Why the Kremlin Fears Solzhenitsyn: "A Great Writer Is a Second Government"
“Kill me quickly because I write the truth about Russian history,” said the author of The Gulag Archipelago to his government just before it arrested him. Russian leaders chose instead to send him into foreign exile. Here a reporter who spent many years in the Soviet Union and has written many books about its system and its leaders tells how Solzhenitsyn stands in a tradition of Russian writers who have felt they owed their country the “civic duty” of exposing and expressing what others could not. “The only audience which is really important to him is the Russian people,” writes Harrison Salisbury, and that the leadership knows well. “They are afraid of him,” according to one of Solzhenitsyn’s friends, “because when he speaks they hear the voice of the camps, they hear them, those ghosts, those millions, those tens of millions who left their bodies there. . . .”