Uncensored Russia Analysis

            Peter Reddaway’s Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union[1], is a compilation of The Chronicle of Current Events, a dissident underground newspaper published in the Soviet Union. Reddaway translated and published the first twenty-one issues of The Chronicle, distributed in the USSR between in 1968 and 1971. Rather than print whole issues, Reddaway sorted segments of each issue into various topics. For example, there are sections devoted to the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel and the Czech Invasion.

            Uncensored Russia, and The Chronicle, is the core of my thesis, so this document is obviously incredibly important to where I’m going. I’ve decided to focus in certain sections of it. It’s too big of a source to try to tackle the whole thing well.

I’m going to look closely at the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, two Soviet writers sent to prison camps for publishing their texts abroad. The case and circumstances surrounding it are frequently credited for beginning the dissident movement.  I’ll also be focusing on the aftermath of the trial, especially the publication of Alexander Ginzburg’s White Book, a transcript of the court proceedings and Ginzburgs’s subsequent arrest and trial. Finally, I’ll be examining The Chronicle’s reaction to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the trials of those who demonstrated against it.

Reddaway writes of these events, “"Symptoms of the new conditions were that serious criticism of STalin was now forbidden, that two secret police generals were appointed to sit on the Supreme Couty, and that in 1966 Sinyavsky and Daniel recieved savage sentences of seven and five years' hard labour. This trial--and even more so that of Galanskov and Ginzburg in January 1968--gave an immense stimulus to unofficial literary life, provoking mass protests and turning people's attention in a remarkable degree towards politics (Reddaway, 19)."

  I’ve chosen these events because they were turning points in the dissident movement and directly connect to The Chronicle’s founders. Daniel was married to Larisa Bogoraz, a distributor of the paper. Sinyavsky and Ginzburg were close friends of theirs. The founding editor of The Chronicle, Natasha Gorbanevskaya, was arrested after protesting the Czech invasion.

Reexamining The Chronicle reminded me just how impressive its breadth was. For a newspaper that relied on a network of underground newsgathering, and luck, it was able to cover the caucuses, prison camps and hospitals extensively.

Reddaway’s introduction is incredibly helpful for context, as well as analyzing the editorial bias of the Chronicle and explaining how it’s editors evaded arrest. The Chronicle’s editors insisted their paper was legal as it offered no commentary. It simply reported events as they happened.

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[1] Reddaway, Peter, trans. Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union: The Unofficial Moscow Journal, a Chronicle of Current Events. American Heritage Press, 1972.