<< No. 43 : 31 December 1976 >>

FIVE ENTRIES

(Periodicals, 3-5)

[1]

Raïssa Lert

“A Frank Conversation” (39 pages)

The author of this article, an old Party member, wants to interpret the twenty years that have passed since the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU (1956), from the point of view of someone who believes in the possibility of communism with a human face.

She speaks of the hopes and illusions which sprang up among part of the intelligentsia immediately after the Twentieth Congress. “In all areas of culture, art and literature an irresistible, irreversible process of developing self-awareness was going on.” However, with regard to the authorities themselves “in principle nothing changed — neither when Khrushchev exposed Stalin, nor when Khrushchev was removed in October 1964”. The fall of Khrushchev coincided with the beginning of ‘creeping re-Stalinization’. The author considers the main reason for this was the inability of the upper echelons to rule by different, non-Stalinist methods.

The intelligentsia sensed the ‘danger in the air’. The author here attributes great significance to the samizdat work by Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (CCE 6.8 [1]; one of the first ideological blows against Stalinism) and to Solzhenitsyn’s books.

Lert mentions such milestones as (1) the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel in 1966: this case “became perhaps the first significant catalyst of public opinion” and the protests against the sentence marked the beginning of dissident activity; and (2) the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The reaction to the wave of repression “on the part of dissidents was the publication of the typewritten compilations called A Chronicle of Current Events, which reported these acts of repression.”

Only the ideological and punitive agencies are to blame, asserts the author, for the fact that many people who began their activities favouring the creation of a real socialist society, later became opponents of socialism as such. She considers that freedom of opinion, including both non-Marxist and non-socialist opinion, is in the interest of a socialist society, and that the existence of a political opposition would not weaken but strengthen socialism.

The author feels that “the administrative victory of Stalinism” is accompanied by “clear signs of its moral defeat”. The chief sign of this is the fact that today “public opinion does not coincide with the official viewpoint”. The dissidents today do not operate in a vacuum:

“Hundreds, thousands, of the most ordinary people, who have never protested against anything, in the depths of their hearts do not believe the newspapers’ libels about dissidents”.

“the criticism voiced openly by a small number of dissenters reflects the thoughts, opinions, feelings and state of mind of a significant number of Soviet citizens who sympathize with them — at present passively. That is worth something. And that is one of the most important results of these twenty years”.

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[2]

Tatyana Khodorovich and Malva Landa

“Prison Visits”, December 1976 (5 pages)

a by-product of investigating the case of Svyatoslav Karavansky

In 1966 Sviatoslav Josyfovych KARAVANSKY was allowed a visit from his wife N. A. Strokatova (Ukr. Strokata) which lasted 24 hours. Since then, Karavansky has been deprived of visits from his wife on various pretexts, or the visits have been limited to almost symbolic duration (in 1967-1971 they had four meetings of 30 minutes and one that lasted an hour).

The period when Strokata herself was serving a term in the camps (1971-1975) was especially difficult.

Although the law does not forbid meetings between imprisoned relatives, Khodorovich and Landa write that “a visit is not mentioned in the law as a reason for transfer”. Karavansky went on hunger-strike for 98 days, trying to exercise his right to a visit, while at the same time his wife was being deprived of her right, e.g., “for not fulfilling the work norm” (Strokata was ill all this time, the authors point out, and spent the last part of her sentence in a cancer hospital).

Since her release N. A. Strokata has been living under surveillance and finding great difficulty in getting permission to visit the camp (CCE 39.13 [12]). Landa and Khodorovich write:

“On 6 February 1976 she was informed that her husband did not deserve a visit, but that the camp administration, guided by ‘humane considerations’, would allow Karavansky a visit lasting 24 hours.

“A 24-hour visit in 1966. A 24-hour visit in 1976. What humanism!”

The authors report that Lieutenant-Colonel Drotenko, who heads the KGB in the Mordovian camp system, recently forbade Karavansky to include verses in his letters to his wife. Karavansky responded by going on hunger-strike. It is possible he may be deprived of visits again.

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PERIODICALS (3-5)

[3]

VESTNIK ISTINY, 1

“Messenger of Truth”, No. 1 (53), 1976.

This quarterly, ‘A spiritual and moral journal’ produced by the Council of Evangelical Christian and Baptist Churches, is a successor to the journal Vestnik Spaseniya (“Messenger of Salvation”) which began to come out in 1963. The change in the title marks the change from hectographic to typographic printing methods and is more suited to the journal’s contents, in the opinion of the editors.

The journal is 32 pages long. It has a ‘spiritual and moral section’, a section ‘Pray for them’ (about imprisoned members of the Council of ECB Churches: Georgy P. Vins, Nikolai G. Baturin and Pyotr V. Rumachik), and sections on ‘The Christian family’ and ‘Poetry’.

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[4]

37 (1-6)

[“Thirty-Seven”, April-November 1976, Leningrad]

A journal concerned with literature, criticism, religion and philosophy.

The editorial board consists of Victor Krivulin, Tatyana Goricheva, Lev Rudkevich and N. Kononova. The journal comes out once a month in Leningrad, except (according to Petersburg tradition) in July and August. Each issue is about 150 typewritten pages long.

The journal’s title is taken from the number of the apartment of one of the editors, an apartment in which philosophical and religious seminars, poetry evenings and discussions of art exhibitions have taken place for a number of years. This subject matter has now been transferred to the pages of the journal.

*

Numbers 1-3 open with “Gospel dialogues” by Goricheva and Krivulin.

The philosophy section includes the following articles: ‘The teacher and his pupils’ by B. Ivanov, ‘An observer’s view of the spiritual in art’ by I. Suitsidov (No. 2), and ‘Hegel and existential philosophy’ by B. Glebov (No. 5). The journal is publishing, seemingly for the first time, translations of works by Kierkegaard (No. 1), Heidegger (Nos. 2, 3 & 5), Shestov (from French, No. 5), and Krishnamurti (No. 6).

Literature is represented by poetry (Yelena Shvarts, Krivulin, Oleg Okhapkin, Genrikh Sapgir, Boris Kupriyanov, Alexander Mironov and Alexander Ozhiganov), and prose (G. Solgov, Vadim Nechayev, F. Chirkov, V. Danin, L. Kozyreva and N. Konyayev).

There is a section for the publication of older works: Pavel Florensky (No. 2), Kazimir Malevich (No. 3), Boris Pasternak (No. 4) and Alexander Lyubishchev (No. 4), and the memoirs of A. G. Romm about Marc Chagall.

These articles appear: V. Alexeyev, “The poet and registration” (No. 1); Lev Rudkevich, “Growth and Creativity” (No. 2); and “On faith: an ethological study” (No. 3). No. 6 publishes an account of a debate on “Christianity and ethics”.

A chronicle of “Unofficial cultural life” appears regularly.

The journal has printed obituaries on the deaths of Ludmila Boblyak, Yevgeny Rukhin and Martin Heidegger.

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[5]

ARCHIVE, 1 & 2

Nos. 1 and 2 (1976)

The editors Vadim Nechayev, a litterateur, and Marina Nedrobova, a physicist, consider the Archive to be not a journal but a book. Its volumes will appear in connection with events of special cultural significance. The book is published with illustrations.

The first issue includes assessments of the exhibitions of unofficial artists which took place in autumn 1975 in Moscow (at VDNKh, the “Exhibition of Economic Achievements”, CCE 32.13 [17]) and in Leningrad, at the Nevsky House of Culture from various viewpoints: “Cultural movement or Happening?”, “The left-wing triumph of VDNKh (the All-Union Exhibition of Economic Achievements)” and “Art and the Spirit”.

The second issue includes a treatise on art by A. Basin, essays on the ‘Alef’ group of artists by Vadim Nechayev and Marina Nedrobova, poems by Roald Mandelstam and philosophical prose by Anri Volokhonsky.

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