Critical Masses

...But somehow the absence of religious literature in the country, the constant attacks on the church and religion in the press, the atheistic propaganda gene r a l l y - a l l sharpen the Russian citizen's feeling of being pursued, and heighten the 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 attraction of the church, especially for the young...

...And when the most honest, courageous, and capable of a people are exterminated over the course ofhalfa century, that people's moral fiber tends to atrophy, its nation declines, the evidence for which may be seen in this case in the massive alcoholism (according to official calculations 30 percent of the male population in the workers' districts) among Russians and the unusually high level of crime...

...Now tell me, whom will we consider a "dissident" and whom will we not...

...Unfortunately, this is not enough to change it...

...It is in trouble from without, for its enemies are more powerful now than ever b e f o r e , and it is in trouble from within, for the contradictions within the member s t a t e s themselves and the tensions between them are e n e r v a t i n g and confusing them...

...Now of course no one is forbidden to go to church, but no one is welcome to go either...

...Let me offer a couple of examples, harmless enough at first glance...

...Nevertheless, some other workers soon after tried again, this time more cautiously...

...And the expulsion was so violent, the treatment so harsh, that almost half were killed...

...It remained for Raymond Aron to tell them t h a t Europe was not taking upon i t s e l f any concrete responsibility for Israel's defense...

...I spoke, nothing and no one was in view...

...There is a reason for this...

...and they sometimes end in bloodshed, when the army is called in to suppress them...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 9 I got up and came forward...

...That was all he had said in his paper, and he did not even succeed in publishing it, since he was arrested and sentenced to death...

...And even among those individuals who actively and conspicuously resist, what degree of stubbornness must we consider critical in order to award the title of "dissident...

...It is understandable t h a t Americans should feel e m b i t t e r e d by this s t a t e of affairs...

...Because they do not want him to grow into another Solzhenitsyn...

...And this is w r i t t e n by a man who had lived through pre-war Stalin purges and the front lines of World War II, and who later survived five years of psychiatric hell...

...One old man from the Norwegian wartime resistance movement asked me once: "Tell me openly, indeed the numb e r of genuine d i s s i d e n t s is very small, true...

...As the Venice summit approached, the Stuttgarter Zeitung complained that the Israelis were being too demanding: " I t is a presumptuous idea to demand from nine mature states not to be concerned an iota about what is happening before their door and--naturally--in the neighborhood of their most i m p o r t a n t d e l i v e r e r s of energy...

...And that means abroad...

...If one has in mind those dissatisfied with the existing regime, then there are many--the overwhelming majority...

...T h i s is just one example of t h e ways in which the Western Alliance--that group of nations which s h a r e s a commitment to individual liberty and economic progress-is in trouble...

...Perhaps they are not really so unhappy...

...There is at least one more "uncounted" group: the workers...

...This dependency leads to the impression not only that the "dissidents" are few, but that all "dissidents" are distinguished scholars, writers, poets, artists--in a word, intellectuals--and that their movement is constantly on the verge of defeat...

...Their motto is: "Let them hate, only let them fear...

...For three years even they have attempted to organize some kind of resistance (about which I will say more later...

...Should we consider all the residents of the Baltic states to be "dissidents," or only those who still spread around samizdat...

...Besides, were the authorities to try to catch all the samizdatists, they would have to arrest a good half of their own apparatus, and their own children and relatives as well...

...The reasonable person is silent...

...Of course, when speaking of Russians we must remember that tens of millions of them have been exterminated...

...Students are expelled from the university quickest of all for this, and anyone in a position of leadership, especially in a school, will lose his job for it...

...For the 20-year existence of our movement the press has really chronicled us, at the most, five times, and we are all alive...

...Take, for example, Levko Luk'ianenko, with whom I sat for more than a year in a cell at Vladimir prison...

...When all is said and done then, are there many or few dissidents in the Soviet Union...

...Naturally, all this did not make them admirers of Soviet power...

...I have never known who here coined this term...

...Yes, and not simply alive, but we have grown remarkably, we have spread, we have affected the political atmosphere of the country...

...In any case, it was terrible...

...Thousands of families go to the Crimea and try to settle there...

...Considering all this, it is not surprising that the workers are fundamentally passive, preferring to steal from the factory everything of value and selling and buying through the "black market...

...The Politburo does not intend to bring about free elections and it is not entirely necessary for them that they be loved by all the people...

...But where and when were they many...

...First, of a Soviet scholar, a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, who was living quite peacefully in Moscow, working, bothering no one, and not expecting anything bad...

...tnath to sacrifice their freedom and work, their social position, their security and peace and the security of their family--such people are, o f course, not many...

...And it has had an effect on official Soviet "culture policy...

...More important, the pretexts for their arrests were often ludicrous...

...As I walked up to the rostrum, I concentrated only on the coming up...

...They are among the few we know...

...Even so, a few have dared to resist...

...But how many thousands do we not know by name...

...In this connection, perhaps there is something to be learned from the famous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, "The Emperor's New Clothes...

...Among these, the Pentecostals have been especially active: 30,000 of them not long ago requested, permission to emigrate to any country where their religion is not forbidden and persecuted...

...I never endured a more terrible moment...

...The Berliner Morgenpost, for instance, wrote: "Europe enhances an organization of murderers which uses massacre as a political instrument...

...If they do not allow him to publish officially, then all that much sooner he will appear in samizdat...

...The West Europeans, many of them at any r a t e , fault the Americans for i r r e s o l u t e leade r s h i p ; in turn, the Americans complain that their allies are maneuvering, opportunistically and cynically, for shortterm advantages, in particular with respect to their Arab oil suppliers and the totalitarian colossus in the East...

...And how shall we count them, these people who are part of the nationality movements...

...Really...

...What happened within me at this time, I never could say...

...Alas, we should know by now t h a t the Europeans will always try very hard to have t h e i r cake and e a t it too until reminded by cruel reality that this cannot be...

...At the end of 1977 about 40 workers from various parts of the USSR gathered in a Moscow apartment to arrange a press conference for foreign correspondents...

...Instead, he serves two years m a camp for "sponging," or parasitism...

...And producing this culture's "literature"are not only students, as in the 1960s, but also well-known writers and poets who published just yesterday in official Soviet publications...

...Their leader, a miner named Vladimir Klebanov, was placed in a prison-psychiatric hospital in Dnepropetrovsk...

...It appeared in the Western press around 1969 or 1970...

...The Crimean Tatars number now up to half a million people, the Volga Germans one and a half million...

...A simple handful...

...When he arrived in the West, much to his surprise, he turned out to be a "leading dissident...

...Or perhaps it is enough that in the Baltic, where everyone speaks fluent Russian, no one answers you in that language if you ask how to find an address...

...For example, Stalin sent the Crimean Tatars and the Volga Germans to Siberia and Central Asia...

...Perhaps altogether only several thousand among the quarter billion people in the Soviet Union...

...He smiled sadly and distrustfully...

...Fie began to demand an explanation...

...One of the fastest growing and, for the authorities, most dangerous branches of the Defense of Law movement is rooted in the multinational character of the Soviet Union, which comprises 100 various nationalities and ethnic groups (Russians per se constitute less than half the population of the country...

...Thus, Vladimir Skvirskii was sent into exile for five years because be failed to return some library books on time...

...The samizdat of the time was an exclusively literary phenomenon, often featuring poetry that had been prohibited during Stalin's rule...

...The thing is too diffuse and immense...

...What is a "leading dissident," anyway...

...Besides the peoples who were occupied, like the Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians, whose struggle for national independence and the survival of a national culture has never ceased, there are still many small peoples who were punished as a whole by the Soviet authorities...

...Even the death in a labor camp of Vladimir Shelkov, the 84-year-old leader of the Seventh Day Adventists, and the recent arrest of the bishop of the Pentecostals, Nikolai Goretoy, failed to attract much attention...

...But perhaps they are...

...But these Christian groups do indeed unite several million people...

...N e v e r t h e l e s s , to r e f e r the idea of "dissidents" only to the idea of samizdat is to restrict it unfairly...

...This is one of the most frequent questions I have been asked since coming to the West and yet also one of the most difficult to answer, and the difficulty begins with the word "dissident...

...This is how he wrote about it in his memoirs, twenty years later: "Even so, uncontrolled, "wildcat" strikes do happen in the USSR, especially when there is a food shortage...

...insults are spoken within the hearing of journalists (the most shocking example being that of a close advisor of French President Giscard d'Estaing's, who called Jimmy C a r t e r an imbecile...

...Stiff letters are exchanged between national leaders...

...A group of eight people announced the formation of "The Free InterProfessional Organization of Workers" (SMOT), the anonymous members of which were divided primarily into ten groups (altogether about 200 people) spread throughout the country, Almost all of the eight who did announce themselves, by the way, had been in the past arrested, put in psychiatric hospitals, or exiled...

...Soviet trade unions, for example, exist not for the defense of their members but in order that the state may supervise discipline and fulfill the quotas of some production plan...

...It seems that in the Western press the idea of a " d i s s i - dent," of a "leading dissident" in particular, is bound up with notoriety of some sort, a notoriety that depends on the Soviet authorities' willingness to make an "example" of someone and, curiously enough, on the press itself, on the attention it is willing to lavish on such an "example...

...And the number of single samizdat publications, although difficult to determine precisely, runs to around 100,000...

...For man, there is always something to lose in every situation: In a place like the USSR, one begins to fear changes because the changes happen only for the worse...

...It has been especially difficult to determine who wants to do what in Europe since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan l a s t December, because, to tell the truth, there 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980...

...Such ludicrousness shows not only the self-confidence of the authorities in the absence of interest abroad in the fate of these people, but also the authorities' hesitation about pressing serious charges against workers and thereby stirring up sympathy in the West or in the USSR on their behalf...

...Are they included when the list o f " dissidents'-' is drawn up...

...Not surprisingly, tempers in such conditions are getting short...

...Unfortunately, the Western press has paid very little attention to them...

...I did not feel myself...

...Then everyone picks up the call, the stupid king flees, and good triumphs over evil...

...It was the most horrible experience of my life...

...But whether this makes one a "leading dissident" is another question...

...We ourselves--the participants in the movement for the rights of man, or, more precisely, in the Defense of Law movement--never called ourselves dissidents, but the Soviet press quickly seized on the term, because it sounds foreign and suggests something non-Russian, isolated from the people...

...This was not the first time the Europeans had shown inclinations of this sort (in 1973, for instance, only Portugal allowed American supply planes to relay on its territory), but the Israel is did not receive the news any more quietly for that...

...Can it be that we helped to rebuild Europe and contributed to its defense for 35 years only to see our allies cut and run when circumstances get scary...

...006BDtO00Oo~00000~QDODD9m0~g00DQ0DO0B9so0D000Q0mb0O~0U0e0Q00Oi~DbOQOQOQOQg00OQb~0O0QQO0IggImDDmP9OIQQD0~ g000OB0OUg00Qo0iQbQ6oU0~QOoQIQQ0D~0DDOm0~0gQ 611" t seems clear," wrote the (West German) Handelsblatt on J u n e 11, " t h a t for the EC [European Community] countries, under pressure from France and Italy, the question of a recognition of the PLO is only a matter of time...

...The Orthodox Church, for instance, far from being in opposition to the state, is unbelievably corrupt and subject to strong state control...

...The humanitarian Soviet authorities subsequently changed his death penalty to 15 years in prison, but in 1977 he was again arrested, because he wrote still one more paper: a declaration to the Ukrainian Helsinki group...

...According to Soviet law, the individual is to blame if in the course of a month he can't fred work...

...There are those who would be silent even if they stepped over the devil several times...

...Being a jurist by education, he wrote a paper in 1961 in which he showed that in accord with the Soviet Constitution any Soviet Socialist Republic, which his native Ukraine happened to be, had the right of independence...

...And no matter how loudly the boy will cry, they all pretend that they do not know because they have not heard...

...The most energetic of these people have been in prison man), times...

...At the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s a handful of students and intellectuals were actively resisting...

...Btit indeed, it is only a fairy tale...

...achievement of the Carter administration: the Camp David peace accords...

...Who exactly decided this and how I do not know...

...If we say that all the Crimean Tatars were punished, by being forced from their homeland, then should we consider all of them " d i s s i - dents," or only those who have suffered in prison...

...To the intelligent person it seems indecent to yell that which everyone knows, to the stupid person it seems awkward...

...Again he received 15 years in a camp...

...In answer he received the usual Soviet lie and insult, so he became even more indignant and was given an exit visa...

...Accordingly, the strike is a criminal offense--"a group activity which undermines the work of the enterprise"--and is punishable by up to three years in prison.* Moreover, workers do not have the right to change their place of work more than twice in a year...

...But before we complain about this, it is worth remembering a thing or two about the Western Europeans, notably that there are a lot of them and that they have many different tastes in pastry...

...In other words, an alternative culture has arisen in the country where the supremacy of the official party censor has made literature and art instruments of propaganda...

...T h i s is all very well and good, I hear someone say, but what about the simple Russian people...

...Even so, there are ways of registering dissatisfaction...

...And even for those who would not remain silent the fear is strong, in 1961, Petr Grigor'evich Grigorenko--then still a member of the Party, a general, a professor at the most prestigious Soviet military academy--decided honestly to say in a speech at a Party conference that which everyone was thinking anyway...

...Each year the Crimean Tatars conduct a campaign for a return to Crimea...

...Fear is the main thing...

...Even so, the church is not always an easy refuge or symbol of protest...

...It appeared, indeed, that the Europeans were i n t e n t on continuing to distance themselves from I s r a e l , even if it meant undercutting the only foreign policy _9 Not all European commentators defended the ominous trend toward the abandonment of Israel...

...All powerful, irrational, animal...

...For instance, around 50 million Russians visit church during the Easter holidays...

...The characteristic rationalization was perhaps expressed best by the Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung: " I t is precisely because the EC states want to prevent a new holocaust that they are seizing the initiative...

...Moreover, although all this self-publication is unlawful--theoretically THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1980 7 any of the samizdat publishers can sit in prison, and so can anyone who turns his works over to samizdat, or who reads it or retypes it--the authorities cannot possibly enforce the law...

...At their meeting just prior to the Venice summit, the EC members did not recognize the PLO, but a statement was put out that called for including it in the peace negotiations...

...But this is not the case...

...Well, in general, there are enough," I answered evasively...

...Such is probably how one feels on his way to an execution...

...In other words, the unions, being part of the party-state machine, are more concerned with raising productivity than with improving the conditions of the workers...

...In practice the long rule of the naked king makes the people cynical and corrupted...

...Well we, too, were very small...

...Who of those people who have written in the USSR has not flung his writing into samizdat...

...Conversely, other Christian groups, like the Pentecostals, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Baptists, are quite outside the law: A jail term of up to three years threatens anyone attending such Protestant services...

...Now samizdat publications constitute an entire industry, with tens of periodically issued magazines, the most famous of which--the Chronicle of Current Events--not long ago celebrated its twelfth anniversary...

...Roger Kaplan is a program officer with the Smith Richardson Foundation and a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...

...When this happened not once but twice he became indignant...

...Without a doubt, far from all are truly believers: For many, going to church is a form of protest...

...7ladimir Bukovsky, the noted Russian dissident, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976 after spending more than 12 years in Soviet labor camps, prisons, and psycbiatric hospitals...

...In any event, be~bre my own sudden liberation in Zurich in December 1976 I knew nothing of it...

...They announced a newly formed "free trade union" and were soon after arrested...

...And, perhaps, it is this special feeling which brings forth the hypnotic influence of the mass which concentrated all its attention on me...

...Generally, the term has led to confusion, especially when used carelessly in the Western press...

...This year, for example, Reshat Dzhemilev and Rollan Kadyev were let out of prison, but they were soon arrested again...

...I myself was baptized by the Western press "the third leading dissident" after Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn...

...Almost all of them are forced to go back...

...Why do the authorities permit such a truthful and critically-minded writer as Valentin Rasputin to publish in official publications...

...He leads whom, to where, and why...

...on the contrary, many condemned it...

...Is this enough for the title of"dissident," or is it necessary to sit in jail for 35 years like Danylo Shumuk, who was imprisoned for writing his memoirs and for circulating articles by Milovan Djilas...

...Each year petitions and l e t t e r s of p r o t e s t showing tens of thousands of signatures arrive in Moscow from these people...

...For 34 years I lived in the Soviet Union and I did not once meet a man satisfied with the system...

...Moreover, the majority of the nationalities were joined to the USSR by force, by means of occupation...

...Since then they have not been permitted to return to their homeland...

...Yes, then, such people, who are prepared for one word of...

...In the story, everyone is silent until a boy calls out: "But, indeed, the king is naked...

...And if there are no u employed workers in the USSR it is because the unemployed are not officially registered by the state...

...He was refused permission to attend an international scientific conference abroad...

...There is no better example of this than samizdat...

...We who p a r t i c i p a t e d in the Defense of Law movement never made distinctions of that kind...

...Now it is true t h a t in the USSR in order to win permission to leave it is necessary "to do some work"--to make a bit of noise, to get into the Western press...

...I say "even" because, in spite of widespread Western notions about the "Workers' Paradise," the workers in the USSR are among the most oppressed groups of all...

...They all have, except maybe Brezhnev...

...But then, after the victory it turned out that all had been members of the Resistance...

...It should be remembered, especially by those who might object that I am still talking about a select, highly educated group of readers despite the large number of samizdat publications, that the thirst for the printed word in the USSR is huge, so that the reading public, including those who read samizdat, is not limited only to intellectuals...

...Is a customs union the best they can achieve in the way of political development, even in the face of a clear threat to their stability...

...His book, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, was published last year...