Russia's Free Press

...for that one has to turn to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and Peter Reddaway's Un-censored Russia...

...He notes that "historiography in the USSR is not allowed to evaluate objectively the activity of many outstanding participants in the October and February revolutions, which naturally results in numerous distortions in describing and considering the significance of some highly important events of those days and months...

...The author, originally a Men-shevik and Soldiers' Deputy, turned Bolshevik, was arrested in 1930, and after surviving more than 20 years in labor camps wrote this samizdat narrative whose hero is Lenin...

...These aims are of course similar to those of Sakharov and his adherents, but the means are different, for, as Zimin puts it, "we can cleanse and renew the interrupted, perverted and betrayed task of the Russian and world October...

...M. P. Yakubovich's memoir is a dramatic eyewitness account of the first Congress of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies in Petrograd in June 1917...

...He was subsequently arrested for opposing certain features of Bolshevik policy, and was shot in 1921 in Moscow's Butyrki Prison without any formal trial or sentence...

...He rejects their call for repentance and self-sacrifice and notes that they have failed to pose an important question: What is better for Christians and Christianity, a totalitarian state or a democracy...

...This would have prevented most of the excesses of the civil war and the "Red Terror...

...Nor are Soviet historians at liberty to discuss certain conceptions...

...Lev Z. Kopelev, whose moving memoir, To Be Preserved Forever, was recently published in English, appeared in The First Circle as the fictional Lev Rubin, the idealistic Communist...

...Started in Moscow in the spring of 1975, the "socio-political and literary anthology" set out to bring together a group of persons "concerned about the development of a just society and of socialist thought in the USSR, considering it their principal task to combine socialism and democracy...

...This book is a compilation of eight essays that first appeared in the samizdat periodical Dvadtsaty vek (Twentieth Century), edited by Medvedev and circulated underground...

...Andrei Sak-harov, the "Western" democrat...

...Two other pieces included in this volume deal with early Soviet history, too...

...a road that cannot (and ought not to) attract a single thinking man and is as distant from Christianity as revolutionary Marxism...

...But here he attacks the Nobel laureate's 1973 "A Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union...

...It is impossible not to admit that this sort of 'terrorist' fame has done grave harm to the cause of socialism throughout the world...

...The editor's own contribution here is a long essay (almost a quarter of the book) on the October Revolution...

...Thus he belongs to Med-vedev's "aberrational" school, rather than to the "Westerners," who renounce Lenin and the Revolution...

...Nevertheless, it is a useful addition to the growing body of material clandestinely circulated in the USSR that is now available in English, and the views it offers will give American readers a better sense of how varied intellectual ferment is in that country...

...any struggle for the improvement of the state and social organization seems unnecessary, fruitless, and in the last analysis, simply harmful...

...One is actually a letter to the heads of the Party and government written by F. K. Mironov, a Don Cossack officer decorated for his exploits as a Red Army commander in the civil war and accepted into the Party...

...only by turning our attention to the experience of Lenin's time...

...Marxist sociologist A. Zimin analyzes Stalin's brand of Socialism and finds it a latter-day version of the "Asiatic mode of production," an expression Marx used to describe Oriental economic exploitation joined to political despotism...

...He warns that the Kremlin's secrecy hinders any attempt to fight against the increase in alcohol consumption, "for society cannot combat an evil without knowing its locations and its dimensions...

...German Andreev, while agreeing that "only through religious consciousness is it possible to proceed toward happiness," objects to the approach of Solzhenitsyn et ai...

...They invite Russia to take again the road she already passed along: that of orthodoxy, nationalism and authoritarianism (euphemism for despotism...

...The correct path, according to Andreev, is Tolstoy's concept of Christian redemption...

...Yet without establishing real democracy, so completely scorned by Solzhenitsyn and his fellow-contributors, true faith is not to be achieved...

...Regret-ably, Yakubovich's fate in Stalin's era is not mentioned...

...On the whole, The Samizdat Register lacks sufficient background information for the layman...

...To the authors of the volume...

...and historian Roy Medvedev, the socialist whose Let History Judge condemned Stalinism as an aberration of Leninism...

...The pseudo-history maintains that the 1917 Revolution was necessary and inevitable, and that Lenin's leadership was infallible...

...His letter, written shortly before his execution, is a poignant plea for exoneration from a loyal Communist whose misfortune it was to have advocated the NEP before its implementation...

...And the thousands of pages of these "self-published" un-censored manuscripts that have arrived in the West during the last decade reveal a wide range of dissident ideas—three main currents being represented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the religious Russophile...

...Mironov remained an "unperson" until 1956, when his case was reexamined...

...Still, he concludes by praising the novelist's "agonized alarm for the fate of Russia and Russian national culture," and opposition to any form of violence in dealing with this problem...

...But samizdat plays a more important role: Sixty years after total censorship was described as a "temporary and extraordinary measure" by the Bolsheviks, it continues to be enforced, making samizdat Russia's free press...

...Zimin holds that the Soviet Union is not moving toward Communism because the prerequisites for such a step include worker self-management, freedom to criticize the authorities and demand their replacement, the right to leave and return to one's country, the autonomy of arts and science, and full equality for all nationalities and ethnic groups...

...Medvedev soon declared, however, that it would provide a forum not only for Marxist viewpoints but for any article deemed worth of discussion...

...Finally, there is A. Krasikov's richly documented study on alcohol —which he calls "Commodity Number One"—in the Soviet Union today...

...Even today, "not only many bourgeois historians but also many sincere supporters of socialism still look upon the Bolsheviks of the civil war period not as heroes but as 'beasts...

...He concludes, for example, that the responsibility for the civil war lies "not only with the Russian counterrevolution or the interventionists but also with the Bolsheviks themselves, who raised a substantial section of the population against their rule through their premature 'introduction of Socialism.' " The concessions to the middle peasantry and to the petty-bourgeoisie that the Party was forced to grant in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP), says Medvedev, should have been made in the spring of 1918 instead of 1921...

...Despite Kopelev's profound respect for his friend's "unquestionable nobility and loftiness of purpose," he accuses him of gross distortions of history in a step-by-step analysis of the letter, and agrees with Sakharov that Solzhenitsyn's "religious-patriarchal romanticism" is anachronistic...

...Medvedev, who attempts to correct official distortions, sharply criticizes many of Lenin's and the Bolsheviks' decision during the early months of the uprising...

...Sergei Elagin takes issue with the religious thinking expressed by the contributors to From Under the Rubble, an earlier samizdat book edited by Solzhenitsyn...

...in 1960, he was posthumously rehabilitated and restored to Party membership...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Director of Program Planning, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, New York The word samizdat has become so familiar to Americans who follow the Soviet scene that it is often printed in our newspapers and magazines without italics...

...Through painstaking research, the author uncovers facts the regime has concealed about the popularity of vodka?on its way to becoming also Calamity Number One...

...And even those historians who have long since refused to follow the official line continue to be subject to the influence—of which they are often unaware—of the stereotypes of pseudo-history they have grown up with since childhood...

...Three of the remaining essays are devoted to opposing Solzhenitsyn...