In an interview on Solzhenitsyn

Tell me about The Solzhenitsyn Files, the old politburo stuff released from the archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

This is something of a curiosity really. It was part of that rush of archival material that suddenly became available at the end of the Soviet period, and the Russian editors filtered through a mass of politburo stuff concerning Solzhenitsyn and produced this intriguing book. You see, back in the 1970s, whenever any foreign journalists asked about Solzhenitsyn and what was happening to him, the official Soviet line was: “Look, you admire him as a writer, but do you really think the Soviet leadership is going to waste its time agonizing over one writer? Do you really think Brezhnev/Andropov is actually sitting around talking about a novelist?” That approach worked pretty well in the West because nobody could imagine the US President holding a meeting about what to do about Updike.

But then came these archives and you’ve got Andropov and other leaders, phone conversations and transcripts of meetings, and they all are sitting around talking about Solzhenitsyn and what to do about him. The archives cover some of the scurrilous fabrications that came out concerning him (books and articles purportedly by friends denouncing him and smearing his reputation both morally and otherwise) but there’s no reference, unfortunately, to the ticklish issue of his attempted assassination in the early 1970s.

Do we know that’s true?

Yes. One of the KGB officers responsible has been interviewed and has confirmed exactly what happened, so we do know for certain, yes.

This collection of material is an extraordinary demonstration of how much writers mattered in the Soviet Union. If you were a writer you sort of … mattered. Solzhenitsyn said that in the West a writer could go to the top of a mountain and flap his arms about like mad and nobody would take any notice, but in the Soviet Union if a writer stirred his hand in a certain way it sent shock waves through the viscous air.

Another interesting thing for me was that this reveals that the KGB knew about Gulag Archipelago in the mid-60s. He’d been writing it furtively while he was publicly writing Cancer Ward, and they bugged a conversation in which he told a friend he was secretly writing this book that would be a huge bombshell when it was published in the 1970s. The KGB couldn’t then have doubted that there was another, secret book that was not Cancer Ward, which was basically pretty innocuous. This was a good five or six years before they actually located a copy of Gulag Archipelago and before the brouhaha that culminated in his expulsion in the 1970s.

So the Soviets, allegedly, made Solzhenitsyn the menace he became, But here, in these archives, we can see that he clearly did have an agenda already that would rock the Soviet Union on its heels and the KGB knew about it. The KGB report and transcript were sent by Semichastny to the Central Committee back in 1965.

This material also details all the counterfeits that were brought out to damage Solzhenitsyn’s reputation. There is a sizeable black museum of these things. One is a document alleging that he was an informer at Ekibastuz labour camp. Everyone knew he’d been approached and asked to be an informer because he wrote about it in Gulag Archipelago, and here is a forged document in which he denounces fellow prisoners who are planning an escape. The dates are all wrong but it’s a good forgery. This material shows you the wonderful world of spy stuff.