№ 3142

November 25, 1967

Comrade A.I. Solzhenitsyn.

Dear Alexander Isayevich!

During the meeting of the Secretariat of the Board of the Union of Writers of the USSR on September 22 of this year, at which your letters were discussed, along with sharp criticism of your action, the comrades expressed the benevolent idea that you should have a sufficient time to think carefully about everything that was discussed at the Secretariat, and only then speak publicly and determine your attitude to the anti-Soviet campaign. raised by unfriendly foreign propaganda around your name and your letters. Two months passed.

The Secretariat would like to know what decision you have reached.

Sincerely,

K. Voronkov

At the request of the Secretariat,

Secretary of the Board of the Union

writers of the USSR

[6]

1.12.67 Ryazan

TO THE SECRETARIAT OF THE UNION OF WRITERS OF THE USSR

From your No 3142 of 25.11.67 I cannot understand:

1) Does the Secretariat intend to protect me from three years of continuous (to put it mildly "unfriendly") slander in my homeland? (New facts: on 5.10.67 in Leningrad, in the House of Press, in front of a crowded crowd of listeners, the editor-in-chief of "Pravda" Zimyanin repeated the tired lie that I was in captivity, and also groped for a hackneyed trick against the undesirables - to declare me a schizophrenic, and the camp past - an obsession. why did the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court not see this in the case.)

2) What measures has the Secretariat taken to reverse the illegal ban on my printed works in library use and the censorship order to remove my name from mention in critical articles? (In "Questions of Literature" they did so even... in translation of the Japanese article. At Perm University, a group of students was sanctioned for trying to discuss my printed works in their scientific collection.)

3) Does the Secretariat want to prevent the uncontrolled appearance of the "Cancer Ward" abroad, or does it remain indifferent to this danger? Are any steps being taken to publish excerpts from the story in Literaturnaya Gazeta, and the whole story in Novy Mir?

(4) Does the Secretariat intend to petition the Government for our country to accede to the international copyright convention? In this way, our authors would have a reliable means of protecting their works from illegal foreign publications and the shameless commercial translation race.

5) In the six months that have passed since my letter to the Congress, has the distribution of the illegal "edition" of excerpts from my archive finally been stopped, and has this "edition" been destroyed?

6) What measures did the Secretariat take to return the seized archive and the novel "In the First Circle" to me, apart from public assurances that they had allegedly already been returned (secretary Ozerov, for example)?