The Gulag Archipelago: Solzhenitsyn takes his biggest risk – archive, 1973

A new work by Solzhenitsyn, perhaps the most politically dangerous of all his books, is to be published in Paris today in a Russian edition. The publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the west has been authorised by Solzhenitsyn, and has been rushed through after the confiscation of a manuscript copy by the Soviet security police.

It has as its core a direct autobiographical account of what he has previously dealt with only in fiction – his own experience of Stalin’s camps. According to a description apparently approved by the author’s lawyer in Zurich, Dr Fritz Heeb, this central material “expands … to the dimension of a national epic, by turns historical, documentary, autobiographical and political,” and the result is “a vast fresco of the Soviet concentration camp system as it operated from 1918 to 1956.”

The most explosive element in the book is that it names many important figures involved in that grim story, many of whom are still alive. The Gulag Archipelago has been completed for at least five years. Solzhenitsyn had withheld the book out of concern for some of those still living, but the confiscation of a copy of the text has forced him not to postpone publication any longer.

The existence of such a work – with its documentation from survivors which should add enormously to knowledge of the period and of the operation of the camps – had been hotly debated, by Kremlinologists and students of Solzhenitsyn’s works in particular, until the news came out in September of the seizure of a typescript copy in Leningrad.

Solzheiltsyn was reported then as saying that a woman had been forced to disclose its whereabouts to Soviet security agents and had subsequently hanged herself.

Translations into English, German, French, and Swedish are expected during next year. The English version will be published by Collins in London, and Harper, Row in New York.

A serious attempt is being made to prevent the commercial scramble that developed over previous translations of Solzhenitsyn texts: Dr Heeb has been instructed to take legal action if ‘there’ are any unauthorised versions of the original, which is protected by copyright.

One hopes Solzhenitsyn has better luck than he has sometimes had with translators in the past.