Invisible Allies

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alexis Klimoff (Translator), Michael Nicholson (Translator)

After his expulsion from Russia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn secretly worked on a memoir that would acknowledge the courageous efforts of the people who hid his writings and smuggled them to the West. Before the fall of Communism, the very publication of Invisible Allies would have put these friends in jeopardy.
Now we are finally granted an intimate account of the extensive, ever-shifting network of individuals who risked life and liberty to ensure that Solzhenitsyn's works were kept safe, circulated in samizdat, and "exported" via illicit channels. These imperiled conspirators, often unknown to one another, shared a devotion to the dissident writer's work and a hatred of the regime that brought terror to every part of their lives. The circle included scholars and fellow writers and artists, but also such unlikely operatives as an elderly babushka who picked up and delivered manuscripts in her shopping bag.
With tenderness, respect, and humor, Solzhenitsyn tells us of the fates of these partners in the women who typed distribution copies of his works late into the night under the noses of prying neighbors; the correspondents and diplomats who covertly carried the microfilmed texts across borders; the farflung friends who hid various drafts of Solzhenitsyn's works anywhere they could - under an apple tree, beneath the bathtub, in a mathematics professor's loft with her canoe.
In this group of deftly drawn portraits, Solzhenitsyn pays tribute to the anonymous heroes who evaded the KGB to bring The Gulag Archipelago and his many other works to the world.

Genres: History, Russia, Russian Literature, Memoir, Nonfiction

344 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1995

About the author

also known as
Alexander Solzenitsyn (English, alternate)
Αλεξάντρ Σολζενίτσιν (Greek)

Works, including One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) and The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975), of Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, exposed the brutality of the labor camp system.

This known Russian novelist, dramatist, and historian best helped to make the world aware of the forced Gulag.

Exiled in 1974, he returned to Russia in 1994. Solzhenitsyn fathered of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a conductor and pianist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksan...

Reviews

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A re-read of a book that commemorates and thanks those - who, before, could not be named or even hinted at when Solzhenitsyn was in the ussr and for some time after - brave souls who helped him with his work, hid manuscripts, microfilm, smuggled letters and documents out to other countries, and risked their freedom to do so. Well-written, as always, and well annotated.

[Vaclav Haken · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Solzhenitsyn, do I need to say more?

[LaochRione · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really highlights how far Western civilisation has fallen. This book highlights the selfless, silent heroism of so, so many people over so many years. It shows the lengths to which truly heroic people will go to preserve their history, their heritage and their right to think freely.

In today's society of cancel culture and far-left wokism, it's hard to imagine that such people are but legendary myths in our modern mists. I'm sure Solzhenitsyn himself would be horrified by our society.

[Leonard Klossner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt this book was an almost necessary introduction to the Gulag Archipelago (which I'm currently reading) because, since it's about Solzhenitsyn's allies who played their part in the preservation of his numerous texts from the KGB and their underground samizdat distribution (bootleg microfilm photographed versions), it really gives a sense of the operations and the triumph of the human will that occured not only on Solzhenitsyn's part but on all his allies' parts that was responsible in ultimately delivering and detonating the bomb that exploded the Soviet Union.

Apologies have been spared for the concentration camps, and so-called nazis these days are met with total intolerance if not violence (its own separate issue). With that said, who has apologized for the gulags, and how many more millions of corpses are needed to silence those who claim that this or that regime was not *real* communism, as though they knew better than, say, Stalin or Zedong (note to future tyrants: please consult young twenty-somethings in the future for instructions on how to correctly implement total state control).

It seems a mockery of Solzhenitsyn's legacy and every one of the brave individuals who played their part in resistance against communism to wave the hammer & sickle to this day decades after the ideology has cannibalized tens of millions, with so many of the regime's own among them, not only in the Soviet Union but in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong.

Figures like Hamsun, Heidegger and countless other intellectuals who found themselves on the wrong side of history with their National Socialist sympathies can be forgiven for disavowing once they learned of the atrocities the ideology was responsible for.

What of our professors and students and our darling French intellectuals then and decades after who did not disavow once the world learned just how many corpses of men, women and children were buried beneath each utopia?

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well the summary of this book already explains it pretty well. I will say it does get tough (at least for me as an English speaker) to keep track of all the Russian names involved. Sometimes first names are used, sometimes second, sometimes third, or others. It gets hard to follow at times. But the book is an interesting read that allows us to understand what was involved in getting Solzhenitsyn's works written and published inside a communist country. The chapters are grouped according to the "allies" involved, but there is some overlap. One more thing is that I recommend reading Appendix B because that is eyewitness story of a KGB agent that witnessed an assassination attempt on the author.