Moscow on the Seine

...and Syntaxis, founded last autumn by Andrei Sin-yavsky and his wife, Maria Rozova...

...While there are, of course, exceptions —e.g., Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Eugene Ionesco (who may unwittingly have inspired the title of the essay) —they all find themselves subjected to a veritable reign of "secret terror...

...Medvedev faced the issue squarely: Never in the history of the political opposition in Russia, he wrote, whether under the Tsars or under their successors, had internal disagreements been swept under the rug...

...Many of the Third Wave emigres, says the author of Gulag Archipelago, are possessed of "a fierce hatred not of the Soviet system, but of Russia itself, of its very people...

...Is my talks with Russian emigres, I tried to get to the bottom of the controversy between Maximov and his admirers on the one hand, and Sinyavsky and his admirers on the other...

...Bitter oersonal and ideological feuds have bedeviled every generation of political emigres (read, for example, E.H...

...Roy Medvedev is, of course, the well-known historian and dissident, Abraham Brumberg, the former editor of Problems of Communism, is currently a guest scholar at the Kennan Institute for Higher Russian Studies...

...Yet intellectual America lionizes them," because "almost all" American intellectuals "live and breathe socialism and communism," and they are pleased to be confirmed in their conviction that "what we must fear [is] not communism at all, but the national existence of the Russian people...

...For what is at stake among Russian exiles in Paris is not the absence of unanimity...

...But at least she and her supporters raised a crucial moral issue: Did Medvedev have the right to flay his fellow-dissidents, including those languishing in Soviet jails and unable to defend themselves against his accusations...

...With the exception of Russkaya mysl (hereinafter RM) and the staidly conservative religious quarterly Herald of the Russian Christian Movement, they are all Third Wave products: Konti-nent, a quarterly boasting a regular German edition, as well as sporadic editions in Italian, Spanish, English, and Portuguese (circulation in Russian: 5,000...

...That a relatively small handful of emigres should have given birth to as many as seven periodicals may be seen by some as an absurdity...

...As a result, Avtorkhanov and/?A/maypossibly be brought to court on the charge of libel...

...Glezer, Bokov had said, deleted a favorable reference to Limonov in reprinting an article from RM, thus engaging in a "conspiracy of silence" against the author of the novella...

...Other squabbles mirrored in the emigre publications here cannot even be said to touch upon real political, let alone moral, problems...

...A spate of indignant letters to RM labeling the story "pornographic," and condemning the editors of the Ark for having "insulted Russian literature...

...But lofty principles are one thing, and visceral reactions (or possibly the force of one's political/cultural heritage) another...

...In addition, Medvedev has fallen out with some of his Socialist colleagues, who find his fiercely independent stance, his refusal to participate in any organized dissident activities, incomprehensible at best, suspicious at worst...

...If achievement were to be measured, however, by the number and intensity of internecine quarrels, the Russian press in Paris could surely be dubbed a collective succes de scan-dale...

...two small literary journals, Echo and the Ark...

...Sinyavsky's remarks were published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei-tung, following an article by one of the German newspaper correspondents deploring the intolerance" and "dictatorial methods" of the novelist Vladimir Maximov, editor of Kontinent...

...Of these, Syntaxis contains no belles-lettres, devoting itself exclusively to social and political criticism, with special emphasis on the burgeoning problem (indeed, as Sinyavsky puts it, "danger") of Russian nationalism both within the Soviet establishment and among Russian dissidents...

...Still others claimed that Solzhenitsyn—the towering spiritual patron of Kontinent—was responsible for the split...

...The quality of the journals may be a matter of taste...

...Our usual Russian quick temper . . . angrily sees words as deeds and tends to make of every controversy a cold or even civil war...

...One of the latest emigre scandals, the "Saga" is not merely a series of thinly veiled caricatures of individual intellectuals, most of them German, French and American, but a sweeping indictment of the "Western intellectual elite" as a whole...

...This may well be all to the good...

...That Maximov does at least try to practice what he preaches was illustrated by the inclusion of maverick French Communist intellectual Jean Ellein-stein in a Kontinent symposium on Solzhenitsyn...

...How faithfully Maximov echoes Solzhenitsyn's ideas may be seen from the latter's latest interview last February with the BBC...

...Aleksandr Glezer, editor of the rival Third Wave, went further...

...Partiinost is a singularly Soviet term that is usually translated either as "par-ty-mindedness" or "party spirit," and that stands for a combative type of ideological partisanship—precisely the quality the editors of Kontinent, in their very first issue, firmly condemned...

...As it happens, the letter was published in RM a week after my conversation with Glezer (and with the coeditor of they4rA:, N. Bokov...

...Any attempt to draw particular parallels between the Soviet and the Tsarist systems, therefore, or to analyze Soviet Communism in terms of certain endemic features of Russia's political culture, is apt to elicit the response (as one of the contributors to Sinyavsky's journal, Syntaxis, put it): "Help...

...Carr's splendid The Romantic Exiles), but in the case of the Paris colony they seem to constitute its very life-blood...

...Their passion for openness may be praiseworthy, he says, and their attempt to secure maximum publicity abroad understandable...

...They're insulting Momma...

...Its members, claims Maximov, are marked by a "spiritual deafness, ideological narrow-mindedness, and the social instinct of a herd...

...At the slightest excuse the horrid spectre of an 'enemy of the people' is conjured out of the shadows...

...When I saw EUeinstein, I asked him about this...

...The editors of RM thought differently: Omitting Limonov's name, they bluntly observed, was clearly "a breach of IONTINENT The internationally acclaimed journal of literary, social, political, and religious commentary journalistic ethics...

...But it is safe to predict that the effort at finding a common platform, however nobly conceived, will not bear any fruit in the near future...

...The underlying tenet (or instinctive assumption) of Kontinent is that Communism is a vast conspiracy, inspired by a Western doctrine thoroughly alien to the traditions of the Russian people...

...Clearly, Sinyavsky's defection from Kontinent is a matter of grave concern to its editors...

...In it, besides stating his case against the novella, he sought to counter an accusation of censorship that had been leveled against him by Bokov...

...As if this were not enough, Medvedev has drawn fire for criticizing some of his fellow-dissidents, among them Al-eksandr Ginzburg—one of the five human rights activists suddenly exiled to the U.S...

...It had an impact, too, on a meeting here of about 500 Russian emigres, called together to "unite" the three waves (and the warring factions within them...

...The latest issue of the Ark, for instance, carries a novella by an emigre writer, Eduard Limonov, now residing in New York...

...and such evidence as Avtorkhanov cited has been decisively rebutted by Zhores in the pages of RM...

...The reaction...

...The article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, to cite one case, was traced by Maximov to a decision made by the Soviet Communist Party—"as we know from well informed sources"—to silence the voice of Soviet dissidence both in the USSR and in foreign countries...

...No doubt the Soviet press will make the most of it, too...

...Last November, Andrei Sakharov's wife called a press conference in the couple's Moscow flat and accused Medvedev of having said Ginzburg misappropriated some of the Fund's money for personal (and often squalid) purposes...

...Limonov's story," he told me, "is not only sheer pornography...

...For some inexplicable reason, she said, the offer was rejected...

...That its editor should become the object of scathing comments by someone with such impeccable moral and intellectual credentials as Andrei Sinyavsky is even more dismaying...

...But by creating a plethora of groups and organizations with public membership lists, and by inviting all and sundry to join, they become infiltrated by police agents bent on catching them in the slightest indiscreet or "illegal" act...

...Called "It is I— Edichka," it is a Milleresque tale of a penurious Russian vagabond who had to struggle to stay alive in his native Ukrainian city of Kharkov, and now continues to spin out an uncertain existence in the bohemian haunts of New York...

...The most common epithet is "Soviet agent," or some variant thereof...

...Pluralism" and "diversity" are the two words most commonly used by Maximov when describing his journal, and they were emphasized by Gorban-evskaya in her conversation with me...

...Yet on balance it seems to me that there is no reason to doubt Sinyavsky's own explanation: "I found," he told me, "that I could no longer tolerate any version of parti-inost...

...In Paris, the moral question was lost sight of in what turned into a rancorous personal vendetta...

...The impulses to use "abusive language and threats against those who think differently," he wrote some time ago, "are all unfortunately the results of a Soviet education and are hard to overcome...

...Moreover, Roy and Zhores are planning to wash the dissident linen in public by producing a joint book containing all the pertinent documents, so that the Western reader may judge for himself who is in the right...

...author of nearly 20 books (some of them written jointly with his twin brother Zhores, a geneticist now living in London), including Let History Judge and On Socialist Democracy...

...Sakharov's accusation borne out by the text of the Medvedev open letter she alluded to...

...Other emigres hinted knowingly at purely personal enmities between the Sinyavskys and Maximov...

...Perhaps, as time goes on, the mental shackles that have been inherited from that cruel period, still so much in evidence today, will gradually wither away...

...He said he had sent a letter to RM, but the editors, "who practice typical Soviet-like censorship," refused to print it...

...But it will hardly be edifying reading...

...and that the only defense against it is religion and Russian nationalism...

...A self-declared Marxist, he is persona non grata as much to the "nationalists," whose article of faith is that the Soviet Communist system sprang fullblown from the writings of the 19th-century German philosopher, as to the "democrats," for whom "socialism" is also (quite understandably) a nasty word...

...The aroused passions, I was told, were finally assuaged with an " artistic" program (Russian songs) and a well-stocked buffet...

...Perhaps no one understands this mentality better and is more qualified to speak about it than the brilliant writer Andrei Sinyavsky, author of On Socialist Realism, The Trial Begins and the recent Voices from the Chorus (who was first published in the U.S...

...In Medvedev's opinion (voiced in a number of "open letters" shown to me by his brother), many dissidents have engaged in needlessly ostentatious behavior...

...What stretches the editor's tolerance for "pluralism" to a breaking point, though, is any professed sympathy for socialism or for some variant (no matter how silly or "revisionist") of Marxism...

...the Third Wave, which specializes in unofficial Russian art (many of whose finest representatives now live in Paris...

...and if the tactics of certain groups or individuals tend to be harmful to the common cause and jeopardize innocent people into the bargain, then it is the responsibility of their critics to speak up, precisely in order to "minimize the number of 'losses' in our already not too numerous human rights movement...

...This has unquestionably been true for many of Maximov's editorial comments, and has been reflected in his tendency to regard every criticism of the journal as the work of sinister pro-Soviet (or Soviet) forces...

...Furthermore, they thus tend to compromise people who prefer to remain anonymous and not risk the danger of official reprisals...

...Sinyavsky's was only one of several articles and letters devoted to this subject...

...I will not refuse to speak with anyone," was his response...

...At times the disputes are local...

...it is also definitely pro-Soviet...

...to be] denounced as an 'ideological diversionary' or 'a Zionist' (by Soviet judges), or pilloried as a'dangerous Red'or . . . 'a henchman of the KGB' (in the emigre community...

...Far more characteristic of Maximov' s basic attitude is his recent series of feuilletons, called "Saga About Rhinoceroses," originally published in RM and reprinted in the current issue of Kontinent...

...That a distinguished Western newspaper should lend its pages to an acrimonious debate about a journal that only four years earlier had triumphantly announced it was to be the spokesman of "a whole continent of East European culture," a symbol "of the unification and collaboration of all antitotalitarian forces in Eastern Europe in their dialogue with the West," is in itself a melancholy comment on the (perhaps inevitable) divisiveness of emigre life...

...I relate these tiresome details, I hasten to add, not because I consider them intrinsically fascinating or because I wish to side with one or another of the injured parties, but simply because they illustrate the political and intellectual climate—indeed, the mentality—of so much of the Russian emigre community...

...From this erupted an abrasive confrontation between what might be termed, broadly speaking, the "Russian nationalists" and their opponents (whose ideas are most forcefully reflected in Sinyavsky's Syntax-is...

...MOSCOW ON THE SEINE BY ABRAHAM BRUMBERG Paris According to an editor of the Paris-based weekly Russkaya mysl (Russian Thought), there are about 20,000 Russians living here today, more than one-fourth of them "Third Wave" emigres—that is, those who left the Soviet Union within the last 10 years or so...

...The "Saga" quickly added fresh fuel to the perennial quarrel between Maximov and his critics, enlivening the pages of RM...

...Neither is Mrs...

...It also does its best to epater les Russes by making outrageous comments (sometimes hilarious, sometimes venomous) about everything and everybody—the CIA no less than the KGB, Radio Liberty and the Soviet press, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn as well as the Soviet leaders...

...One need not look at them through the Western eyes of a Joseph Conrad to be taken aback by their unrestrained rhetoric and by the extravagance of the charges hurled to and fro...

...One of them, Natalia Gorbanevskaya (a poetess and one of the participants in the remarkable demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, held in Moscow's Red Square on August 21, 1968), told me that Sinyavsky was offered exclusive control of as many as 50 pages in each issue of the journal, in addition to his own contributions...

...In fact, it is a tribute to the resilience of Russian creativity, which years of intellectual and physical terror have not been able to destroy...

...Thick-skinnedly oblivious to any injustices in the Communist world, adept at dialectical twists and turns, mendacious and committed to communism, they will overrun civilization, "trampling underfoot" opponents like Maximov...

...But incidents of that kind seem aberrations...

...at other times they involve dissidents in Moscow as well...

...The charge that Medvedev is a willful accomplice of the Soviet secret police, made in effect by Avtorkhanov, is as fanciful as it is pernicious...

...Glezer had admitted the deletion to me, but maintained that he was following standard "Western practice...

...it is the inability to "agree to disagree...

...last month—when he was serving a 10-year sentence for various "crimes" incurred while dispensing the Fund for Relatives of Political Prisoners in the USSR (donated by Solzhenit-syn...

...The novella is replete with Russian equivalents of four-letter words and has a few explicit homosexual scenes, one between a black and a white...

...Her statement gave rise to yet another flurry of open letters, whereupon the scene shifted to Paris: In late December, A. Avtorkhanov, aWorldWar II emigre whose first Sovietological works came out in Germany in 1943-44, published an article in RM branding Medvedev a purveyor of "disinformation," a "slanderer" and an "informer" to boot...

...in the pages of The New Leader...

...And this community is served by no less than seven Russian-language publications—the largest number of Russian periodicals to be published in any single city outside the USSR...

...The book, I suspect, will do well: Political cum personal intrigues among Soviet dissidents (most of whom have been immune from criticism in the Western press) are bound to be grist for journalistic mills...

...The storm that has raged around the person of Roy Medvedev is a case in point...