Invisible Allies
After his expulsion from Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn secretly worked on a memoir that would acknowledge the courageous efforts of the people who hid his writings and smuggled them to the West. Before the fall of Communism, the very publication of Invisible Allies would have put these friends in jeopardy. Now we are finally granted an intimate account of the extensive, ever-shifting network of individuals who risked life and liberty to ensure that Solzhenitsyn's works were kept safe,...
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After his expulsion from Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn secretly worked on a memoir that would acknowledge the courageous efforts of the people who hid his writings and smuggled them to the West. Before the fall of Communism, the very publication of Invisible Allies would have put these friends in jeopardy. Now we are finally granted an intimate account of the extensive, ever-shifting network of individuals who risked life and liberty to ensure that Solzhenitsyn's works were kept safe, circulated in samizdat, and "exported" via illicit channels. These imperiled conspirators, often unknown to one another, shared a devotion to the dissident writer's work and a hatred of the regime that brought terror to every part of their lives. The circle included scholars and fellow writers and artists, but also such unlikely operatives as an elderly babushka who picked up and delivered manuscripts in her shopping bag. With tenderness, respect, and humor, Solzhenitsyn tells us of the fates of these partners in intrigue: the women who typed distribution copies of his works late into the night under the noses of prying neighbors; the correspondents and diplomats who covertly carried the microfilmed texts across borders; the farflung friends who hid various drafts of Solzhenitsyn's works anywhere they could - under an apple tree, beneath the bathtub, in a mathematics professor's loft with her canoe. In this group of deftly drawn portraits, Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the anonymous heroes who evaded the KGB to bring The Gulag Archipelago and his many other works to the world. Publishers Weekly A memoir of the dissidents who risked their lives to smuggle Solzhenitsyn's work into the West. (May)
1Nikolai Ivanovich Zubov32Nikolai Ivanovich Kobozev263Veniamin Lvovich and Susanna Lazarevna Teush324The Estonians465Elizaveta Denisovna Voronyanskaya656Natalya Milyevna Anichkova and Nadya Levitskaya897Mirra Gennadyevna Petrova1038Elena Tsezarevna Chukovskaya1139Natalya Ivanovna Stolyarova (Eva)14210The Column in the Shadows16711A New Network19612Three Pillars of Support22113The Foreigners25114Troubled Waters of the Quiet Don279Appendix A: Letter from Natalya Stolyarova303Appendix B: From Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, or The KGB vs. Solzhenitsyn306Translators' Notes319Index335
\ Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly\ A memoir of the dissidents who risked their lives to smuggle Solzhenitsyn's work into the West. (May)\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalSolzhenitsyn's best-known works, including the Gulag Archipelago (LJ 8/74), were written in secret, circulated only as underground typescripts (samizdat), and eventually smuggled out of the Soviet Union for publication in the West. This current work details how all that occurred and thanks the more than 100 individuals who typed manuscripts, microfilmed them, stored copies, and transported them. Although it was written at the same time as the autobiographical Oak and the Calf (LJ 5/1/80), in 1974 at the beginning of Solzhenitsyn's exile in Switzerland (and later the United States), publication was delayed to protect those still in Russia (whose real names are used throughout) and those Western journalists and diplomats who helped carry material out of the country. The manuscript was not updated after 1974 to record how those people fared after Solzhenitsyn left the Soviet Union. The book will be of interest to specialized collections.-Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York\ \
