Stop the Presses

The American Conservative, in its September/October issue, also has an excerpt from Solzhenitsyn’s forthcoming memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. These pages, written in 1994 but published here for the first time in English, recount, with vivid flair, the dramatic tale of how The Gulag Archipelago was almost published in the USSR in January 1989, but was ultimately vetoed by Gorbachev himself, who literally stamped his feet at the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir and ordered half a million covers announcing Archipelago to be torn off at the last minute.

“Then someone informed the Central Committee that Zalygin had dared put one line of advance publicity on the cover of the October issue of Novy Mir: it said that in 1989 the journal would publish something (unnamed) by Solzhenitsyn. Zalygin was called to the CC and sternly informed that his escapades were intolerable and that he was smuggling an “enemy” into print. And they gave the printers a direct order: stop the presses! pull the covers off the copies already finished (and there were now almost 500,000 of these)—and shred them. A truly Bolshevik-scale exercise!”