The frightened millionaire

Press, 12 November 1977, Page 15

The frightened millionaire

ROSS MADDEN

reports from Cavendish,

Vermont.

The man reputed to have S6M in the bank walks to work each morning through a 40-foot underground tunnel between

his house and his office, and seldom emerges until ’t is dark. By then the spotlights

are beaming down on the high wall surrounding the 50-acre grounds, and closed-circuit TV scans the house and garden. Inside the $427,000 ranch-style house, the

world’s richest — and loneliest — recluse eats a quiet meal with his wife and children at the end of another day of his three-

year exile ... a day when no-one came to kill him. Even in his heavily guarded home in a remote village in the mountains

of Vermont, Alexander Solzhenitsyn still lives in fear of his life. Exiled forever from the Soviet Union in February,

1974, after 11 years in 58-year-old Nobel Prizewinning novelist is still convinced that he remains a prime target for Soviet agents.

Charges of treason remain on the Kremlin files, and never a week goes by without at least one letter containing a death threat.

Solzhenitsyn, his 38-year-old wife Svetlova, his mother-in-law, three children, and middle-aged secretary arrived in the town of Cavendish last Russian slave camps, the summer after two years of exile in Switzerland. They live in a rambling, eightbedroom house at the top of Windy Hill Road.

He was, he said, “sick of being on public view.” On. of his last acts before leaving Zurich was to throw a handful of gravel at reporters and tell them: “It’s shameful the way you disturb other people.”

He chose Cavendish because it reminded him of Russii.. He told a friend recently: “I like the simple way of life here. I like the countryside and I enjoy the climate with the long winter, and the snow, which reminds me of Russia.”

In fact, he sees little of the beautiful New England countryside — Solzenitsyn works relentlessly, at least 12 hours a day, on the third volume of his account of the forced labour system of Stalin and Lenin. He is working from nearly half a ton of documents he took with him into exile.

Few of Cavendish’s 1300 inhabitants have seen the great man. His trips outside his estate are limited to occasional church services in the town of Claremont, 20 miles away.

He gives no interviews, and all contact with the outside world is through 60-year-old Mrs Irena Alberti, his friend, interpreter, and secretary.

But the man who has described exile from Russia as “the worst thing that could ever happen to me” (it was only the second time Russia had expelled one of its citizens for life) can take some consolation from the fact that he will never want for money. At least $3.6M worth of Western book royalties, plus interest, was waiting for him in Switzerland, and this amount has steadily increased. Solzhenitsyn was able to rent a house in Zurich at $l4 000 a year while he looked around for a permanent home, and finally settled on Vermont.

He paid about $178,000 cash for the house on Windy Hill Road and immediately laid out another $250,000 on building an office, putting in four bathrooms, building a tennis court — and installing closed-circuit TV, electronic security systems, and a ring of spotlights.

Anyone approaching the high wooden gates breaks an electronic beam. A two way radio, set on a steel pillar, crackles into life, asking who you are and what you want.

Always the answer to visitors is the same: “Mr Solzhenitsyn is very busy. He is not seeing anyone and is not giving any interviews. He says that any distraction would break his concentration for a week.”

Indeed, the only public appearance he has made was at a meeting of Cavendish residents to apologise for the fact that his protective fence cut off a hunters’ right of way. Afterwards the 200 people at the meeting gave him a standing ovation. “He's an extremely

down-to-earth person and is totally accepted by everyone around here,” I was told. Recently Solzhenitsyn sent an unsolicited gift of $350 towards the renovation of a building in the town, and he has given several residents autographed copies of his books.

He pays his $7OOO---year local tax bill without a murmur.

But will he stay among the pines and maples of Windy Hill Road, in selfimposed exile while he reads, writes, and negotiates a deal to publish books on Russian culture and religion.

His close friend and literary agent, Fritz Heeb, believes that Solzhenitsyn will now stay in America for good — unless the regime changes in Russia, and he is allowed to return.

“He knows in his heart of hearts that this will never happen. He knows he will remain an exile for life, and it is something that still upsets him deeply.” As the fourth anniversary of his banishment approaches, Alexander Solzhenitsyn is still not convinced that he is beyond the tentacles of Soviet vengeance. “The security measures we have taken may not keep out Soviet agents,” he wrote to a friend recently. "But they are the best we can do.”

Four years ago, when he lived in a shabby flat in Moscow’s Kozitsky Street, Solzhenitsyn habitually kept a ready-packed overnight bag . . . just in case he was arrested.

Today, the shabby black bag, containing pyjamas and shaving kit, stands alongside his desk. Perhaps the Soviet secret police didn’t come today. But Alexander Sol-

zhenitsyn, after 30 years of defiance, still can't bring himself to believe they won't come tomor-