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

Uncensored Russia Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Uncensored Russia Vol. 4- Czech

95: R: "THe dramatic Sovietinvasion of Czechoslavokia on the night of August 20-21st, 1968, introduced a new dimension into the Soviet civil rights movement....The demonstration of August 25th and other acts of protest by Soviet citizens form the core of this chapter."

96: No 3. was 10 days after the invasion

99: protests begin

THey reprint a LEditor about the protest
-includes list of participants
-It's by the editor of Chronicle Natalya Gorbanevskaya

102: (7 and 5)- consequences of being a radical

104: Rise of self-immolation as a form of protest.

112-begins trials of the arrested demonstrators

113 (4) "As reported in the third issue of the Chronicle, seven people staged a sit down demonstration at Execution Place in REd Square on August 25th, 1968 as a protest against the sending of Soviet troops into Czechoslavakia (R, 113)."

Gorbanavskaya declared unfit

114-118: just how absurd the trial was.

119: The Soviet Press as a comparison

4: "Just like the official announcement the articles mention, in the first place, only one charge, that of violating public order: i/e/ the charge under article 190-3. Secondly, even this 'violation' is not described, and nowhere is there any reference to the fact that was a protest demonstration against the intervention of Soviet troops in in Czechoslovakia. Instead, the writers of these articles, not shrinking from direct liverl, give 'character sketches of the accused aimed at compromising them in the eyes of the reader (R, 119)"

159 (11): Gorbanavskaya  arrested

Uncensored Russia Vol. 3-Ginzburg

68: Trial for someone reading The White Book

71: BIRTH OF THE MOVEMENT

(6) "On December 5th, 1968, the traditional demonstration to mark Constitution Day took play on Pushkin Square in Moscow. It is well known that the first demonstration at the Pushkin monument took place on December 5th, 1965, as a sign of protest afainst te arrest of Sinyavsky and Daniel and was held under the slogan 'Respect the Constitution!' The demonstration in 1968 was a silent meeting: about twenty people stood for ten minutes with head bared around the monument. A large number of volunteer police and K.G.B. men were also present: they waited expectedly on the sidelines but did not themselves attempt to organize any provocations. (R, 71)

(11) On December 5th, 1969, the traditional silent demonstration was held on Pushkin Square...This time about fifty people went to honour the memory of their comrades in camps, prison and exile. At six o'clock in the evening the demonstrators surrounded by a crowd of plain-clothese security men, bared their heads (R, 71) ."

73: Issue 1 juxtaposes Ginzburg w/ human rights year

79-80: protest letters re: Ginzburg

83: effects of signing letters

90: Kaiden (student who committed suicide after found to be reading Ginzburg) Chronicle devotes lots to him

Uncensored Russia Vol. 2- S & D

"Two important points emerge. First, the Chronicle's aim is openness, non-secretiveness, freedom of information and expression. All these notions are subsumed in the one Russian word glasnost. (R, 26)"

"The Chronicle regards itself as lefal because it merely compiles an accurate recrod of events and there is truth there can--legally speaking--be no 'libel'. 'anti-Soviet' or otherwise( R, 26)."

"Anonymity, let us recall, has seemed to the Chronicle's editors a regretabble necessity, forced on them by the authorities regard for legality. (R, 29)"

That confidence has grown still more when the maximum cross-checking against the Soviet press, reports from Western documents has confirmed the Chronicle's accuracy and revealed no serious errors at all (R, 29)."

R. is GLOWING

"As for the correspondents' own sources, these vary widely. In the compiling of trial accounts, for example, many people--including defendants witnesses and lawyers-- who have been present either at the original trial or at the appeal hearing, can help. In addition leaks of information and even of documents (176-183) sometimes provide material from official institutions...(R, 30)"

30: Correspondent's network-look how impressive
reaches the west 2 weeks to 2 months

32: audience

33: KGB

54 (1)": We are not illegal, how to send them info

55 (2): discussion of their tone
"Samizdat had a dual right to figure in the Chronicle: first, in so far as a part of expressly devoted to te question of human rights; secondly, the whole of samizdat is an example of freedom of speech and the press of creative freedom and freedom of conscience, put into practice.

58 (7): please be careful about submitting information-avoid inacurracies

61-64: letter re: S & D

66: White book and subsequent protests

Uncensored Russia Notes Vol. 1

Reddaway, Peter, trans. Uncensored Russia: The Unofficial Moscow journal, a Chronicle of Current Events. American Heritage Press, 1972. 

"The Chronicle is in fact the "organ" of these movements' mainstream, a mainstream called by its members either the Democratic Movement or, with a narrower application, the Civil (or Human) Rights Movement (Reddaway, 17). "

"The Chronicle, by contrast, focuses on precisely on many of those aspects of Soviet life where the official press is most inadequate. It illuminates them, like the best primary sources, in precise, unemotive language. It is uninhibited by censorship, yet in taking advantage of this it is constrained by potent considerations to achieve a high level of accuaracy. In brief, it both articulates the demand of aggrieved groups in Soviet society and throws fresh light on those institutions with which the groups conflict. Meanwhile almost nothing of all this reflected--at least recognizably-- in the official press. (Reddaway 17)"

17-18: Really great historical overview of samizdat beginning with Pushkin

18: Secret Speech 

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

"Seemingly , in fact, it was the year 1966 which saw the birth of an expressive new Russian word--full of ominous overtones for the authorities samizdat (Reddaway, 19)." 

"But how does a work get into samizdat? Usually the author, or a friend of his, or a publishing house editor, types out some copies and passes them around. In this way popular items are typed and retyped indefinitely and often reach the outside world through the help of a Soviet or Western tourist. In that case, they have a chance of second publication, this time in tamizday i.e. in the Western press or an emigre journal 'tam' or 'over there'. Finally they may also then be broadcast back to the Soviet Union by Western radio stations, thus achieving a third 'publication (Reddaway, 19).'

22: summary of the movement, solid

23: "As for foreign links, all reformist elements--those fully within the system as well as as well as those on the fringes--  have, as in the last century, profited from their development. Especially under Khrushchev foreign books and periodicals became more accessible, travel abroad, even defection, was possible for some, Western radio stations broadcasting in Russian were in certain periods not hammed, and emigre material began to circulate (R, 23)."

"The political liberalism underlying article 19 of the U.N's Declaration does indeed also underlie the Chronicle's Editorial policy. Individuals with widely varying views are, for example, given an equal amount of space. Similarly with samizdat items. And the activities of almost all the known democratically inclined groups are at least on occasion recorded. (R, 25)

But the Chronicle contains little purely editorial material, so particular aspects of its editors' position must often be inferred. No. 5, however provides some broad guidelines. After discussing the movement for human rights and its 'general aim of democratization,' the editors go on to describe 'the more particular aim pursued by the Chronicle as : 'seeing that the Soviet public is informed about about what goes on in the country' in the field of human rights. Thus 'the Chronicle is in no sense an illegal publication, and the difficult conditions in which it is produced are created by the peculiar notions about law and freedom of information which, in the course of long years, have become established in certain Soviet organizations. for this reason the Chronicle cannot like any other journal give its postal address on the last page (R,25) ."

Old Notes of Uncensored Russia

On April 30, 1968, the first edition of The Chronicle of Current Events was distributed. The first words of the issue juxtaposed the beginning of the worldwide Human Rights Year with the start of the trial of Yury Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg, Aleksei Dobrovolsky. [1] It also marked the beginning of the crown jewel of the dissident movement. The Chronicle of Current Events was samizdat published; typists secretly typed it on layers upon layers of carbon paper and distributed it discretely.  The paper was genius in its simplicity, writers described raids of apartments and arrests and on what was going on in prison camps and psychiatric hospitals, but offered no commentary. The events spoke for them selves. [2] In Uncensored Russia, Peter Reddaway compiled the first eleven issues of The Chronicle, published in Russia during 1968 and 1969.  His book was published in the U.S, as a tamizdat, text in 1972. Rather than just run the issues in their entirety, Reddaway organized individual articles into different thematic sections, such as “The Camps and Prisons,” “The Mental Hospitals” and “Solzhenitsyn.”

...

Following Stalin’s death, Khrushchev brought the “Thaw” to Soviet culture. He ushered in an era of de-Stalinization with his “Secret Speech” in 1956. The Thaw is demonstrated by Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, her memoir of her husband’s persecution for writing a poem attacking Stalin. The most important moment of the Thaw occurred in 1962 when Khrushchev personally approved the publication Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

 In many ways, Solzhenitsyn’s work is an attempt to further what Khrushchev said the Secret Speech. While Khrushvhev felt that “We should not wash out dirty linen before their eyes,[1]” Solzhenitsyn believed the opposite: that it was necessary to expose everything about the Stalinist years. For Solzhenitsyn, telling the truth is tied with the role of the artist. In one scene in the novel, two prisoners, Kh-123 and Tsezar, discuss the film Ivan the Terrible. Tsezar argues the film is a work of art because of its camera angles and aesthetic beauty. But Kh-123 responds, saying it’s a piece of propaganda. Tsezar believes the movie’s message is the only reason it made it past the censors. Kh-123 retorts, “A genius doesn’t adapt his treatment to the taste of tyrants![2]” This scene represents Solzhenitsyn’s overall point in writing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. He wrote the novel, a piece of art, to expose what occurred in the camps.

Both Mandelstam’s memoir, and especially, Solzhenitsyn’s novel are in response to Khrushchev’s speech. While Khrushchev exposed and denounced the party purges in his speech, he failed to mention the terror and the persecution of the intelligentsia. Both writers believed they had a fundamental obligation as survivors of the terror to tell their stories, and to prevent the deformation of future generations. [3] Their works sought to correct the omissions in Khrushchev’s speech.

If One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was a response to the secret speech, and the events surrounding it, then The Chronicle was a response to Solzhenitsyn novel and the events of the early sixties. While Khruschev had ushered in the age of the Thaw, his successor Brezhnev tightened state controls on publishing. In his introduction, Reddaway writes of Brezhnev’s reign, “The Khrushchev era of more or less peaceful coexistence between the party and the liberal intelligentsia was at an end.[4]” As censorship became more prevalent, there were also other indications that Stalinist conditions were returning.  For one, it became illegal to make any negative comments about the former leader. Additionally, two members of the secret police were appointed to the Supreme Court. While reformers were clearly unhappy with these events,  Reddaway argues the ultimate catalyst for the birth of The Chronicle was the trial and sentencing of Sinyavsky and Daniel. He describes their sentences of seven and five years, respectively, of hard labor as “savage.” The uproar surrounding their sentencing was unheard of for the time. He writes, “This trial…gave an immense stimulus to unofficial literary life, provoking mass protests and turning people’s attention in a remarkable degree towards politics.[5]” The injustice of their trial revitalized the literary community and reminded them of what Solzhenitsyn said was their duty: to expose the truth. Out of these conditions, a newly reinvigorated literary class and a desire to show the public the truth, came The Chronicle.

Indeed, a great deal of The Chronicle was dedicated to discussing the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel. The paper chose to print Ginzburg’s White Book, a defense of the two writers. It also printed a letter by Vitaly Potapenko attacking the newspaper, the Izvestia for slandering Sinyavsky and Daniel. The letter calls out the writer of an article about the trial that referred to Sinyavsky and Daniel as “anti-Soviet lampoons.” Potapenko writes, “Such statements are called ‘contempt of court’ and are an attempt influence public opinion and the decision of the court.[6]’  Potapenkos then calls for the writer and editor of the article to be brought to court for their actions. Potapenko’s letter avoids making a judgment about whether or not Sinyavsky and Daniel were guilty, rather it demonstrates the injustice of their trial and sentencing. This letter represents one of The Chronicle’s main goals, to establish “some measure of the rule of law.[7]” The paper sought to prevent the arbitrary nature of arrests and searches in Soviet society, as part of their quest for basic human rights in the Soviet state. Potapenko’s letter demonstrates just how arbitrary the system was. The government had convinced the public the two writers were guilty before they were even put on trial. Furthermore, it also calls for the writer and editor of the news article to be held accountable for their actions. He seeks a system of laws that would not allow the Izvestia to get away with their slanderous article.

The Chronicle’s desire for a system of law is also evident in it its coverage of political prisoners sent to labor camps. In its seventh issue, The Chronicle ran the story of Svyatoslav Karavansky who was sentenced to twenty-five years in 1944 because of his role in a Ukranian nationalist organization. He received amnesty in 1960, but in 1965 he was ordered to complete his sentence after writing an article about national discrimination against university entrants. Besides the unjust nature of his second sentencing, the article also discusses trials in camps, which never included defense lawyers. Again, it demonstrates the few civil rights Russians had when attempting to fight charges levied against them.

 In other articles in Reddaway’s “The Camps and Prisons” sections, writers describe the horrific conditions in the camps. A great number of the pieces focus on hunger strikes the prisoners either threatened or went through with because of their poor living conditions. For instance, eleventh issue describes a hunger strike at the political camps of Mordovia. The prisoners at the camp decided to embark on a strike after one of their own was sent to the cooler. Other examples include hunger strikes over the denial of packages and not allowing prisoners to have guests. The hunger strikes gave The Chronicle an excuse to comment on the conditions in camps because it was necessary to explain the prisoners reasoning in undergoing the strikes.

In another piece on camps, The Chronicle printed a summary of a letter from camp prisoners laying out an argument against the camps.  It states, “The authors show how the system of concentration camps established under Stalin and since condemned in words alone, continues to serve as the basis of penal policy in our country[8].” They argue that the camps were a disgrace to the country, especially in the eyes of the world. They also pointed out most prisoners in the camps posed no true threat to the state, but rather were post-war nationalists and preachers. This particular argument is reminiscent of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The title character is not, in the least, a threat to Soviet society. During World War II, while serving the Red Army, Denisovich was a German prisoner of war. After he escaped, he was accused of being a Nazi spy, and was sentenced to work in a labor camp. The prisoners in the camps during The Chronicle’s years were sent to camps on similarly false, trumped up charges.

The chapter on the camps and their prisoners recalls One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for another simpler reason. Both pieces of writing exposed the truth about what was going on in the camps. Khrushchev’s speech conspicuously failed to mention forced labor camps. Solzhenitsyn’s novel seeks to rectify this oversight. He wants to air the truth about the camps, exposing them as slave labor camps, but Khrushchev is not willing. The Chronicle, too, sought to reveal the truth about human rights violations. In the first issue, it states,

“We believe it is our duty to point out also that several thousands of political prisoners, of whom the rest of the world is virtually unaware, are in camps and prisons. They are kept in inhuman conditions of forced labour, on a semi-starvation diet, exposed to the arbitrary actions of the administration still operating.”

Besides echoing Solzhenitsyn’s images of life in the camps as devastating, it also recalls his language. The Chronicle claims it was their “duty” to expose the truth, just as Solzhenitsyn believed it was his duty, as an artist, to tell the true story about the forced labor camps.

There are other indications of The Chronicle’s relation to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For one, they devoted so much content to Solzhenitsyn that Reddaway dedicated an entire chapter of his book to it. The paper frequently ran content sympathetic to Solzhenitsyn’s call for the abolishment of censorship. In fact, it printed the entirety of his letter to the Russian Republic Writers’ Union.  Moreover, after Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union, The Chronicle featured many statements and letters of support from various sources, including the National Committee of French Writers, Arthur Toynbee and Arthur Miller.

The letter from Westerners brings up another important part of samizdat publishing, its evolution to tamizdat publishing. Underground texts, such as Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, were sent abroad to be published. A prime example is the very publishing Reddaway’s book, a collection of samizdat texts, in the United States. The spread of tamizdat allowed for the outside world to understand what was going on in Russia and dissidents sought to use this to their advantage. In 1969, Yury Galanskov wrote an essay about the Russia penal system and called on Westerners to pressure the Soviet government to change them. He wrote,

“The Western press, and especially the Western radio-stations broadcasting in Russian, publicise arbitrariness and acts of crude coercion by Soviet official personnel, and thus force the state bodies and officials to take quick action. In this way the Western press are fulfilling the tasks of what is at present lacking in Russia, an organized opposition, and thereby stimulating our national development[9].”

Galanskov believed that the West was able to stimulate democratic change in Russia in a way that Russians themselves were not able to.

However, Galanskov was ultimately proved wrong by the glasnost reforms. During the late eighties, Russians ushered in an age of reform in their own country, although the Western world was supportive of their efforts. In his introduction, Reddaway describes the class structure of the dissident movement. Close to half were academics, particularly in science fields, many were writers, artists and actors and some were engineers. [10] This was the third generation of cohorts within the apparatchik. This group matured after Khrushchev’s speech in 1956, and was never intimately acquainted with Stalinism. They were an educated middle class, who were career driven and careful not to be considered party hacks. This group flirted with the dissident movement. They read and supported things like The Chronicle. In particular, they were the generation that centered around unburying the past, just as Solzhenitsyn and The Chronicle sough to do.

It was this group of young urban professionals that ultimately forced democratic reforms. 

---

[1] Khrushchev, Secret Speech, page 568

[2] Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, page 67

[3] Linda Gerstein, Class Lecture, December 3, 2009

[4] Ed. Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, page 18

[5] Ed. Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, page 19

[6] Ed. Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, page 63

[7] Ed. Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, page 22

[8] Ed. Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, page 224

[9] Ed. Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, page 225

[10] Ed. Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, page 24

[11] Linda Gerstein, Class Lecture, December 10

[12] Linda Gerstein, Class lecture, November 24, 2009

---

[1] Ed. Peter Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, page 53

[2] Peter Kenez, A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, page 227

A Narrowing of My Thesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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