Defying Doublethink

...On the one hand, he is not sure that the current spiritual resistance will grow...

...More likely it will wither away...

...A far cry from protest...

...At certain moments of our lives we even expect them, and if they fail to materialize we are perplexed and worried, as if we somehow neglected something...

...He remarks to his friend that he was "greatly touched by what Arkady Belinkov [the brilliant Soviet dissident critic who defected in 1968 and taught at Yale until his death in 1970] wrote to the pen Club just before he died...

...The conflict is not between political doctrines and ideologies, parties and classes: it is another and more fundamental quarrel...

...Thus what distinguishes the dissidents is not their convictions as such, but the fact that "they defend them openly, breaking with the tradition of doublethink...

...And, conversely, when they hear a word of encouragement from the West, thousands inside the country breathe a sigh of immense relief...

...Because they do not hold views different from most of their fellow citizens, he argues, they should not be called "those who think differently...

...in 1974...

...When secrecy at home is matched by inattention abroad, those imprisoned in Soviet doublethink feel as if they are in a leaden coffin...

...In an insightful chapter entitled "The Dissidents," Shragin pays homage to the men and women who have performed the most courageous feat possible for a Soviet citizen: speaking out and not caring who may hear...

...between human sympathy and cruelty...

...Shragin comments: "To this day we sustain a deep love for the oppressions and punishments that rained on us....We believe they are liable to recur at any time, and so we are not surprised when they do so...

...He corrects the false impression held by many in the West that Soviet dissidents are an opposition group with a definite political program, explaining that they are not members of an anti-Soviet organization or exponents of a hostile ideology, but merely individuals who wish to follow their consciences...

...Moreover, the phenomenon of samizdat "could not have developed if manuscripts had not been printed abroad and introduced to the Soviet public in Russian-language radio programs...

...They piled up in a corner of my room...

...In particular, Shragin demonstrates that just as in the days of...

...Shragin adds that it is especially dispiriting when the West "will not or cannot hear the voices of those crying out within Russia...

...On the other hand, he believes that "even the tightening up of repression and its increasingly illegal character indicate that the dissidents are getting stronger rather than weaker"-a statement that sounds like wishful thinking...

...The Shragins left the USSR for the U.S...

...Thanks to its efforts and sacrifices, our stagnant existence has once more felt a breath of history, a touch of something unrehearsed and creative, which has already set the bounds to the excesses of despotism...

...By trial and error I discovered that four pages at a time was the most I could dispose of in this way-a long, tedious procedure...

...and, finally, between personal dignity and a system in which contempt for the individual is elevated into a rule of life...

...Despite the fact that the intelligentsia was stifled and to a great extent physically destroyed during the decades of Stalinist terror, Shragin declares that it is today manifestly alive...

...That told how two Moscow intellectuals about to emigrate-Shragin and his wife, Natalia Sadomskaya -persuaded their friend Yuri Orlov, a well-known physicist and fellow dissident, to put together a brief autobiographical sketch that they could have published in the West if anything happened to him...

...Demonstrating in Red Square or writing open letters to Party chief Leonid I. Brezhnev is useless without the help of the foreign press...

...But we must save that which is alive in Russia.' " Shragin's book illuminates that which is alive, if not well, in the Soviet Union-namely, an intelligentsia in ferment searching for answers to the old Russian question, "What is to be done...

...I couldn't burn them because the place would have filled with smoke and attracted the unwelcome curiosity of neighbors...

...It is the conflict between truth and lying on command...

...Taught by experience, I realize what freedom of the written word means: it is the situation in which a writer can, without fear of the consequences, throw drafts into the wastebasket...

...By "we" the author is speaking of the intelligentsia in a specifically Russian sense of the term-I.e., "people who have matured spiritually to the point where they feel obliged to make sense of their lives, and can no longer submit to the lies and hypocrisy of Soviet life...

...between honesty and self-interest...

...What do we hope for?' Belinkov asked...

...Under existing conditions, however, doing things openly means doing them so that they become known outside the USSR...

...When Orlov was arrested on February 10, 1977 for heading an unofficial group of citizens monitoring Soviet compliance with the Helsinki accord-which resulted in his being sentenced last month to seven years at hard labor and five years of exile-Shragin gave his sketch to The New Leader ("The Road to My Arrest," March 14, 1977...

...The Challenge of the Spirit concludes with an Epilogue in the form of a long letter that Shragin wrote in 1971 to Larisa Bogoraz, who had been exiled to Siberia for participating in a demonstration in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops...

...He actually began The Challenge of the Spirit in Moscow, where friends hid separate chapters as they were completed to keep the KGB from getting at them...

...The author quotes frequently from Russian writers and philosophers of the 19th and early 20th century to establish the relevance of their observations to the "sick society" of the present...

...In Apologia of a Madman (1837), for instance, the political thinker Pyotr Chaadayev (whose Philosophical Letters were never published in a complete edition) sarcastically thanks Nicholas I's government for treating him no worse than society at large would have, and he inquires, "What should the best-intentioned government do but conform to what it sincerely believes to be the settled wish of the country...

...Only one who has been unable to do this can appreciate what a privilege it is...

...The only thing to do was to flush the sheets down the toilet...

...Instead, drawing upon his knowledge of Russian history, he shows how "the past conflicts that caused so much physical and moral suffering to thinking people in Russia are still with us in almost unaltered form today...

...rather, as Andrei Sakharov has suggested, they should be labeled "those who think freely," or simply "those who think," to separate them from a majority afraid to think and intent on ignoring the truth they all know in their hearts...

...He writes: "Rough drafts were a terrible problem...

...As for the future, Shragin is ambivalent in a manner that is characteristic of Russian intellectuals...

...Nevertheless, one must agree with the author's assertion that "the dissidents have achieved their most important aim: there is now a moral potential in our [Soviet] society that even the state cannot ignore...

...Tsarist rule, there remains a great gulf between the regime and the intelligentsia...

...We know we cannot alter the present system in our country, and we deliberately do not set out to do so...

...Yet Shragin's book is not a personal account of his activity as a dissident (he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1968 for participating in protests against the regime's violation of human rights and subsequently wrote samizdat articles pseudonymously...

...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Director of Program Planning, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, New York Readers of this magazine may recall that the name Boris Shragin appeared last year in a "Between Issues" column...

...Shragin considers Orwell's term an accurate description of Soviet man's self-deception...

...Now Shragin, who teaches at Hunter College of the City University of New York, has written a book that contributes much to our understanding of the position of Russian intellectuals...