Tamizdat, Sept 1975 (37.17)

<<No 37 : 30 September 1975>>

Tamizdat is an acronym meaning ‘published there’. Usually it designates a samizdat work which has been sent abroad and published ‘there’, i.e. in the West, before returning ‘illicitly’ to its country of origin.

SEVEN ENTRIES

[1]

KHRONIKA PRESS

The ‘Chronicle’ publishing house (New York)

has published

issues 13, 14 and 15 of A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR (CHR, in English) and
issues 33-35 of A Chronicle of Current Events (in Russian).

It has also printed

A Collection of Human Rights Conventions Ratified by the Soviet Union;
In Defence of Andrei Tverdokhlebov (in English).
a new book by A. D. Sakharov (next), dated June 1975.

[2]

Andrei Sakharov

My Country and the World (1975, 80 pp).

“Today I feel the necessity of returning to the theme of my earlier work”

writes the author in his introduction — he has in mind the book he wrote in June 1968, Progress, Co-existence and Intellectual Freedom, CCE 5.1 (6) —

“but I have concentrated not on optimistic futurology’, i.e. on the dream, but on the dangers, errors and dramatic events of today, on everything that stands between the dream and reality.”

The new book is about:

1. Soviet society

Many of the illusions of the Western intelligentsia can be explained precisely by their insufficient understanding of what lies behind its facade, by their failure to understand the potential dangers of Soviet totalitarianism; ultimately this also explains the amazing miscalculations and failures of Western policy, which has yielded, without a fight, in one area after another to its partner in detente.

2. The free choice of one’s country of residence

This important right is of great social significance as a guarantee of many other basic human rights, and also as a guarantee of international trust and the existence of an open society. The events resulting from the amendment to the trade bill passed by the U S Congress have reflected the attitudes of the socialist and Western worlds to this problem, their tactics, principles and disposition of forces. They have revealed the fragmented, disorganized and uninformed state of the West. I hope that the future will also show the inner strength of the West and its ability to learn from its difficulties.

Defending the freedom to choose the country one lives in constitutes a kind of experimental model or testing area, which will determine the entire nature of détente.

3. Problems of disarmament

Saving mankind from the threat of thermonuclear destruction is undoubtedly the first priority among the tasks ahead, but this task cannot be separated from other political, economic, humanitarian and moral problems, above all — from the problems of international trust and ‘openness’ in society, from the need to overcome the fragmentation of the West. A real solution of the disarmament problem must include; (a) a complete control system, including inspections; (b) a reduction of armaments to an equal level, which must be a sufficiently low level (this applies both to the negotiations on limitation of strategic weapons by the superpowers, and to Regional negotiations); (c) the elimination of factors promoting the arms race; (d) the elimination of factors leading to strategic Instability.

4. Events in Indo-China and the Near East

None of us, it seems, are yet in a position to assess the significance and scale of the tragedy which has occurred in Indo-China. However, this tragedy was undoubtedly made possible, to a considerable extent, by the blindness of the whole world to the aims and methods of the forces which stood behind the young men thrown into the fire of war. It is extremely important not to let this lesson be in vain. The duty of honourable people throughout the world is to help refugees and children orphaned by the war in every way and not to allow a new betrayal like that of the ‘displaced persons’ 30 years ago.

5. The liberal intelligentsia in the West, its illusions and responsibility

In spite of the many dangerous misconceptions which are widespread among them, I believe that the inner honesty, reason and altruism characteristic of this influential and most active section of Western society will prevail.

Conclusion.

The world needs demilitarization, national altruism, and internationalism, free exchange of information, and free movement of people, openness, and international support for social and civil human rights. The countries of the Third World should receive aid from all sides and should, from their own side, fully accept their share of responsibility for the world’s future, pay more attention to the development of material production and cease to speculate in oil.

All these are indispensable conditions for overcoming the fragmentation of mankind, saving it from the danger of thermo-nuclear war, famine, ecological disaster and dehumanization; these are the conditions that must be met in order to avert the dangers of scientific-technical progress and to use it for the good of all.

[3]

YMCA PRESS (Paris)

Recent publications

YMCA Press has printed an essay collection Live not by Lies;
It has published a booklet “Two Press Conferences” about the essay collection From Under the Rubble (CCE 34.20-2).

The booklet contains materials from the press conference organized in Moscow on 14 November 1974 by Mikhail Agursky, Yevgeny Barabanov, Vadim Borisov and Igor Shafarevich, and from the press conference held in Zurich on 16 November 1974 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

3. YMCA Press has published Our Hope: Homilies (CCE 32.20), a collection of talks by Dmitry Dudko.

Besides the talks themselves, the volume contains a declaration and a petition by Father Dmitry, appeals on his behalf, and an article by Anatoly Krasnov-Levitin, “Father Dmitry Dudko”.

4. YMCA Press has issued The All-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of the People.

A collection of all the materials relating to the ASCULP (or ‘VSKhSON case’ ; CCE 1.6) and the later fate of the group’s members (CCE 19.4).

YMCA Press has published two new books by A. Solzhenitsyn.

[1] Alexander Solzhenitsyn,The Calf and the Oak: Essays on literary life (1975, 632 pp.).

This book, written between 1967 and 1974, describes events connected with the author’s creative work in the years 1965-1974, up to his forcible expulsion from the USSR.

The CHRONICLE is of the opinion that the picture that the author paints of certain of his fellow countrymen (for example Valery Chalidze) is not accurate.

[2] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Prussian Nights (1974, 64 pp).

This long poem is obviously inspired by the author’s personal experience as a wartime participant in battles in East Prussia.

[4]

Robert Conquest

The Great Terror (1974, 1,064 pp).

Formerly extracts of this book, which tells of the years of the Stalinist terror, circulated in samizdat under the title “The Mighty Terror”.

Now a Russian translation by Leonid Vladimirov has come out in Italy. The book’s author says, in a foreword to the Russian edition: “I feel that this chronicle of events will convince those who survived the Terror that their sufferings have not been forgotten or erased from the memory of mankind.”

[5]

KONTINENT, 1-4

In Paris four issues of the journal Kontinent have now appeared. The editor of issues 3 and 4 is Vladimir Maximov.

[6]

20TH CENTURY

The journal Twentieth Century has started to come out in England.

The editor and compiler is Roy Medvedev (in Moscow), The journal’s secretary is Raisa Lert (CCE 34.20-1 [14]). The journal publishes articles by Soviet authors in English. Four issues have already appeared.

[7]

Natalya Reshetovskaya

Sanya: My Life with Alexander Solzhenitsyn (284 pp.).

The above-mentioned book has appeared in the USA in an English translation. On 1 August 1975 The International Herald Tribune published a review by Susan Jacoby, who lived in Moscow in 1969-1971. The review states [¹]

“These memoirs can only be regarded as a deliberate attempt by the Soviet authorities to compromise the character and works of a great writer who has already been deported abroad by these authorities. Sanya [²] has the dubious distinction of being both a libellous and a boring book and cannot be understood without a good knowledge of Soviet literary politics.

“The author of Sanya, Natalya Reshetovskaya, was Solzhenitsyn’s first wife.

“They married in 1940. They lived together for only one year before being separated — first by the war, then by Solzhenitsyn’s imprisonment in a Stalinist labour camp. Sometime later Reshetovskaya divorced her husband and married another man; however, in 1956 she was reunited with her first husband.

“In 1973 Reshetovskaya and Solzhenitsyn were divorced after a bitter legal battle which dragged on for three-and-a-half years. Immediately afterwards Solzhenitsyn married Natalya Svetlova who by this time had already borne him two children.

“It would be unfair to Reshetovskaya to describe this book as the hysterical ramblings of an abandoned wife as there is no evidence that Reshetovskaya wrote the book in the form in which it was published.

“There are some differences between Sanya and the extracts from Reshetovskaya’s memoirs which appeared in the Soviet Union in the underground samizdat journal Veche.

References to The Gulag Archipelago appear so persistently in the pages of Sanya that one’s suspicions are aroused; this book could have been the main reason why the Soviet authorities arranged the publication of Reshetovskaya ‘s memoirs …”