Soviet Magazine Will Publish Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Gulag’

Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn’s banned chronicle of dictator Josef Stalin’s labor camps, “The Gulag Archipelago,” will be published this year by a literary journal, a secretary at the magazine said Friday.

Selected chapters from the lengthy book will appear before year’s end in the magazine Novy Mir, the secretary, Valentina Ivanovna, said in a telephone interview.

She refused to say who in the Soviet leadership had approved publication of the gripping tale of repression under Stalin. Kremlin officials have said such works still are off limits.

“I am against the publication of a number of works by Solzhenitsyn, and in the first place, such works as ‘Lenin in Zurich’ and ‘The Gulag Archipelago,’ ” Communist Party ideology chief Vadim A. Medvedev told reporters in November.

Exposing Soviets to such books would undermine society, he said.

But the Washington Post on Friday quoted Novy Mir’s chief editor, Sergei P. Zalygin, as saying that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev supported publication of Solzhenitsyn’s works, none of which have appeared in the official press here.

The Gulag is a trilogy that maintains massive political repression began in the Soviet Union under founder V.I. Lenin.