Notes of a Revolutionary

...One thing that has not changed since Stalin has been the total saturation of Soviet society with KGB informers...

...It was a rare occasion that Amalrik failed to throw an official cliche" back at his tormentors...

...At his last trial he was accused, among other things, of saying that the Soviet system was dictatorship...

...I felt the urge to shout back at Trudeau through the iron grill: "Arrest a million Canadians...

...simply fails to realize . . . that there are other worlds besides America...

...Amalrik responded, "Do you really mean everything foreign is fine...

...it also holds a mirror for us...

...The cases against him, for instance, were almost invariably based on information supplied by informers, some of whom subsequently testified against him in court...

...His reply was: "Because they have capitalism, and we have socialism...

...I read that while in prison she had given an interview in which she talked about the "inhuman conditions" of her incarceration...

...And when a KGB official inquired how he managed to live on 26 rubles a month (earned as a mailman) and still afford a cottage in the country, he replied: "You can chalk it up to the power of our Soviet ruble...

...This often astonished and embarrassed the officials, who couldn't imagine anyone taking these rules seriously...

...when she was asked to support the liberal Communists arrested in Czechoslovakia, she replied that a socialist state had the right to punish its enemies...

...At last the book is, or will become, a memorial of sorts to its author, a remarkable man...

...Yet under the limited or quasi legality of the Brezhnev years (when KGB officers once told him with unmistakable regret that they could no longer treat him the way he would have been treated in the past), such efforts were not totally quixotic...

...Angela Davis did not let her defenders down...

...have them dig mines and build houses and then you'll have a fine city as Norilsk...

...that the populace was almost poverty-stricken...

...Consider his statement in court regarding political freedom: [N]o criminal court has the moral right to judge anyone for the views he had expressed...

...In a striking vignette of Soviet society Amalrik relates with understanding Nadezhda Mandel-stam's refusal to sign a petition to the authorities: "She refused to sign the statement, saying that she agreed with it entirely, but that she was simply afraid...

...Amalrik provides a perceptive and witty insider's view of how Soviet society works, as well as the attitudes of its people toward the regime, politics, work, consumption, crime, and the pleasures of the flesh...

...and Involuntary Journey into Siberia...

...send them beyond the Arctic Circle...

...On one occasion, a KGB man searching his apartment "exclaimed in admiration, 'That's a fine mattress!'," to which another KGB man added that everything Amalrik owned was fine, being "all foreign stuff...

...have them set up a barbed-wire fence around themselves, under the muzzles of machine guns...

...The dispersal of informers is a powerful device for maintaining overt conformity and high levels of mistrust, resulting in the carefully made distinctions between friend and relative, on the one hand, between stranger and enemy on the other...

...blacks could join the police force, that the Jews transformed Palestine into a blossoming orchard...

...Reading about his experiences and beliefs makes one wonder how such a man could survive or develop under the conditions of Soviet life and, more generally, about the limits of the social-political determination of the human personality...

...One thing is clear: a basic feature of the Soviet regime continues to be the waging of war against any bearer of proscribed ideas...

...that I had insulted its leaders-in particular Leonid Brezhnev . . . that while looking at a photo of Brezhnev and Nixon I remarked: '' What a disagreeable person!'' Hostile (and KGB rehearsed) witnesses would testify that he had praised feminists in "calling their movement 'serious,' " or had said that "in the U.S...

...The nature of the Soviet system is illuminated in another way when Amalrik tells a police officer "that in sending me from pillar to post and back again over such a simple matter [a residence permit] they were giving themselves needless work...

...The repression of over six decades has created habits of unthinking conformity, what Amalrik calls "passive acceptance" and an instinctive avoidance of politics...

...In 1976 he was pressured to leave the USSR, and in 1980 he died at age 40 in an automobile accident in Spain on his way to the Madrid Meetings devoted to the issues covered (or supposedly covered) by the Helsinki Agreement...

...that it was not socialism but state capitalism...

...The average American," he writes...

...What we see in it is not always conducive to pride in the wisdom of the West...

...One of the most unusual, original, and idiosyncratic members of the Soviet dissident movement in the Brezhnev era, he spent much of his short life in prison, exile, or labor camp...

...I think Amalrik was correct in his assessment of the broadly based American attitudes that provide the background against which the experts and policy-makers have been free to pursue their own projections and wishful thinking...

...The treatment of Amalrik illustrates the Soviet regime's abiding preoccupation with and fear of unorthodox ideas...

...The widespread use of informers also leaves its mark on the informers themselves...

...This court does not have the right to judge me...

...If you take the 'mirror image' theory seriously . . . what you see in place of the USSR is a well-intentioned but misunderstood gentleman...

...that I had called socialist countries "Soviet colonies" and had said that the union republics did not enjoy equal rights . . . that I had scoffed at the Soviet press and radio...

...All of the murderers, rapists and holdup men I met were furious that a possible accomplice in a murder should be extolled as a heroine...

...He never ceased to demand his rights, especially those specified by Soviet laws and prison regulations...

...This is done because the socialist system cannot otherwise cope with the harvesting and storing of vegetables...

...to achieve its ends vis-a-vis the USSR...

...and that schools should not depend on the state...

...To oppose ideas with criminal punishment-whether those ideas be true or false-seems to me to constitute a crime in itself...

...The policeman's answer: "That's all right...

...Therefore I will not enter into any discussion of my ideas with the court...

...And of Angela Davis he writes...

...that I had said that the Communist party did not have the support of the people...

...About Henry Shapiro, the UPI Moscow Bureau chief for several decades, Amalrik notes that "being a reporter in Moscow for forty years does something to a man," inducing in parties lar "an attitude of adaptation at any price," which in Shapiro's case included the "hiding in his desk" of an important article by Sakharov for fear that it might bring "very unpleasant consequences...

...He had, it appears, an almost inexhaustible power of resistance, resilience, and will power, and on a number of occasions he came close to wearing down his oppressors and winning concessions from them...

...Hence he is willing to accept only what fits into the framework of his culture.'' Other Westerners, Amalrik found, were similarly limited in their outlook, and their naivet he found most distressing...

...Obviously if I had got only mangy dollars instead of rubles I wouldn't have seen hide nor hair of our cottage.'' What made Amalrik particularly unusual were his Westernized, liberal individualism and a critique of Soviet society unencumbered either by the hopeful back-to-the-founders outlook of some dissenters (i.e., those wanting a return to a pure form of Marxism-Leninism) or by the traditional-religious Russophile values which characterize the outlook of Solzhenitsyn and his followers...

...From Amalrik's account, it appears that part-time informing has become an almost commonplace, casual activity for vast numbers of the population, so common in fact that the moral stigma attached to it has diminished...

...I do not plead guilty to the charge of having circulated "false and slanderous fabrications" but I shall not prove my innocence here, since the very principle of freedom of speech rules out any question of my guilt...

...Along with other kinds of evil, they destroy trust among people," Amalrik writes...

...I asked Captain Rubel why she under those "inhuman conditions" was allowed to meet with a television crew whereas under "human conditions" I was not even allowed a visit from my wife...

...Amalrik was also justly skeptical of Marshall Shul-man's mirror image theories of Soviet-American relations, pointing out that "he [Shulman] apparently assumed that a method that proved successful in American academic circles [i.e., rational argument or persuasion] would also enable the U.S...

...and we were warned we would be searched to make sure we hadn't stolen any onions...

...While in jail, Amalrik heard over the radio that . . . Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau had visited Norilsk and remarked that Canada did not have such a fine city beyond the Arctic Circle...

...As Amalrik observes, "Nothing cripples people morally quite so much as the realization that their own well-being can be gained only through the misfortunes of others, that the shortest route to freedom is one that prolongs the term of a fellow inmate.'' As a "free citizen" living in exile in the Soviet Far East in Magaden, where he worked at a scientific research institute, Amalrik participated in the following episode: Once I took part in a joint excursion for the purpose of sorting rotten onions...

...In prison, for example, if "anyone pointed out to me that a floor had not been properly mopped or swept, I [would quote] Marx to the effect that slave labor is unproductive, a viewpoint to which I clung through thick and thin...

...Several times every year, scientists, engineers, blue-collar workers, white-collar workers and sometimes even KGB agents are sent out in teams to harvest or sort potatoes and other gifts of nature...

...And when Miss Davis was acquitted, there was groaning throughout the camp...

...From the example of Miss Davis I understood that ideology can kill the most human part of a human being ae" the capacity for empathy, sympathy and compassion...

...There are lots of us...

...This is a tradition that stretches in an unbroken line from Lenin's time, and it is unlikely to come to an end under Yuri Andropov...

...Such quotations make clear that this volume not only deepens our understanding of Soviet institutions and conditions of life...

...To him, living without such a paper was as inconceivable as living without air...

...It's our Soviet stuff that is fine...

...Pravda was full of articles about "the heroic Angela Davis...

...One of the most striking things about Amalrik was his defiance of the authorities and his sense of humor...

...When defying official pressures and harassment he made good use of his command of Marxism-Leninism...

...that a system based on violence would not last long...

...he was force-fed on 70 of those...

...NOTES OF A REVOLUTIONARY Andrei Amalrik / Alfred A. Knopf/ $16.95 Paul Hollander Notes of a Revolutionary is a posthumous collection of Andrei Amalrik's writings, a chronicle of his confrontations with the authorities (in and outside prison) from 1966 to his departure from the Soviet Union ten years later...

...Certainly Amalrik betrays little surprise or moral indignation on the innumerable occasions when he learned that people around him, especially in prison, labor camp, and exile, had been informing on him to the KGB...

...His hunger strike, which he describes here, lasted 117 days...

...While Soviet intolerance of free expression is often dismissed in the West as pointless if not eccentric, it clearly has served the stability of the Soviet system...

...One cannot overestimate the importance of this type of social controlt It bridges the gap between the old-fashioned, informal controls (exercised by neighbors, relatives, etc., about whose opinions one cares) and the formal control of the police...

...Andrei Amalrik is best known for his Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984...

...As she was seeing me out, she nodded toward a door in the entrance hallway: 'For the first time in my life I have a bathroom of my own.'" In his contact with Westerners (both within the Soviet Union and in his short life abroad), Amalrik acquired penetrating insights into the limited Western grasp of Soviet realities, insights gleaned partly from his observations of Western journalists and diplomats...

...The ubiquitousness of informers in Soviet society is a momentous fact of Soviet life to which Western political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists have not paid adequate attention...

...Another police officer "simply could not believe that there was no such thing as a residence permit in the U.S...

...Five clerks at the vegetable storehouse supervised the work of ten scientists...

...that democratic freedoms were lacking, especially freedom of speech...

...that juvenile crime was growing in the USSR...

...The subject of informers in the Soviet Union is inexhaustible, the number is infinite, and the evil they do is immeasurable...