A Narrowing of My Thesis

To narrow down my thesis, I find myself going back to where I started this project, with The Chronicle of Current Events. [1] The Chronicle was an underground newspaper published by a select group of dissidents in the late sixties and early seventies.  When I sat down to do this assignment earlier in the week, I panicked. I was going through my notes and it seemed to be a jumble of odd anecdotes about newspapers, journalists, Decembrists and radio. There was no sort of overarching idea.

That was until I found my notes on The Thaw Generation, written by Ludmilla Alexeyeva and translated by Paul Goldberg[2]. Alexeya’s book is her memoir of her years as a leader in the dissident movement; in particular, she focuses on the years she spent as an editor of the Chronicle. Looking at it, I realized everything I’ve been reading connects back to The Chronicle, at least in a tangential way. So my narrowed topic is: the reporting and dissemination of The Chronicle as a case study for how information was shared by dissidents in the Soviet Union.

Here’s how I see it shaping up, so far:

·      How The Chronicle came about-The context of The Chronicle is a fascinating story. The concern with openness and transparency began earnestly among dissidents after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech and the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich[3]. But the samizdat movement began in earnest after the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, and the subsequent publication of Ginzberg’s The White Book[4].

·      How an underground newspaper gathers news- This is one of the things that initially attracted to me to this topic. I spent the summer working at a newspaper and have a decent feel on traditional reporting. I didn’t have a sense of how to report a story when it was dangerous to get caught with notes or interview the people stories were on. The Chronicle used a network of dissidents spreading information back and forth to each other in person.

·      How to publish an underground newspaper in the USSR-This is where history of samizdat publishing comes in. Dissidents typed up carbon copies and passed them around. It’s impossible to estimate how many copies of The Chronicle were in circulation for this reason.

·      How/Why The Chronicle stories were broadcast on Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Part of the reason The Chronicle was so influential in the USSR was that its articles were broadcast in. Dissidents were savvy about getting in touch with foreign broadcasters and journalists to bring their stories abroad.

·      How/Why The Chronicle  was published in the United States? How did Reddaway’s Uncensored Russia come to be? The Chronicle and tons of other samizdat was smuggled to the States and published here.

This is still somewhat of a jumble. The way I’m looking at it is the process story of how samizdat, using The Chronicle, as a case study came to be an influential part of the dissident movement.

I still don’t have a thesis for my thesis, per se, but everything I’ve been looking at does connect to the story of The Chronicle.

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[1] Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia: protest and dissent in the Soviet Union: the unofficial Moscow journal, a Chronicle of current events (New York: American Heritage Press), 1972.

[2] Alexeyeva, Ludmilla and Paul Goldberg, trans. The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), 1993.

[3] Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2005.

[4]Hayward, Max, trans, On Trial: The Soviet State versus “Abram Tertz” and “Nikolai Arzha,” (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers), 1966.