Two Journeys Through the Gulag
SOSIN, GENE
Two Journeys Through the Gulag Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life By Victor Herman Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 371 pp. $12.95. To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter By Vladimir...
...When Henry Ford concluded a deal with Moscow in the early '30s for the construction of an automobile plant in Nizhni-Novogrod (later Gorky), the elder Herman, a Socialist, decided that he and his family would join a group of Americans who were contracting to work there for three years...
...Born in 1942 in the Urals, Bukovsky was a teenager when Nikita Khrushchev delivered his Secret Speech detailing Stalin's atrocities to the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956...
...Western readers have been there before—guided by Gustav Herling in A II odd Apart and by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, among many others...
...From that point on his future was sealed—all the more so because his father decided to stay in the Soviet Union after the Ford contract expired and thereupon exchanged his family's American passport for a Soviet one...
...Of course...
...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Director of Program Planning, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, New York Victor Herman and Vladimir Bukovsky were born in different countries, are from different generations and have never met...
...At the end, we learn of his being flown to Switzerland in exchange for the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalan...
...Now a biology student at Cambridge University, Bukovsky challenges us to reflect on our obligations: "Thousands of books have been written in the West and hundreds of different doctrines created by the most prominent politicians to find a compromise with this kind of regime...
...To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter By Vladimir Bukovsky Viking...
...When Soviet authorities tried to persuade him to change his application to read "USSR," he stubbornly refused...
...He became a member of a clandestine youth group that had no particular aim—political or otherwise—except to recruit others...
...I mean generally, all over the Soviet Union, something was suddenly wrong...
...It was a move the father soon regretted, for Stalin's purges were getting under way...
...While Victor Herman was engaged in that contest, Vladimir Bukovsky was waging his own battle on a higher moral and intellectual plane...
...His despairing father had warned that many Americans were being arrested and urged Victor to take his younger sister and get out of the Soviet Union (his mother had already died...
...In between, he shares with us such experiences as his years of confinement in prisons, labor camps and the notorious Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry...
...Bukovsky tells his story with the flair of a novelist, employing the device of a long flashback...
...They are all evading the only correct solution—moral opposition...
...The whole world had betrayed us, and we believed in nobody...
...In 1938 he was arrested as a counterrevolutionary and sentenced to gulag country...
...both—albeit each in his own way—survived this totalitarian oppression...
...From 1973-76 Bukovsky enjoyed freedom for a total of 14 months, and dedicated himself to telling the world how the Soviets use psychiatry to suppress dissidents...
...and both finally left the Soviet Union in 1976...
...438 pp...
...Little did the authorities realize that what they were tempering was one of the most intransigent dissidents of the post-Stalin era...
...The book begins in 1976 as he is suddenly moved from prison to an unknown destination (to be shot in the woods outside Moscow...
...We are fighting for the freedom to create, and it was no accident that many of us...
...Suddenly only insofar as / could see, because what had I seen to this point...
...And by the end of the '50s, during his final year of high school, he and some fellow students—motivated by boredom and irreverence toward official cliches—put out a satirical magazine...
...It was decided that the young rebel should be sent from school to be "tempered in the furnace of labor...
...I don't mean just with me, with my losing the footing I had...
...Not only did he build cars and trucks along with the other Americans, including Walter and Victor Reuther, but he became in quick succession a track star, medal-winning marksman, aviator (he was hailed as "the Lindbergh of Russia"), and the world-champion free-fall parachute jumper...
...Neither atom bomb nor bloody dictatorships, not theories of 'containment' or 'convergence' will save the democracies...
...Following his release from the cruelties of forced labor, he spent another 20 frustrating years fighting the Soviet bureaucracy for the right to return to America...
...Strongly influenced by Vol-pin's remark that "We've only ourselves to blame if we don't demand that our laws be observed," Bukovsky launched a crusade for justice that landed him in the gulag...
...We wanted to die shoulder to shoulder with comrades we trusted, with comrades we relied on more than ourselves in this sea of treachery...
...Bukovsky's first steps toward active protest were almost naive...
...No, not suddenly at all...
...At one of these sessions Bukovsky met Aleksandr Sergeyevich Yesen-in-Volpin, a mathematician son of Sergei Yesenin, another famous poet of the early Soviet period...
...The rest of Coming Out of the Ice is mainly devoted to his journey through that nightmare...
...But Victor was trapped...
...A century ago, Nikolai A. Nekrasov wrote a line that is familiar to every Soviet school child: "Perhaps you cannot be a poet, but you must be a citizen...
...Victor, a tough, athletic 16-year-old at the time, dreamed of adventures with wolves and bears in the Russian forests, and shortly after arriving seemed destined for glory...
...To Build a Castle reveals Bukovsky as both...
...We used to make fun of him...
...The KGB got to know the activists as well, and in the spring of 1961 Bukovsky was summoned for questioning...
...Although essentially nonpolitical, the journal "was downright scandalous—and inadmissible from the Party's point of view...
...Victor, too, realized that "something had gone wrong...
...We all got to know one another in Maya-kovsky square...
...These two autobiographies record their respective uneven struggles...
...But the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution that year, he tells us in To Build a Castle, shattered his youthful faith in Communist values: "After those red-starred tanks, the pride and joy of our childhood, had crushed our peers on the streets of Budapest, a bloody fog blinded our eyes...
...17.50...
...The jump that set the record, however, marked the beginning of Herman's troubles: In registering his feat with an international agency, he insisted he was an American citizen...
...In the early '60s, Bukovsky began to organize poetry readings in downtown Moscow...
...The pampered Western democracies have forgotten their past and their essence—namely that democracy is not a comfortable house, a handsome car, or an unemployment benefit, but above all the ability and the desire to stand up for one's rights...
...Had I looked...
...We who were born and have grown up in an atmosphere of terror know of only one remedy—the position of a citizen...
...Yet they shared a similar fate: Both spent most of their adult lives in Soviet prisons and labor camps...
...later merged with the movement for human rights...
...Herman was born in Detroit in 1915, the son of Ukrainian Jewish emigres...
...His dialogues with Daniel Lunts, chief of the political department, are minidramas full of ironic humor...
...Our parents had turned out to be informers and agents provocateurs, our generals executioners—even our childhood games and fantasies were steeped in deceit...
...Alik" gave Bukovsky what he lacked until then, a knowledge of the Soviet citizen's legal rights: "Alik was the first person we had even come across to speak seriously of Soviet laws...
...But neither KGB beatings, nor the remonstrances of his apprehensive father (a Party member who was criticized for bringing up his son "incorrectly"), nor his expulsion from Moscow University prevented Vladimir from continuing the readings at the statue of Russia's great poet of the Revolution...
...Yet if the details of human degradation recounted here no longer shock or surprise, Herman's determination to prevail does remain inspiring...
...In the higher echelons, our magazine was pronounced an act of ideological sabotage, as a result of which the headmaster and I were summoned to discuss the matter with the Moscow City Committee of the Party...
...Only cynicism struck us as sincere, for noble words had become the small change of deception...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 6
