Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/23/2003 5:44:37 PM PDT by MadIvan
ALEXANDER Solzhenitsyn, whose famous novel The Gulag Archipelago exposed the horrors of the Soviet prison camp system, has been accused of being a KGB informer who betrayed friends to the hated spy agency.
The popular newspaper website, pravda.ru, accuses Russia’s Nobel laureate of informing on several acquaintances who were then condemned to the very death camps he described in his book.
Solzhenitsyn’s son yesterday issued a furious denial of the story, claiming his 84-year-old father was the victim of a "smear campaign".
The newspaper alleged that after serving as an artillery officer in the Second World War, Solzhenitsyn confessed to the KGB that he, an army colleague and a childhood friend had set up a criminal group to slander the leaders of the Communist Party.
As a result, one of the writer’s two acquaintances was exiled to a labour camp in the far north, it said. Pravda.ru claimed he implicated his innocent friends in order to reduce his own term in prison. "Alexander Solzhenitsyn wasn’t even pressed by the special services for co-operation. He readily agreed," it said. "For this very reason he was sentenced to a shorter term."
In a separate allegation, the website claimed the writer denounced a group of inmates planning a strike at the prison camp in Kazakhstan to which he was exiled in 1945.
But in a telephone interview with The Scotsman last night, the dissident’s youngest son dismissed the claims as false and "nothing but a retread of a tired old KGB smear campaign".
Stephan Solzhenitsyn, 29, a city planner who lives in the United States, said the accusations first surfaced in the mid- 1970s when the Soviet authorities were trying to discredit his father.
The writer’s devastating indictment of the Stalin-era network of death camps for political prisoners had just been published in Europe, prompting a black PR campaign by the KGB, he said
Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR in 1974, launching a war of words on the Soviet regime from exile in Switzerland and later the US. In a desperate bid to tarnish the writer’s reputation, the KGB passed journalists a letter which purported to show he had been an informer.
"Why these accusations are being repeated now I have no idea," his son said yesterday. "It was comprehensively shown at the time they were based on a single document which was proved to be a KGB forgery."
He would not speculate on the motive for publishing the allegations now. "In the 85th year of his life, the list of my father’s ill-wishers appears to be as robust as it has ever been," he said.
"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."
Once described by Mikhail Gorbachev as a "living prophet", Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent 11 years in prison and internment during the Soviet era.
The official reason for his detention was that he made derogatory remarks about Stalin.
His first book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in 1962, with the express permission of the general secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who unleashed a gradual de-Stalinisation.
In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. But he was increasingly persecuted by the communist literary establishment, who accused him of encouraging Russia’s ideological enemies.
After the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the West, he was arrested by the authorities and deported.
Since his return to Russia in 1994 he has become a controversial figure and a prominent critic of the government. He refused a state medal from former president Boris Yeltsin, blaming him for the country’s "current disastrous state".
He appears to have more cordial relations with the present president, Vladimir Putin. The Solzhenitsyns invited the president and his wife to the writer’s cottage outside Moscow where he lives as a near recluse.
Stephan Solzhenitsyn said his father is aware of reports that he was a KGB informer but does not wish to comment.
"In his opinion, he adequately defended himself from these accusations 27 years ago," he said.
Regards, Ivan
The hell with the story, but I am impressed that this 84 year old man has a 29 year old son(84-29=55!). Having led a pretty rough life he must be quite a guy.
But I see I was wrong. It wasn't the Peace Prize
The press hates anyone questioning their moral authority. They attacked SOD Rumsfeld as a pack last week for daring to tell them that he had tremendous faith in the American people to search for and find the truth (FoxNews ratings skyrocketed as they told the truth re. the war. (^:)
As far as the emigre groups are concerned, in a common scenatrio, smear information is placed in the hands of the willing dupes of Western press, and then used by the eager beavers in the State Department as a justificatione to ostracize these groups. All the Eastern European emigre activist groups and governments in exile got this treatment during and after WWII, and now, of course, the Cuban dissident groups are getting it. In a bitter irony, no one in Cuba (and other countries) would ever believe these smears, but in the West there is no shortage of naive deep thinkers, not only on the Left.
(The posting software changed it, I swear!)
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