Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet Dissenters
Friedberg, Maurice
"Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet Dissenters" That, I believe, was the real story underlying the defeat of Proposition One---as it has been of much recent political history. The problem, as certain social criics have warned us since the...
...Occasionally, the "Jews" were good Orthodox Christians and, their passports notwithstanding, had no intention of going to Israel...
...In the last two years or so, parallel with the slow but steady stream of Soviet Jews leaving for Israel (a limited emigration allowed for reasons of domestic policy, and also partly to appease critics abroad, although it should be emphasized that the vast majority of applicants are not allowed to leave), there has also been a ~cond group of emigrants, very small in numbers, and therefore little noticed...
...there are Crimean Tatars, deported by Stalin from their native lands and refused permission to return by the same Soviet government that sheds crocodile tears over the fate of Moslem refugees elsewhere...
...Them Arabs can stop selling oil to the The Alternative April 1974 13...
...Among the goods reported in short supply after the imposition of controls were: wheat, beef, corn, soybeans, fish, pork, milk, cheese, bacon, chickens, turkeys, salmon, raisins, potatoes, dried fruit, mayonnaise, catsup, peaches, margarine, canned vegetables, canned meats, asparagus,/artichokes, lobster, frozen berries, green beans, peas, apricots, Spare, cooking oil, baked beans, potato chips, onions, quail eggs, truffles, prawns, turtle meat, pitted cherries, capers, juniper berries, King Crab, frogs, earthworms, lumber, paper, steel, horses, mules, copper, pet food, buMhess forms, cow gallstones, cement, aluminum, machine tools, heavy machinery, plastics, detergents, fertilizer, hay, drill pipe, coal, hydroelectric power, and a large number of parts, supplies, and materials for business and industry.6 And, 0f course, petrolemn--the energy crisis . . . . and the people brought provisions no more to market since they could not get a reasonable price for them...
...Unlike most of the other circles of Soviet dissidents, the Democratic Movement was never identified with specific ethnic or religious groups, nor were its aims linked with a particular political program...
...A brilliantly edited compilation of materials from the Chronicle is Peter Reddaway's Uncensored Russia, McGraw-Hill, 1972...
...only to have their Soviet passports confiscated abroad, thus preventing their return to Russia...
...As suggested by its name, its aims were very modest...
...He spoke of wanting to acquire "calm quarters with some land, convenient for work and for health...
...Perhaps, as a result of a wave of ruthless repressions in a re-Stalinized Russia these grievances will now for the time being disappear from public view...
...It is not an easy problem...
...There are the Jews whose ties to Israel have, if anything, grown stronger now that tens of thousands of Soviet Jews have settled there...
...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested in his wife's apartment on the afternoon of February I4 and forcibly flown to West Germany...
...He looms increasingly as the...
...The most recent unpleasant reminder of this fact, one viewed with fury in Moscow and with not a little annoyance in many Western capitals, is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a 600 page compilation of data on the Soviet system of police terror and network of concentration camps...
...There is no denying the fact that at this time, after a wave of arrests, Soviet dissenters are in a state of disarray...
...There are the Ulcrainian nationalists whose ambitions range from linguistic autonomy to political independence...
...As a matter of fact, the authors of beth books were in their teens at the time of Stalin's death...
...Possibly so, if we were only short of oil...
...In the past Mr...
...The problem, as certain social criics have warned us since the French Revolution, is a problem of lost authority...
...There was much blood shed upon very slight and trifling accounts...
...Obviously, excessive solicitude for them would not be viewed kindly by the Soviet authorities...
...On other occasions, Solzhenitsyn made acid comments about those Western liberals who are willing to concede imperfections in the observance of human rights in the Soviet Union, but only on the condition that this be accompanied by a condemnation of '~Fascist regimes" in Greece, Portugal, and South Africa...
...But we need another sort of explanation for shortages of many different goods at once...
...Because some of the men and women in that group were Jewish or of partly Jewish origin, they were often ostensibly allowed to leave as Jews...
...Fritz Heeb, while looking for more permanent residence in Norway...
...Still, the seeds of discontent from which the various movements sprang up remain intact--nearly nothing was done by the Soviet regime to placate even the most innocent demands--and one may therefore expect that dissenters will make themselves heard again before long...
...There is no doubt, however, that ultimately they will come again to the surface...
...Friedberg wrote this article the condition of at least one of the Russian dissenters has changed dramatically...
...Solz henitsyn is trying to make the best o1" a bad situation...
...Sinyavsky's unexpected arrival was not an isolated case...
...His future plans are uncertain and will remain so until he has secured the release of his family and---almost as importantly ---of his research files, which he must have to con(inue work on his historical novel, the first installment of which, August 1914, has already appeared in the West...
...Most of the present Soviet leaders are themselves products of the Stalinist system, and practically all aged fifty and above now occupying top posts were the dictator's faithful lieutenants...
...and this increased the dearth so much that at last, after many had died by it, the law itself was laid aside...
...One of them, Marchenko, an ordinary worker, is still in the Soviet Union where he leads a precarious existence in and out of prisons...
...Eft Timothy J . Wheeler The Energy Crisis Is Not a Crisis IN THE YEAR 301 A.D., the emperor Diocletian called a press conference...
...Maurice F r i e d b e r g Solzhenitsvn and the Soviet Dissenters . / WE MAY, EVERY" ~ often, f i n d o u r s e l v e s eyeball to eyeball with the Soviet military machb,,~, a ~';tuation most recently witnessed in the Middle East, though not limited to that area...
...Did comprehensive wage-price controls, enforced with the death penalty, stop inflation...
...moreover, ~me were actually told to choose between emigration and prison...
...Still, Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago deals primarily with the terror of the Stalin era and contains little information that was totally unknown before, and is thus somewhat ~lnerable to charges of being dated...
...In an interview on February 18 he asserted that "even old trees . . . are transplanted, and they take root in a new place...
...4 Did generM wage and price controls, enforced by the Internal Revenue Service,5 stop inflation...
...Similarly, we are assured by an incongruous coalition of industrial tycoons lusting after huge business ventures in the Soviet Union (to be financed, of course, with credits underwritten by American taxpayers) and assorted liberal Polyannas, that de-Stalinization which was set in motion nearly twenty years ago continues to make progress, and that the Soviet Union, while perhaps not yet a perfect democratic society, can at least be counted on to act rationally and with moderation...
...A small number, however, were allowed to go abroad...
...Indeed, there is no reason to be very surprised by this fact...
...I am not one of them, and if you are, you did not read our little history lesson with your thinking-cap on...
...Not exactly...
...In many ways, Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, revealing as it is, may be less significant as commentary on present conditions in the Soviet Union than two other recent books, Andrei Sinyavsky's A Vo/ce from the Choir and Anatoli Marchenko's My Testimony...
...By and large these were limited to demands that the Soviet Union observe those democratic rights to which it is committed in theory, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the Soviet Union is a signatory, and the country's own Constitution which guarantees all Soviet citizens freedom of speech, assembly, and conscience...
...Heinrich B~ll, before flying to Zurich where he is now temporarily living with his lawyer, Mr...
...It informs us, for instance, that the number of Stalin's murderous accomplices actually brought to trial for their crimes did not exceed two dozen, and while the overall number of inmates in prison camps has drastically declined, the Soviet system of camps and the conditions in them have not changed very much...
...Thirteen years later the historian Lactantius reported the results of Diocletian's edict: "After the many oppressions2 which he had put in practice had brought a general dearth upon the empire, he then set himself to regulate the prices of all vendible things...
...Now that he has been forcibly deported from his native land Mr...
...Once abroad, they are quickly reduced to political impotence and thus rendered harmless to the Soviet regime...
...Approximately two years ago the Soviet authorities finally succeeded in suppressing that group's illegal journal, the Chronicle of Current Events, a remarkable typewritten publication that had for a period of nearly four years dispassionately and without editorial comment recorded 12 The Alternative April 1974 violations of human rights in the Soviet Union...
...The procedure is made even more attractive to the Soviet regime because it enhances its reputation for humaneness-after all, the dissenters were not shot...
...On the other hand, such charges may be countered with the observation that Solzhenitsyn's book only continues a pattern in the fortunes of accounts of Soviet concentration camps published in the West over the last half century...
...They were all, however, in one way or another linked to the various unorganized groupings known in the West as Soviet Dissenters, most frequently to the fragment known as the Democratic Movement...
...hope of all freedom-loving men throughout the world...
...The reason for such "dumping" of Soviet dissenters in the West is quite simple...
...Most dissenters associated with the Chronicle of Current Events, notably Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin, ended up in prisons or in prison-psychiatric hospitals (by an Orwellian twist of reasoning Soviet authorities regard political dissenters as criminally insane, and it is therefore fit and proper that they should be committed to such institutions...
...Recently they have become less reticent about identifying themselves as such, and the label of Stalinism is now once again regarded by many Soviet Communists as a badge of honor...
...There seem to be a great number of people who don't know what is causing the energy crisis...
...Solzhenitsyn wrote off exile as "spiritual castration...
...and the people brought provisions no more to markets, since they could not get a reasonable price for them...
...As a Nobel Prize winning author, Solzhenitsyn is, at least for the time being, protected from reprisals by his international reputation, although it should be emphasized that he has also antagonized a number of influential Westerners...
...Arriving in Germany with little more than the clothes on his back, the Nobel Prize author stayed at the home of the German author, Mr...
...Not exactly...
...There are the several particularly disadvantaged religious groups, such as the Baptists (one such Baptist was portrayed as an inmate of a Soviet labor camp in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), or the Lithuanian Catholics (whose illegal publication contains long lists of victims of harassment by a government that is simultaneously mending its fences with the Vatican), or the Jehovah's Witnesses, whose sect is simply outside the pale of Soviet law and in which mere membership is a criminal offense...
...As Yevgeni Yevtushenko warned a few years ago, while still something of a nonconformist Soviet poet, Stalin's heirs can be found throughout Russia...
...The extent of the Soviet Union's much-heralded de-Stalinization is thus about the same as Germany's de-Nazification would have been, had Hitler's-death been followed by some perfunctory disavowals of a few of his policies: a closing of the crematoria, a reduction of the size of slave labor camps, and a trial of twenty SS-men...
...In several cases, such as those of Professor Zhores Medvedeev or of the lawyer Valeri Chalidze, dissenters were generously allowed to accept invitations to lecture at Western universities (liberalism and deStalinization...
...Unprincipled greed,"1 he said, had caused food prices to go up eightfold recently, and as Emperor ,~.f aH the people, it was his duty to bring prices and wages into line...
...Since Mr...
...Defiantly he spoke of his plans to write about Russia and to continue his personal mission to bring the Russian people a regime of '~ustice and law...
...His books, published in the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, were once firmly disowned by the Soviet authorities as concoctions produced by embittered antiSoviet ~migr~s---until their author was identified in 1965 and sentenced to prison...
...This selective deportation results in small colonies of former Soviet dissenters who may now be found in Rome, London, and New York, desperately looking for some sort of permanent residence and employment...
...Most Western organizations that help refugees (not to speak of government bodies) prefer to keep away from these displaced persous...
...Both describe present-clay Soviet concentration camps, not Stalinist ones...
...Indeed, as a result of such conditioning there were people in the West who in 1956 were initially skeptical about the reliability of some of Khrushchev's revelations (none of them entirely new either) regarding Stalin's terror that were contained in his famous ~secret speech" at the Twentieth Party Congress...
...Understandably, many people blame the oil companies, or greedy capitalists, or them damn Arabs for the energy crisis...
...Thus, for instance, he excoriated the Nobel Committee and the Swedish government for cowardly buckling under to Soviet pressures and refusing to present to him the prize in Moscow, either in his private apartment or in the Swedish Embassy...
...But until we discover new legitimate sources of values and structure, we cannot be surprised if people demand more and more government, even as they continue to reject various bond issues and to vilify for incompetence and unresponsiveness the people they continue to elect...
...And these are only those groups whose grievances were voiced persistently and openly in recent years notwithstanding the fear of reprisals...
...Nearly all contained some information that was new, and also much data that was readily available earlier, but was simply not believed...
...In a word, Rome starved...
...He had there~ore issued a total edict that "commanded cheapness" in many hundreds of commedi"Lies m~_d put ceilings on wages in almost evew cmcupation, x~th the death penalty for offenders...
...Still, even the account already pubfished is refutation enough of the sham of de-stalinization...
...Shortages are a novelty in this land of plenty...
...yet the Administration in Washington as well as its most persistent moralizing critic Senator Fkflbright both solemnly assure us that the Cold War is dead and we had better cultivate the fragrant flower of ddtente...
...The famous novelist's account is carried to 1956, but a postscript, and Solzhenitsyn's other pronouncements, suggest that it may well be followed by a sequel...
...Two years later the historian Timothy observed that Richard's edict had brought a general dearth upon the empire...
...The other, Sinyavsky, a brilliant writer and literary theoretician, recently arrived in Paris...
...Thus, over the years some of Western Europe's left-wing intellectuals systematically denounced such information as anti-Soviet slander, even when its authenticity was beyond doubt...
...The fact remains, however, that evidence for the latter assertion is even flimsier than for the first and consists, by and large, of Soviet assurances complemented with Western wishful thinking...
...The problem for those concerned about the growth of government is how to develop a form of authority to recapture the consent that is vital to strong authority, but that the traditional communities and authorities have substantially lost...
...In the year 1971 A.D., eleven days after promising that he would never impose wage-price controls, 3 the emperor Richard called a press conference to announce that he had issued an edict imposing controls on most prices and wages...
...It might even hurt the - spirit of ddtente...
Vol. 7 • April 1974 • No. 7
