FIVE ENTRIES
[1]
A. D. Sakharov
Peace, Progress and Human Rights (1 December 1975, 15 pp.)
The text of a lecture prepared for the Nobel Prize ceremony (and read by Yelena Bonner on 11 December in Oslo).
‘Peace, progress and human rights — these three aims are inseparably linked, and we cannot achieve one of them by any means while we neglect the others. This is the most important thought that I want to express in this lecture …
‘In this way I defend the thesis of the primary and decisive meaning of civil and political rights in the formation of the fate of humanity. This point of view differs substantially from widely held Marxist, and also technocratic concepts, according to which it is material factors and social and economic factors which have decisive importance.’
*
[2]
Anatoly Marchenko & M. Tarusevich
‘There is a Third Way’ [1] (August 1975-January 1976, 30 pp.)
Another of the “unofficial assessments of the present situation from inside the Soviet Union”. The work is addressed basically to the Western public and is an analysis of the internal and external policy of the Soviet State throughout the whole period of its existence.
The authors show that “it is not law, nor love of peace, nor humanity, nor ethical principles which guide the internal and external policy of the USSR. The CPSU takes into account only one argument: power”. Therefore, the authors consider the path of agreements and compromises by which the West seeks deliverance from the threat of atomic war with the USSR to be not only ineffective, but dangerous.
They think that, apart from war and endless compromise, there is a ‘third way’ moral opposition to violence.
“This position is suitable both for individual people and for associations, and for whole States. The task of the governments and the public of these States consists in not limiting their moral opposition to declarations, but in ensuring that it determines their political actions and that it is reliably defended from suppression by force of arms.”
*
[3]
G. Polyakov
“Reading Solzhenitsyn” (12 pp.)
A critical analysis of the national-religious and socio-political ideas contained in the “Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union” (and partly also in the book The Calf and the Oak) and in the articles of Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich in the anthology From Under the Rubble.
The author takes exception to views which hold that a nationalistic world-view is an indubitably fruitful motive force in history: to the attribution of certain qualities to whole nations and associations, and not to their particular representatives. Polyakov also has “doubts about the argument concerning the possible advantages (to Russia) of an authoritarian system”. He does not think that authoritarianism can be clearly distinguished from totalitarianism.
The author perceives in these views of Solzhenitsyn and those who think like him unavoidable contradictions with the ‘moral position’ and the ‘logic of the rejection of tyranny’ depicted in Solzhenitsyn’s fictional works and in The Gulag Archipelago. He thinks that the basic reason for the contradictions is “the theoretical premise common to almost all Soviet dissidents; the firm conviction that a change in the existing system must be only a peaceful, evolutionary and reformist one”, the non-acceptance of ‘all the revolutions in history’.
“We do not know what awaits our country in the future, but it would be extremely unjust to the Russian people (and also to the other nations in Russia) to consider it capable only of ‘senseless and merciless mutiny’ [2]. And it would be even more erroneous to yield out of fear of such a mutiny to a dictatorship whose true face, in essence still unchanged, has been exposed by A. Solzhenitsyn better than by anyone else.”
*
[4]
L. A. Gendin
“Revenge”
Kishinyov-Moscow: November 1974-January 1975 (20 pp.)
The author is an active participant in the movement for emigration to Israel. For six years he has been unable to receive permission to emigrate. During the past two years he has spent 112 days behind prison bars.
In his autobiographical story he describes his journey to Kishinyov to gather information about the situation of Jewish ‘refuseniks’, his arrest, and his escape from his guards.
*
[5]
A. Khorugvin
“A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: ‘What is to be Done?’” (29 January 1975, 2 pp.)
A description of a gathering of Moscow poets on 28 January 1975, and mainly of a speech by Alexei Markov:
“This came down to the fact that editors and those standing behind their backs (in the Soviet Union one cannot speak openly about the existence of Party censorship) had usurped all spiritual power into their own hands.”
=========================================
NOTES
- Published in Kontinent (Paris), 1976, No. 9.
↩︎ - A famous quоtation from Pushkin: «русский бунт. Бессмысленный и беспощадный» (The Captain’s Daughter).
↩︎
==========================
A Chronicle of Current Events 