Silence for Solzhenitsyn

Russia's greatest living writer is very seldom read these days in his own country. A former prison camp inmate whose evocative historical novels have dealt bluntly with the repressions of the Stalin era, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is excluded from official Moscow literary circles. He lives on the outskirts of the ancient city of Ryazan under the shadow of a Soviet campaign to discredit him. Though his major works (The Cancer Ward and The First Circle) are widely read abroad, they have never been published in Russia. Nor have any of his short stories appeared in the Soviet Union during the past three years. Last week the Soviets moved to impose on him the sentence that a writer dreads most: silence.

According to reports from Moscow, the Ryazan branch of the Soviet Writers Union recently yielded to party pressure to expel Solzhenitsyn from the organization. The move was taken to punish the 50-year-old author for "conduct unbecoming a Soviet writer," for "actively using the bourgeois anti-Soviet press for anti-Soviet propaganda," and for failing to combat the use of his name abroad. Since the ouster places a stigma on Solzhenitsyn, it means, in effect, that no Soviet editor would dare accept his works for publication.

Lonely Dissenter. Solzhenitsyn's dismissal was an inevitable conclusion to his long, often lonely, campaign for intellectual freedom in the Soviet Union. Since the Russian publication in 1962 of his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, he has been marked as a dissenter. While a handful of other Russian writers fled to the West, he remained determined to stay and work for the cause of literary freedom in the Soviet Union. In 1967 he angered the apparatchiki with his famous letter to the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers, in which he condemned "the no longer tolerable oppression, in the form of censorship" to which the country's literature was subjected. Soviet officials became increasingly outraged after his books were smuggled to the West and published.

The action against Solzhenitsyn will not be final until ratification of the ouster by the Executive Committee of the Union of Soviet Writers. Since some of the writers on the executive committee oppose the ouster, Solzhenitsyn's case may well turn into an important test in the struggle against literary repression in Russia.

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