hundred people, had gone unnoticed by the “all-seeing and all-hearing” KGB, which only caught on, according to declassified documents, in August 1973.
When the KGB did learn of the work, Andropov’s reaction was: “
After vacillating for a rather long time, Brezhnev at last sanctioned Solzhenitsyn’s arrest. On February 12, 1974, the writer was charged with treason and taken to Lefortovo Prison in Moscow, where he had already spent 1945 and 1946. Solzhenitsyn, as he later recalled, was prepared for the worst—even execution. But unexpectedly for him and the Western media, which had speedily covered the sensational news of his arrest, he was released the next day, stripped of his Soviet citizenship by special decree, and placed on a charter flight to Frankfurt-am-Main. (As it was later revealed, this came as the result of secret negotiations between cunning Andropov and German chancellor Willy Brandt.)
From West Germany, Solzhenitsyn went to Zurich and then to the United States, where he settled with his family in the small town of Cavendish, Vermont. This was the start of the twenty-year exile of the most famous and influential Russian writer of the late twentieth century.
The authorities were sure that they were making a clever move in the cultural cold war by expelling Solzhenitsyn from the USSR. Brezhnev and Andropov obviously borrowed the idea of forcing political opponents out of the country from Lenin, who in 1922 had a large group of prominent intellectuals forcibly sent to the West, announcing, “We will purge Russia for a long time.”1
Lenin’s ideas were always considered the highest form of wisdom in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, besides which, in this given situation, from a purely political point of view, Lenin’s solution was not at all stupid. The Russian antirevolutionary emigres never managed to organize themselves into an effective political force.
General Dmitri Volkogonov studied the Soviet secret archives that were opened for him (and remain closed to this day for others), containing the innumerable reports by Bolshevik agents from Paris, Berlin, and other Western capitals and he concluded that the Soviet secret police succeeded in neutralizing the emigre community by “doing everything possible to ‘corrupt’ it through discrediting, bribing people to spy, and pitting factions against one another.”2
According to Volkogonov, there was close surveillance on almost every famous Russian emigre: “Numerous special dossiers were kept to record every notable public step of the person, his statements and moods.”3 In the archives of the Foreign Directorate of OGPU, Volkogonov found reports on the writers, poets, and philosophers who had settled in the West—Zinaida Hippius and Merezhkovsky, Balmont, Mark Aldanov, Nabokov, Berdyaev, Georgy Fedotov, and many others. They even kept watch over the composer Igor Stravinsky and the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, the former mistress of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II.
Andropov, who valued the early Bolshevik experience and had carefully studied the secret dossiers and the history of the KGB, which he headed, had apparently been eager to apply the Leninist methods of fighting ideological foes. When the West increased pressure on the USSR in the early 1970s about free emigration, the Soviet leadership decided to make some concessions, but placed the process under tight control.
Indeed, they permitted only Jewish and German emigration, which might not seem much. But for the first time in many years, thousands of people started leaving the Soviet Union on their own volition and legally. The majority of them belonged to the educated classes.
Among those who ended up in the West one way or another in the following years were a number of major cultural figures who “disturbed the peace” and whom the authorities decided to get rid of: the poets Joseph Brodsky and Alexander Galich; the writers Vladimir Maximov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Viktor Nekrasov, Vassily Aksyonov, Vladimir Voinovich, and Georgy Vladimov; the musicians Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, and Rudolf Barshai; the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny; and the artists Oskar Rabin, Mikhail Chemiakin, and Oleg Tselkov.
Some cultural stars defected: the dancers Rudolf Nureyev, Natalya Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Alexander Godunov; the pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy; the conductors Kirill Kondrashin and Maxim Shostakovich; the film director Andrei Tarkovsky; and head of the Moscow Theater on the Taganka Yuri Lyubimov.
Apparently the Soviets believed that once these irritants found themselves abroad and the first wave of heightened media interest in them subsided, they would lose their authority, which was based on being insiders, and their influence would come to naught, both in the Soviet Union and in the West.
The Soviets based their prognosis on the experience of the earlier waves of immigration: the “White,” after the revolution, and the “displaced persons,” after World War II. Even though they were much more numerous, they eventually dissolved into the countries where they settled and by the 1970s no longer posed a threat to the Soviet regime and Party ideology.
Moreover, the Communist apparatchiks developed quite cordial relations with some of the emigres of the first two waves; they were permitted to come as tourists and even on business to the homeland, a privilege that the new immigrants could not even dream about. The departure of the latter was seen by everyone—the regime, the immigrants, and their relatives and friends who stayed behind—as “permanent” exile. When one of the friends seeing off Brodsky said, “Till we meet again,” the customs guards corrected him: “It’s ‘good- bye.’”4
Solzhenitsyn may have been the only one to repeat stubbornly that he was certain of his return to Russia. The first volume of his
Some say that
Some of his critics, like Voinovich, deny the literary value of
In memoranda to the Central Committee after Solzhenitsyn’s expulsion, the KGB concluded with obviously
