Posted on 04/23/2003 3:55:09 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A discredited decades-long KGB smear campaign alleging that Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was an informer against his fellow gulag prisoners has resurfaced in Pravda.ru and drawn the wrath of the author's son, Stephan.
Solzhenitsyn wrote his classic 1974 expose of the vast ring of Soviet slave labor camps he called the "Gulag Archipelago." The book, smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West, created an international sensation. It revealed for all the world to see the horrors visited upon dissidents imprisoned within the gulag and earned the author the undying hatred of his former Soviet slave masters.
The author's son writes that the Pravda article "Mass Media Hush Up Solzhenitsyn Was Informer" is "nothing but a retread of a tired old KGB smear campaign from the 1970s. Such stories have surfaced periodically ever since, and this is just another example.
"It never occurred to the KGB to suggest that Solzhenitsyn was an informer until he himself described in 'Gulag Archipelago' (1974) how he had been approached, while in the camps, by recruiters who hoped he would become an informer. The KGB immediately seized on this nugget to develop it into a weapon to discredit Solzhenitsyn - and thus to cast doubt on the 'Gulag Archipelago' itself. The storyline is startlingly simple: Solzhenitsyn the informer condemned his friends to the camps of the Soviet gulag."
To back up the phony charge, the KGB, employing its "gentle tactics of persuasion, produced its 'witnesses' and mounted a triple rollout: a brochure by Kirill Simonyan published in Denmark; a television interview with Nikolai Vitkevich; and a book by Solzhenitsyn's first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya." "The brotherly Czechoslovak secret police chipped in as well, with a book by agent Thomas Rezac in 1978, among other endeavors. Perhaps the KGB's most notorious effort was in the field of forged letters - specifically the 'Vetrov' letter. Solzhenitsyn responded to this as soon as it appeared (see LA Times, 24 May 1976). Even more brazen is the story of a 52-page letter of denunciation: that letter simply never existed."
Stephan Solzhenitsyn shows how false these statements of alleged witnesses proved to be. He noted, for example that the KGB threatened Simonyan, who revealed the intimidating threats to a colleague, shortly before dying in 1977 - an account of which was published in Novy Mir in 1999.
He demolishes the other claims as well by showing them to have been contrived by the KGB.
He concludes: "Unfortunately, lies will persevere and multiply as long as there are mouths ready to repeat them. I fear that a decade from now we will be clearing my father's name from the same smears all over again."
Also, a web-wide google search for "Mass Media Hush Up Solzhenitsyn Was Informer" comes up blank.
The author's son writes . . .
If any NewsMax staffers are lurking, he wrote where and when?
Two good books: One Day in the life of Ivan D. and Gulag A...last had 4 book set paperback >850 Pg...Shillary, now has a model to work from... :|
See also MadIvan's post from The Scotsman.
True irony is being an engineer sent to the first circle of Dante's inferno to build machines to spy on other fellow countrymen.
At least you can day Stalin wasn't a racist: He killed Georgians and Chechnyans, Jews and Ukrainians, in equal numbers with Russians, White Russians, Volga Deutsch, Mongol-Tatars, etc. And he is unique among Kremlin rulers in that after his death he had no personal property other than a pair of valenki, felt winter boots.
Wouldn't you just love to have a glance at Gorbachev's and Yeltsin's Swiss accounts?
Interesting point of view, triggering a small rant from me.
We can wonder at how coincidental the size of Gorbachev's "personal" account (imagining that yes, it were large) ocurred to the time of the Soviet Union's demise. And as Russia struggled to right itself, how fat did Yeltsin make his personal account on the backs of his country's poor?
As we find out more and more about Iraq's financial tentacles into the British government, and possibly our own media (to say the least), I wonder if people will think back to Clinton and the Chinese alleged funding of the DNC.
Corruption is a bigger enemy than I had realized.
I want Scott Ritter to hang. And I want to know who else accepted even a penny from Iraq's Oil for Food program. What about Koffi?
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