A Knock on the Door

Georgi Vladimov, 51, a Soviet writer, hunches over a cup of tea in his small, fifth-floor apartment on the out skirts of Moscow. Outside, the sun has broken through the midwinter gloom, and in the courtyard below a father plays with his child among the birch trees. It is a scene of cheery placidity, but life is not placid for Vladimov. Like thousands of fellow citizens, he has learned firsthand about the implacable methods the KGB uses to intimidate those who deviate from prescribed norms of thought or behavior.

On Dec. 28, a team of agents searched Vladimov's apartment and then interrogated him for two days. They seized research notes, books and magazines for a novel he was writing about World War II. They took away his two typewriters, one with Cyrillic script and one with Roman script. "It's very hard to work now," Vladimov told TIME Moscow Bureau Chief Erik Amfitheatrof last week. "They could search me again any time."

A promising writer whose early fiction appeared in the 1960s in Novy Mir, the respected Soviet literary monthly, Vladimov has not had a word published in the Soviet Union since July 1969. His fiction evidently drew too accurate a portrait of how Stalin's shadow still hangs over the Soviet system. His best-known novel in the West, Faithful Ruslan, an imaginative story about a labor-camp guard dog who finds he cannot live in a world without prisoners, is available only to Soviets willing to risk passing along hand-typed copies.

The intricate network of wrinkles around Vladimov's eyes lightens as he describes the KGB search. His interrogator, a lieutenant colonel, told him that the KGB employs experts to examine the literary worth of authors they investigate. Vladimov had received a highly favorable evaluation. But the rest of the message was not so encouraging. If Vladimov did not write a letter of apology for his "antistate" writings by Jan. 20, listing all the Western diplomats and journalists he has met, his files would be sent to the prosecutor.

The deadline has passed. Vladimov did write a letter to Yuri Andropov asking to be allowed to emigrate. He told the Soviet leader that he was "ready to accept the familiar thorns of a Russian writer and walk under the vaults of Lefortovo Prison," but had decided to leave for his family's sake. Wrote Vladimov: "To be forced to this is painful and humiliating. We have already proved our love for Russia by the patience with which we endured persecution, repression, humiliation."

Vladimov does not expect Andropov himself to reply. An answer will come either from the passport office, which means he will leave, or from the procurator, which means he will be warned that criminal charges are pending. For now, the man widely considered the best writer of his generation in the Soviet Union can only sit and wait in his small apartment until a postman drops an official letter in his mailbox. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.