open letter to Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB.
For many years, I have borne in silence the lawlessness of your employees: the inspection of all my correspondence, the confiscation of half of it, the search of my correspondents’ homes, and their official and administrative persecution, the spying around my house, the shadowing of visitors, the tapping of telephone conversations, the drilling of holes in ceilings, the placing of recording apparatuses in my city apartment and at my garden cottage, and a persistent slander campaign against me from speakers’ platforms when they are offered to employees of your Ministry. But after the raid yesterday, I will no longer be silent.21
After detailing the brutal nature of Gorlov’s treatment and the threats made against him, Solzhenitsyn demanded that Andropov publicly identify the intruders, oversee their punishment as criminals, and offer an explanation of why the incident had occurred. “Otherwise,” Solzhenitsyn concluded, “I can only believe that you sent them.” Solzhenitsyn sent a copy of the letter to Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, stating that he considered Andropov “personally responsible for all the illegalities mentioned” and that if the government wished to distance itself from such actions it should conduct an investigation into the matter.22
Far from distancing itself, the government awarded Andropov with a place on the Politburo two years later. This was the beginning of his rise to supreme power within the Soviet Union. On the death of Brezhnev in 1982, he became General Secretary of the Communist Party, consolidating his power in June of the following year with his election to the presidency. Thus the head of the hated KGB became the head of state.
On August 23, 1973, Solzhenitsyn gave an interview to the Associated Press news agency and Le Monde, in which he detailed death threats he had received. He was convinced that these were the work of the KGB. He had also heard from sources allegedly within the KGB that there had been a plan to kill him in a car accident. Even as he was speaking to these Western journalists, the KGB was being implicated in the death of Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, a frail sixty-seven-year-old woman who was one of Solzhenitsyn’s most devoted supporters. Over the years, she had typed up many of his works and was known to be one of his confidantes. She was arrested by the KGB and broke down under interrogation, divulging the whereabouts of a hidden copy of The Gulag Archipelago. Racked with guilt, she returned home on August 23 and apparently committed suicide by hanging herself, though there were rumors that the KGB had a direct hand in her death. Such rumors were fueled by the fact that her body was taken to the Leningrad morgue in strictest secrecy and was not shown even to the family before being sealed in a coffin for burial. There seems to be no doubt that the KGB was at least indirectly responsible for the death of this elderly woman.
Solzhenitsyn had done everything in his power to keep the existence of The Gulag Archipelago a secret from the authorities. Now that they had a copy in their possession he had no choice but to order publication in the West as soon as possible. He announced the existence of the book, and his decision to publish it, to Western correspondents in Moscow. If the cat was out of the bag, the whole world and not just the KGB ought to know about it.
A few weeks later, on September 24, there was an enigmatic meeting between Solzhenitsyn and Natalya on a station platform that seemed to bear all the hallmarks of KGB involvement. The unhappily married couple, who for several years had not lived as man and wife in anything but pretence, had finally divorced six months earlier, and Solzhenitsyn had married Alya soon afterward. Relations between Natalya and her former husband had been strained, and Solzhenitsyn was surprised when she phoned to arrange the meeting. He deduced from the tone of her voice that her motives were not merely personal, and he reluctantly agreed to meet up with her at the neutral location of the Kazan station. Natalya told him that she had been speaking to “certain people” and had come to discuss the publication of some of Solzhenitsyn’s suppressed works, particularly Cancer Ward. The prospect of finally having Cancer Ward published in the Soviet Union was certainly alluring, but there was something in the nature of his former wife’s offer that aroused his suspicions. She told him that he was wrong to keep attacking the security organs. It was the Central Committee that was persecuting him, not the KGB. She announced that she had recently made many new and influential friends in high places, and that they were far cleverer than Solzhenitsyn realized. If these people had been searching for his manuscripts, Solzhenitsyn had only himself to blame: “You tell the world that your most important works are still to come, that the flow will continue even if you die, and that way you force them to come looking.” It was then that Natalya had mentioned what these certain people evidently wanted her to convey, no doubt with the threatened publication of The Gulag Archipelago in mind. “Why don’t you make a declaration that all your works are in your exclusive possession and that you won’t publish anything for twenty years?”23 So that was it. If he agreed to block publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the West, Natalya’s influential friends would agree to the publication of Cancer Ward in the Soviet Union. Insisting that her only aim was to help him, Natalya asked cautiously whether he would agree to talk to someone a little higher up. Solzhenitsyn replied that he would speak only to the Politburo and “only about the nation’s destiny, not my own”.24