The Attack on Solzhenitsyn

Once again, Russia's heavy artillery was rolled out against that nation's greatest living novelist last week. In a major policy pronouncement, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda vowed that vigilance would henceforth be exercised to "sweep away" Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other "wretched renegades." The author's banned novels, Cancer Ward and The First Circle, which were bestsellers in the West, were excoriated by Pravda as "lampoons on the Soviet Union which blacken the achievements of our fatherland and the dignity of the Soviet people."

Even more ominously, the paper equated Solzhenitsyn with dissidents, like Andrei Amalric, who are now serving sentences in concentration camps for precisely the offenses Pravda attributes to Solzhenitsyn. So menacing was Pravda's denunciation that many Sovietologists fear for the writer's physical safety. They believe that Soviet hardliners, angered by the Nobel Prize award to Solzhenitsyn this month, have increased the pressure to bring the beleaguered author to trial.

Key Figure. Solzhenitsyn's arrest would be the cruel but logical culmination of a three-year effort by the KGB, the Soviet secret police, to fabricate a case against him based on Article 70 of the Russian criminal code. That article makes it a crime, punishable by seven years' imprisonment, for a writer deliberately to "disseminate slander" about the Soviet system in Russia or abroad. In order to build a case that could appear plausible in court, the KGB has planted Solzhenitsyn's forbidden manuscripts, together with spurious "authorizations," on unsuspecting Western publishers. Many Sovietologists believe that the key figure in this elaborate plot is one Pavel Licko, a sometime Czechoslovak journalist but also a longtime Soviet intelligence officer.

Licko first met Solzhenitsyn in 1967, when he called on the writer at his former home in Ryazan, a city that is out of bounds to foreigners. Unaware that Licko had held a top post in the Slovak Central Committee during the Stalinist terror. Solzhenitsyn accorded him an interview--the first he had ever given a foreigner. On the strength of the interview, which was published in several European countries, Licko later visited London, where he boasted of his supposed intimacy with Solzhenitsyn; he also signed an affidavit saying that the author had entrusted him with a manuscript of Cancer Ward and had asked him to place it for publication in England. In addition, Licko tried to persuade Western newsmen to print an assortment of fantastic stories and patent lies that made Solzhenitsyn out to be a traitor to his country.

When fragmentary reports reached Solzhenitsyn in Russia of his purported "authorization" of Cancer Ward, he sent letters to two European newspapers denying that he had authorized any Western firm to publish it. Told by friends that Licko had claimed to represent him in the sale of the novel, the author stated categorically that he had never even given the man a manuscript, let alone instructions about its publication.

More Ammunition. During the brief Dubcek liberalization in 1968, Licko was fired from his magazine job by colleagues who apparently shared the widespread suspicion that he worked for the KGB. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, however, Licko again enjoyed the status he had held under the terroristic regime of Party Chief Rudolf Slansky. By 1969, he had been promoted to editor-in-chief of a Czechoslovak Communist propaganda magazine.

Last September, Licko was suddenly arrested on charges of "damaging the interests of the Czechoslovak Republic abroad.'' He is still awaiting trial. "Very few liberals, and certainly no hardliners, have been arrested in Czechoslovakia since the invasion," British Sovietologist Leopold Labedz points out. "Then why Licko?" he asks. Labedz and other experts believe that the KGB may be sacrificing an agent to obtain more ammunition against Solzhenitsyn. If Licko is tried for "representing" Solzhenitsyn abroad, the KGB can probably count on him to testify to the same lies he once attempted to foist on journalists. Licko's testimony could then serve the Soviet prosecution in the event of a political show trial of Solzhenitsyn.

Britain's Robert Conquest, a specialist on the brutal Soviet purges of 1937-38, considers such a trial likely. "Solzhenitsyn's arrest," he says, "would be a major political decision, signifying a war to the death against all opposition in Russia, and a reversion to the tightest kind of totalitarian control."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.