Gulag_ A History - Anne Applebaum [313]
Most powerful of all were the reactions of people still in prison. Leonid Sitko, then serving his second sentence, heard of the publication in distant Dubravlag. When the camp library’s copy of Novyi Mir arrived, the camp commanders kept it for themselves for a whole two months. Finally, the zeks got hold of a copy and held a group reading. Sitko remembered that prisoners listened “without breathing”:
After they read the last word, there was a deathly silence. Then, after two, three minutes, the room detonated. Everyone had lived the story in his own, painful way . . . in the cloud of tobacco smoke, they discussed endlessly . . .
And frequently, more and more frequently, they asked: “Why did they publish it?”66
Why indeed? It seems the Party bosses themselves began to wonder. Perhaps Solzhentisyn’s honest portrayal of camp life was too much for them: it represented too momentous a change, its appearance came about too swiftly for the tastes of men who still feared their own heads might roll next. Or perhaps they were tired of Khrushchev already, feared he had gone too far, and used Solzhenitsyn’s novel as an excuse. Indeed, Khrushchev was deposed soon afterward, in October 1964. His replacement, Leonid Brezhnev, was the leader of the Party’s reactionary, anti-change, anti-Thaw, neo-Stalinists.
In either case, it is clear that in the aftermath of the novel’s publication, the conservatives rallied, and with amazing speed. Ivan Denisovich appeared in November. In December—a few days after Khrushchev met Solzhenitsyn and personally congratulated him—Leonid Ilyichev, the chairman of the Central Committee’s new Ideological Commission, lectured a group of 400 writers and artists gathered at the Writers’ Union. Soviet society, he told them, must not be “shaken and weakened under the pretext of the struggle against the cult of the individual ...” 67
The rapidity of the change reflected the Soviet Union’s ambivalent attitude toward its own history—an ambivalence which has never been resolved, even today. If the Soviet Union’s elite were to accept that the portrait of Ivan Denisovich was authentic, that meant admitting that innocent people had endured pointless suffering. If the camps had really been stupid and wasteful and tragic, that meant that the Soviet Union was stupid and wasteful and tragic too. It was difficult, and it would remain difficult, for any Soviet citizen, whether a member of the elite or a simple peasant, to accept that their lives had been governed by a set of lies.
After a period of wavering—a few arguments for, a few arguments against—the attacks on Solzhenitsyn started coming thick and fast. In earlier chapters, I have already described the angry reactions, of both prisoners and guards, to Ivan Denisovich’s many efforts to evade hard work. But there were more elevated criticisms too. Lydia Fomenko, the critic of Literaturnaya Rossiya, accused Solzhenitsyn of failing to “disclose the full dialectic of that time.” Solzhenitsyn had condemned the “cult of personality,” in other words, but had failed to point the way to the optimistc future, and had failed to include “good” communist characters who would triumph in the end. This kind of criticism was echoed by others, and some even tried to correct Solzhenitsyn’s mistakes in literary form. Boris Dyakov’s “A Story of Survival,” the “loyal” camp novel published in 1964, explicitly featured descriptions of hardworking, loyal Soviet prisoners.68
As Solzhenitsyn’s novel was being considered for the Lenin Prize, the Soviet Union’s highest literary award, the insults grew worse. In the end— using tactics that would be repeated in later years—the establishment resorted to personal insults. At the Lenin Prize Committee meeting, the head of the Komsomol, Sergei Pavlov, stood up and accused Solzhenitsyn of having surrendered to the Germans during the war, and of having been convicted on criminal charges after that. Tvardovsky got Solzhenitsyn