Martin Antonenko
A Fixture
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2008
- Messages
- 9,001
A Volatile Book Appears!
On a summer day in August 1973, the Russian writer Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn ...
... who is under strict state surveillance, receives once again in the early hours of the morning (as is usually the case!) visit by employees of the "Komitat Gossudarstvennoj Besopasnosti" (= "Committee for State Security", KGB).
Here is a KGB pass ...:
Only members of the "state organs" had such an identity card that could be opened!
Usually it was enough to show it unopened!
This is the one of KGB boss Yuri Andropov himself ...:
House search!
The "Tschekists" (as they are generally called after their forerunner organization "Tscheka") must have been a little more attentive this time than usual, because they find an unpublished, well-hidden manuscript:
It is about the book "The GuLag Archipelago", in which Solchenitsyn tells the truth about the literally thousands of Soviet prison camps, completely unvarnished.
Solzhenitsyn knew from firsthand what he was writing about:
Shortly before the end of the war, he was in East Prussia in 1945 as a young artillery lieutenant in the Red Army ...
... arrested because of a thoughtless remark about Stalin. He hadn't even made the remark that was his undoing, but it was in a friend's letter to him. The friend was of course arrested too!
Solzhenitsyn had got to know the "GuLAG Archipelago" over many years (until 1953) as a prisoner from the inside ...:
"GuLAG" is a Russian acronym and translates as: "Headquarters of the Corrective Labor Camps" ("Glawnoje uprawlenije isprawitelno-trudowych lagerej") the following map shows "only" the main camps ..:
Solzhenitsyn had previously worked on the "Gulag Archipelago" for over ten years from April 1958, but withheld its publication and hid the manuscript.
At that time he wrote on the historical novel cycle "The Red Wheel", which he considered to be his most important work ...:
(And I add: It is by far his best! M. R.)
In "August 14" he describes the Russian defeat in East Prussia almost to the minute, in "November 16" how the political opposition to tsarism is formed and in "March 17" the revolution and the overthrow of the tsar!
A publication of the "Archipel GuLAG" and the arrest that appeared almost certain afterwards would have made the work on it impossible, which he did not intend to complete until 1975.
Since September 1965 he was under constant surveillance by the KGB.
In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, he did not travel to Stockholm to receive the award, fearing that the government would refuse him to re-enter the Soviet Union.
And now the state "organs" have captured the "Achipel GuLag". The manuscript is of course immediately confiscated and immediately disappears in the "poison cabinet" of the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square!
But Solzhenitsyn has taken precautions:
He had made an exact copy of the book by hand and in nights of work, friends had smuggled it piece by piece from the Soviet Union and deposited it at the Russian emigrant publisher YMCA-Press in Paris.
Now that the KGB has the manuscript, Solzhenitsyn sees no reason to keep anything secret or withheld. The publisher receives an order from him to print the book immediately.
On December 28, 1973 the "Archipel GuLag" appears - first in Russian - in Paris!
The KGB and the government must have been confused at first, believing that by confiscating the original manuscript they had prevented publication!
Now the first edition has to be obtained, checked and compared - and then it would still have to be clarified why and under what accusation one should arrest the uncomfortable man and how one should then deal with him.
Even in the Soviet Union in Brezhnev's time it was not so easy to put a world-famous Nobel Prize winner into camp!
So it took until February 13, 1974, until all the points were set:
That evening Solzhenitsyn was arrested on charges of "Article 64" of the Soviet Criminal Code ("treason")!
The writer spends a short night in the Lubyanka, the next morning he is driven to the airport and put on a plane to Frankfurt am Main in West Germany.
Shortly before the doors of the plane close and the plane starts rolling, his KGB guards confiscate Solzhenitsyn's passport.
Then they let the - now stateless - writer fly ...
In Germany, Solzhenitsyn is expected by his German writer colleague Heinrich Böll, who initially takes the now completely mediocre man into his home ...
Only in 1990 will Solzhenitsyn be rehabilitated and regained his Soviet citizenship. On May 27, 1994 he returned to Russia via Vladivostok ...:
His journey with the "Trans-Siberia Express" to Moscow is like a triumphal procession!
On August 3, 2008, the greatest of all Russian writers, together with Leo Tolstoj, died at the age of 89 in his Moscow house and with his family as a result of a stroke.
On a summer day in August 1973, the Russian writer Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn ...
... who is under strict state surveillance, receives once again in the early hours of the morning (as is usually the case!) visit by employees of the "Komitat Gossudarstvennoj Besopasnosti" (= "Committee for State Security", KGB).
Here is a KGB pass ...:
Only members of the "state organs" had such an identity card that could be opened!
Usually it was enough to show it unopened!
This is the one of KGB boss Yuri Andropov himself ...:
House search!
The "Tschekists" (as they are generally called after their forerunner organization "Tscheka") must have been a little more attentive this time than usual, because they find an unpublished, well-hidden manuscript:
It is about the book "The GuLag Archipelago", in which Solchenitsyn tells the truth about the literally thousands of Soviet prison camps, completely unvarnished.
Solzhenitsyn knew from firsthand what he was writing about:
Shortly before the end of the war, he was in East Prussia in 1945 as a young artillery lieutenant in the Red Army ...
... arrested because of a thoughtless remark about Stalin. He hadn't even made the remark that was his undoing, but it was in a friend's letter to him. The friend was of course arrested too!
Solzhenitsyn had got to know the "GuLAG Archipelago" over many years (until 1953) as a prisoner from the inside ...:
"GuLAG" is a Russian acronym and translates as: "Headquarters of the Corrective Labor Camps" ("Glawnoje uprawlenije isprawitelno-trudowych lagerej") the following map shows "only" the main camps ..:
Solzhenitsyn had previously worked on the "Gulag Archipelago" for over ten years from April 1958, but withheld its publication and hid the manuscript.
At that time he wrote on the historical novel cycle "The Red Wheel", which he considered to be his most important work ...:
(And I add: It is by far his best! M. R.)
In "August 14" he describes the Russian defeat in East Prussia almost to the minute, in "November 16" how the political opposition to tsarism is formed and in "March 17" the revolution and the overthrow of the tsar!
A publication of the "Archipel GuLAG" and the arrest that appeared almost certain afterwards would have made the work on it impossible, which he did not intend to complete until 1975.
Since September 1965 he was under constant surveillance by the KGB.
In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, he did not travel to Stockholm to receive the award, fearing that the government would refuse him to re-enter the Soviet Union.
And now the state "organs" have captured the "Achipel GuLag". The manuscript is of course immediately confiscated and immediately disappears in the "poison cabinet" of the KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square!
But Solzhenitsyn has taken precautions:
He had made an exact copy of the book by hand and in nights of work, friends had smuggled it piece by piece from the Soviet Union and deposited it at the Russian emigrant publisher YMCA-Press in Paris.
Now that the KGB has the manuscript, Solzhenitsyn sees no reason to keep anything secret or withheld. The publisher receives an order from him to print the book immediately.
On December 28, 1973 the "Archipel GuLag" appears - first in Russian - in Paris!
The KGB and the government must have been confused at first, believing that by confiscating the original manuscript they had prevented publication!
Now the first edition has to be obtained, checked and compared - and then it would still have to be clarified why and under what accusation one should arrest the uncomfortable man and how one should then deal with him.
Even in the Soviet Union in Brezhnev's time it was not so easy to put a world-famous Nobel Prize winner into camp!
So it took until February 13, 1974, until all the points were set:
That evening Solzhenitsyn was arrested on charges of "Article 64" of the Soviet Criminal Code ("treason")!
The writer spends a short night in the Lubyanka, the next morning he is driven to the airport and put on a plane to Frankfurt am Main in West Germany.
Shortly before the doors of the plane close and the plane starts rolling, his KGB guards confiscate Solzhenitsyn's passport.
Then they let the - now stateless - writer fly ...
In Germany, Solzhenitsyn is expected by his German writer colleague Heinrich Böll, who initially takes the now completely mediocre man into his home ...
Only in 1990 will Solzhenitsyn be rehabilitated and regained his Soviet citizenship. On May 27, 1994 he returned to Russia via Vladivostok ...:
His journey with the "Trans-Siberia Express" to Moscow is like a triumphal procession!
On August 3, 2008, the greatest of all Russian writers, together with Leo Tolstoj, died at the age of 89 in his Moscow house and with his family as a result of a stroke.
