The Magical Chorus

model, but unlike him, they hid behind the pseudonyms Abram Terts and Nikolai Arzhak, which the KGB eventually uncovered.

Pasternak had only been threatened with arrest and trial, but the authorities decided to go ahead with Sinyavsky and Daniel. Brezhnev with Petr Demichev, then ideology secretary of the Central Committee, made a special visit to Konstantin Fedin, head of the Writers’ Union, for approval of these sanctions, reminiscent of Stalin’s repression. Fedin, once a talented prose writer and favorite of Gorky’s, had become totally ossified over the years, and it goes without saying that, flattered by the attention, he approved.

Under Brezhnev, cultural issues moved mostly into the supervision of apparatchiks; the general secretary rarely interfered in cultural affairs, usually only when he wanted to give an award to a favorite film actor.

The day-to-day work in the area was left to Furtseva (Minister of Culture between 1960 and 1974) and Demichev (Minister of Culture 1974 to 1986). The conservative Demichev was rather colorless; there were many colorful but unsubstantiated stories about Furtseva, a strong personality: that she had been Khrushchev’s mistress, that she was an alcoholic, that she had slit her wrists after a Party demotion in 1961, and that she committed suicide by taking cyanide in 1974.

The work of both ministers was supervised and controlled in many ways by two much more influential figures —Politburo member Mikhail Suslov, who was in charge of ideology since the Khrushchev years and known as the Party’s gray cardinal for his backstage machinations, and Andropov, who headed the KGB for fifteen years and became the country’s leader after Brezhnev’s death in 1982.

Tall, thin, and pale, Suslov was a Party ascetic, who dressed modestly and wore old-fashioned galoshes until his death in 1982. Andropov, who ostensibly loved jazz, whiskey, and Jacqueline Susann novels, was smart and personable. The two seemed polar opposites. But they were similar in believing in Communism and the primacy of Party ideology over culture and behaved accordingly. The decision to arrest and try Sinyavsky and Daniel had been prepared by these men, who felt that the intelligentsia was getting out of hand again and needed to be brought to heel. And once again, it led to unexpected results.

The arrest of Sinyavsky and Daniel itself was a warning, as the authorities had intended; at that moment people seriously feared that the two writers might be executed for their “subversive” works, already translated into many languages. It soon became clear that accused were no longer tortured behind bars, they were not beaten during questioning, and apparently they were in no danger of a death sentence. The trial was going to be open. This reflected the new tactics of the regime, intended to prove the guilt of Sinyavsky and Daniel strictly within the post- Stalinist “socialist legality” so that both Soviet intellectuals and the liberal West would be satisfied.

The defendants, Sinyavsky, of medium height, bearded, and cross-eyed, and Daniel, stoop-shouldered, black- haired, and charmingly talkative, did not repent. They quickly earned the sympathy of the skeptical Western journalists who flocked around the Moscow courthouse. Foreigners were not admitted into the courtroom, but when the defendants’ wives came out during recess, they were ready to talk openly and give interviews to the Western press—for the first time in Soviet history.

Close contact was thus forged between Soviet cultural dissidents and the Western media. It was a historic breakthrough, which led directly to the daily dramatic reports on the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial on radio stations that broadcast to the Soviet Union.

The names of the disobedient writers became widely known; I remember a friend bringing an hour-long compilation he had taped of reports from Voice of America, the BBC, and Deutsche Welle to my dormitory at Leningrad Conservatory. We had the chance to hear the witty writings of the banned authors, because the radio broadcast excerpts from them.

Following the trial on a transistor radio in his village “hide-out” near Obninsk, Solzhenitsyn was working on Gulag Archipelago, which he defined as “an experiment in literary investigation” of the Soviet camp system. In his diary he noted that the “progressive West” had previously forgiven the Soviet Union for its cruel treatment of writers, but this time was upset over Sinyavsky and Daniel—“a sign of the times.” The West was outraged by the sentence: seven years in hard-regime camps for Sinyavsky and five for Daniel.

But in the Soviet Union there were notables who were not ashamed to hail it; Sholokhov famously declared: “If those guys with black consciences had been caught in the memorable twenties, when trials did not depend on the strictly defined articles of the Criminal Code but were ‘based on revolutionary righteousness,’ oh, those werewolves wouldn’t have gotten off so easily! But here, you see, there are complaints about the ‘severity’ of the sentence.”¹⁴

Western radio stations carried news of a letter in defense of Sinyavsky and Daniel signed by sixty-two Soviet writers. Solzhenitsyn did not join them: “It is not fitting for a Russian writer to seek fame abroad.”(That was how Maria Rozanova, Sinyavsky’s wife, conveyed his explanation to me.) But by that time, Solzhenitsyn had, albeit with “bated heartbeat,” smuggled out the manuscript of his novel The First Circle, and in 1968–1969 this novel and the other, Cancer Ward, which Solzhenitsyn could not get published in the USSR, either, came out in the West.

The appearance of these “polyphonic” (his term) works about the Stalin era suddenly made Solzhenitsyn, who had just turned fifty, a real candidate for the Nobel Prize. The action of The First Circle took place in a secret research institute for prisoner scientists, a sharashka, and Cancer Ward was set in a hospital—both autobiographical and at the same time symbolic.

Solzhenitsyn had proved to the Western cognoscenti that he was not a one-work wonder whose fame rested only on the political sensation caused by One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Now there was a mature master working in the best traditions of the great Russian novel and holding an independent position vis-a-vis the hostile Communist establishment.

The belligerent Soviet empire armed with nuclear weapons seemed a mysterious and ominous monolith to the West, so the smallest manifestations of contrary thought within Soviet society were regarded with lively interest. Even the timid desire for liberalization among Soviet intellectuals was hailed by their Western colleagues, because it gave them hope of moving the Soviet Union toward greater transparency and “normalcy.” The post-Stalinist Communist leadership had offered the slogan of “peaceful coexistence” for socialism and capitalism, but still forcefully rejected coexistence in ideology, which increased the jitters in Europe and America about the reliability and stability of detente between East and West.

Hence, the arrival of a figure like Solzhenitsyn on the Soviet cultural scene was a gift for the West. Solzhenitsyn combined several attractive qualities: an enormous talent who presented the bitter truth about Soviet life, he wrote not from secondhand accounts but as a fearless eye-witness using his own tragic experience as an inmate in a Stalin concentration camp. His future adversary, the satirist Vladimir Voinovich, summed up the perception of Solzhenitsyn at that time: “He writes beautifully, his behavior is valorous, his judgments independent, he does not bow down to authority or fold before danger, he is always prepared to sacrifice himself.”¹⁵

The tall, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed Solzhenitsyn, with his memorable Nordic face, made a powerful impression. Akhmatova, not given to raptures, was astounded after he visited her: “Fresh, smart, young, merry. We had forgotten that such people exist. His eyes were like precious stones.” She concluded solemnly: “A bearer of