Dissenter

...Although he styled himself a revolutionary in the mold of Prince Kropotkin, Amalrik really resembled the rebel defined by Camus: the slave "who had taken orders all his life" but was determined to defy the next command, affirming that "there is a limit beyond which you shall not go...

...He derided his confreres, on the Left and the Right, for platforms that rival the regime's claims to a total understanding of history...

...Repeated turns in an icy solitary cell led to his near-death from meningitis...

...The first, Involuntary Journey to Siberia, celebrated his exile among the peasants of Tomsk who fulfill their chores in a vodka haze that softens the rigors of their crude existence...

...The wardens could break his body but not his spirit...

...After his 117-day hunger strike, this was commuted to exile...

...This sin against the prevailing Slavocentric ideology cost him his degree from Moscow State University...

...Notes of a Revolutionary was completed shortly before Amalrik's death in a 1980 automobile accident while en route to Madrid to testify on Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords...

...He found a new calling as barrackroom lawyer, collecting fees of butter and sugar for drafting complaints to bedevil the authorities...

...Notes of a Revolutionary should be read by anyone who wants to examine the underside of a society generally hidden from foreign eyes...

...There he finally accepted a KGB offer that could not be refused: a one-way ticket to Holland...

...He could not stomach the compromises essential to effective politics, finding that "the need to change the outside world through one's own creativity is greater than the need to adapt to it...

...At age twenty-two, then, Amalrik was a confirmed nay-sayer, the embodiment of dissent from a society in which going along is the price of getting along...

...It opens with his return from exile to a Moscow seething with the Sinyavasky-Daniel trial, a watershed of the Democratic Movement in 1966, and concludes with his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1976, as a new wave of repression began to engulf his friends...

...Then they had him exiled for three years to a Siberian collective farm, hauling manure...

...He dedicated an article on hy-droelectricity to the Tenth-Century Saint Olga, who advised her people to build dams...

...When the camp commandant cursed him out for tying the bureaucracy into knots, he knew he had scored one small victory...

...Individualist to the last, he departed only on his own terms, after a farewell tour of Russia's ancient sites, with his wife Gusel and a Siamese cat...

...There he learned to overcome "semi-starvation as an educational measure...

...Finding no law specifically prohibiting it, he had two of his books published abroad...

...It is a gripping account of a man who resisted all the seductions and threats the regime could muster by simply saying no...

...His gibes at the foibles and weaknesses of fellow dissenters were sometimes cruel and self-indulgent, Clearly, Amalrik was not an organization man...

...The second, guaranteed to provoke his arrest as an "anti-Sovietchik," was Will the Soviet Union Survive until 19841 It offered a negative response to this Orwellian question, as it surveyed an ossified leadership unable to handle a domestic economic crisis, conflict with China, and the seething hatred of borderland nationalists...

...In Amalrik's version, "There is a line that every honorable person not only can but must draw: the line of nonparticipation...

...When his imprisonment drew to a close, Amalrik was sentenced at still another rigged trial to three more years for "slandering the system...

...Instead, he chose to confront his interrogators as mere thugs, underlings for the Mafia that runs his country, from whom he demanded a simple regard for the law...

...In the early 1960s, he drifted into Moscow's protest movement...

...His central role was to serve as liaison between recalcitrant artists and sympathetic foreigners who could relay their works to the West...

...He subsisted as a free-lancer for the Novosti press agency, catching the greats of Soviet theater in asides that exposed their hypocrisy...

...By the time he was a college student, his habit of thumbing his nose at the Establishment was so firmly engrained that he refused to revise his thesis identifying Norman influences on Sixth-Century Kievan Rus...

...Unlike more ideologically inclined dissidents, such as Solzhenitsyn or the Medve-dev brothers, Amalrik offered no comprehensive program...

...The watchdogs of the KGB, infuriated by Amalrik's rejection of their efforts to recruit him as an informer, arrested him for "leading a parasitic way of life...

...He grudgingly performed the minimal tasks needed to survive, but lent them eccentric twists guaranteed to give his bosses apoplexy...

...a tongue-in-cheek promise to "reevaluate" his writings allowed him to return to Moscow...

...The central section of this book portrays his next involuntary journey—a three-year excursion to a Far East prison camp, "the place from which no one returns...

...AKremlin seer might have predicted that Andrei Amalrik was going to turn out badly when, as a mere lad, he refused to join the Pioneers (a Soviet youth group), to the dismay of his teachers...

...Harvey Fireside (Harvey Fireside, who teaches politics at Ithaca College, wrote "Soviet Psychoprisons...

...Further, he managed to earn the respect of other zeks— hoodlums, murderers, and rapists...

...Yet when he was subjected to propagandists who scoffed at the pitifully small number of the regime's opponents, he had the temerity to respond, "But it's the yeast that makes the bread rise...