“GULAG” AND THE MEN OF PEACE

Last winter Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was published in Paris in Russian, and appeared in the bookshops of the West—including two Swiss bookshops long licensed to sell on United Nations premises in the Palais des Nations at Geneva. The director-general of the UN Geneva office, clandestinely acting at the instigation of the Soviet government, promptly caused the book to be removed from the Palais shelves, along with Solzhenitsyn’s other works. Shortly thereafter, one of the bookshops—Messrs. Payot—closed. At the surviving establishment, that of Naville & Co., the subsequent English and French editions of The Gulag Archipelago likewise briefly surfaced and submerged.

Under the UN Charter, the organization’s international staff are sworn not to “seek or receive instructions from any government”;¹ under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights they are bound to uphold the free circulation of ideas and information “through any media and regardless of frontiers.”²

United Nations censorship of Solzhenitsyn’s works aroused comment in the European press, which reported a courageous protest by 250 of the several thousand UN employees at Geneva. On July 4, during a press conference at Geneva conducted jointly by the UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim, and his subordinate, Vittorio Winspeare-Guicciardi, director-general of the Geneva office, the latter revealed that UN “guidance” had been at work in the Palais bookshops over many years.

Speaking of his “responsibility” and even “duty to inform Payot orally and confidentially” of the displeasure felt by “certain delegates” at finding Solzhenitsyn’s book displayed, Mr. Winspeare-Guicciardi ignored the fact that his duty and responsibility are explicitly to the contrary. The bookshops too had “their duty,” in his view, to avoid “publications à caractère outrageant pour un Etat Membre.” The furtive means by which pressure was applied to the bookshops—“my, should I say, discreet way of dealing with the matter”—was emphasized; and Mr. Winspeare-Guiccardi concluded, “These are the facts of February.”³

Mr. Waldheim himself introduced his elucidation with an affirmation of adherence to “the long-standing principle of freedom of information.”⁴ Indeed, in 1972, when Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel address condemned the UN as “immoral” for betraying its obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Mr. Waldheim had stated that he “would be the first to welcome any initiative” toward honoring that covenant.⁵

“Doublethink,” wrote George Orwell, “means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”⁶

There were, it will be recalled, other “facts of February.” In that month Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn prepared, in unexampled challenge to the forces of organized inhumanity, to lay down his life for those causes to which the UN is nominally dedicated. His hostages to fortune were his wife and children. The immediate issue was the publication outside Russia of his The Gulag Archipelago, the ultimate issue those liberties enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortified in his long struggle by any word from UN sources, Solzhenitsyn, in his own words, “was upheld by the unseen, unheard thread of popular sympathy…and the world brotherhood of writers.”⁷ On the afternoon of February 12, Solzhenitsyn was dragged from his home by the Soviet police, and on February 13, deported into permanent exile.

During these great and terrible events, UN leaders could find no better occupation than to arrange, by stealth, for removal of Solzhenitsyn’s works from international territory.

The Gulag Archipelago is a firsthand account of the most prolonged and extensive violation of human rights in recorded history—furnishing the very substance with which the UN was created to deal, and with which it has pitilessly declined to concern itself. Had a comparable chronicle been smuggled to the world from Dachau in the 1930s, it would—being offensive to the fascist membership of the League of Nations—have met an identical reception at the Palais. (The secretary-general of the League, Sir Eric Drummond, who permitted his Italian staff to wear the fascist emblem, had similar antennae for the “outrageant.”) Mr. Waldheim himself, who served as an officer in Hitler’s army on the Russian front described in The Gulag Archipelago, should be no stranger to the context in which such evils occur.

The secretary-general has received protests from PEN, and myself; I should be glad to hear of others. The world has heard nothing from those agencies and publications, those jurists, academics, and public persons who have attached themselves to an institution rather than to a set of principles, nor from the huge, and hugely timid, preponderance of UN officials. For failing to denounce inhumanities, Solzhenitsyn reminds us, “every man has at hand a dozen glib little reasons.”⁸

Thus the embargo imposed upon Solzhenitsyn’s writings in his native land has been, with exquisitely indicative irony, reproduced on the international territory of the UN—the organization charged with defending the free expression for which Solzhenitsyn was ready to give his life. Is there a writer among us who would not, in these circumstances, prefer to be considered “outrageant” at the UN? We may assume that Confucius long since vanished from the Palais bookshop; and that Aristophanes was, until last month, as unwelcome there as in his homeland. Some “discreet way” will perhaps be found of eliminating books on Watergate or ITT. Naville & Co. may eventually wish to proceed into exile from UN territory and seek literary asylum in the free world.

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Editorial comment: In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, published October 6, 1974, the UN spokesman André Lewin responded to what he called Shirley Hazzard’s accusation that Secretary-General Waldheim had “censored” Solzhenitsyn “by prohibiting the sale of his books in the bookshop located at UN European headquarters in Geneva,” insisting that “there is no ban or censorship whatsoever in the bookshop of the United Nations” and that Solzhenitsyn’s books “are sold there.”

Hazzard was granted a response to Lewin, also published October 6, 1974:

 

I do not accuse the United Nations of censoring Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works at bookshops under its influence: I state it as an incontrovertible fact.

Readers of Mr. Lewin’s deceitful and injudicious letter may obtain United Nations press release SG/SM/2033 of July 5 giving the UN’s own account of its policy of censorship and the clandestine UN interventions at Geneva that resulted in commercial book sellers on international territory “referring their customer to shops in town” for purchase of works by Solzhenitsyn.

Exclusion of Solzhenitsyn’s works from UN premises, at UN and Soviet instigation, began last winter and was maintained—as the unfortunate Mr. Lewin reveals with his reference to “settling the matter”—into the summer. Mr. Waldheim’s farcical invocation of the principle of freedom of information was in fact made during this ban and, as Mr. Jerzy Kosinski pointed out in his PEN protest of August 1, with no indication of lifting it. All this was reflected with perfect accuracy in my “Guest Word” of August 25.⁹

On August 28, three days after publication of my article, the director of the UN Geneva office informed Mr. Kosinski, in a letter of two sentences, that Solzhenitsyn’s works had at last made their reappearance on UN premises.

Mr. Lewin’s shameless misrepresentation intensifies the ominous light shed by these events. What matters is not, of course, that Solzhenitsyn’s work has finally been admitted to UN premises as a result of cumulative public pressure, but that it was ever removed and for months proscribed by our custodians of free expression. Mr. Waldheim and his subordinates have now compounded their dishonor with a mendacious, blustering attempt to conceal it.

Mr. Lewin has most unwisely called my statements “unfounded.” I am more than ready to substantiate these matters at law. That my own role here is simply to illuminate abuses of public trust does not mean I will tolerate libels.

In my article of August 25, I conjectured that Confucius would find himself among the victims of UN servility to totalitarian decrees. I now learn that a quotation from Confucius was removed from the walls of the UN headquarters in New York on September 17, on instructions from the government of China¹⁰—and no doubt in pursuance of Mr. Waldheim’s concept of “the long-standing principle of freedom of information.”