Gulag (78 page)

Yet, in another sense, Brodsky “won” in a way that previous generations of Russian prisoners could not have done. Not only did he publicly challenge the logic of the Soviet legal system, but his challenge was also recorded for posterity. A journalist took surreptitious notes at the trial, which were ultimately smuggled to the West. Thanks to this, Brodsky immediately became famous, in Russia and abroad. His behavior at his trial not only became a model for others to follow; it also inspired both Russian and foreign writers to petition the government for his release. After two years, release was granted, and he was eventually expelled from the USSR.

Nothing like this had happened while Stalin was alive. “People are as ever thrown behind bars and as ever transported to the East,” wrote Valentyn Moroz, a Ukrainian dissident historian, shortly afterward. “But this time, they have not sunk into the unknown.”
¹⁷
And that, in the end, was to be the greatest difference between Stalin’s prisoners, and the prisoners of Brezhnev and Andropov: the outside world knew about them, cared about them, and above all could affect their fate. Nevertheless, the Soviet regime was not growing more liberal—and events moved quickly in the wake of the Brodsky trial.

In the same way that 1937 stands out as a special year of persecution for the Stalinist-era intelligentsia, so too does 1966 stand out as a special year for the generation of the Thaw. By 1966, it was clear that the neo-Stalinists had triumphed. Stalin’s reputation as a flawed but still admirable leader had been officially restored. Joseph Brodsky was in a labor camp. Solzhenitsyn was a banned author. Khrushchev had been ousted and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who openly made statements designed to refurbish Stalin’s reputation.
¹⁸
Within a year, Yuri Andropov, who had just been appointed Chairman of the KGB, would make a speech to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Cheka. He would praise the Soviet secret police, among other things, for its “implacable struggle against state enemies.”
¹⁹

In February 1966, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel also went on trial. Both were well-known writers, both had published their work abroad, and both were found guilty, under the terms of Article 70, of “Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda.” Sinyavsky received seven years of hard labor, Daniel received five.
²⁰
This was the first time anyone had been put on trial not just for vagrancy, but because of the actual content of their literary work. A month later, in significantly greater secrecy, more than two dozen Ukrainian intellectuals went on trial in Kiev. One was accused, among other things, of owning a copy of a poem by the nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, after whom streets are named in Moscow and Kiev. Because the poem had been printed without the author’s name, Soviet “experts” classified it as an anti-Soviet poem by an unknown author.
²¹

In a pattern that would soon become familiar, these trials spawned other trials, as other outraged intellectuals began to use the language of the Soviet legal system and the Soviet constitution to criticize the Soviet judiciary and the Soviet police. The case of Sinyavsky and Daniel, for example, made a great impression on another young Muscovite, Aleksandr Ginzburg, already active in “unofficial” cultural circles. He compiled a transcript of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, the “White Book,” which he distributed around Moscow. He and three alleged collaborators were arrested soon afterward.
²²

At about the same time, the Kiev trials made a great impression on a young Ukrainian lawyer, Vyacheslav Chornovil. He compiled a dossier on the Ukrainian judicial system, pointing out its internal contradictions and establishing the illegality and absurdity of the Ukrainian arrests.
²³
Afterward, he was quickly arrested.
²⁴
In this manner, an intellectual and cultural movement, begun by writers and poets, became a human rights movement.

To put the Soviet human rights movement in context, it is important to note that Soviet dissidents never started a mass organization, as did their Polish counterparts, and they cannot receive full credit for bringing down the Soviet regime: the arms race, the war in Afghanistan, and the economic disaster wrought by Soviet central planning must receive equal credit. Nor did they ever manage more than a handful of public demonstrations. One of the most famous—staged on August 25, 1968, to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia—involved only seven people. At noon, the seven gathered in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square, and unrolled Czech flags and banners marked with slogans: “Long live free and independent Czechoslovakia,” “Hands off Czechoslovakia, for your freedom and ours.” Within minutes, a whistle blew and plainclothes KGB rushed at the demonstrators, whom they seem to have been expecting, shouting, “They’re all Jews!” and “Beat the anti-Sovietists!” They tore down the banners, beat up the demonstrators, and took all but one—she was with her three-month-old son—straight to prison.
²⁵

But small though they were, these efforts caused a great deal of trouble for the Soviet leadership, particularly given its continued commitment to spreading world revolution and its consequent, obsessive concern about the USSR’s international image. In Stalin’s era, repression on a massive scale could be kept secret even from a visiting American Vice President. In the 1960s and 1970s, news of a single arrest could travel around the world overnight.

In part, this was thanks to improvements in mass communication, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and television. In part, it was also because Soviet citizens found new ways to transmit news as well. For 1966 also marked another milestone: the birth of the term samizdat. An acronym which deliberately echoed the term
Gosizdat
, or “State Publishing House,”
samizdat
literally means “self-publishing house,” and figuratively refers to the underground press. The concept was not new. In Russia, samizdat was nearly as old as the written word. Pushkin himself had privately distributed manuscripts of his more politically charged poetry in the 1820s. Even in Stalin’s time, the circulation of stories and poems among friends was not entirely unknown.

But after 1966, samizdat grew into a national pastime. The Thaw had given many Soviet citizens a taste for a freer sort of literature, and at first samizdat was a largely literary phenomenon.
²⁶
Very quickly, samizdat came to have a more political character. A KGB report which circulated among Central Committee members in January 1971 analyzed the changes over the previous five years, noting that it had discovered more than 400 studies and articles on economic, political, and philosophical questions, which criticize from various angles the historical experience of socialist construction in the Soviet Union, revise the internal and external politics of the Communist Party, and advance various programs of opposition activity.
²⁷

The report concluded that the KGB would have to work on the “neutralization and denunciation of the anti-Soviet tendencies presented in samizdat.” But it was too late to put the genie back in the bottle, and samizdat continued to expand, taking many forms: typed poems, passed from friend to friend and retyped at every opportunity; handwritten newsletters and bulletins; transcripts of Voice of America broadcasts; and, much later, books and journals professionally produced on underground typesetting machines, more often than not located in communist Poland. Poetry, and poem-songs composed by Russian bards—Alexander Galich, Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vysotsky—also spread quickly through the use of what was then a new form of technology, the cassette tape recorder.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, one of the most important themes of samizdat was the history of Stalinism—including the history of the Gulag. Samizdat networks continued to print and distribute copies of the works of Solzhenitsyn, which were by now banned in the USSR. Varlam Shalamov’s poems and stories also began circulating in the underground, as did Evgeniya Ginzburg’s memoirs. Both writers began to attract large groups of admirers. Ginzburg became the center of a circle of Gulag survivors and literary figures in Moscow.

The other important theme of samizdat was the persecution of the dissidents. Indeed, it was thanks to samizdat
—
and particularly to its distribution abroad—that the human rights advocates would gain, in the 1970s, a far wider international forum. In particular, the dissidents learned to use samizdat not only to underline the inconsistencies between the USSR’s legal system and the KGB’s methods, but also to point out, loudly and frequently, the gap between the human rights treaties that the USSR had signed, and actual Soviet practice. Their preferred texts were the UN Declaration on Human Rights, and the Helsinki Final Act. The former was signed by the USSR in 1948 and contained, among other things, a clause known as Article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
²⁸

The latter was the end result of a Europe-wide negotiation process, which had settled a number of political questions left open since the end of the Second World War. Although they were hardly noticed at the time of its 1976 signing, the Helsinki Treaty also contained some agreements on human rights—part of the so-called “Basket Three” of the negotiations— which all of the participating nations signed. Among other things, the treaty recognized the “freedom of thought, conscience and belief”:

The participating States recognize the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms . . . they will constantly respect these rights and freedoms in their mutual relations and will endeavour jointly and separately, including in co-operation with the United Nations, to promote the universal and effective respect for them.

Both within the USSR and outside it, most of the information about the dissidents’ efforts to promote the language of these treaties came from the house journal of the Soviet samizdat networks: the
Chronicle of Current
Events.
This newsletter, dedicated to a neutral recording of otherwise un-publicized news events—human rights abuses, arrests, trials, demonstrations, new samizdat publications—was founded by a small group of acquaintances in Moscow, including Sinyavsky, Daniel, Ginzburg, and two dissidents who would become famous later, Pavel Litvinov and Vladimir Bukovsky. The tale of the
Chronicle
’s further evolution and development is itself worthy of a book the length of this one. In the 1970s, the secret police conducted a virtual war against the
Chronicle
, organizing coordinated searches of the homes of anyone who was suspected of being connected with the journal: on one memorable occasion, an editor plunged a set of papers into a pot of boiling soup while the KGB searched her apartment. The
Chronicle
survived the arrests of its editors, however, and managed to reach the West as well. Eventually, Amnesty International would publish regular translations.
²⁹

The
Chronicle
played a special role in the history of the camp system too. Very quickly, it became the main source of information about life in the post-Stalinist Soviet camps. It published a regular feature, “Inside the Prisons and Camps”—and, later, “Inside the Punishment Cells” as well— which recorded news from the camps, and published interviews with prisoners. These startlingly accurate reports of events in the camps—the illnesses of various dissidents, the changes in regime, the organized protests—drove the authorities wild: they found it impossible to understand how the information got out. Years later, one of the editors explained:

Some [information] is carried when a fellow is released from the camps. There would be contact somewhere along the line after he left. Or you could bribe prison guards so that when you met with relatives, you could pass written information and verbal information. Then the relatives might stop in Moscow and pass on what you said. You could bribe guards, for example, in Mordovia. These [the Mordovian political camps] were all new camps, organized in 1972, and there were all new guards. They would pass notes sometimes when they became sympathetic to our situation. There was a mass hunger strike in the camps in 1974, and when they saw that, the guards were sympathetic.

You can also corrupt guards. They don’t earn much. They don’t have much. They come from provincial areas. You might, for example, get something from Moscow—a cigarette lighter—and bribe a guard. Or he would give you an address. The bribe—the goods or the money—would be sent there in exchange for passing information ...
³⁰

There were also methods of concealment. One ex-prisoner described one of them:

In minute letters, I write out my latest poem on four centimetre-wide strips of cigarette paper . . . These strips of cigarette paper are then tightly rolled into a small tube (less than the thickness of your finger) sealed and made moisture proof by a method of our own devising, and handed on when a suitable opportunity presents itself.
³¹

However they did it—by concealment, bribery, or flattery—the information that the
Chronicle
managed to extract from the camps remains significant today. At the time of the writing of this book, post-Stalinist MVD and KGB files remain largely closed to researchers. Thanks to the
Chronicle
, however, to other samizdat and human rights publications, and to the many, many memoirs which describe the camps of the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct a consistent picture of what life in the Soviet camps was like in the years after Stalin.

“Today’s camps for political prisoners are just as horrific as in Stalin’s time. A few things are better, a few things are worse . . .”

So began Anatoly Marchenko’s memoir of his years in prison, a document which, when it first began to circulate in Moscow in the late 1960s, deeply shocked the city’s intelligentsia, who believed the Soviet labor camps had closed for good. The working-class son of illiterate parents, Marchenko’s first prison conviction was for hooliganism. His second conviction was for treason: he had tried to escape the Soviet Union by crossing the border into Iran. He was condemned to serve his political term in Dubravlag, Mordovia, one of two notorious, strict-regime political camps.