Invisible Allies

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...Others occupied quite respectable positions in Soviet society...

...He might he respected for opposing the Soviet establishment, but he could not be forgiven for his fierce and fundamental criticisms of the Revolution itself...

...It is, after all, beyond question that Solzhenitsyn has little to contribute to the discussion of race, class, and gender or to the many other politically correct issues that nowadays so beguile so many of our high-reputation writers and their cheerless champions in the media and the academy...

...This unconscionable attack was made, amazingly enough, in the course of a review of The Gulag Archipelago...

...Invisible Allies is indeed a chronicle of the men and women who, with few 64 February 199 6 • The American Spectator exceptions, remained undaunted by that "ax suspended over their heads," and of the ingenious stratagems that were devised by these amateur conspirators to elude detection by what Solzhenitsyn also calls "the Unsleeping Eye" of the state apparatus...

...For with the official publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the early 1960's, Solzhenitsyn had emerged as the leader of the internal opposition to the Soviet regime...

...Toward the close of the first chapter of Invisible Allies, which was written only a few months after Solzhenitsyn was forcibly expelled from his homeland, he gives us a sense of the spirit of moral obligation in which the book itself has been conceived: I sit down to write these pages and in my mind's eye all my loyal companions in arms, my collaborators, my helpers, almost all of them still alive and still in danger, gather around me like affectionate shadows...

...To understand the scope and complexity of this underground network and the hazards it faced in every one of its activities, it has to be recalled that in the period that is recounted in Invisible Allies Solzhenitsyn was writing or constantly revising an immense, unpublished literary oeuvre—not only the three stout volumes of The Gulag Archipelago and two sizable novels Cancer Ward and First Circle, but plays, poetry, shorter fiction, and the early volumes in his vast cycle of novels on the history of the Revolution...

...It was Ivan Denisovich, above all, that prompted so many remarkable people to rally to Solzhenitsyn's banner and become the "invisible allies" that made his mission a success...

...Had anything quite like this ever before occurred in the history of literature...

...The myth of the Revolution was in some cases the hardest thing to give up,even among people who felt a profound disgust for the Soviet regime...

...The American Spectator • February 1996 65...

...To produce typescripts of all these works and make carbon copies of them, to circulate them to reliable readers, to microfilm those thousands of pages (when things came to that stage), and find adequate hiding places for everything that had been written and copied...

...Yet such was their dedication to Solzhenitsyn's cause that even these disagreements, which could be fundamental, were subordinated to the success of his mission...

...About this personal side of Solzhenitsyn's ordeal he is customarily reticent, but it is nonetheless one of the elements of the narrative that adds romance to the suspenseful, spy-thriller aspects of the gripping story that is told to us in Invisible Allies...

...Some, like Solzhenitsyn himself, were former zeks, inmates of the Gulag who had survived its punishing regimen...

...It should not be forgotten that it was our then—secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who, in the interests of an ill-fated policy of detente, advised the White House not to receive Solzhenitsyn upon his arrival in America, lest such a reception offend the delicate sensibilities of the Soviet leadership— a decision that, to his credit, Kissinger later deeply regretted...

...Solzhenitsyn wrote the book in Zurich, in 1974-75, immediately upon completing The Oak and the Calf...

...Here I am safe and sound, while they continue to live with an ax suspended over their heads...

...And it wasn't only our literary critics who were sorely vexed by Solzhenitsyn's outspoken opinions...

...Whatever may happen to, or in, Russia in the future, The Gulag Archipelago is one of the books that changed the history of the twentieth century, and the tale of how it was written, copied, preserved, secretly circulated at home, and smuggled abroad for publication throughout the free world is itself a special kind of thriller...

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...It is worth recalling, however, that even in the heyday of Solzhenitsyn's celebrity as an admired dissident, he was always looked upon with a good deal of suspicion by our own intellectual and media elite...

...Many were developed by the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S...

...It was in the nature of their clandestine tasks, moreover, that many remained unknown to each other —both for their own protection and to provide Solzhenitsyn and his subversive manuscripts with as much security as this precarious and swiftly changing situation allowed...

...Solzhenitsyn and His Silent Circle Invisible Allies Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Counterpoint /34.4 pages / $29.50 REVIEWED BY Hilton Kramer Given the political and spiritual climate of American cultural life in the last decades of the twentieth century, we should not be surprised that even a writer as heroic in stature and as formidable in accomplishment as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — who, incidentally, observed his 77th birthday in December — has virtually disappeared from the collective consciousness of our fickle and often foolish literary scene...

...It may well have had some precedents, but none that I know of...

...Thus, in the very year that Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union —1974— he was attacked by George Steiner in the pages of the New Yorker for showing insufficient reverence for Lenin's great achievement in establishing the Soviet state...

...For the first time, too, he was committing to paper the large poetic auvre he had created during his years in the Gulag and preserved for himself by a prodigious feat of memory...

...Unknown to the world, they risked everything without receiving in recompense the public admiration that can mitigate even death...

...In Invisible Allies, Solzhenitsyn has given us a group portrait of these brave souls that contains some of his tenderest writing...

...The irony of it...

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...The situation didn't get any better, either, when Solzhenitsyn came to live in the United States, where, as I well remember, in 198o the late Irving Howe, proud editor of the writings of Leon Trotsky, offered some moral instruction to the author of The Gulag Archipelago in the pages of the New Republic...

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...There is also a very poignant subplot to be followed in Invisible Allies—the story of the breakup of Solzhenitsyn's marriage to a woman who actually became a threat to his entire project and the whole clandestine network that was laboring on his behalf, and his happy attachment to his present wife, who came into his life as one of the most remarkable of the many women who served his cause...

...Solzhenitsyn isn't chic, and there is no use pretending otherwise...

...and then, at a further stage of this clandestine project, to make contact with and assess the trustworthiness of the couriers who might be counted upon to ferry these works to trusted contacts in the West—all of this, needless to say, required an immense amount of time, a great deal of laborious effort, and huge personal risks on the part of collaborators who, in most cases, were already working at full-time jobs and otherwise living under very difficult conditions...

...I see their eyes and listen intently to their voices—more intently than I ever could in the heat of battle...

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...A typical course (equivalent to a college semester) includes an album of 10 to 12 audio cassettes (10 to 18 hours), recorded by native-born speakers, plus a 250-page textbook...

...Inevitably, the book is also in some respects a self-portrait, and on this score, too, Invisible Allies is one of its author's most riveting works...

...What that mission entailed, not only in the way of intellectual stamina and political courage but in the assortment of skills and risks required to outwit powerful adversaries while completing vast literary projects under the most unforgiving circumstances—that whole story is one of the most extraordinary in the annals of totalitarianism, and one of the few to end in a clear-cut triumph over Soviet villainy...

...It wasn't always the case, either, that every one of Solzhenitsyn's dedicated collaborators agreed in every respect with his political and religious views...

...Now, with the publication of Invisible Allies, some very important chapters of this tale are recounted for the first time...

...That, in the eyes of the American literary left, was going way too far...

...Inevitably, there were ideological disagreements — not, for the most part, about the catastrophe that Stalin and his successors had imposed on Russia, for virtually everyone's life had been deeply touched by the years of Terror, but about the legitimacy of the Revolution itself...

...The latter, whichtold the story of his open opposition to the Soviet regime in the years preceding his arrest and expulsion in February 1974, was promptly published at the time—the Russian edition in Paris in 1975, the English translation here in 1980...

...The so-called Thaw that had made its publication possible proved to be short-lived, however, and during the new crackdown that ensued Solzhenitsyn's moral authority was further enhanced by his open and steadfast campaign of opposition —a campaign that reached a kind of climax with his public "Letter to the Soviet headers" in 1973...

...The publication of Ivan Denisovich had raised hopes that the truth about the Terror and its consequences might at last be open-ly discussible, and it was in the light of the shattered hopes that came with the new crackdown that these allies sought out the author of Ivan Denisovich, who was otherwise unknown to them, and placed themselves at his service...

...What could not be published until the collapse of the Soviet Union itself was the story of the improvised clandestine network of individuals who, at great risk to themselves, supported Solzhenitsyn's endeavors in an unremitting battle of wits with the KGB...

...None of this, fortunately, did anything to deter Solzhenitsyn from his steadfast pursuit of the literary and historical mission he had set for himself, which was nothing less than to write a moral history of the Bolshevik Revolution and the catastrophic consequences it visited upon the Russian people...

...And for many of them the publication of these pages will come too late...

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...HILTON KRAMER is editor of the New Criterion...