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“Secret snitch of the NKVD”: what Solzhenitsyn was accused of when he was in the Gulag

The personality of A.I. Solzhenitsyn is perhaps the most controversial in the history of Russian literature of the 20th century. Some idealize him, calling him a new classic and a martyr for his dissidence and “incompleteness.” Others, on the contrary, curse and consider him a traitor to the Motherland, a slanderer and a snitch. Various rumors about the underside of the writer’s life have not subsided since the mid-1970s, and one of these dark stories is about an NKVD informant nicknamed “Vetrov”.

Pros

Accusations against A.I. Solzhenitsyn of secret work for the NKVD and denunciation began to spread after in 1976 the German writer and criminologist Frank Arnau published a denunciation allegedly written by Solzhenitsyn, in which on January 22, 1952, the authorities of the Peschanyi camp were informed that a group of Ukrainian nationalists was preparing to start an uprising. The writer V.S. Bushin in his book “Solzhenitsyn’s Total Project” reports that Frank Arnau’s exposé in the socialist journal Neue Politik was preceded by his trip to the USSR, where he talked with a number of people close to Solzhenitsyn – Professor “S”, Frau “R” and Mr. “V”.

It is not difficult to recognize the group of the main witnesses who left incriminating testimony against the writer: his first wife N.A. Reshetovskaya and his school friends N.D. Vitkevich and K.S. Simonyan. On the basis of the testimonies he had collected, Arnau was preparing an entire book entitled “Without a Beard. Exposure of A. Solzhenitsyn”. However, the criminologist died before he could complete the work, and the work was continued by the Czechoslovak journalist Tomáš Řezáč, who wrote the book The Spiral of Solzhenitsyn’s Treason.

The story of the agent “Vetrov” begins with the confession of A.I. Solzhenitsyn himself in “The Gulag Archipelago” that he was recruited under this sexot nickname, but, according to his assurances, he did not write a single denunciation during his stay in the camp. Solzhenitsyn’s assertion of his innocence is refuted by the testimony of Witkiewicz and Simonyan. Witkiewicz was repressed for ten years because of his anti-Soviet correspondence with Solzhenitsyn during the war. According to him, the testimony of a friend played a decisive role.

“The day when I saw the records of Solzhenitsyn’s interrogation was the most terrible in my life. From them I learned things about myself that I had never dreamed of, that I had been systematically conducting anti-Soviet agitation since 1940, that I, together with Solzhenitsyn, had tried to create an illegal organization, had worked out plans for a violent change in the policy of the Party and the state, had slandered (even “maliciously” (!) Stalin, and so on<. >Not only was the signature well known to me, but I also had no doubts about the handwriting with which Solzhenitsyn personally made additions and corrections to the protocols, each time signing in the margins.”

Witkiewicz reports that the future Nobel laureate also slandered the Simonyans and his own wife. Simonyan confirms this testimony: “In 1952, I was summoned to the district department of state security. The investigator sat me down at a separate table, pushed up a bulky notebook… In this notebook, neatly numbered to 52 pages,.. Proof was given that it was I who from childhood was an anti-Soviet, a spiritual and political corrupter of comrades, in particular, of him, Sanya Solzhenitsyn, and that it was under my influence that he engaged in unseemly anti-Soviet activities.”

There is a version that Solzhenitsyn deliberately addressed his attacks against “Pakhan” (Stalin) in his correspondence, which was reviewed by the military censorship, to Witkiewicz, being sure that he himself would be released after the war under an amnesty. As V.S. Bushin notes, Solzhenitsyn began to write to his wife about his hope for an early amnesty in his first letters from the camp. However, the amnesty did not happen, and then, according to the whistleblowers, the agent of the “Winds” developed further informant activities. As circumstantial evidence, Bushin cites the suspiciously benign conditions in which Solzhenitsyn found himself each time.

He cites the testimony of a certain prisoner of the Omsk prison, Dostoevsky, who said that Solzhenitsyn easily shied away from hard physical work and was eager “at all costs to get a command or any other position, away from muscular efforts.” And, as Bushin notes, referring to the memoirs of Solzhenitsyn himself, the writer succeeded all the time. At one moment he was appointed head of production, then as an assistant to the standard-setter, then as a mathematician, then they took him at his word when he “impudently declared himself a nuclear physicist”, and, finally, he was sent to a privileged job in the library.

“Solzhenitsyn spends the whole day at his desk. So he literally spent most of his sentence … At lunchtime, he lies in the yard on the grass or sleeps in the dormitory: dead hour, like in a pioneer camp. In the morning and in the evening he walks, before going to bed he listens to music on the radio with headphones, and on weekends (there were up to 60 of them, Dostoevsky had three: Christmas, Easter and the name day of the sovereign) he plays volleyball for three or four hours and again performs exercises. That’s the kind of hard labor – with a dead hour and volleyball, with exercise and music, with three meals a day corresponding to all this,” Bushin writes sarcastically, seeing in such lightness of camp life obvious signs of the special position of the sexot. “Simple common sense does not allow us to think that a person who signed an undertaking to be an informant in the camp and who himself admitted it in the pages of his book, nevertheless did not engage in denunciation activities, and no one asked him for inactivity, and it did not interfere with his peculiar camp ‘well-being’…”

Carefully analysing Frank Arnau’s “Vetrov’s denunciation” published by Frank Arnau, Bushin asserts: “I recognized Solzhenitsyn’s peculiar small handwriting on the facsimile copy immediately and without difficulty.” However, the writer did not limit himself to the first impression, but carefully checked the magazine copy of the document with Solzhenitsyn’s original letter, which he had at his disposal, “in some very essential details, in particular, in the outline of the most characteristic letters of his handwriting: ‘x’, ‘zh’, ‘d’, ‘t’ and a number of others.” He draws attention to the fact that in addition to the identity of the handwriting, the authenticity of the document is proved by the literary manner, the peculiarity of the placement of commas and other characteristic details.

Arguments “against”

Solzhenitsyn himself vehemently denied all the revelations that were pouring down on him, and in response accused his ex-wife and friends of collaborating with the KGB. In his article “The Darkers Do Not Seek the Light,” he asserts that “systematic slander began almost immediately after Ivan Denisovich” (1962). Solzhenitsyn calls his abandoned first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, “the best and most faithful assistant to the KGB,” who “steadily, persistently, at various levels of distortion and lies” took revenge on him for his betrayal. Solzhenitsyn explains the “slanders” of Witkiewicz and Simonyan by the fact that the former was reinstated in the party for this, and the latter was “pinned down by the KGB” for “certain psychobiological features associated with sexual choice.”

Solzhenitsyn also stigmatizes his foreign whistleblowers, accusing Frank Arnau of collaborating with the Stasi and calling Tomáš Řezáč a “Czechoslovak commissioner.” The Nobel laureate claims that Andropov himself wrote to the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Jaromir Obzina, about Rzhezach’s book on August 10, 1978: “The publication of this publication was the result of the author’s conscientious work and persistent joint work with him by employees of the 10th Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Czechoslovakia and the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR…”

At the same time, Solzhenitsyn emphasizes that no one has ever seen the denunciations attributed to him against Witkiewicz and Simonyan: “… Nonsense about “52 notebook pages in inimitably small handwriting” allegedly written in the spring of 1952 in the Ekibastuz penal camp, which was still nurtured by our recent rebellion, and immediately after my cancer operation, with the sole purpose of discrediting Simonyan. Where’s that notebook? Quote these 52 pages that have not been quoted by anyone, including Rzhezach, by anyone!”

The writer is just as resolute in calling the “Vetrov denunciation” published by Arnau a forgery, remarking: “…the ‘denunciation’ of the Ukrainians was marked on January 20, 1952, they quote ‘today’ alleged conversations with Ukrainian convicts and their ‘tomorrow’ plans, but they missed the fact that on January 6 all the Ukrainians were transferred to a separate Ukrainian camp, tightly separated from ours…” He also emphasizes that he himself sent samples of his handwriting to Western graphologists, but Arnau refused the examination.

“In the Archipelago, and not only in it, I did not spare myself, and all the remorse that passed through my soul – all on paper… In this series, I did not hesitate to relate the story of how I was recruited as a camp snitch and given a nickname, although I never used this nickname and never submitted a single report. I would consider it dishonest to keep silent about it, and to write it interesting, bearing in mind the multiplicity of such recruitments, even in freedom. My goal was to show in the whole book, in all my books, what can be made out of a person. To show that the line between Good and Evil is constantly moving through the human heart,” Solzhenitsyn concludes in his defense.

Summing up, it should be noted that the question of whether the “Vetrov denunciation” is an original or a forgery has remained open, and other similar documents have not yet been found.