SOLZHENITSYN Target of KGB Propaganda and Censorship by Voice of America

On September 19, 1974, the KGB began a large-scale operation to discredit Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and cut his communications with Soviet dissidents. From the article:

"This research article written for Cold War Radio Museum website to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia deals primarily with censorship at the U.S. taxpayer-funded and government-run Voice of America (VOA) during the policy of détente in the 1970s as it was directed by higher-level officials against Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, one of Russia’s most famous writers. VOA’s silencing of Solzhenitsyn’s voice in its broadcasts and restrictions on readings from his major work, The Gulag Archipelago, were a direct result of a successful KGB-run propaganda and disinformation campaign affecting U.S. policy at the White House level all the way down to U.S. government officials in charge of the Voice of America. The KGB, the security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, in addition to conducting foreign intelligence operations, also suppressed internal dissent and took active measures abroad, including propaganda and disinformation, against anyone viewed by the communist authorities as an enemy of the Soviet Union. In a partial relief for truth-deprived audiences behind the Iron Curtain, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, also U.S. government funded radio broadcasters, were largely unaffected by Soviet propaganda or censorship by U.S. government officials in response to threats from the Kremlin. Their censorship-free broadcasts beamed by shortwave radio signals behind the Iron Curtain helped to compensate to some degree for VOA’s failures and helped to save America’s reputation among the East Europeans and the Russians as the leader of the Free World and a champion of freedom.

As revealed by Major Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB senior archivist who had defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 after providing the British embassy in Riga with a vast collection of KGB files, during the 1970s and 1980s, Solzhenitsyn was a target of an unprecedented disinformation campaign undertaken by the KGB through its multiple operatives abroad who also received assistance from other Soviet Block intelligence agencies. 1 KGB smears aimed at discrediting the dissident writer, human rights defender and Nobel Prize winner by portraying him as an anti-Western Russian nationalist and enemy of détente managed to intimidate and influence American policy makers at all levels and successfully undermined his reputation in the West even to this day. The KGB also spread false accusations of pro-Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism to discredit Solzhenitsyn and anyone associating with him or offering him support.

The senior management of the Voice of America followed the lead of the Nixon White House and the United States Information Agency (USIA) in caving in to pressure from Soviet propaganda which also managed to influence some but not all of the VOA central English newsroom journalists and their managers. Even VOA foreign language services were not completely immune to the onslaught of Soviet propaganda although many tried to resit it and, as far as they could, opposed orders from higher management to ban Solzhenitsyn from their broadcasts until specifically ordered to stop their efforts to interview the writer. In the end, KGB propagandists and censors within the Voice of America and the United States Information Agency, whose officials had the final authority over VOA until 1999, prevailed in their determination to deny the exiled writer a chance to present himself and his accounts of Stalinist crimes in his own voice to audiences behind the Iron Curtain which were exposed to Soviet propaganda lies about him from their local communist-controlled media. After his forced exile to the West in 1974, Solzhenitsyn was banned from participating in VOA programs for almost ten years, during Nixon and Ford administrations, and for all practical purposes also during the Carter administration as Russian Service broadcasters gave up on trying to interview him and he stayed away from the station.