Commentary No 22 (November 1971)

22.1 On the presentation of the Nobel Prize to Solzhenitsyn

  1. Solzhenitsyn’s letter letter to the Nobel Foundation of 27 October 1970 has never been published.
  2. Additional clarification:

the “Press statement” of 7 October stressed that Solzhenitsyn could choose how to receive his insignia. In a letter to the Norwegian journalist P. E. Hegge, published in the Swedish press on 19 October and in the world press the next day, Solzhenitsyn said he would like the ceremony to take place in Moscow, in public, but doubted the feasibility of this in the near future. His letter of 22 October appears not to have been published.

On 29 October the Swedish Academy agreed to have the ceremony in Moscow, and asked the Swedish government if the embassy could be used. When no answer was forthcoming, Solzhenitsyn suggested, in a letter to the Academy published in an A. P. dispatch from Moscow of 23 December, that a private flat be used. On 4 January 1972 the Academy agreed to this, and hoped for a ceremony in the spring.

22.2 The case of Vladimir Bukovsky

  1. Extracts from the Open Letter to the Serbsky Institute and the World Health Organisation appeared in many papers on 6 October 1971. Full text in Possev, 10, 1971, pp. 3-4.
  2. For an extract from the letter of support from Academicians Sakharov and Leontovich see the Reuter dispatch of 5 October.
  3. Vladimir Maximov is author of Sem dnei tvoreniya [The Seven Days of Creation], Possev-Verlag, 1971, a 500-page novel. See extracts from his appeal in a Reuter dispatch of 11 October.
  4. On the telegram sent by Bukovsky’s mother see Le Monde, Paris, 19 October 1971.
  5. See brief summary of the late October appeal to all human rights organisations in an A. P. dispatch of 9 November from Moscow.

22.3 Material concerning the forthcoming International Congress of Psychiatrists

  1. Although only Professor Jenner’s address appeared, his co-signatories in fact came from all over Britain, and a few from abroad.
  2. See extracts from the letter by Lithuanian intellectuals in the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore, 20 November 1971.
  3. See summary of Sevruk’s 200-page autobiography in CCE 15.11, item 3 (Possev: Shestoi spetsialnyi vypusk, February 1971, p. 24.)
  4. Bryantsev also wrote the article “Under the mask of falsehood” (Izvestia, 19 April 1971), which dealt with the arrest and deportation of the Belgians Hemschoote and Sebreghts. See CCE 20.5 (item//), for a summary of an as yet unpublished booklet by V. Chalidze, in which he replies to this article. [A translation of “False friends in a quagmire of slander”, and a samizdat reply to its allegations, my be found in Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Russia’s political hospitals, 1977, Appendices 4 & 5.]