The USSR on Trial
FEUER, LEWIS S.
The USSR on Trial THE DEMONSTRATION IN PUSHKIN SQUARE By Pavel Litvinov Translated by Mary a Harari Gambit. 176 pp. $4.95. MY TESTIMONY By Anatoly Marchenko Translated by Michael Scammell E....
...Anatoly Marchenko's My Testimony is important as a forerunner of this trend and because, as Max Hayward writes in his Introduction, "it is the first detailed and completely unvarnished report on conditions in Soviet camps today, by someone who knows them at first hand...
...They came from homes broken by divorce, the father's desertion, or his death in the War...
...In the infraworld he emerged as a spirit of nobility...
...When these meetings were broken up by the Komsomols, the group organized itself under the rubric smog (Samoye Molodoye Obsh-chestvo Geniyev), The Youngest Society of Geniuses...
...A protest march against the official Moscow Writers Club had as its slogan, "Socialist Realism Must Lose Its Virginity...
...The activities of the Literary Opposition, especially of its student contingent, can take on bizarre forms...
...Bukovsky's mother said plaintively: "And there were always his friends...
...Reviewed by LEWIS S. FEUER Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto To publish the proceedings of a political trial in the Soviet Union, a state that functionally requires secrecy, is a most serious act of rebellion...
...He boldly asserted to the court "the touching unanimity of Fascist and Soviet law," observing that in Spain people were tried for taking part in peaceful May Day demonstrations...
...About 90 detention camps for political prisoners still exist in the Soviet Union...
...He replied that they had taught him that the new Soviet legislation was "contrary to the basic universal principles of law...
...One group of young writers, mostly undergraduates, got to know each other at the Mayakovsky Square poetry readings in 1960...
...He was always doing things for them and about them, and taking the blame for others...
...The official henchmen at first liked the idea, but then took fright, refusing to allow the "so-called Leftist trend" to convene for art discussions...
...Kant's works, he said, "made me see a lot of things in a new light...
...The Pushkin Square demonstrators were members of what might be called the "Literary Opposition" ("Scientific Opposition" is the other distinct type of Soviet rebellion to emerge in recent years...
...By publishing political trial records, they allow the Soviet judicial system to condemn itself...
...But, being mostly self-taught, they were without academic respectability...
...To be sure, whole classes of population are no longer imprisoned or exiled as they were at the height of the Stalin era when, in Hayward's estimate, as many as 20 million people languished in prisons and camps...
...Karl Marx thought that capitalist society inevitably generated, indeed required, an industrial reserve army...
...Marchenko's book, written in a staccato style, is an account of human beings surviving under the degrading ordeals of a deliberate cruelty...
...Solzhenitsyn's name, too, became a lustrous symbol of freedom...
...Viktor Khaustov and Vladimir Bukov-sky, the principal organizers of the protest, were later sentenced to three years at hard labor...
...asked Bukovsky...
...In 1966, for example, they sought to win the Komsomol's permission to found a discussion group...
...The four actually tried-khaustov, Bukov-sky, Vadim Delaunay, and Yevgeny Kushev-ranged in age from 19 to 30 and had not had any university education...
...These young men were also bound by one new virtue...
...Khaustov refused to disclose the name of the friend at whose apartment they met...
...At Mordovia, Marchenko found writers, scientists, doctors of philosophy, students, workers, semi-illiterate peasants...
...in the ensuing confusion, other pictures sustained damage, and Brezhnev's body was fitted with Khrushchev's head...
...Following an unsuccessful attempt to escape from the camp in which he was being held by crossing the border to Iran, he was indicted for treason and sentenced to an additional six-year term...
...The torturers "are still occupying their posts . . . bearing not one iota of moral responsibility for their acts...
...In time, the Literary Opposition may articulate the discontents of wider segments of the Soviet peoples...
...And realistic reportage is appearing, by Soviet muckrakers like Marchenko...
...to pronounce the very name of Solzhenitsyn" before kgb operatives was "like waving a red rag in front of a bull...
...Yet in the long run, the growing influence and success of the Soviet Opposition offers the surest hope of a world freed from the anxieties inspired by the totalitarian presence...
...Yet it was high fantasy to think Socialist Realism a virgin...
...But those 90 camps enthrall the Soviet spirit...
...And friendship is a novel basis for action in the Soviet Union, where personal loyalties are not permitted to override official edicts...
...prisoners knew a propagandist lecturer was to visit their camp whenever they saw Trotsky's Son taken to the cooler...
...Two of the signs in evidence bore the demand, "Release Dobrov-olsky, Galanskov, Lashkova, and Radzievsky...
...The Soviet regime, after half a century, remains too unstable for such experiments in "repressive tolerance...
...Delaunay's lawyer argued that older people were to blame "when young poets lose their way, start thinking themselves very nearly geniuses, and form mutual admiration societies...
...there is the farce of the stooges and stool pigeons officiating at the prisoners' "collectives...
...A few become the politicians of the infra-world, like the one they called "Trotsky's Son," who could out-argue anybody...
...Pavel Litvinov, the worthy grandson of Maxim Litvinov, Soviet Foreign Minister in the '30s, courageously defied the threats of the kgb and prepared typewritten copies of the judicial proceedings against the now famous 1967 demonstrators in Pushkin Square...
...Free, spontaneous discussion—undirected, un-monitored, and undeflected by the threat of Soviet coercion-portends the liberation of reason...
...415 pp...
...8.95...
...The new methods of political opposition are becoming ever more visible in the Soviet Union...
...Certainly Marchenko's infraworld contains horrors worse than those described in an earlier time in Peter Kropotkin's In Russian and French Prisons or George Kennan's Siberia and the Exile System...
...Kushev insisted: "Friendship matters to me more than points of law...
...And he quoted Whittaker Chambers' words: "Even if I read such books, I should not have believed them...
...he asked...
...Like all movements sustained by the energies of generational revolt, smog's tendency was to adorn its demands with the language of sexual liberation...
...Today the New Left is largely indifferent to the Soviet liberals, to Sinyavsky, Daniel, Litvi-nov, Solzhenitsyn...
...the elders venerated were only those who had endured torture or ostracism by the Soviet state-osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva...
...they cite instead the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, to which the Soviet regime gave its formal vote...
...she had sold herself long ago...
...MY TESTIMONY By Anatoly Marchenko Translated by Michael Scammell E. P. Dutton...
...instead of being comrades, they were friends...
...Three of the five formally charged were workers or unemployed...
...How can there be any talk of democracy when we are watched and followed at every step...
...On January 22, 1967 at 6:00 p.m., about 30 people demonstrated in Moscow's Pushkin Square on behalf of freedom of speech and publication...
...Liberals quote Marx and Lenin less...
...It would be far more accurate to say that the Soviet order requires its infraworld reserve army to give its citizens a negative incentive to conform and submit...
...The characters are grim and their actions often grotesque: There are the prisoners who tattoo "Slaves of the cpsu" on their bodies, and are then forced to disfigure themselves in removing the tattoos...
...Marchenko has brought the world tidings of Yuli Daniel, who vanished into the camps after an exemplary stand at his trial four years ago...
...For a brief period the inquisitors and torturers retired discreetly into the background, but they were confident that when the Khrushchev era was over "their experience would be needed again, that they would be recalled...
...Will the writings of the Soviet Opposition have much effect on the American New Left, inebriate with its neo-ideological brew of Marx, Bakunin and Marcuse...
...In July 1968, a week after he wrote an open letter praising Czechoslovakia's efforts for freedom, he was arrested again...
...This remarkable document embodies, more than any study could, the spirit guiding the small, isolated circles of men and women who are the primary forces for Soviet freedom...
...there are the religious sectarians who rebuke the worldly, bravely affirming that all political power, Soviet included, is an emanation of the devil...
...The Pushkin Square Literary Oppositionists had tried every means of expressing themselves wholly within conventional channels...
...Groping its way from ideology to philosophy, the Literary Opposition has turned from Marx to Kant, from materialism to idealism, from dialectic to universalism...
...Thus Delaunay, who had misgivings concerning the proposed demonstration, declared: "I could simply not desert my friend at such a moment...
...Reading My Testimony, one learns how re-Stalinization is taking place in Soviet life...
...An electrical worker, he was first arrested at the age of 22 when the police intervened in a scuffle at a workers' hostel...
...there are the continuous suicides and the pervasive homosexuality in the regular camps...
...However, when the New Leftist is confronted with unsettling facts he is likely to behave as John Strachey, an Old Leftist, did when he was a Marxist...
...smog's cause was artistic freedom...
...Before the demonstrators could attract much attention, however, they were attacked by secret police and activists of the Komsomol Operational Squad...
...One can see why...
...The Soviet regime and its apparatus of judges, prosecutors, secret police, and strong-arm men are loath to see their behavior made public, since the state itself is put on trial when people are informed of how it manages the "trials" of individuals...
...No longer having anything to lose, many speak their minds...
...it simply represses...
...And they were right," writes Marchenko...
...All the other prisoners agreed that by trying Daniel and Sinyavsky the kgb had suffered a great defeat: "The main thing was that now the whole world would know the Soviet Union had political prisoners...
...The court had no answer...
...Khaustov, for instance, who acknowledged that he had read Kant and Hegel, was asked at the trial what conclusions he had drawn from his readings...
...He said he "had strong inhibitions to reading this kind of book about Russia...
...For a brief period in 1962, the New Left basked in the Soviet permission to admire Solzhenitsyn's One Day and to recite Yevtushen-ko's Babi Yar...
...Soviet society rests on an "infra-world" of those who have resisted and lost...
...The four had been arrested a few days earlier for having transcribed the trial proceedings against writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel...
...They learned of Khrushchev's downfall when they were told to go around tearing down his pictures...
...For the most part, the prisoners are political skeptics...
...And he made short shrift of Lenin's distorted notion of freedom: "What is the use of freedom to demonstrate 'for' if we can't demonstrate 'against...
...Bukovsky, who had dared to photograph Milovan Djilas' The New Class, went even further...
...Others cultivate fantasy, spending their spare time writing petitions to the authorities...
...nevertheless, he "became the centre that united diverse groups and nationalities...
...Deaf and war-wounded, he was continually harassed by the kgb...
...Marchenko has had considerable experience with today's Soviet prisons...
Vol. 53 • February 1970 • No. 4
