The Smart Side of Paris: The GULAG Comes to Paris

In 2002, Isabelle Thérèse Esmein, a Russian language scholar and secretary at the French Embassy in Moscow from 1958 until 1962 died in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a few miles south of Paris on the RER B line. When she died, she took a mystery to her grave concerning one of the most important books of the 20th century.  

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Sitting in his cell in Lefortovo Prison in February of 1974, Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn was greeted by guards who handed him a tie and a suit to change into. Imprisoned because of his anti-Soviet writings, Solzhenitsyn thought that the moment had arrived when he would finally have his chance to voice his political objections directly to Soviet leaders. He had been playing the conversation in his head for years, preparing for the moment when he would shake them from their ideological fanaticism. 

Alas, it was only a dream. The guards took the Nobel Laureate to Sheremetyevo airport, “stripped him of his Soviet citizenship, and expelled him to West Germany,” to quote Benjamin Nathans in To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause.  

Solzhenitsyn was a gargantuan figure in Russian literature. Despite being a decorated soldier in WWII, he fell afoul of the Soviet government for having criticized Stalin. That criticism cost him years of his life in a Soviet prison camp, an experience that he turned into brilliant literature, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), a work that exposed the cruelties of Soviet prison camps and which was based on his experiences there. Despite receiving permission from Soviet authorities to publish the book, ensuing works were not quite so lucky, and he turned to clandestine means. Using smuggling networks to the West, he was able to publish The First Circle, and Cancer Ward in 1968.

Two blocks from the prestigious Collège de France, where esteemed scholars and Nobel Laureates speak, sits an unassuming little specialty bookstore named Les Éditeurs Réunis. The store has few curious visitors; most clients go there with a purpose: to browse the large collection of Russian language books and its array of French language translations of Russian classics. There, you can find translations and original language editions of Solzhenitsyn’s works as well as other once-illicit material. 

In 1958, Solzhenitsyn began writing his Russian language masterpiece, The GULAG Archipelago, a three-volume work meticulously detailing the horrors of Soviet prison camps, which Solzhenitsyn himself had experienced for 11 years of his life. It tells true tales of unwarranted arrests, phony trials with predetermined verdicts, horrific, inhuman tortures that make you turn your head while reading them — as if you had seen them yourself — executions, starvation, and acts of unimaginable depravity and desperation.  

This tale could not be told in the Soviet Union… Communism’s mission of One True Socialism was sacred and could not be sullied by the horrid truth. Whoever spoke of its abuses must at once be denounced as a liar for fabricating stories and as a traitor for having revealed the truth. Authors who dared criticize the government were subjected to unending harassment, searches, and imprisonment. 

Stories coming out of the Soviet Union at this time are replete with incidents of apartments being ransacked in search of clandestine literature that sought to expose the horrors of Soviet Communism. Solzhenitsyn documents a case, for example, of one man’s apartment being searched and, the police finding “a tiny coffin” that held “the body of his newly dead child,” they promptly “dumped the child’s body out of the coffin and searched it.” Nothing was sacred except Communism’s holy image. 

What, then, would the KGB not do to find a manuscript so sinister as to expose the arrant truth of the horrors of Soviet Communism? What lengths would they not go to in order to uncover a manuscript that claimed to expose “the evil secrets of Stalin”?  

Because the KGB searched everywhere, incredible care and cunning were required to ensure that the manuscript of The GULAG Archipelago was preserved. (In one case, a manuscript was entrusted to a copyist who held on to it too long; she was found hanged in her apartment.) Once the manuscript was finished in 1968, Solzhenitsyn had it copied in secret and microfilmed. He could not afford to trust many people with; he chose to trust Assia Douroff to help smuggle the manuscript to the West for publication. 

Douroff was a Franco-Russian woman, who served as steward of the French embassy in Moscow. Douroff could not carry the manuscript herself out of Moscow; her job would not permit it. She needed someone of confidence with the proper diplomatic credentials to allow her to avoid having her travel belongings searched. She chose a shy, unassuming, deeply religious woman who served in the Eastern Europe division of the French Foreign Ministry (Quai d’Orsay).

After receiving a microfilmed copy of The GULAG Archipelago in Moscow from Douroff, the woman flew to Paris and landed at Orly Airport with the package hidden away. There, in a scene worthy of a spy novel, she swapped bags with Nikita Struve (1931-2016), a Russian scholar and professor of Russian literature at Paris Nanterre University who was to find a printer with the capacity to print the Cyrillic text, keep the project secret, and coordinate translation, publishing and distribution of Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece.  

Once the translation was done, typesetting and printing began at Les Éditeurs Réunis, right on 11 Rue de la Montagne Ste Geneviève. The bookstore still sports a poster of the celebrated anniversary of publication of The GULAG Archipelago. It is hard to imagine now the lines of customers wrapping around the block, eager to buy one of the fifty thousand copies that were printed on the premises, but it is true. Those copies sold out in short order. 

And what was Isabelle Thérèse Esmein’s secret?  

That it was she who smuggled The GULAG Archipelago out of Russia.