Monday, October 31, 2011

Conversations in Exile-Gorbanevskaya


Glad, John Ed. Conversations in Exile. Translated by Richard and Joanna Robin. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993.

NG
'88

"'Latent schizophrenia'"-223

"not ruled" out- meant she had it

"In 1969 I think all of Moscow knew that I was publishing the Chronicle. The only question was when I would be arrested. Since I knew I would be arrested, all I had to do was find a successor. But that turned out to be more difficult than I imagined. One idea was to hand it over to Galya Gabai, but her apartment was constantly being searched. Once she took some material for the Chronicle home, and her mother was forced to throw it into a pot of soup to keep it out of the hands of the KGB. That was in 1969. After that Galya said she wouldn't be able to take over for me. I started work on it again, and after a while I was arrested." (G, 226)

"I was arrested on Wednesday, December 24, 1969. I had found someone who was thinking over the Chronicle, and he was supposed to come over that night to see how the publication was put together. Material for the eleventh edition, which was supposed to come out in a week, was in my desk. That day my apartment was searched. In the pocket of my winter coat I had notes on a hunger strike in the camps from an interview with the wife of a political prisoner. So much material was found during the search that they stopped filling out that statement, stuffed the rest of the papers into a folder, sealed it, and said that the statement would be completed in my presence and said that the statement would be completed in my presence and in the presence of other witnesses. That never happened, and I had the impression that the envelope never left my desk. Furthermore, I put on a jacket instead of my winter coat and indicated with my eyes that the coat, which had not been searched, should be taken care of.  All that material was left in the apartment and wound up in the hands of those who continued to publish the Chronicle after I was arrested. the eleventh edition came out on time with a lead article about my arrest. I never learned what happened to the envelope, whether it was left untouched or if it had just seemed that way to me. The material had been collected by all sorts of people, all with different handwriting. If it had fallen into the hands of the KGB, it would have provided evidence against many people." (G, 227)

didn't need many copies for radio-228

"I would get seven copies on fairly thin paper. Later we started getting twenty copies on very thing paper, although the last couple of copies were almost completely illegible. Each of these was then retyped several times in Moscow and other cities. When things got more repressive, copying became more difficult. But even so, we would get out several hundred copies of each issue.

Another method was to photograph the pages and print them on photo paper. We got more copies that way, but they came out very thick. All the same, it was a popular, if expensive method. It was hard to find the proper film and paper. After prison I used to buy photo paper in Leningrad, where it was easier to get, and bring it to Moscow." (G, 228)


Conversations in Exile- Sinyavsky

Glad, John Ed. Conversations in Exile. Translated by Richard and Joanna Robin. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993.

Conducted 1983

Interview w/ Sinyavsky

how discovered his identity

AS: "Keep in mind that we first started sending manuscripts to the West in 1956. They were published in 1959. That wasn't our fault. The person who smuggled out the manuscripts and had them published help them up so as to first clear the way for Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago." 


"Helene Zamoiskaya, an old French friend, whom I had met back in the years I was a student. I met her in 1947 at Moscow State University. And we're still friends to this day.

After it was published the KGB began an investigation, and I was given some idea as to their progress. For instance, I learned that the Soviet ambassador to France asked the publisher where he got the material, who gave it to him, how it was gotten out, and so on and so on. So they were on the lookout.

...

It was the courier they had to identity. They had to find hte route being used. There were attempts to bribe some foreigners, particularly French and American, to establish the route. They had to establish the courier's contacts in Russia, and usually the contacts of a person like that are limited to a small at Mosxow State University. The rest was easy. Our rooms were bugged, Daniel's and mine, for at least six months and I think it was more like nine months." (G, 152)

Post- arrest:

"I think too that in a situation like this it's important to be true to yourself. And for me it would have been a lie to admit some sort of guilt for art. Moreover (I learned thins only later) ours was the first public political trial--with the possible exception of the Penkovsky trial--since the Stalin era. So you can see, deep down in my consciousness were the show trials of the thirties where the accused were always repented. And I loathed all of that. So it would been stupid if I had repented. It would have been stupid if I had repented. It would have been unnatural.

What this is natural. I really am a proponent of pure art. Even if I have political motives, I don't believe you can try a writer for that. In the interrogations everything was reduced to long and sometimes ludicrous theoretical arguments. I might have read a short story to someone. That counted as agitation and propaganda, as "distribution" of material. (G, 155)

Radio in prison:

"And they all knew about me before I arrived. They practically lifted me up onto their shoulders! They realize that the more a person is criticized in the Soviet press, the better a person he must be. Because the papers said that I wasn't remorseful, the other prisoners realized that I wasn't an informer or provocateur. They were impressed that I was writer. Of course, they had never read any of my books. They probably would have been horrified if they had. But a writer who was imprisoned because of his books must have been writing the truth. So they treated me very well. " (G, 157)

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Hopkins, Vol. 7 "Unknown, Unsung"

Bukovsky on the typewriter- he would erect a monument to it  (137)

"First recall that all printing presses, duplicating machines, and photocopiers in the Soviet Union are state-owned and -controlled. That is, the KGB oversees their use. There are known cases of dissident groups establishing illegal underground presses, but these have been rare. Moreover, officially printed material in the Soviet Union is censored by the government agency Glavit. There is, in short, no conceivable, practical way for a Soviet citizens' group to mass-produce thousands or tens of thousands of copies of a newspaper, periodical or newsletter without state permission."

"The Chronicle's typists, however, never graduated to international celebrity rank. There are reliable reports of several women sentenced to labor camps for typing the Chronicle and of others interrogated. For the most part, the names of those who did produce the Chronicle-and most of them have been women-have disappeared in the anonymous mass that forms the private Soviet world." (H, 139)

"THe first problem a staffer faced in producing an issue was obtaining a typewrite. In the early 1960s, typewriters for private purchase were scarce in the Soviet Union, as were many consumer good. Even as production of Soviet models and foreign imports later increased, however, type-writers could leave a trail for the KGB to follow. Some times a purchaser of a new or used machine would be required to give a name and address. Moreover, it was believed among Soviet dissidents that the KGB routinely took samples of type imprints from each machine. Typed samizdat would be matched against these samples to incriminate the writer."

Ludmilla- find in THaw generation, inherited them to friends, give when emigree

"There is an unmistakable attachment of Chronicle workers to the typewriters. It is borne out by the fact that they can still recall in interviews precisely the manufacture of their typewrites, the price, and where the machines were purchased.' (H,140)

"THe constant noise of the machine carried through thin walls of Soviet apartments, possibly spurring a hostile or suspicious neighbor to inform the KGB. KBG-implanted listening devices in apartments could pick up continuous typewriter sounds. THe prudent choice, then was, to type the Chronicle in apartments not readily identified by the KGB as those of dissidents or their friends. Using such apartments meant, however, carrying a 20-pound typewriter hidden in a satchel from one's home to another address, pushing onto crowded buses or the subway, and then trudging blocks with heavy load to the final destination." (H, 140)

Galina Salova-worker:

"'I would lookt at people after they had put out an issue of the Chronicle,' she remembers. 'Their eyes were red. They obviously had had now sleep

-work at "fever pitch

-single spaced
6 or 12 carbon copies with original

"It was physically hard work. Typists would pound keys of old manual typewriters, trying to give clarity to carbon copies. THere was a premium on accuracy, for mistakes usually were not erased, but simply 'x-ed' out. So typing for the Chronicle meant tense, exhausting hours closeted in a safe apartment, feeling anxiety rise as fatigue set in and wondering if the KGB was preparing a search. " (H, 140-141)

Salova interview:

"It was difficult to find thin paper and carbons. You had to buy it at special stores. And people who worked there watched who bought the paper. A woman friend of mine found a professional typist to buy the paper, since she had reason to do so because of her work. How did we find the paper? Someone would call and tell me that there is carbon paper at such and such a store. I'd tell friend go buy what they could. You could only buy a limited amount-say 50 or 100 pieces.

...I was always worried when the Chronicle was being retyped.

For one thing there was the problem of getting a Chronicle copy for retyping..We would not talk out loud about it-apartments were monitored. We'd write notes to each other if we had to exchange information.

If we arranged to meet, say, in the subway to pass the Chronicle, the person might give me a book. Inside would be a copy of the Chronicle. " (H, 143)

hired prof typers sometimes

"A representative issue, done by a profession typist at 20 kopeks a page (100 kopecks to the ruble) would total about 20 rubles. Even that price was half the rate for professional work. But 20 rubles amounts to 10 to 15 percent of a monthly wage. Many of those reproducing the Chronicle have had no other money to live on aside from their pay. They could not always accept the extra financial burden of the Chronicle. The logical choice for some, then, was to sell it. Prices  per copy varied. Figures of 2 to 5 rubles a Chronicle copy are mentioned. Some people sold other samizdat-reproduction of Solzhenitsyn's novels, for example--to help subsidize production of the Chronicle. Others accepted contributions from friends and sympathizers. Still others simply paid from their own pockets for reproduction of Chronicle issues, necessarily giving up something for themselves."

145: photo copying

"The Chronicle has national circulation in the Soviet Union since its inception. Once distributed only in Moscow, then in LEningrad and Kiev, the Chronicle now reaches most major cities. It is believed the Chronicle routinely has been distributed to these Soviet cities in large numbers: Leningrad, Vilnius, Riga, and perhaps Tallin in the Baltic states region; Kiev, Odessa, Kishinev, Kharkov, and Everan in the souther and southwestern regions; and Novosbirsk, Sverdlovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Volograd, Tomsk, and Tashkent in the Soviet Siberian and central Asian areas. The Chronicle has found its way elsewhere, to remote Siberian villages to political prisoners in exile, for example. But given the reproduction and distribution system, there is no reliable method to document where each issue of the Chronicle moves or how many copies. (H,148)

The total circulation of the Chronicle generally is estimated in the thousands, not many in a country of 270 million people. In successive reproductions by typerwriter of photocopying, a single Chronicle number might total between 1,000 and 10,000 individual copies. Each number might, in fact, vary in total copies, depending, for example on the extent of KGB harassment at the rime or availability of paper. Multiply by ten for the number of readers per issue and the total reading audience in the Soviet Union of a Chronicle issue might be 10,000 to 100,000. These are only approximations. The truth is no one really knows wither the readership or the circulation of the Chronicle." (H, 148)

"The Chronicle's audience has been magnified, however, by foreign radiobroadcasts. Especially in the earlier years, when the Chronicle was almost the sole source of uncensored and reliable news of political affairs in the Soviet Union, the foreign press corps routinely extracted from the Chronicle. In turn, Radio Liberty, Voice of America, BBC, Deutsche Welle, and other foreign radio broadcast the information back to the Soviet Union in Russian-language programs. Radio Liberty, the American-financed radio station transmitting in Russian and other languages of the Soviet Union, eventually broadcast whole issues of the Chronicle. The programs have been recorded in the Soviet Union for transcription and samizdat circulation. Thus, the entire state Glavit censorshop system has veen circumvented and Chronicle reports have reached millions of Soviet listeners." (H, 149)

Several conditional facts must be kept in mind in assessing the Chronicle's network. First, Soviet authorities reinstituted jamming of foreign radiobroadcasts in August 1968, coincident with the invasion of Czechoslavakia. The jamming was not halted until 1973, the year Brezhnev leadership searched for a conciliatory gesture to spur the Helinski agreement negotiations." (H, 149)

"An essential element in the Chronicle's network has been the foreign press corps in Moscow, first and foremost the American correspondents. Soviet dissidents interviewed about the Chronicle often mention individual reporters who took special interest in the struggle between Soviet authorities and dissidents. To mention some is to risk slighting other correspondents who were equally involved, but these names come up: George Krimsky and Roger Leddington of the Associated Press; Ray Anderson, Hendrick Smith and Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post; James Yuenger and Frank Starr of the Chicago Tribune; Robert Toth of the Los Angeles Times; and Jay Alexbank and Alfred Friend, Jr. of Newsweek.... (H,149)

"Soviet authorities recognized the importance of foreign correspondents in the Chronicle and other samizdat information network. Some of the best informed Western reporters were routinely harassed and some were expelled. David Bonovia and George Krimsky, for example, were ordered out of the Soviet Union in the mid-1970s. The KGB interrogated Robert Toth for three days before he was permitted to leave Moscow in 1978. THere was not doubt that their contacts among Soviet dissidents, and their reporting of what Soviet authorities considered highly objectionable information, led to their expulsion." (H, 150)



Hopkins, Vol. 6 "The Network"

"To use the term 'editors' is necessary but imprecise shorthand for discussing those who produce the underground publication. PErsons once involved in final stages of Chronicle issues repeatedly have said in interviews that there really have been no Chronicle "editors" in the larger sense of person who plan and direct Chronicle coverage. "Compiler" seems the more accurate description of Chronicle editors' actual functions, for they usually have had little to say about what information reached them and most frequently have been responsible for assembling what information they did receive into readable, coherent form." (H,119)

"Outside of the small group in Moscow that has provided continuity for overall production responsibility, there has been a larger corps of correspondents, informants, messengers, writers, typists, couriers and distributors without the Chronicle would have remained the narrowly focused brief bulletin it was in 1968. Now a periodical of 100 pages and more per issue, the Chronicle probable ranks in the numbers of people producing it with a large newspaper." -second round

"What would be called the 'news flow' in an American periodical has developed in the Chronicle case with remarkable efficiency. It has improved over the years as the network spread, connecting not only the sources of news but readers and user of Chronicle information both inside the Soviet Union and abroad. The KGB seems to have been unable to halt the Chronicle news flow, and indeed may have decided that the most difficult task in attempts to silence the publication. For Chronicle information moves through successive hands to typed pages in a private world of special and close peripheral relationships. It may be remembered that in the first months of the infant Chronicle, Natalia Gorbanevskaya..."-how to get them info (H,120)

"This system has functioned for years with impressive reliability and accuracy, while also protecting the Chronicle. Even persons who lived in Moscow and knew active dissidents and who themselves were involved in the democratic movement usually did not know who compiled the Chronicle." (H, 120)

"To discuss the organization of the Chronicle is virtually a contradiction in terms. Those who have worked on the Chronicle describe an amorphous, undisciplined process in which participants pass slips of paper with handwritten notes brought from Siberia or carry a few sheets of type-written paper across Moscow to another apartment. Trust in one another and deep commitment to promoting the practice of civil rights nurtured voluntary and self-discipline work on the Chronicle. It has been a system devoid of directives and commands, as well editorial assignments." (H, 121

"News from labor camps also flowed naturally to the Chronicle, as wives and friends of dissidents returned from remote Siberian prisons to pass on information. The Soviet labor camps eventually became something of a seive for information." (H, 121)

Ginzburg interview:

"The basic thing is that there are lots of political prisoners. Each one is sentenced to a certain period of time, so no month passes when someone is not release. NAturally, e can carry a good deal of information from the camps. When you leave the camp you feel like a "stuffed duck," we'd say. For three months before you are scheduled for release,, people are giveing you information to pass on. After I got out, I'd remember things in my sleep and I'd wake up and write them down.

Then you would write down things in the camps and smuggle those out. It's hard, but not impossible. I managed to get a copy of the labor camp rules smuggled out. In 1969, we made a tape recording inside a camp and smuggled that out and Voice of America broadcast it. We thought about smuggling for 24 hours a day." (H 121-122)

Bukobsky interview

"The information comes by devious routes. Some is carried when a fellow is released from the camps. THere would be a contact somewhere along the line after he left. Or you could bribe prison guards so that when you met with relatives, you could pass written information or verbal information. Then the relatives might stop in Moscow and pass on what you said." (H, 122)

"Trials of dissidents are an obvious source of news for the Chronicle. Although ostensible public, the trials usually have been held in courtrooms packed with KGB crowds. But when friends of dissident could argue their way info the courts, they would make careful notes of procedures.  It was risky business, for the notetaker was automatically identified to the KGB and he or she invited arrest of questioning. In later years, friend of dissidents smuggled small tape recorders into courtrooms. From these recordings came the unusual transcripts of trials published by the Chronicle." (H, 123)

123: by mid '70s full proceedings

"Time and again, as Soviet authorities attempted to stage political trials in the form of authentic proceedings, the Chronicle published embarrassing verbatim texts showing judges refusing to hear dissidents' evidence, or prosecutors and investigators distorting facts and of judges handing down sentences against all rational consideration of original charges." (H, 123-124)

127: estimate 20-40 people involved in final stages of an issue
early years just NG

129: flaws

"One can find similar imbalances in the early years of the Chronicle regarding religious affairs, pr the vast Soviet rural population, or workers' grievances, or women's rights. The Chronicle was the child of Moscow intellectuals concerned with rights of speech and press. Successive issues of the Chronicle attracted readers with like attitudes, ready to contribute like information. Grigorenko's special interest in the Crimean Tartars, Alexeyeva's contacts with the Ukranians, and Kovalev's connections with Lithuanians likewise accounted for some earlier editorial themes." (H, 129)

"THe surrogate Chronicles in London, New York, and Munich have become important in their own right as outlets for Soviet internal news. Their circumstances allowed editors leeway in shaping publications, although the Kline-Chalidze Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR or Lyubarsky USSR News Brief found themselves limited, too, by the available channels of information from the Soviet Union. (H,130)

THe Chronicle of Current Events that is translated and printed by Amnesty International has become an unequaled source of photographs of Soviet human rights activists. Smuggled from the Soviet Union and reproduced beginning in the volume containing Chronicle nos. 28-31... (H,130)

News reports that have reached New York and Munich from Moscow have come through many channels. Recall that the Kline-Chalidze Chronicle was started in the spring of 1973, after it seemed that the Moscow Chronicle had been silenced. With that Moscow outlet closed information flowed to New York." (H,130)

Reddaway interview: "We were amazed at the volume of material forwarded to use; it was really enormous, so much so that it was never able to fit all the available material in one issue. THe sources are many: for instance, we have recieved a great deal from the so-called democratic circles, the humanists, as it were, of the Soviet movement for human rights. We have received, and still receiving, a lot of material from labor camps, psychiatric institutions, and from the activists of the Jewish Exodus movement. " (H,130-131)

"This underground stream of documents from the Soviet Union to to Western Europe and the United States began as a trickle in the mid-1960s. THe volume had become so great by 1972 that the Munich-based Radio Liberty assembled enough samizdat to produce four volumes averaging more than 600 pages each. These formed the basis of a samizdat archive, directed initially by Albert Boiter, that grew to tens of thousands of pages of material. In 1973 and 1074, when the New York Chronicle was getting underway, the Radio Liberty Arkhiv Samizdata averaged more than 3500 pages of documents from the Soviet Union each year."(H,131)

"This material was being smuggled or simply carried out of the Soviet Union by Western correspondents, by tourists and diplomats. Some was being sent in diplomatic pouches. The early issues of the Chronicle itself were slipped into the sealed diplomatic mail of the Moscow embassies of Italy, the United STates, France and Canada, although not necessarily with the ambassador's knowledge. Letters sent to Vienna and Helsinki from Moscow successfully carried samizdat. Addressed to these "neutral" capitals, they seemed to pass Soviet surveillance of international mail more readily than letters going else where in Western Europe. " (H, 131)

"There was little risk in these enterprises, and so the samizdat flow surged by the year. At worst, a foreigner carrying samizdat out of the Soviet Union would be searched and the material confiscation...But for every piece of samizdat the KGB found, hundreds of other documents streamed out of the Soviet Union." (H, 131)

"The surrogate Chronicles have been directed to two large audiences. One iabroad, largely in the United States and WEstern Europe, and composed of journalists, government officials, human rights advocates attached to various civic organizations, and scholars. The other audience is the Soviet population itself. Some 2,000 copies of the Russian translation of each issue of the Chronicle of Human Rights in the Soviet Union are printed and most of those are intended for the Soviet Union. In addition, Khronka Press has reprinted Russian copies of the Moscow Chronicle as issues have been recieved in New York. The pressrun has gotten up to as many as 1200 and these too are meant to be smuggled into the Soviet Union." (H, 133)

One Day in the Life

"'You're wrong, pal,' Caesar was saying, and he was trying not to be too hard on him. 'One must say in all objectivity that Eisenstein is a genius. Now isn't Ivan the Terrible a work of genius? The opirchniki dancing in the masks! The scene in the cathedral!'

'All show-off!' K-123 snapped. He was holding his spoon in front of his mouth. 'To much art is no art at all. Like candy instead of bread! And the politics of it is utterly vile--vindication of a one-man tyranny. An insult to the memory of three generations of Russian intellectuals!' (He ate his mush, but there was not taste in his mouth. It was wasted on him.)

'But what other treatment of the subject would have been let through...?'

'Ha! Let through, you say? Then don't call him a genius! Call him a toady, say he carried out orders like a dog. A genius doesn't adapt his treatment to the taste of tyrants!'

Caesar looked around and streched out his hand for the mush, as if it had just come to him out of thin air. He didn't even look at Shukob and went back to his talk.

'But listen! It's not what but how that matters in art.'

Kh-123 jumped up and banged his fist on the table.

'No! Your how can go to hell if it doesn't raise the right feelings in me!'" (Sol, 67)

Saturday, October 29, 2011

In the First Circle

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. In the First Circle. Translated by Harry T. Willetts. New York: Harper Perennial, 2009.

first written '55-'58

in their way to prison camp, intelligentsia, essentially political prisoners

"Swinging the compressed mass of bodies to and fro, the gaily painted orange-and-blue truck swished along the city streets, passed one of the stations, and pulled up at a crossing. A dark red car was  held up by traffic lights at the sam road junction. It belonged to the Moscow correspondent of the newspaper Liberation, who was on his way to a hockey match in the Dynamo stadium. The correspondent read the words on the side of the truck: Myaso/Viande/Fleish/Meat


He had made a mental note of several such trucks seen in various parts of Moscow that day. He took our a notebook and jotted down in dark red ink:

'Every now and then, one encounters on the streets of Moscow food delivery trucks, spick-and-span and impeccably hygenic. There can be no doubt that the capital's food supplies are extremely well organized.'"

(740-741)

Solzhenitsyn Participation and the Lie

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. "Participation and the Lie."I Must Speak Out: The Best of The Voluntaryist. Edited by Carl Warner. 200-202. San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes,  1999.

published in 1975 by Little Brown and Company in Under the Rubble


"Our present system is unique in world history, because over and above its physical and economic constraints, it demands of us total surrender of our souls, continuous and active participation in the general conscious lie."  (Sol, 200)


"The most important part of our freedom, inner freedom, is always subject to our will. If we surrender it to corruption, we do not deserve to be called human."(Sol, 200)

"But let us note that if the absolutely essential task is not political liberation, but the liberation of our souls from participation in the lie forced upon us, then is requires no physical, revolutionary, social, organizational easures, no meetings, strikes trade unions-things fearful for us to even contemplate and from which we quite naturally allow circumstances to dissaude us. No! IT requires from each individual a moral step within his power- no more than that.  200


"Do not lie! Do not take part in the lie~ Do not support the lie!" 200


"It is an invasion of man's moral world, and our straightening up and refusing to lie is also not political, but simply the retrieval of our human dignity." 200

"It simply means: not saying what you don't think, and that includes not whispering, not opening your mouth, not raising your hand, not casting your vote, not feigning a smile, not lending you presence, not standing up, and not cheering." 201

"We all work in different fields and move in different walks of life. THose who work in the humanities and all who are studying find themselves much more profoundly and inextricably involved in lying and participating in the lie- they are fenced about by layer after layer of lies. In the technical science it can be more ingeniously avoided, but even so one cannot excape daily entering some door, attending some meeting, putting one's signature to something or undertaking some obligation which is a cowwardly submission to the lie. The lie surrounds us at work, on our way to work, in our leisure pursuits--in everything we see, hear and read." 201

"It will cost you canceled dissertations, annulled degrees, demotions, dismissals, expulsions, sometimes even deportations. But you will not be cast into flames. Or crushed by a tank. And you will still have food and shelter." 202

"This path is the safest and most accessible of all the paths open to the average man in the street. But it is also most effective! Only we, knowing out system, can imagine what will happen when thousand and tens of thousands of people take this path--how our country will be purified and transformed without shots or bloodshed." 202

"But this path is also the most moral: we shall be commencing this liveration and purification with our sown souls. Before we purify the country we shall have purification with our own souls. Before we purify the country we shall have purified ourselves. And this is the only correct historical order; for what is the food of purifying our country's air if we ourselves remain dirty."  202

Hopkins, Vol. 5 "New Times"

85: Reboot w/ press conference

"In doing so, they were trying to demonstrate that the Chronicle was a legal enterprise, that htey themselves were doing no more than excersising the right of free press guaranteed in the Soviet constitution. But they also were inviting KGB retaliation, for they were challenging Andropov's authority, deliberaley it seemed."

prepared the back missing issues 28-30

"There was somehing new about the Chronicle. For the first time, contributors to the Chronicle publicly associated themselves with what Soviet authorities bluntly said was an illegal publication. Tatyana Khodorovich was a Russian-language linguist, a cultured woman with the just ends of the blossoming Soviet human rights movement. The other two public sponsors of the new Chronicle were equally dedicated. Tatyana Velikanova, a mathematics programmer, had long been connected with the Chronicle as a source of information. Sergei Kovalev, an internationally known biologist, was a friend of Andrei Sakharov and shared the physicist's concerns about the repressive nature of Soviet society. In a separate statement drafted in Khodorovich's hand, and given to correspondents that May 7 when the Chronicle reappeared, Kovalev, Khodorovich and Velikanova obligated themselves to distribute the Chronicle. Others before them had been tried and imprisoned for as much.

'We consider it our duty,' they said, 'to facilitate the wide distribution to the maximum possible extent. We are very convinced of the necessity of making available this very truthful information about infringements of the basic rights of man in the soviet Union to everyone who is interested. (H, 87)"

part of initative group

107: pushing libel charge

"The London involvement began with a translation by Max Hayward of no. 5 of the Chronicle, dated December 1968. It appeared in subsequent issues of Survey, the British journal dealing with Soviet and East European affairs. Its editor, Leo Labedz, was perhaps the first foreign expert in Soviet affairs to recognize the significance of the Chronicle, sufficient in any case to translate into English and reproduce an entire number outside of the Soviet Union. At this point, Peter Reddaway, a Soviet specialist and lecturer at the Chonicle and took on the task of translating subsequent issues into English, beginning with no.  7. These he had mimeographed and sent privately to other Sovietologists. At the optimum, about 100 English-language copies of the early Chronicle were produced. Asked to do a book, Reddaway collected the first 11 issues of the Chronicle-those of the Gorbanevskaya ere-to produce an annotated and analytical account of the fledgling Soviet democratic movement that appeared in 1972 as the volume Uncensored Russia.

As Reddaway worked on his book, the head of research for the London-based Amnesty International also took an interest in the Chronicle. Dr. Zbynek Zeman, a scholar of Czech extraction, recognized that the Chronicle published precisely the type of well-documented information about human rights violations with which Amnesty International dealt. Starting February 1971, then, with issue no. 16, Amnesty International translated each Chronicle issue into English. Districution eventaully reached a maximum of 3,000 copies.

As all this was going on in London, other versions of the Chronicle were born in New York.  Valery Chalidze, the physicist who with fellow scientists Andrei Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov had formed the Human Rights Committee, had been allowed to travel to the United States  for a lecture tour in December 1972. Once Chalidze was there, Soviet authorities promptly deprived him of his Soviet citizenship, thus banishing him from his native country. Within a few months after this, it was clear that the Chronicle under KGB pressure had ceased to publish. Chalidze was not directly involved in the Chronicle's production, but he was nonetheless intimately associated with Moscow's dissident community. One in the United States, and with the Chronicle, apparently suppressed, Chalidze was urged to fill the void. The stimulus came from Edward Kline, a wealthy New York businessman with a special dedication to Soviet human rights. With line's financial backing, Chalidze set up Khronika Presss in New York and in mid-1973, as part of Khronika Press, began publishing a was  facsimile of the Soviet Chronicle. The New York version was called A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR. Printed in both English and Russian, six times a year, its content, style and format (save for being printed rather than typewritten) mimicked for the Soviet Chronicle. Originally, the editors were Peter Reddaway and Edward Kline. Subsequently, Pavel Litvinov replaced Reddaway who became the London correspondent, and Valery Chalidze became editor in chief.

The Kline-Chalidze drew on a variety of sources in and outside the Soviet Union and ably continued the work of the Soviet Chronicle during the latter's 18-month hiatus. Russian-language copies were smuggled into the Soviet Union, and the English-language veresion were distributed among Western journalists, government specialists, and scholars specializing in Soviet affairs.

While the original Chronicle reappeared in Moscow in May 1974, the question in New York obviously was, What now? The decision was to continue the Chronicle of Human Rights, as a backstop to the Soviet Chronicle and because it could get information in English about Soviet human rights events to influential readers far more rapidly that the Moscow Chronicle. At the same time, it was decided to reproduce the Moscow Chronicle itself in Russian as copies arrived in the United States. This amounted to a Chronicle printing press in exile. Ultimately as many as 1,200 copies per issue of the Russian-language Chronicle were produced in New York, most of them destined for the Soviet Union.

95: MunichChronicle

96-97: post '74 Chronicle, more caught up in national groups, Jews


Hopkins, Vol. 4, "Betrayed"

68: Yakir and Krasin

70: it was their survival instinct

72: example to stop others

74-75: Chronicle covers own demise

"The KGB's political case was helped by the fact that Radio liberty did routinely broadcast in Russian large segments of the Chronicle issues as they reached the radio's central offices in Munich, West Germany Germany. Moreover, Posev, the monthly Russian emigre journal ideologically connected to the NTS and published in Frankfurt, reprinted whole issues of the Chronicle. These reprints were distributed abroad and were also smuggled back into the Soviet Union. THe Chronicle group instantly realized that a tactical mistake had been made in Posev's and Radio Liberty's use of the Chronicle numbers....The KGB script for all the trials played amply on the fact that the Chronicle to all the appearance worked in unison with foreign enemies." (H,77)


Hopkins, Vol. 3 Case 24

1970-1972: KGB focuses in dissidents

"The very harassment and persecution of Soviet political reformists, of religious dissenters and of outspoken nationalists by the KGB were the Chronicle's editorial fare. THe KGB could not delve into internal dissent without coming into contact with the Chronicle. It was thus inevitable that one target of the directorate was the Chronicle itself. (H, 48)"

"The pattern of arrests and imprisonment suggested KGB concentration on those publicized dissidents who associated with Western correspondents-hence, the Amalrik trial and conviction in November 1970 in remote Sverdlovsk after the publication in the West of hist book." (H,50)

"It was also clear to foreign observers, not to mention the better informed Soviet leadership, that the Chronicle of Current Events had become the most consistent, reliable, and reknowned source of what the Kremlin regarded as hostile and politically dangerously information. (H,50)"

"The final issues of the Chronicle edited by Gorbanevskaya in late 1969 had included summaries of a samizdat publication called Crime and Punishment that intended to expose former NKVD during Stalin's dictatorship. Under Anatoly Yakobson, the style, persisting in detailed reports of trials and labor camp conditions and enriching its reportage with new insights in Soviet political life. Issue no. 17, dated December 1970, carried a report of KGB supression of a previously unpublicized Ukranian nationalist group that had put out 15 issues of its own underground journal between 1964 and 1966 promoting Ukranian independence. Issue no. 19, in April 1971, listed 16 films produced in the Soviet Union that either had been censored before showing or whose distribution had been restricted. Issue no. 21, dated dated typewritten underground journal that contained authoritative private political information, including a transcript of the closed Communist party meeting that ousted Nikita Khruschev in October 1964l The Chronicle, numbering on the average about 40 typewritten pages, was by now something more than recitation of a small Mowscow group. Appearing regularly every two months, it had developed a solid network of informants that routinely funneled more and more news through Chronicle channels to the final editor. (H, 51)"

59-lots of cases... "These cases suggest the breadth  of the KGB investigation into the Chronicle. And they underscore that, by 1972, the Chronicle reached samizdat readers far beyond Moscow. A loosely woven network had been created to pass information between the Chronicle group in Moscow and supporters in most part of the country. The last issue of of the Chronicle before it was forced into silence, no. 27, carried news reports from 35 locations in the Soveit Union. KGB investigations and trials also documented that the Chronicle was also being reproduced in weidely separated regions of the country. (H,59)"

Friday, October 28, 2011

Hopkins- Vol. 2 "The Spark"

21: Baptist newspaper since '64

"From the start, then, the Chronicle was set apart from other and plentiful samizdat literature, political tracrs, petitions, statements and reports...Soviet and foreign journalists could get this type of information in Moscow in the late 1960s only on a sporadic basis and only if they were involved in samizdat and dissident circles. Even then, sometimes incomplete. If one were outside established dissident circles, the most one knew about official actions besides rumors was contained in cryptic Soviet reports. They told virtually nothing except that something had happened. (H, 22)"

-alternative to official information

"The style of the Chronicle was heavy on facts--names, ages, dates, places, specific events. It was light on both judgements and speculation or opinion (H,22)"

NG: "Basically there was an attempt in all the letters to be very exact, to lay out the facts, to describe the violations of rights, to quote articles of law. Nothing was exaggerated. The love for objectivity was in the air. (H, 23)"

"The first issue drew heavily on actions against the Chronicle group and its friends and acquaintances. Besides the Galanskov-Ginzburg proceeding with  which some of the Chronicle people were closely connected, protest statements reproduced in that first issue revealed a pattern of signatures. Many of those who encouraged founding of the Chronicle turned up as co-authors of grievances...This is to sat that Gorbanevskaya used what was available, and most of that information came from or was collected by one relatively small Moscow group. (H,25)"

"Production of the Chronicle came from the very first was along the lines of a "chain letter." Gorbanevskaya typed the first seven copies. One went to a Western correspondent, another was saved in order to produce more copies, and the remaining five copies were given out. In the already established form for distributing samizdat, recipients were expected to reproduce further copies. Commonly these were typed, but homemade photocopying of samizdat was increasingly popular. How many copies of a particul samizdat item were made could not be said, the work being done privately and separately. (H, 26)

-expected it to be short

-28: -end of '68, assert legality
-how to submit info

29: ""The price for that system, however, was a secrecy and confidentiality that amounted to an underground publication (H,29). "

"If the Chronicle was legal, why be secret? If the Chronicle was secret could it be legal? (H,29)"

"Not only the now standard arrests and interrogations were reported; political documents and statements, internal disputes involving Soviet policy, and protests and grievances from among an increasingly broad spectrum of the Soviet population were reported as well. The information, moreover, was assembled in one readable source, in direct and unambiguous Russian. There was no need to read between the lines as Soviets routinely did when the official Soviet press reported some specially sensitive issue." (H, 30)

31:  samizdat news

"The information flow to and from the Chronicle developed in important ways under Gorbanevskaya. First the volume of facts increased as friends and readers caught on to what the Chronicle wanted and was willing to publish. Also, a sort of "beat" system of reporting emerged. It was not planned but developed simply because of personal interests and contacts. (H, 33)."

Ei: Tartars- Grigorkenko
Jews Takir
Ukraine-Alexeyeva

34: Amalrik, Litinov, Yakir

"Through this connection, the contents of the Chronicle moved through an already established information network of Moscow correspondents, Western news agencies and newspaper, radio, and television reports to editorial offices and media abroad. Abroad, foreign shortwave broadcasters picked up Chronicle information, and individual news reports based on Chronicle items or contents of whole issues found their way back to the Soviet Union in Russian-language broadcasts of the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Voice of America. Radio Liberty broadcast readings of entire issues of the Chronicle. (H, 34)

"Although foreign radio signals were heavily hammed from the summer of 1968 to the fall of 1973, broadcasts could still be generally served the Chronicle well, as audiences numbering in the tens of millions in the Soviet Union heard the news from the Chronicle. (H, 34)"

36: implications of Red Square

"In the aftermath of the invasion, in the three years leading up to the twenty-fourth Communist party congress in 1971, at which General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev renewed a policy of coexistence and cooperation with the West, important debates were held over the implications of this policy. On the one side, the benefits of detente in terms of Western trade and financial assistance for the lagging Soviet economy were attractive to a number of groups in the Soviet Union. But there also was the argument, frequently made in the Soviet press, that in times of closer relations with the West, greater vigilance was required within the country. This was an old problem for Soviet leaders-... Not great on the re-freeze"(H, 37)

41-42: Gorbanevskaya trial


Thursday, October 27, 2011

Outline Draft

Thesis: By examining the creation, dissemination and content of "The Chronicle of Current Events" we see the embodiment of two of the core dissident values-glasnost and legality.
  • General Context
    • Breznev (re-freeze, rehab of Stalin)
    • Embodied by S & D
    • Ginzburg/protests
  • Direct Context
    • Meeting
  • What the Chronicle was
    • No Commentary
  • How it was reported
  • How it was published
  • Other means of getting published
    • Western journalists
    • Radio
  • This was radical-airing the dirty laundry
    • Khrushchev
    • Soviet realism, more socialist than realist
    • Journalism at that time-Master and Margarita, bought off,
    • double-speak
    • Rectified by Solzhenitsyn-this is actually Soviet realism
      • NEED TO TELL THE TRUTH-Obligation
    • Ginzburg
  • Chronicle was all about truthfulness
  • In this way, it reflects general values of the dissident movement- openness, glasnost
  • Similarly, in legality
    • Human rights year
    • Opening pages-Chadlize
    • it's own legality
    • Amalrik
    • Ginzburg
  • It wasn't libel, it was truth
  • Ideas of truth and legality are inherently intertwined for this movement
    • Telling the truth is legal! It is necessary
    • Amalrik

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Samizdat as a response to socialist realism
Socialist realism stifled the truth (i.e cult of personality, Master and Margarita)- samizdat about exposing it

Monday, October 24, 2011

Novels

In the First Circle- Ending, journalist is like "oh! how nice!" also Eleanor Roosevelt

Master and Margarita- writers are bought off

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Issue 28 Published by Amnesty International

December 21, 1970
Moscow



"A. Amalrik refused to take part in the trial, submitting the following note addressed to the chairman of the court: 
- 
An answer to the question whether I plead guilty. 
The charges brought against me concern the dissemination by me, verbally and in print, of views which are here  called false and slanderous. I do not consider either the interview given by me or my articles and books to be slanderous.

I also think that the truth or falseness of publicly- expressed views can be ascertained by free and open discussion, but not by a judicial investigation. No criminal court has the moral right to try anyone for the views he has expressed. To oppose ideas—irrespective of whether they are true or false with a judicial criminal penalty seems to me to be a crime in itself. 

This point of view is not only natural for everyone who  has his Own Opinions and who needs creative freedom; it  also finds legal expression both in the Constitution of the  USSR (article 125) and in the Universal Declaration of  Human Rights, which all the signatory-nations have  promised to put into effect."

39: Prints A's final address-details in his memoir how it was smuggled out

"...I wish only to answer the assertion that several of my statement are directed against my people and my country. It seems to me that my country's principal task at present is to throw off the burden of its hard past, for which, above all, it needs criticism and not eulogies I think I am a better patriot than those who loudly hold forth about love for their country, meaning by that- -love for their own privleges [sic]" (Issue 28, 40)

Also includes: 

The trial of Amalrik and Ubozhko. Andrei Amalrik's final  address. The trial of Valentin Moroz. Solzhenitsyn's letter to the Nobel Foundation.The Committee for Human Rights in the USSR.  Public statements regarding the trial  of Pimenov, Vail and Zinoveva. The Leningrad trial of the "hi-jackers". Trials of recent years: the case of the UNF  [Ukrainian National Front]. Persecution of Jews wishing  to emigrate to Israel. Rigerman. American citizenship and the Soviet police. The fate of Fritz Mender. Political  prisoners in the Mordovian camps. News in brief. Samizdat  news. [index.] 

News in brief- 10 pages of who got arrested, what's going on in prisons, etc




Notes of a Revolutionary

Amalrik, Andrei. Notes of a Revolutionary.  New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1982.

NB: He has a complicated reln. w/ western journalists. Needs them, but thinks they were manipulated.

Intro by Susan Jacoby: "My former husband, then the correspondent of the Washington Post, was among the minority of journalists who were willing to meet with dissenters. Most of the press corps was content to get its "unofficial" news secondhand, from less timid. Andrei Amalrik, who was a reliable source of news about official persecution of other dissenters, was the first--and for many years the only-- Russian dissident to discuss publicly what he considered to be the inadequacy of western news reporting from Moscow." (A, xii-xiii)

Ginzburg asks for help getting in touch w/ the west

" But I never asked him to let me read it, partly so that if an investigator asked me if I had seen it, I couls say I knew nothing about it. I figured the authorities would not stand upon ceremony with either Ginzburg or me. And apparently Ginzburb had the same idea, which might explain why he didn't risk going to see the foreign correspondent. Or perhaps he thought the latter would be frightened if he came to see him. Because in those days, all of us were a little afraid: afraid of the regime; afraid that people who feared the regime would take us for provocateurs; and afraid of provocateurs.

Nonetheless, I agreed to put the correspondent in touch with Ginzburg and thereby took upon myself to a role that I played until the autumn of 1969--a role that involved me, to some extent, in what was later called the Democratic Movement...Ginzburg met with the journalist at our place. Since my wife and I had no curtains for our windows, we came up with a naive conspiratorial strategy just in case someone tried to photograph us from outside: we covered the windows with paintings." (A, 3)

7: met W. through wife's arts

"The Soviet authorities are stern. They don't like girls' panties hanging on cherry trees, Russians going as guests to the homes of Americans, or foreigners buying and selling paintings. And above al, they don't like when foreign correspondents stay in Russia to long: because the longer a correspondent lives there, the better he understands the situation." (A, 9)

20: sets up interviews for Ginzburg's mother

2 generations of dissidents

"The 'generation of 1956' was influenced by de-Stalinization, by disturbances in Poland, and especially by the Hungarian uprising in October 1956. I recall my impatience while waiting for the news from Hungary. If at that time there had exited some organization that asked me to take up arms agasint the regime, I would have agreed without giving it a second thought. But there was no such organization.

The 'generation of 1966' was formed under the influence of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial of 1966, the Czechoslavak reforms of 1967-68, and (finally) the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The 'generation of 1956' was one of 'dropouts.' I use the word in quotes, because it is the Soviet press's favorite epithet for us. It can, however, also be used without quotes, because in fact we began our protests at such an early afe that we were not allowed to complete our education. Galanskov, Ginzburg, Vladimir Bukovsky, myself, and many others were expelled from universities on several occasions; in some cases, expulsion was either preceded by arrest or followed by it.

By contrast, the 'generation of 1966' consisted of 'establishmen' people. Instead of half-scholars, it included doctors of science; instead of poets who had never published a single line, it included longtime members of the Union of Soviet Writers; instead of "persons with no specific occupations,' it included old Bolsheviks, officers, actors, and artists. For many of them, the years of 1953-1956 had also been decisive. But they still had hopes for improvement; and it was not until the unmistakable regression toward Stalinization in 1965-1966 that their inner dissent was strengthened and their protest provoked." (A, 21)

29: at a trial he met Karel van het Reve-Het Parol University of Leyden, published his books abroad

"Although it was against the law, the witnesses were taken out of teh courtroom after terrifying. even Galanskov's sister was removed. Such things made the atmosphere very tense. On the fourth day, near the courthouse, Larisa Bogoraz and Pavel litinov handed out to correspondents their statement: "To the World Public." That declaration was drafted in strong language. It demanded "condemnation of this shameful trial," "realease of the degendents from armed custody." and "stripping the judge of his judicial powers.

In one leap we had overcome a difficult barrier. We had addressed ourselves to public opinion rather than to the regime; and we had spoken up in the language of free persons, not in that of loyal subjexts, thereby overcoming a centuries-old complex: the idea that no Russian--and least of all, a Soviet-Russian should address apeals to foreigners. ("We are we, and they are they." "Don't wash your dirty linen in public." "It's better to get a blow from your master's club than a piece of bread from a stranger.") That same evening, on the BBC, we heard the statement translated back into Russian. Esenin-Volpin, sitting with the text in his hands, kept repeating: 'Right! That's it! Exactly!' Huddled around the radio, we resembled a painting we had been familiar with since our youth: Behind the Fascist Lines, Members of the Young Guard Listen to Radio Moscow.


The importance of the statement was understood in the West. It was reprinted, fully or in part, in many newspapers, and The Times of London devoted an editorial to it. The flow of statements and appeals that followed it during the next two months raised hopes that a social movement of sorts had surfaced in the USSR and that something would happen at any moment. It was rather like the hopes raised in 1956 by the theory of liberalization known as 'The Thaw.' (A, 31)

36-37: Attempt to hold press conference, KGB discovers it

"No foreign journalist in the USSR can really feel and believe that he is a "noninvolved" chronicler "looking upon both good and evil with indifference" primarily because he himself is an object of manipulation by the Soviet system. Naturally, the authorities realize they cannot manage the foreign press as they do the Soviet media. But to some degree they are able to control the information that foreign correspondents send abroad from Moscow. This accomplished in two ways: by isolating the correspondents and by employing stick-and-carrot policy. (A, 38)"-examples if need be

"The role played by foreign journalists in the USSR as a source of information has been, and still is, crucial. And many journalists, despite all difficulties, have resisted blackmail--a fact confirmed inter alia by the long list of correspondents expelled from Moscow in the past fifteen years...

Lots of thoughts on Western journalists, carrots and sticks-flogging

"We had been sending our declarations and articles to the outside world because that was hte only way we could make them public without censorship. Our aim was to give the world a better idea of the state of affairs in the USSR and to reach the Russian people via Western radio. And in that we succeeded. The number of listeners to foreign radio broadcasts increased several times over. We could not, of course, instruct the Western papers and radio stations how to publish and broadcast our material. And sometimes they wrote and broadcast the opposite of what we wanted people to hear." (A, 52)

59: VOA on Czech invasion
60: brings names of protestors

73: "In that cold spring of 1969 we often met with Anatole Shub of the Washington Post, who tried to convince me that the USSR would soon have to make some changes, however slight, in order to find a common language with the West. But Shub, as an American, had too much faith in common sense. The Soviet system is basically senseless."

74: Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?


84: Western correspondents assumed he was KGB
"They took it for granted that Russians were afraid to socialize with foreigners and that the KGB would send agents to contact them. From this it followed that a Russian whou held no official position and yet was so manifestly willing to meet with them must--or could--be a KGB agent. (A,91)"

91: search of Natalya Gorbanevskaya's house

92: "After Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? was published, I gave my first interviews to American correspondents: to James Clarity of the New York Times and William Cole of CBS...We established good relations with both of them and were invited to their homes for dinner on several occasions. (A, 92)"

"I regarded the interview with William Cole as very important, since it was the first TV interview weith a dissident and millions of people would be able to see an gear me. It was a terrible blow when I learned that the video tape had been confiscated Sheremetovo Airport. (It was shown at my trial as one of the most damning pieces of evidence.) I thought that Cole would be mortally frightened by all this, but he suhhested that we repeat the interview. I agreed, with the proviso that he not try and get the videotape out of the country himself. This time I invited Petr Yakir to take part, and he invite Bukovsky, and a taped talk by Ginzburg was smuggled out of his prison camp. (A, 93)"

93: CBS never shows it, it's in Russian , why people dislike America

"I have never understood the notion that Brezhnev is a "liberal," or what meaning his admirers attach to that word. After each crisis resulting in more power for Brezhnev, I was arrested. I was taken in after he became First Secretary in late 1964, after he prevailed in the crisis of 1970, and after he triumphed over his opponents in 1972-1973 in the matter of detente. Of course, there were many other involved besides me; it's just that each of my arrests was a symptom of increased repression. (A, 97)"

107-108-legality

"I told Kirinkin that in my opinion there was nothing either anti-Soviet  or libelous in my writings, and that I would give no testimony during the investigation." (A, 108)

141: legality issues w/ the trial

142-143: getting statement to wife, it was eventually published in the Chronicle

Friday, October 14, 2011

Reading List


  • Meerson-Aksenov intro
  • Amal'rick
  • Bukovskiĭ
  • Gorbanevskaya
  • Havel
  • Rubenstein
  • Conversation with Dissidents
  • Hendrick
  • Radio article 1
  • Radio article 2
  • Komaroi article
  • Behind the Lines
  • Mikkonen
  • Oushakine
  • Walker
  • Lovell
  • W. Article
  • Amnesty Issues
  • Solzhenitsyn article

Hopkins Vol. 1 "Resistance"



Hopkins, Mark. Russia’s Underground Press: The Chronicle of Current Events.” New York: Praeger Publishers, 1983.


"They were all acutely aware that information five to Western correspondents in Moscow about arrests and trials about ominous reports of hunger strikes in labor camps, and of life there among political prisoners could be transmitted in foreign broadcasts. Sometimes it was just a matter of hours after a document was given to an American news agency in Moscow that a foreign radio report about the event could be heard in shortwave programs in Moscow. The British Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Livbery, Duetsche Welle and Voice of America Russian-language broadcasts circumvented the Soviet censorship administration for the press, radio, television, literature and general publishing. These reports in turn attracted new sources of information, nurturing a grapevine of civil rights news. Khushchev had halted blanket jamming of foreign radio broadcasts in Russian in 1963, with the exception of the officially despised Radio Liberty, whose special focus on internal Soviet political events made it a category unto itself. People could listen to all the foreign news they wanted in the mid-1960s in the Soviet Union. The tacit foreign radio stations was creating a vast information network reporting to the mass Soviet audience independently of the Glavit organization.

"The information network among the dissidents themselves operated on the basis of personal knowledge and trust and sometimes out of sheer chance. It happened like this: Larisa Bogoraz, wife of Yuly Daniel, was on the train traveling to see her imprisoned husband. She met the wife of Valery Ronkin, who also, it turned out, was on a trip to visit her husband in the same Siberian labor camp. Ronkin was an unfamiliar name to Moscow dissidents. A Leningrader, Ronkin had been arrested in 1965 for antistate activities after the KGB broke up a clandestine and preached a truly workers' state. It was called the Union of Communards and preached a truly workers' state. In the conspiratorial fashion of earlier illegal Russian Marxist circles, the group met in secret. It published a samizdat journal called The Bell on a clandestine printing press...Even after the KGB penetrated the Union of communards and imprisoned Ronkin, not many in the Soviet Union, let alone the outside world, knew about him or his group, such was the compartmental quality of of Soviet life, especially concerning dissident political and police matters. The Moscow dissidents thus learned of the Ronkin case only when two wives met to share common information about their imprisoned husbands. (H, 8-9)" 

"What was happening, then, as trials picked up in the Soviet Union of the late 1960s and as dissidents met and talked was a growing awareness of a pattern of events. That some of this information was obtained by Western correspondents and that some of it was broadcast back to the Soviet Union in Russian served to document and enlarge the dissidents' picture of their society. For they suffered from a sense of isolation and ignorance of daily events in the Soviet Union, where authorities ensure that the mass media present a narrow and particular portrait of the country. In the late 1960s, Soviet dissidents only graduating assembled facts to convince them that the post-Khrushchev leadership was undertaking a deliberate policy of repression. (H,9) 


10-11: Dologprudny meeting


"There were a series of get-togethers among the increasingly active dissidents in the late winter and early spring of 1968. There was no organization, no specific leaders, no agendas, no records-none of the paraphenalia that goes on with planned, orderly action. Natalia Gorbanevskaya remembers talking with Ilya Gabai, among others, before the first issue of "The Chronicle" appeared and deciding that a bulletin of some kind must be issued to publicize the mounting information they had on hand... (H, 10)"


-it was an informal decision 10-11

"The Dolgoprudny meeting ended with an understanding that Natalia Gorbanevskaya would produce some sort of "bulletin" reporting information from friends of the group and anyone else about the persectutions underway. It still had no name. It would be typed because that was how virtually all samizdat was produced in the Soviet Union. The general Soviet public, then or now, did not nor does not have access top printing presses or even mimeograph machines, let alone electonic copiers. Anything produced on Soviet state presses, in any case, is censored by Glavit. This is to say that the talk in 1968 of putting out a private, unofficial "bulletin" readily translated in the minds of those involved into a few typed carbon copies of the samizdat that would be circulated among friends, one of the copies being reserved for a contact in the Western press corps in Moscow. (H,12)


Paradox: "Its main intent was to publicize violations of human rights in the Soviet Union, especially the lesser known incidents, and thereby draw what dissidents thought would be curative world opinion to the Soviet malady. The group set out to be neither clandestine on public activities and confined itself scrupulously within the limits of written Soviet law. (H,12)  


12: didn't think it would survive


"The Chronicle group shunned conscious, planned secrecy. They regarded that tactic as too similar to the Bolsheviks, to the Leninst concept of a political movement" (H,13)


"The Chronicle group believed more in public action, in holding a mirror to the the Soviet social syste built by Stalin. They wanted little more than the civil liberties ensured in the 1936 "Stalin constitution."  (H,13)


"Yet, as Gorbanevskaya began preparing the first issue of the Chronicle, the work was per force and by habit and practice more of a clandestine operation than a public petition. It was the opposite of how the dissidents, in their more idealistic moments, hoped to function." (H, 13)


"Two specific phrases proved important to the Chronicle-in article 70, the words "slanderous fabrication that discredit," and in article 190-1, "deliberately false statement derogatory" to the Soviet state. The KGB and Soviet courts were to use these time and time again to argue that the Chronicle was an illegal publication." 


"In compiling a bulletin bout protests and objections to the Soviet government and about  reprisals against individuals who challenged authorities, Gorbanevskaya had to conduct herself carefully. She could not use the telepone to obtain information, for everyone knew that the KGB tapped private phones. She could not, without some risk, carry notes with information on her person. It was risky for her, and it was risky for those who supplied her. KGB experts could trace people by their handwriting. Traveling around spread-out Moscow in crowded buses or the metro took hours our of a day if one wanted personally to talk with friends. Gorbanevskaya had to keep a file of information in her apartment. The KGB could search apartments whenever they chose. She had no readily available  reference books on Soviet law to check criminal proceedings. She had no archive, no file of newspaper or magazine clippings against which to check names, dates, places and events. It was like putting together a bulletin out of a shoebox, relying on one's own memory or the memory and exactness of others." (H, 15) 


"The KGB could connect documents and typewriters. Each machine, like fingerprints, has its own its own typeface characteristics. One had to be careful in writing samizdat that it could not be traced through other items typed on the same machine." (H, 16)


17: Human Rights Year


17: she gave birth, came back and finished it up





The Chronicle as a mirror of the dissident movement
-legality
-openness

Not just in what they reported, but its existence.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Roth-Ey Lecture

'59 Khrushchev foes to Hollywood
went as representative of superior culture
"future belonged to Soviet Culture"

Soviet culture: "universal culture for universal audience" -mass politicization, "spiritual growth"

not highbrow, it's unibrow

media took in all other forms

USSR resiliency and vulnerability

Post WWII '60s: mass culture on mass scale

Radio:
'63: freestanding explosion in numbers
change in experience

culture transformed
End of mass terror
open up-peaceful coexistence-Soviets have W. exposure through official alliance
unofficial forms

fear of bourgeoisie

Soviet not just reactive

'64: round the clock radio, ut no censors at not

Short wave radio
-No Soviet broadcasts
-jamming, monitoring
-Factories
-100% radio saturation

periodic bans

'30s-'40s
Radio as collective
pedagogical goals
culture of control, scarce resources

70s-domesticate and personalize
-homebased broadcasting
Private, individual, not event based

Still: bulk of consumption was official


context makes a difference

creeping de-Sovietization

Break-up
it didn't have the mobilization b/c break-up of culture

fragmentation of attention-domestic and private

Roth-Ey (Book) Vol. 1


Roth-Ey, Kristen. Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War. New York: Cornell University Press, 2011.

Post WWII- radio starts coming in 

"By 1955, the USSR was spending more on jamming than on broadcasting its own programs, and officials at the radio administration were discussing the possibility that, given both the amount of interference they were throwing up and the impossibility of percision jamming, they would soon paralyze the domestic radio network entirely" (Roth-Ey, 131)

132: Soviet Union produced the short wave radios

"The phenomenon of foreign broadcasting to the USSR was also a ringing testament to its modern, technologically advanced society and a backhanded compliment to its international importance. In the period the period 1963 to 1968, the USSR lifted jamming almost completely, even as Soviet media continued to rail against the enemy voices. To some observers it looked as if  the Soviet authorities had settled in for a hostile, useful peace." (R-E, 133)


"They had not, because though the ideological category of enemy voices had its uses, to be sure, the reality of foreign radio broadcasting to the USSR did pose genuine, intractable problems. What the authorities objected to on the most basic level was information. Jamming practices varied over time, but by and large the Soviets did not attempt to jam broadcasts with purely musical content, nor did they typically jam programs in foreign languages not native to people in the USSR, such as English. THe programming deemed most offensive had to do with Soviet domestic affairs. This could be news of natural disasters of readings of literature banned inside the USSR; it could be first-person accounts from émigrés about historical events such as collectivization or analyses of Kremlin politics. In 1968, it was news of Czechoslovak heresy of "Socialism with a human face" and the subsequent crackdown the triggered the resumption of full-scale jamming. Foreign broadcasting delivered information that the regime did not want people to have, period, and this made hamming, however ineffective, its natural stance." (R-E, 133)


"Yet arguably it was the very fact of foreign broadcasting inside the USSR, and not the informational content of its programs, that spoke loudest of all. By breaking the Soviet regime's media monopoly, foreign broadcasting shattered the regime's hold on the modes and meanings of cultural consumption in Soviet everyday life." (R-Y, 133-134)


"Radio in the Soviet context was designed to educate , inspire and organize collectives; entertainment always took a backseat to edification, and information was to be provided on a need-to-know basis in life with longer-range political agendas. Broadcasting, in other words, was part of planned cultural economy that had little to do with popular taste or timeliness. By contrast, foreign broadcasters went out of their way to present themselves as the Soviet audience's intimate friend and a champion of its rights to information and satisfaction. Programming on foreign stations often mixed formats (news and music) and cultural registers (high and low, serious and silly) and promoted entertainment for entertainment's sake in a way directly counter to Soviet cultural hierarchies and to the idea of uplift. Finally, foreign radio modeled a very different relationship to that time than what was to be found in Soviet media; it was, in a word, timely, and as it delivered not just news but "breaking news," foreign radio told Soviet listeners that they wanted, needed, and perhaps even had a right to be up-to-date in a modern world." (R-E, 134)


135: party create cheap knock off


135: in 20s and 30s, some freestanding radio sets, "For the most part Soviet radio operated via a ststem of radio diffusion exchanges (radiouzly) that picked up signals (via long-,medium- and short wave broadcasts) and relayed them to wired units (radiotochki)" (R-E, 135)


'41: "7 million radios, nearly 6 million of them wired public amplifiers of one sort or another, and Soviet broadcast signals reached almost every corner of the USSR." (R-E, 135)


136: during the war, radio became part of daily life, it was also PUBLIC


"In 1941, the regime had confiscated all freestanding radios for military use (and also, it seems, for the purpose of walling off the population from foreign broadcasters), and this meant that even more than in the thirties, the locus of the Soviet radio experience was the wired public set. People gathered around these radios to get the latest news, but they also came together to hear Soviet literature's leading lights recite poetry and read the Russian classics..." (R-E, 136)


137: '55 "Soviet industry was pumping out several times more sets per year than had been produced in the entire prewar period." 33 million
'65: "more than double again" 32 radios/100 people
'63: no more wireless 


"The shift from wired to wireless radio had far reaching implications that went almost wholly unrecognized at time. For one thing, it meant that that had been a predominantly collective and public activity was now moving into the realm of private experience and was thus far less simple to quantify, monitor, and control-indeed, it was beginning to look less and less like a traditional Soviet phenomenon altogether. ( Groups of listeners gathered to join a radio rally or attend a performance of radio theater were doing something that fit easily into the category of a Soviet activity, whether social cultural, or political. But could the same be said of the solitary listener at home) A second, even more critical issue about the wireless radios--and one that only served to heighten their potential un-Sovietness--was the fact that large numbers of these sets could receive shortwave broadcasts. In fact, according to a 1949 report to the party's Central Committee from the radio administration, nearly all of the freestanding radios being produced by Soviet industry had shortwave broadcasts. And as A. Puzin, the head of the radio administration of Glavradio, pointed out, this meant they were "designed for receiving not just the Soviet, but also foreign radio programs" devoted, in his words, to "the foulest slander of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies. " Puzin recommended curtailing shortwave production almost completely. Nine years later, in 1958, the CC did its own investigation and found that production had not only continued but flourished: the USSR had produced more radios with shortwave capacity since 1949 than all 20 million radios in the USSR ready and able to tune in to foreign slander. At the time Puzin raised his alarm, there had been a mere half a million." (R-E, 138)


Why-WWII, also


"Wiring the vast expanses of Soviet territory for broadcasting, however, was an immense undertaking, even if the goal was to connect diffusion centers to loudspeakers and not individual homes. Radiofikatsiia using the wired system required three things in chronic short supply in the Soviet countryside: equipment, expertise, and perhaps most important of all, electricity." (R-E, 139)


-villages


139: consumer demand


140: "By the late fifties, as many as sixty different foreign stations were broadcasting to the USSR at certain times of the day. Jamming was worse than futile." (R-Y, 140)


high cost


"Nonetheless, the enemy voices could be heard with little trouble in more areas outside the centers of Moscow, Leningrad, and a few other large cities. Worse still, jamming operations made tuning in to republic and all-Union radio impossible in many areas: the Soviets were jamming themselves. With enemy radio the only thing to listen to, some klokhozniki were reportedly choosing to run the VOA and the BBC on their local wired networks.  (R-Y, 140)


141: tuning wasn't illegal


143: Estonian study in '66 "up to 70% of radio listeners" listened to Finnish and other foreign stations
Lithuania '67 35%
'68 Central Radio: 50% at least occasionally 


numbers inflated to make KGB mission look significant


"In closed-door meetings and in public settings, including in mass media, Soviet authorities regularly attacked foreign radio for corrupting listeners. The official list of corrupting influences from abroad grew long in the post- Stalinist era...But arguably, enemy radio had a place of honor in the official imagination. There were multiple divisions in the bureaucracy  for transcribing and analyzing foreign broadcasts, and their reports, sometimes quite sophisticated, went to the in-bosex of party elites on a regular basis. Jamming although no longer a matter for public discussion by 1960 (it was on Glavit's, the main censorship agency, list of taboo subjects), was no secret, and people in radio and the party-state administration were well aware of how ineffective and injurious it was." 


Radio Moscow 148-154


"Radio listening acquired its own disturbing undertones as of the late 1940s because of its association with foreign broadcasting. Radio was already moving in the direction of private consumption in the postwar USSR. Foreign radio, the enemy voice, pushed the point anc ould make all private listening seem more intimate and illicit." 


158: details what was on Soviet broadcasts, it was boring


162: Soviet radio was "attitude to the fact" "The reality was that calibrating attitudes was a politicians' game, not a journalistic one."


170: Soviets couldn't go all night-censor


172: 


"A 1968 survey by radio and TV's reseach bureau founf that 47 percent of people identified themselves as listeners to foreign radio (openly, the researchers notes); just under 10 percent described themselves as "regular listeners," while another 15 percent said they did not tune in themselves but heard about foreign radio broadcasts secondhand. The study was limited to urban regions, but inlike the Maiak survey, it covered multiple republics, it also gathered some interesting information on the tastes of listeners and their social profiles. The largest group of self-reported listeners was in the sixteen-to-thirty-year-old category; more men listened than women (52 percent to 41 percent), and most people listened at night. However there was no clear-cut correlation between educational levels and listening practices: aside from those in the lowest level (who had markedly lower rates), people of varying background reported listening to the foreign voices in rather similar numbers. Interestingly, when asked what they listened to on foreign radio, they split into two roughly equal camps. About 45 percent said they tuned in only for music and about the same number said they listened only to the news; 10 percent described themselves tuning in for both." (R-E, 172-173)


"Soviet researchers drew a direct connection between the inadequacy of domestic radio and the success of the enemy voices. 'The sluggishness and narrowness of the programs on Soviet radio, including on the First STation and Maiak, lead to a situation where a part of the audience is switching over to listen to foreign stations on either a regular or an episodic basis.' Listeners reported that they tuned in to foreign radio not only for what was unavailable from Soviet media sources but also for its timeliness. Here the researchers referred to an earlier study of Maiak to demonstrate just jow far off the mark the station was: fewer than 1 percent of the news segments covered events that had happened within the previous few hours, almost none were live, on-the-scene reports (o.5 percent of the total); about 25 percent of the airtime was given over to discussion of events or ideas with no clear time reference at all."