The Specter of Freedom

...From the moment the February 1966 Sin-yavsky-Daniel trial ushered in what Professor Sidney Monas, in an analytic commentary included in this volume, calls a "constitutional crisis," the dissenters sought means of alerting public opinion to the dangers of a Stalinist resurgence...

...In addition, samplings of the "literature of the underground"--criticism, short stories and poetry--occupy a prominent place in the volume...

...In a letter to members of the Party Politburo and the Central Committee written shortly after the January 1968 Ginsburg-Galanskov trial, Grigorenko pointed out that the world was celebrating International Human Rights Year (designated by the General Assembly to mark the 20th anniversary of the Universal...

...Author's emphasis.] In their appeals to public opinion --both within and outside the Soviet Union--the dissenters have not hesitated to expose overt expressions of the more vulgar types of anti-Semitism...

...And the documents contained in Abraham Brumberg's In Quest of Justice impress upon us the indomitability of the spirit of freedom, even in the face of repression...

...and (4) the censorship of Soviet writers, as illustrated by the Solzhenitsyn case...

...The bigotry of the kgb was highlighted by Natalia Gor-banevskaia, a young poetess, in a report she managed to deliver to newspapers abroad about the 1968 demonstration in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia: "As they ran up to us they shouted, 'These are all Zhidy [kikes]' and 'Beat the anti-Soviets!' " She further disclosed that two Jews--Viktor Feinberg and Pavel Litvinov--were subjected to particularly brutal beatings...

...Their strategy of internationalization has alerted the world to their stubborn struggle...

...Petitions were presented endorsing the principle of ethnic equality and of preserving ethnic culture...

...One section, for example, includes various letters, petitions and statements criticizing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...

...Abraham Brumberg makes that perceptive observation in his introduction to this valuable collection of "protest and dissent" documents, which covers four major categories: violations of the constitutional and legal rights of Soviet citizens, especially as manifested in the Moscow trials of 1967 and in the 1968 Ginzburg-Galanskov trial...

...At the same time, the dissenters are determined to give Soviet Communism "a human face...

...Freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly--the classic rights of the individual--constituted their aspiration...

...Sakharov spelled out one facet of the problem: "Is it not disgraceful to allow another backsliding into anti-Semitism in our appointment policy...

...But their central focus was internal, with emphasis upon the Soviet Constitution--particularly the clauses dealing with freedom of speech and the independence of the judiciary--as the standard to which state officials must conform, and from which they were charged with departing in the Sinyavsky-Daniel affair...

...No longer did they ground their protests only, or even primarily, on the Soviet Constitution...

...Although the more egregious features of the Stalinist terror have so far not been revived in the Soviet Union, the mild liberalizing impulse of the Khrushchev era has been thoroughly dissipated...

...While exposing such blatant anti-Semitism, the dissenters have not neglected the question of the right of Jews to preserve their own national culture...

...The Soviet Constitution, it was clear, had been emptied of democratic meaning, of "Socialist legality...

...Sakharov wrote that the goal of international policy must be "to insure the universal fulfillment of the Declaration of Human Rights," and that to achieve this aim some "international control" over its observance was vital...

...It is obvious that today's dissenters believe this applies equally to Communist Russia, and that they feel it justifies the enormous risks they run...

...Deprived of this position in 1961 because he had protested to Khrushchev against anti-Semitic discrimination in the Army, he was stripped of his rank three years later for speaking critically of Soviet authorities...

...3) religious persecution by the authorities...

...The document offered a set of "general principles" for the international policies of the major countries that embraced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...

...In June 1968 the essay "Reflections on Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" appeared in Moscow for private circulation (it was later published in the New York Times...

...Unlike the Marx-Engels Manifesto he thus deliberately called to mind, however, he was referring not to the specter of Communism haunting the leaders of capitalist society but to the specter of freedom plaguing the Soviet oligarchs...

...they saw to it that Western newsmen were fully informed of their protests, and at times they sought support from foreign Communist Parties...

...Incidentally, in the highest bureaucratic elite of our government, the spirit of anti-Semitism was never fully dispelled after the 1930s...

...This is not to say that they neglected international opinion...

...To judge from the signatures on petitions seeking redress of grievances, the protestors total no more than 700...

...In the course of 1968 the grievances were broadened to encompass the ethnic-linguistic-cultural rights of the numerous Soviet nationalities (Ukrainian intellectuals had spoken out about this as early as 1966...

...Declaration...

...During 1967, as the authorities embarked upon a new series of arrests and trials involving not only writers but those demonstrating on their behalf, the dissenters began to present their demands in terms of legal rights...

...This had been drafted by Andrei D. Sakharov, a leading Soviet physicist and contributor to the development of the hydrogen bomb, but, as the author acknowledged, it was "formed in the milieu of the scientific and scientific-technological intelligentsia...

...But to the extent that they have--for the first time in history--laid bare the regime's ideological and historical pretensions, to the extent that they have effectively exposed the myths that provide the only moral justification for Communist rule in Russia and for Moscow's leadership of the international Communist movement, they have confronted the regime with its most serious moral and ideological challenge to date...

...Now the basic standard of their appeals became an international instrument, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948...

...The idea of "international control" encouraged the dissenters in their new thrust...

...In Quest of Justice also offers considerable documentary material on other areas of dissent...

...In 1968 the dissidents shifted the focus of the campaign...

...After two years of such effort, the dissenters began to despair of moving the authorities or rallying broad sectors of public opinion...

...The present Soviet regime has rejected the trends of the post-Stalinist thaw and is engaged in a broad, determined effort to compel conformism with the Party line...

...Accompanying the change in strategy was a significant alteration in the nature of the grievances the dissenters publicly advanced...

...Pyotr Grigorenko, the remarkable former Soviet Army officer, appears to have been the first to see the implications of publicly applying an international legal and moral standard inside the Soviet Union...

...Two years later, five Russian Baptist women confidentially told the UN that religious rights in the USSR were being violated...

...Then he noted that the "Year" had begun in the USSR with "an unprecedented violation of human rights" which "nailed [it] to a pillory of shame in the eyes of all the world...

...2) restrictions on nationalities, particuularly Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars and Jews...

...B'nai B'rith United Nations Office Ivan Yakhimovich, a philologist turned collective-farm chairman who is one of the most fascinating personalities among Soviet intellectual dissenters, entitled one of his underground letters "A Specter is Haunting Europe...

...Between 1966-68, they addressed their concern to high Party officials, trying to express themselves within conventional, legal channels...

...The apparition would perhaps be less worrisome to the Kremlin if the impact of Soviet dissidents could be measured by their numbers...

...Delivered, appropriately enough, on the 1966 anniversary of Babi Yar, it put the following demand to the authorities: "Let the Jews know Jewish history, the Jewish culture and the Yiddish language, and be proud of them...

...The relevance of international standards to the state of human rights in the Soviet Union also entered into the thinking of members of the scientific community...

...Actually, for almost a decade Soviet intellectuals have been expressing their dissatisfaction with the failure of the post-Stalin regimes to face this issue...

...they sharply criticized state authorities for arresting intellectuals in the Ukraine and the Baltic areas who had vigorously espoused the maintenance of Soviet heterogeneity...

...The new approach only resulted in increased arrests and trials...

...The most striking expression of this theme is to be found in the Chornovil Papers, put together by the Ukrainian writer V. Chornovil, which includes a remarkable speech prepared by a young Ukrainian literary critic, Ivan Dzyuba...

...As early as 1965 Anatoli Levitin, a prolific theological writer, had urged in a private letter to high Soviet religious officials that the Declaration be given "wide publication...

...another consists of letters and manuscripts warning of the rebirth of Stalinism...

...in order to bring Soviet legislation and the structure of Soviet daily life into correspondence with it...

...A major general during World War II, Grigorenko subsequently taught at the prestigious Frunze Military Academy...

...Initially, opponents of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial based their protests on the two authors' artistic rights...

...All opposition (for example, to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia) was punished by harassment, conviction or incarceration in a mental institution...

...As one of the anonymously-authored documents notes, a colleague of Aleksandr Herzen once wrote that the "doctor" needed by Tsarist Russia to treat its numerous sores was "publicity...

...Appeals fell on deaf ears, as the petition that 52 Soviet citizens addressed to the United Nations demonstrates: "The hope that our voices might be heard, that the authorities would put an end to the lawless acts to which we have repeatedly called their attention--this hope has proved to be in vain...

...With ethnic rights emerging as a central concern of the dissenters, it is scarcely surprising that the Jewish question has become an important aspect of their agitation...

...Feinberg was so badly mauled that blood gushed from his face and several of his teeth were broken...

...The desperate cry of a leading dissenter, Vladimir Bukovsky, at his trial in September 1967, typified the sense of hopelessness: "Isn't the Constitution the basic law of our country...

...Yakhimovich was to acknowledge, on the eve of his March 25, 1969, arrest for allegedly "slandering" the Soviet state, that he was indeed in the "debt" of Sakharov's "Reflections...

...Especially noteworthy was the ardent defense of the persecuted Crimean Tatars...