To the Editor:

Only time will tell whether I have been fair or unfair to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his first wife, Natalia Reshetovskaya, in my biography, and Veronika Stein is entitled to her opinion on the matter [Letters from Readers, June, on “The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,” by Norman Podhoretz, February]. But I cannot let stand her accusation of bad faith or the allegation that I was “recklessly uncritical” in my handling of Reshetovskaya’s version of events.

Mrs. Stein cites as evidence my handling of the Solzhenitsyns’ divorce proceedings during 1971-72, and insinuates that I deliberately skipped over facts that I was aware of but preferred to suppress (“it is hard to believe that Mr. Scammell could have been unaware of them,” etc.). In particular she refers to an episode involving a junior lawyer, Alexeyeva, who had been blackmailed by the KGB into intervening in the divorce case and trying to prevent the divorce from taking place. This episode was first described in print in Galina Vishnevskaya’s book Galina, that appeared some months after mine, but the clear implication is that if Vishnevskaya knew about it, I should have done too.

To this I would like to say the following. First, no one who has read my book could possibly accuse me of unfairness—indeed, my impartiality has been underlined by reviewer after reviewer. Second, I was in close touch with Mrs. Stein over a period of many years and interviewed her “extensively,” as she admits in her letter. On many occasions I questioned her closely on Solzhenitsyn’s divorce—and she gave me much information about it. But that information had one distinguishing characteristic: never once or in any respect was it favorable to Reshetovskaya or unfavorable to Solzhenitsyn. And never once were “the stormy events of 1972” or the name of Alexeyeva mentioned to me by Mrs. Stein. Yet now she accuses me of suppressing vital facts. If these particular facts were so vital, why did she never mention them at the time?

As for the events described by Vishnevskaya, I would like to point out that over a period of three years I sought an interview with her husband, Mstislav Rostropovich (I must confess that it never occurred to me to approach Vishnevskaya separately), and his secretary gave me his final answer on May 6, 1982: “After many vacillations and uncertainties . . . Mr. Rostropovich has decided that he cannot participate in the interview you suggest.” I should add that of the hundreds of individuals I approached with a request to interview them on the subject of Solzhenitsyn, Rostropovich was the only one who refused. One consequence was that I never learned of this episode until Vishnevskaya’s book appeared.

Michael Scammell
Woking, Surrey, England

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