Sergei Zalygin; Editor of Soviet Literary Magazine

Sergei Zalygin, 86, the perestroika-era editor of Novy Mir, the Russian literary magazine, who published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and other controversial works. Zalygin had been an outspoken member of the Soviet parliament when he took over as editor in chief of Novy Mir in 1988. He planned to make the magazine--an administrative arm of the powerful government newspaper Izvestia and sister paper to the official Pravda--more independent financially and intellectually. Soon after taking charge, he negotiated the exclusive rights to publish installments of Nobel Prize-winner Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” which sold millions of copies in foreign editions before it was published in Novy Mir. In another coup, he arranged rights to publish the writings of another Soviet Nobel Prize winner in exile, Joseph Brodsky, as well as George Orwell’s novel “1984,” the prophetic 1949 classic describing the dehumanization of man in a totalitarian world not unlike that in the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin. He also published scathing essays on government inaction and obfuscation surrounding the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and on internal problems in the Red army. As a writer, Zalygin strongly defended the environment and provoked the anger of Soviet officials in the early 1980s when he wrote several pieces protesting a plan to reroute several Siberian rivers to desert regions in Central Asia. He was the editor of a 1989 anthology, “The New Soviet Fiction: Sixteen Short Stories.” On Wednesday in Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, according to the Interfax news agency. The cause of death was not disclosed.