The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (41 page)

On September 23, 1972, the couple’s second son, Ignat, was born. The doctor who helped Natalya with her delivery was promptly purged from the Party and lost his teaching position at the Medical Institute. As he was told, this was for “bringing into the world the child of the enemy of the people.”
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Natalya was still recovering from the birth when on October 18 Solzhenitsyn’s wife, Reshetovskaya, unexpectedly came to see her. She asked whether the younger woman ever thought about her; Natalya replied that she had and that she was sorry for the grief she had caused. “Forgive me!” Natalya added with emotion.
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After this meeting, Reshetovskaya withdrew her objections from the Supreme Court, which was then deciding the divorce. In addition, she wrote Natalya that had they met earlier, the divorce would not have lasted two agonizing years. What persuaded her was their personal meeting. The divorce was finalized on March 15, 1973, and on May 11, Natalya and Solzhenitsyn were married. In addition to the church wedding, the couple registered their marriage in a civil ceremony, which gave Solzhenitsyn the legal right to reside with his family in Moscow. But the authorities still refused to permit him to live in the capital. He could be arrested if he stayed with Natalya and the children longer than seventy-two hours.

That year, Solzhenitsyn’s struggle with the Soviet state entered a critical phase. In May, the family rented a country cottage in Firsanovka, southeast of Moscow, but their vacation turned into a living hell. The couple received a flurry of threatening mail until Solzhenitsyn sent several samples to KGB headquarters, warning he would make the affair public. In addition, their village was near the airport, and the roar was overwhelming day and night. Solzhenitsyn, needing to write, retreated to a country cottage he had shared with his first wife. Natalya stayed with her mother and the children in the countryside, where they were utterly defenseless against the KGB. She was also coping with another difficult pregnancy and afraid of miscarriage; however, she wrote to cheer Solzhenitsyn and tell him that she was ready to tackle any situation.

That summer, the couple made a superhuman decision: they would not be intimidated by any threats and were ready to die at any moment. When, in 1992, a Russian reporter asked Natalya whether she had qualms about the choice Solzhenitsyn had made for the entire family, Natalya replied that she knew what was at stake and did not hesitate. “But I would be lying to you if I said I had no fear. I was afraid. Mainly for the children.…”
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On September 2, the couple learned that the KGB had seized the manuscript of
The Gulag Archipelago
. Solzhenitsyn’s former helper and typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, was hunted down in Leningrad. The KGB confiscated her memoir in which she told about the existence of
The Gulag Archipelago
. After she was interrogated for five days and nights, the KGB learned where the manuscript could be found. Believing she had betrayed Solzhenitsyn and other people, she committed suicide at sixty-seven.

The Gulag Archipelago
was Solzhenitsyn’s deepest-kept secret and another “crippling blow to Communism.” The novel had been deposited with his Paris publisher long ago, but Solzhenitsyn waited for the right moment to release it. Such a moment came when the KGB seized a copy of the novel. On September 3, Solzhenitsyn arrived in Moscow to consult Natalya about whether they should launch the novel in the West, which would mean a new round of harassment at home. “‘We’ll have to detonate it, don’t you think?’ I ask her. ‘Let’s do it!’ is her fearless reply.” Solzhenitsyn informed his Western supporters about the seizure of
The Gulag Archipelago
and gave his Paris publisher, Struve, the go-ahead. He pressed him to produce the novel as fast as possible, before the KGB acted. In the middle of these events, on September 8, 1973, Natalya gave birth to their third son, Stepan.

Beginning in November, Solzhenitsyn lived and worked at the writers’ settlement, Peredelkino. He stayed at the dacha of writer and long-time helper Lydia Chukovskaya, traveling to see his family in Moscow once a week. Occasionally he made surprise visits. After a regular goodnight call to Natalya, for KGB ears, he would leave the light on and slip out of the house unnoticed. On the way to
Moscow he would change trains, taking circuitous routes, confident he had outsmarted the agents.

Struve’s YMCA-Press released
The Gulag Archipelago
on December 28, 1973, ten days ahead of time. He and his wife had been preparing the novel together with only few of their staff aware, to ensure secrecy. Upon its release in France and later in England, the novel would be promptly translated in many countries, with the American edition published by Harper & Row in 1974. “This was a bomb,” Struve later remarked contentedly, “that would explode around the world … a literary event of the twentieth century.”
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When Solzhenitsyn heard the announcement about the novel’s publication on the BBC, he felt as though “an enormous burden had been lifted” from his shoulders and rushed to Moscow to share the news with Natalya. “That evening Alya and I were in a festive mood—everything was collapsing around us, but we were holding our own.” Solzhenitsyn made a list of possibilities for the New Year: the Soviet authorities could respond to the novel’s publication with murder, imprisonment, or deportation. Natalya was more optimistic, predicting another newspaper campaign against him.

On January 14, 1974,
Pravda
published an editorial entitled “The Path of Betrayal,” and the following day the article was reprinted across the country. Threatening mail and telephone calls began to pour in. For two weeks in a row, the telephone in Natalya’s apartment rang non-stop as the KGB tried to break the family’s spirit with a campaign of “public anger.” The callers demanded to speak with Solzhenitsyn and shouted obscenities. Solzhenitsyn admired Natalya for weathering it calmly:

She would listen patiently to all the abuse, then say quietly: “Tell me, do you get paid fortnightly in the KGB, or monthly, like in the army?”… Sometimes she would even interpolate a few encouraging remarks, let the man speak his lines, and then say, “Is that all? Right—tell Yuri Vladimirovich [chairman of the KGB Andropov] from me that he’s heading for trouble with dunces like you on his staff.”
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As before, the Soviet newspaper campaign against Solzhenitsyn helped promote his book in the West. In the ironic remark of writer Veniamin Kaverin, the authorities were punishing Solzhenitsyn “with world-wide fame.”
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Prior to his novel, some forty books had been published on the gulag topic in the West, all unnoticed.

When Natalya’s telephone stopped ringing the first week of February, she said it was the calm before the storm. While the couple was wondering what the authorities would undertake next, the KGB was conducting secret negotiations to deport Solzhenitsyn. On February 2, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, highly respected for his efforts to improve East-West relations, said Solzhenitsyn was welcome to live and work in Germany. Andropov (he would succeed Brezhnev as Soviet leader), seized the opportunity to divest himself of a troublesome dissident. He sent a memo to Brezhnev that KGB General Kevorkov was negotiating with the Germans. The KGB worried, perhaps unreasonably, that Solzhenitsyn would discover this and disrupt their plan, so Andropov wanted the matter to be urgently resolved.

Solzhenitsyn was working at the dacha in Peredelkino when, on February 8, Natalya phoned to say that he was being summons to the Office of Public Procurator of the USSR. When the summons was brought to her apartment Natalya found an excuse not to sign the receipt, which gave Solzhenitsyn a postponement. But a second summons arrived on February 11. That day, he returned to Moscow and wrote a letter refusing to accept the legality of the government order.

In the evening, the couple went for a stroll, discussing their strategies in case of Solzhenitsyn’s arrest. Believing that he would be sent to the gulag, he even told Natalya what he would write there—a history of Russia for children. During their walk, the police agents followed at a close distance, which the couple ignored. At home, they went about their usual business and microfilmed Solzhenitsyn’s most recent manuscript; they also packed his prison kit.

On February 12, the government signed a decree for Solzhenitsyn’s deportation; unaware, the couple spent the morning working
in their shared study. In the afternoon there was a ring at the door. When Solzhenitsyn opened, eight towering men rushed in. Natalya demanded their search warrant and, learning there was none, shouted, “Out you go, then.”
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Minutes later, Solzhenitsyn was taken away, but two agents remained in the apartment. Natalya locked herself in the study where, working “at lightning speed,” she collected the papers and microfilms, deciding which ones to destroy and which to hide inside books and on her body. It took her twenty-two minutes to prepare for the search and burn the most incriminating materials. Emerging from the study, she was surprised to see that the agents had left.

The police had damaged the lock, leaving the entrance door opened, and her eighteen-month-old Ignat crawled onto the landing. Three-year-old Ermolai had to be picked up from kindergarten and the two other children, Dmitry, eleven, and Stepan, five months, were in the yard with her mother. Natalya could not attend to their needs, but when later that day a friend offered to take her three-year-old for the night, she replied frostily: “No—let him get used to it. He is a Solzhenitsyn.”
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She phoned friends to tell about the arrest, and human-rights activists began to gather at her apartment, among them Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-bomb. He made a statement in a phone interview with a Canadian news agency, denouncing the arrest, and called it a retribution for Solzhenitsyn’s book, which advocated for millions of victims. (A founder of the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR, Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. Like Solzhenitsyn, he was not allowed to collect it and his wife, human-rights activist Elena Bonner, delivered his speech in Oslo. Sakharov was sent into internal exile after his protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.)

All that day and next, Natalya did not know where her husband was being detained or even if he was still alive. To keep the pressure on the KGB, she decided to release his remaining works in the West, so when Solzhenitsyn’s lawyer, Dr. Heeb, phoned from Zurich upon learning of the arrest, Natalya instructed him to do just that.

At night, she sorted the papers more thoroughly, with her mother and friends helping. They burned unwanted letters, copies, and microfilms in a basin on the kitchen floor, where it remained for the next six weeks. Remembering that Solzhenitsyn had written a letter, to be issued in the event of his arrest, she recovered the document, typed copies on onionskin, and summons Robert Lacontre from
Le Figaro
. He arrived after midnight and promised to distribute the letter, which he smuggled from the apartment, to all news agencies.

On February 14, Natalya received reports from foreign correspondents that Solzhenitsyn had been deported, but refused comment: “I shan’t believe it until I hear his voice.”
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Only when he himself phoned from Böll’s residence in Germany did she acknowledge the fact, saying she would eventually join him with the children. Some forty people who had assembled in her apartment were present during the call. When they began to congratulate her, Natalya described her husband’s deportation as “a misfortune, an act no less brutally arbitrary than imprisonment in a camp.”
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When deporting Solzhenitsyn, the KGB realized he would be photographed upon arrival to the West. Expecting imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn had donned a sheepskin and old fur cap from his gulag days, so the KGB provided new clothes and a muskrat hat and forced him to change. While on the phone with Natalya, Solzhenitsyn asked her to retrieve his prison garb, which had become part of his image. Natalya rushed to Lefortovo prison and demanded his things, only to learn that they had been burned.

Ahead of her was the arduous task of transferring his papers to the West. By then, most of his completed works had been stored in Switzerland, but there was also an enormous archive, research notes, and printed materials, which Solzhenitsyn had collected over the years for his revolutionary epic
The Red Wheel
. Knowing that his work in exile would depend on it, she packed all he might need, an elaborate task since he treasured every single paper.

To succeed with her mission, she needed the help of many people, from Western scholars to journalists and diplomats, who
could smuggle Solzhenitsyn’s archive in multiple installments. She established a network of allies through the Norwegian journalist Nils Udgaard, who put her in touch with his friends in the diplomatic corps. Visits by foreign correspondents, whom she pressed into her service, allowed freedom of action. Packages marked for shipment were delivered to the apartment of Swedish journalist Fredrikson, who had been Solzhenitsyn’s principal link to the West. Eventually, the archive would be smuggled in forty-five installments, bypassing Soviet customs, through various routes and diplomatic pouches.

Though Natalya planned to depart in six weeks, Solzhenitsyn phoned her every day and urged her to come sooner. To ease the pressure, she sent him a letter through Fredrikson, explaining what was keeping her at home. When the coded letter was seized at the border, her entire operation was jeopardized. During the ensuing turmoil, baby Stepan fell ill with pneumonia and she spent nights at his bedside.

Days before leaving, Natalya held a farewell reception, attended by fellow dissidents and foreign correspondents. Sakharov would describe the occasion: “Many good people came to this party, and many a fine Russian song was sung.”
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Most memorable was the mood of the day and Natalya’s emotional address made on her own and Solzhenitsyn’s behalf: