Appealing to the Public

...Until now, however, this vast literature has lacked an up-to-date and comprehensive secondary source that could piece together the inevitably asymmetric first-person accounts...

...People don't get jailed for nothing nowadays...

...Now we try to publicize every arrest, every dismissal...

...Such dismal consequences lead even the least cynical to conclude that concern for law in a lawless society is merely another form of publicity...

...the guard took offense...

...Less well known is the exchange held a generation later between another Soviet security guard and dissident Andrei Amalrik...

...For nothing at all," he answered...

...Indeed, the only anonymous characters in Rubenstein's book are the Western reporters who carried the dissidents' stories to light...

...The sentence for nothing at all is 10 years...

...Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, by the New England Director of Amnesty International, helps fill the gap...

...Under Stalin there was always an iron curtain and no one knew what was going on here...

...You're lying," charged the guard...

...In any case, books like this one should be but a prelude to, not a substitute for, the sometimes brilliant, always enlightening, autobiographies by dissidents that have reached and will continue to reach the West...

...Although Rubenstein reads Russian and interviewed numerous dissidents forced into exile, he fails to draw upon much unpublished, non-English source material...

...As this book reveals, the regime had learned something since the '68 occupation of Prague, which had served to catapult many young protestors into prominence...

...Unlike Medvedev and Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and the democratic activists do not pretend to have a substantive, Utopian vision...

...Today's Soviet dissidents do not need a Solzhenitsyn to assemble and broadcast their case histories...

...More recently, some dissidents have taken the position that participating in political trials only lends legitimacy to the regime's illegal acts, and they have refused to enter the courtroom or, if forced, simply prostrated themselves on the floor...

...Asked why he was in prison, Amalrik replied, "For nothing," failing to mention that the official charge was parasitism...

...It was different before...

...Previous histories of the Zionist movement have not been as extensive or unembarrassed in portraying these links...

...Describing dissidents whose Jewishness was not primary, as well as non-Jews who wrote Zionist appeals, he conveys the importance of solidarity between groups who champion each other's cause in the face of relentless efforts by the regime to instill xenophobia...

...Millions of people were destroyed and nobody knew anything about it...

...They frequently submit copies of their samizdat documents to the KGB, for instance, thereby emphasizing the nonsubversive, lawful character of their work...

...In the past 15 years, over 40 memoirs or nonfiction works by Soviet political prisoners, plus a dozen or so samizdat collections and satiric novels, have been published in the West...

...What do you mean...

...Rubenstein's most original contribution is his analysis of the interrelation between democratic and Zionist activists...

...As Max Hayward said of Amalrik: "He has no particular 'ideology,' but only an almost blind belief in the need to assert one's rights...

...With a postscript written shortly after the physicist's exile to Gorky, Soviet Dissidents renders a just summary of his philosophy of liberal democratization, contrasting it with the neo-Marxism of Roy Medvedev and the Russian nationalism of Solzhenitsyn...

...Our very act of reading their works makes us associates in their principal goal, the struggle to publicize Soviet illegality...

...Supreme Court case upholding the rights of Communist Party members...

...Thus there has grown a natural alliance between these amateur lawyers and Western journalists, which can be said to have commenced in 1964 when The New Leader published the transcript of poet Joseph Brodsky's trial for parasitism...

...More than any other dissident, Andrei Sakharov has represented this solidarity and has served as protector of the KGB's most vulnerable prey...

...He also cited a U.S...

...In chapters of straight narration that perhaps are excessively long, the author presents a readable chronological account of demonstrations, arrests and trials of Moscow democrats, with occasional reference to the activities in outlying areas of Ukranian nationalists, Crimean Tatars, workers, and religious observers...

...When Bu-kovsky asked his interrogators to get him a copy of the Constitution, it took them four days to find one, and then they finally had to purchase it...

...The circumstances of Sakharov's internal exile serve as an ominous warning that the post Stalinist reforms are perhaps not as secure as supposed: His "administrative kidnapping," as Rubenstein labels it, occured without criminal process, without benefit of counsel, and without a limit on the length of the sentence...

...Even when held in KGB custody, they have demanded their right to study and quote the laws no doubt just as a means of counter-harassing their tormentors...

...It is a competent introduction for the untutored and a useful reference work (with valuable bibliography) for those already well-acquainted with the events and personalities of the movement...

...As a fellow dissident said of Shcharan-sky, "His 'crime' was to tell the truth and, what is worse, to tell it in English...

...Dissidents have insisted on working openly...

...To do that the dissidents have had to master the intricacies of Soviet and international law...

...At his trial, Bukovsky spoke for two hours about the unconstitutionality of the law he was indicted underquite an un-Soviet, if not anti-Soviet, approach to criminal defense...

...This is not so dissimilar from refusenik Ana-toly Shcharansky's final words: "And I turn to you, the court, who were required to confirm a predetermined sentence: To you I have nothing to say...

...The result was a three-year sentence, much longer than he might have otherwise received if he had refrained from courtroom polemics...

...Both were symbolized by the posters raised at the first major dissident demonstration: "Respect the Constitution, the Basic Law of the Land" and "We Demand that the Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial be Public...

...They believe instead in the values of the liberal process: representative government, the rule of law and individual self-expression...

...That Amalrik in 1965 was given a mere two-and-a-half year sentence for the arguably concrete act of not holding a job, and that he was released after serving less than half his term due to world-wide protest, is one small measure of the changes...

...In so doing they are making a final statement about the Soviet legal process: that they reject it...

...Do you think the authorities are fools...

...But this is not a fatal flaw, because so much has been translated into EnglishBukovsky's anguished radiance, Bella Akhmadulina's proud appeal for Andrei Sakharovand Rubenstein offers judicious quotes...

...This leads to the espousal of two related tactics, publicity and attention to legality...

...The majority of his associates who might have protested had already been rounded up before the invasion of Afghanistan...

...Another is that unlike the Stalin-era Gulag victim who did not live to publish any books, Amalrik-along with Vladimir Bukovsky, Edward Kuznet-sov, Igor Marchenko, Lev Kopelev, and myriad others-will long be remembered in the West as a resolute proponent of freedom and opponent of fear...

...No study undertaken in 1980 of the Soviet struggle for human rights can fail to take account of the historical changes in the Soviet justice system between the time of the purges and the post-1953 legal reforms...

...Pyotr Yakir described the main task of the dissident movement: "[We] tried to make public every illegal act committed in our country so that all the world may know...

...Reviewed by Donna Arzt Director, Soviet Jewry Legal Advocacy Center Solzhenitsyn's tale of the dialogue between a Stalinist guard and a prisoner is by now an oft-told parable: The guard asked the prisoner why he had been given the unusually heavy sentence of 25 years...