Letter on the Gulag

Esteemed Comrades, Literature cannot develop between the categories 'permitted' and 'not permitted,' 'about this you may write' and 'about this you may not.' Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, does not deserve the name of literature. For decades, Soviet writers have been expected to lie - to pretend that our society has no flaws, that our people suffer no injustices, that our system produces only happiness and prosperity. This is not literature; it is propaganda. I have spent eight years in the labor camps and three more in exile. I have witnessed horrors that the Soviet people do not know exist in their own country. Millions have perished in the Gulag - good people, innocent people, people whose only crime was thinking independently or believing in God or being born into the wrong class. The writer's duty is to tell the truth. I have written about the camps, about the suffering, about the waste of human potential. My manuscript circulates in samizdat because official channels will not publish it. But the truth cannot be suppressed forever. I call upon the Writers Union to end censorship, to allow honest literature, to let writers serve truth rather than power. If you continue to enforce silence about our nation's crimes, history will judge you as accomplices to those crimes. The truth will emerge, with or without your permission. A. Solzhenitsyn