"Key to the attitudes of Moscow human rights defenders toward the U.S. journalists who reported on their activities was the profound isolation of Soviet citizens from the West, indeed from the rest of the world, that was a major component of Stalinism and post-Stalinism." (905)
isolation-906
No longer was Russia ruled by a dynasty with strong royal Western ties. Instead, it was ruled by a revolutionary group that seemed to pose a considerable threat to Western governments and therefore invited their hostility, including invasion by several Western powers during the Civil War.The Bolshevik response was a kind of drawing in, a voluntary isolation on the part of the state that became involuntary isolation for Soviet citizens. Soon after the Bolshevik coup in 1917, it became increasingly difficult for most Soviet citizens to travel abroad freely. By the same token, the entry of foreigners into the Soviet Union was increasingly controlled, as were relations between Soviets and foreigners who were in the country. This simple fact of physical separation had an impact all its own. (906)
Insider and outsiders and the purges
Stalin’s purges in the later 1930s further deepened the question of insiders and outsiders, of who was a loyal Soviet citizen and who a traitor.The repeated and highly publicized searches for saboteurs, for “enemies of the people,” helped create a vast new category of supposedly deceptive outsiders who looked like insiders. The question of insiders and outsiders grew even more dangerous before, during, and after World War II, as Stalin’s deep anxiety about a fifth column among any of the many ethnic groups with (or without) cause to resent his power led him brutally to transport across the Eurasian continent whole national categories of people such as the Balts, the Volga Germans, and the Crimean Tatars." (907)
The state-supported “anti-cosmopolitan” movement following the war heightened the tension for a Soviet ethnic group that was to provide a large corps of participants to the dissent movement, as well as the refusenik movement, in later years: Soviet Jews. (907)
Yet these painful questions about what it meant to be loyal Soviets did
not lead to an embrace of the Western world among emerging human rights
defenders. Due perhaps in part precisely to the isolation of the Soviet Union
from Westerners and Western ideas, the early Moscow human rights move-
ment was distinctly indigenous and inward-looking in nature.
50s dissidents:
The movement arose without notable Western involvement among the kompanii, the liberal intelligentsia networks and circles of the 1950s.8 The kompaniia phenomenon, which began to take shape in the years following Stalin’s death in 1953, led to increasing social and national self-examination among its paticipants, beginning with readings not of Western human rights documents such as, say, the works of John Locke but rather of internally more pertinent materials such as the works of Lenin and Marx by some, and 19th-century
Russian literature and philosophy by others.9 Growing discontent, fed by Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, led to the emergence of the samizdat movement of underground publication, which made accessible to a certain range of urban intellectuals much written material that could not be published officially. Here too the early focus was more on materials that were internally pertinent—such as memoirs and poetry of the Stalin era, opposttional political documents, and Soviet literature that could not be published
due to censorship—than on Western materials on human rights." 908
The dissident Pavel Litvinov began to encounter and think about Westerners for the first time in college, at Moscow University. “When I was at the university I knew some foreigners. I was about 18, I could always tell them apart,” he said in an interview in 2005. This sense of apartness led directly to the question of exactly how they were so different—which led in turn to the question of what kind of people exactly the Russians themselves were. How were foreigners in fact different? “A kind of style, a naturalness and freedom. They talked louder than we did; they weren’t embarrassed by certain things. I remember there was one well- known American and he came barefoot out of his room and walked barefoot down the corridor. Nobody did that in a Moscow University dormitory—but
he just walked out freely.” 910
This was because Western foreigners also represented to many Soviets who met them a kind of freedom of generosity that stemmed from their access to the outside world and to greater wealth. They offered information about the outside world, for one thing: “[F]oreigners became for us more than anything sources of information,” as they offered much-desired glimpses of an unknown and much speculated upon outside world. (911)inteview /w Tatiana Starostina
Some Westerners became sources of material goods unavailable to common Soviet citizens as well, not just of the odd bottle of alcohol from the beriozka (state-run shop selling Western consumer products for Western currency) but of books, clothing (especially jeans, of course), and technology. Some of these gifts were mailed or brought for personal use, but some were donated for the purpose of sale in the Soviet unofficial economy to support impoverished Soviets, usually intellectuals who were having trouble the gift of Western glossy coffee table books on art, design, and so on, which with the state and therefore with employment. One fascinating example was could be purchased in Western Europe, could be shipped relatively cheaply and safely, and could easily be sold on the Soviet black market. (911-912)
Way for Westerners to show their inside status
Yet another path to perceived insider status for some Westerners that would become especially important to human rights activity throughout the late 1960s was aid in overcoming the barriers to discourse and other interaction with the outside world. Such support included carrying letters and manuscripts across the Soviet border to the West, as well as money and information that might be politically touchy. This could be dangerous for Westerners and the willingness of some of them, especially those in the diplomatic corps, to risk jobs and physical safety and emotional peace of mind made a deep impression on some dissenters.19 As generous expressions of Western freedom, such supportive activities helped create a sense of what might be described as a kind of communality between some Westerners and some dissenters. As the human rights activist Aleksandr Podrabinek put it in an interview: “those mutual goals, that general atmosphere, it’s very hard to convey in words… . [I]t was an astonishing atmosphere that Western people fell into. People with responsive [otzyvchivye] hearts, they were drawn into it, they became a part of that atmosphere, part of that dissident culture, they were even participants, to a greater or lesser degree.” (912)
Domestic sphere as bonding: The domestic localities of these encounters also contributed to a sense, whether real or imaginary, of communality between certain Westerners and certain members of the Moscow liberal elite. (913)
Westerners have an obligation:
Through their supportive activities such Westerners perhaps created a sense of entitlement on the Soviet side. Given Westerners’ freedom, wealth, and access to the outside world, to some inside the Soviet Union they appeared actually to owe a degree of personal
partisan commitment. Intensifying that feeling among some in the dissent milieu was the internal transformation in the human rights movement itself with the emergence and strengthening of the ethos of (samo)zhertvovanie that is described above. In their free generosity some Westerners appeared to commit themselves to that ethos of self-giving or self-sacrifice in the pursuit of Soviet human rights as indeed some most wholeheartedly did.(913)
913: Starts with Sinyavsky and Daniel
It was the trial itself that first led to extensive contact with Western reporters. While Western reporters had been at an earlier demonstration at Pushkin Square in support of the two authors, events had transpired too quickly there for dissidents and U.S. journalists to make contact. But at the trial, into which no witnesses were allowed other than family members along with “select” members of the Soviet citizenry to pack the remaining benches, a few kompaniia members began to stand vigil outside the courthouse. Nearby stood an array of Western journalists covering the trial. (913-914)
Although at first the two groups merely eyed each other, kompaniia members evidently liked what they saw in part because the journalists gave a strong impression of commitment to the cause of covering, or publicizing, dissent. As Alexeyeva described it in a 2005 interview: “The first time I saw Western journalists was at the trial of Daniel and Siniavskii, and I have to say that they made a good impression on me. First of all because it was very cold; we came wrapped up just like cabbages, while they were in light coats
and the kind of little shoes that you should wear in the fall and not in the winter. And they were downright blue with cold, but there they stood; they came in the morning just like us and left at the end of the day.” The Russians soon took action in response to this indication of commitment, and therefore potential support: “We asked them to come to a pel´meni shop for some food.” (914)
This encounter contributed to a type of dissident–journalist relationship of increasing importance to the Moscow human rights movement as well as to the emerging Soviet dissent movement as a whole. As dissenters gradually established contacts and relationships among growing numbers of like-minded citizens across the Soviet empire in the next few years, Moscow lay nevertheless at the heart of the movement. This was because as the capital of the vast country, it was the primary area to which the Soviet state permitted Western reporters to be posted. These journalists had considerable importance in conveying the ideas and dreams of the dissidents to the outside world, thereby awakening Western interest in the dissident movement that would prove essential not only to publicizing the dissenters’ cause but indeed to the physical survival of many of the group’s members. Their cause was publicized not only in the outside world; through such media organs as Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, the BBC, and the Deutsche Welle,materials offered to and published by Western correspondents could be further publicized within hours, thus becoming available to vast segments of the Soviet population who had no other means of learning about the dissent movement. (914)
The dissident connection with Western journalists also had an ideological and intellectual logic, arising directly from a central tenet of the human rights movement: the right to openness, to freedom of discourse. (914-915)
Perhaps the most significant figure in developing this vibrant principle of the hu- man rights movement was, as many writing about the movement have reported, Alexander Esenin-Vol´pin—mathematician, long-time dissenter (he had been imprisoned in the 1940s), and lively participant in the doings of the 1960s generation. More than anyone else, according to such memoirists as Vladimir Bukovsky and Ludmilla Alekseyeva, Esenin-Vol´pin expounded repeatedly and forcefully on the radical idea that the Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed Soviet citizens certain rights, including freedom of speech and association.24 Furthermore, he argued for what he called, long before Mikhail Gorbachev used the word, glasnost´, or transparency and openness in the Soviet state. Arguments for this principle of openness were developed in a variety of ways—from Sakharov, for whom it was the path to successful and peaceful internal and foreign relations, to Boris Shragin, for whom it was an essential expression of human dignity and conscience.25 In Eastern Europe, these principles were articulated by Vaclav Havel, who argued for an escape from the ritualistic and hypocritical ideology of the Soviet bloc through “living in truth.”26 For many Soviet dissenters, their relations with Western journalists were in a sense an extension of that principle of openness. (916)
During the interview cited above there was an emotional intensity to Alexeyeva’s descriptions of her relations with U.S. journalists that is not uncommon. Several interviews revealed this sort of enthusiasm, often with reference to specific Western correspondents.30 It is hard to know exactly how to interpret this: Is it simple nostalgia? A tendency toward hagiography and glorification of past associations that is not unknown to the Russian intelligentsia?31 No doubt there is something of this in their responses. The former and contemporary human rights defenders are not much praised in the Russian press even today, and there is a tendency among some of them to glorify the past and past associations. But it is also possible that the positive impressions of U.S. and other Western journalists expressed by several dissenters interviewed stem at least in part from what some dissidents interpreted (not necessarily in error) as individual partisanship and commitment to the dissident cause and community. (917)
WHy W. cared?-GENERATIONAL
The very list of journalists posted to Moscow gives a sense of the prestige and professional potential of the position of Moscow correspondent: Walter Cronkite, Hedrick Smith, Peter Osnos, Strobe Talbott, Kevin Close, Robert Kaiser, and many others who went on to build powerful careers following their Soviet experience. In part this was because of the status of the Soviet Union as superpower and predominant challenger to U.S. might. But it also had something to do with the increasing journalistic fascination during this period with more personal, social coverage of the Soviet Union. There was a notable interest among both journalists and U.S. readers in penetrating that seemingly impermeable Iron Curtain for glimpses of real life. There was also a strong interest in the dissent movement in and for itself. That U.S. journalists were also coming from a national context in which dissent had been raised in status through the civil rights movement, the emergence of the baby boomer generation, and protest against the Vietnam War, was also significant. It was very exciting for many reporters to have contact with brave people challenging an authoritarian regime that was the enemy of the
United States.
More than just reporting:
Like other visiting Westerners, U.S. journalists also engaged in some of the activities that could blur the lines between insider and outsider status as perceived in the dissent community, not only through such professional actions as that of Anatole Shub, who aided a political prisoner in dangerously ill health by publicizing her situation, but also through non-journalistic forms of aid including gift-giving and letter-carrying in which many other Westerners engaged. For example, the U.S. journalist Hedrick Smith, although his ties were not to the dissent movement alone, did a great deal to help out his Soviet associates with a variety of gifts such as food and medicine.32 Peter Osnos and his wife, the Human Rights Watch worker Susan Osnos, also contributed substantially.33 Equally significant was the growing social in- volvement of some U.S. journalists in intelligentsia and dissident networks. Paying social calls and inviting Moscow intellectuals to enter the elite homes of Westerners in Moscow also became comparatively common. The U.S. journalist Anne Garrels, for example, was well-known among Soviet dissenters and other intellectuals for her contribution to the warm and intimate sphere of Moscow intelligentsia social life, holding parties at her home and thereby introducing some Soviets to a wider range of Western goods, ideas, and personal ties.34 Other journalists did much the same, though perhaps to a lesser degree. (918)
Another was Sergei Kovalev, who was deeply aware of Western correspondents’ importance in conveying information from the underground prisoner-information leaflet Chronicle of Current Events to the West, either through reporting or through direct transport of copies of the Chronicle to the West, often through the U.S. Embassy and its diplomatic pouches.40 Vladimir Bukovsky expresses a similar neutral instrumentality in describing his efforts to bring the plight of those dissenters placed in the Soviet system of psychiatric hospitals to the attention of the West through engagment with U.S. journalists, though he does call CBS correspondent William Cole “our friend.”41 Other dissenters to have a more instrumental view of Western correspondents included the more prominent Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, both of whom relied heavily on the foreign press to publicize their human rights messages. Given that inaccurate representation of their communications could be discomfiting or even physically dangerous to them, both men could be deeply frustrated by their inability to control those portrayals in the Western press as they would have wished." (920)
Criticism:
Sakharov writes in his
memoirs, and, “I don’t understand the Western media’s love
affair with Soviet citizens who defect while abroad, jeopardizing efforts to
establish a firm legal footing for the right to move freely.”42
What he viewed as gratuitous Western commentary on dissident affairs
particularly infuriated him. For example he expressed dismay when his wife
Elena Bonner’s observations on human rights at a press conference were watered
down by an unfounded journalist’s comment that Bonner was believed to wish to
leave the Soviet Union.43 A report on Voice of
America during Sakharov’s and Bonner’s hunger strike that Sakharov was ill was
also disturbing to him: “We were infuriated; we felt fine and we feared the backlash
that such exaggeration could provoke.”44 (920)
Solzhenitsyn quote: In Russia, despite Soviet oppression, there has long been a field tugging us in the direction of generosity and self-sacrifice, and it is this force that is communicated to certain Westerners and takes hold of them—perhaps not for all time but at least while they are among us (922)
These words, along with a
comment to the effect that Western journalists and others educated in the West
were willing to “leave their mercenary habits behind and risk their necks” upon
encountering the dissent movement, reveal a harsh critique of and hostility
toward the West and its representatives, including foreign correspondents.48
Solzhenitsyn is describing them as fundamentally selfish, apparently capable of
giving up that negative quality only through contact with (Russian) Soviet
dissenters. These could be dismissed as the words of a self-righteous or merely
cranky individual. Yet they make a great deal more sense if placed into the
cultural context of the dissident struggle with insider vs. outsider identity
for themselves and for foreign correspondents, as well as the narrative of
(samo)zhertvovanie. Solzhenitsyn’s words may reflect at least as much an effort
to assert internal dissenter community identity and the relations of such
outsiders as Western journalists to that identity, and at least as much
confusion about how to evaluate the behavior of those Westerners with insufficient
contextual data, as it does simple hostility. (922)
Amalrik-923
