The Solzhenitsyn Files : Secret Soviet Documents Reveal One Man's Fight Against the Monolith

Reveals the Soviet government's files kept on the dissident writer

This amazing compilation of once top-secret Soviet government documents?declassified by President Boris Yeltsin in 1992?fully chronicles the KGB's and the Politburo's campaign to harass and silence Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from 1965 through the late 1970s. Transcripts of bugged conversations, KGB memos, reports from ministries and minutes of Politburo sessions show how the Soviet ruling elite spied on Solzhenitsyn, tapped his phone and seized his manuscripts while orchestrating a campaign to discredit him as a reactionary elitist. We learn new details of ex-KGB chief Yuri Andropov's personal vendetta against Solzhenitsyn, whom he painted as a dissident leader of a full-fledged "political opposition," resulting in the novelist's arrest and deportation in 1974. This newsworthy book reveals the Soviet leadership as complacent, inept and out of touch with the masses of people who welcomed Solzhenitsyn's works, first published in the West and smuggled into his native land. Scammel is chair of Russian language and literature at Cornell University.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Upon his release from the Gulag, the Soviet system of labor camps, following Stalin's death, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was able to publish fictionalized accounts of his prison experiences in the comparatively benign Khrushchev era. Despite intense political pressure from subsequent, more authoritarian, regimes, he continued to criticize the Soviet government through his writing, gaining fame and respect in the West, which culminated in his being awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for literature. Presented here for the first time in English are more than 150 recently declassified documents that detail the Soviet government's relentless persecution of Solzhenitsyn and ultimately ineffectual attempts to discredit him over a span of 20 years. Appalling in their sheer volume and scope, the papers, arranged chronologically and containing explanatory notes, chillingly portray the Soviet government's single-minded obsession with silencing the writer. This is a worthwhile addition to academic libraries and others with strong political history sections.?Cynthia Ward Cooper, Carrollton P.L., Tex.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.