A Narrowing of My Thesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Thaw Generation-Notes

Alexeyeva, Ludmilla and Paul Goldberg, trans. The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the

Post-Stalin Era. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.

"Every night, we gathered in cramped apartments to recite poetry, read "unofficial" prose, and swp stories that, taken together, yielded a realistic picture of what was going on in our country (A & G, 4)."

Dissidents have 3 options

"The first was to toe the party line and be allowed to advance professionally; the second was to put a career on hold and wait for another thaw; the third was to stay the course of the thaw and accept the consequences: an aborted career and the life of a pariah (A & G, 5)." 

"I had to act.  I had to act as an individual. All of us had to. Our leaders were wrong. They needed us. They needed the public. By realizing that, we became citizens (A & G, 19)."

"But at the time we were at school, few of those connections could be called friendships. Going out of the immediate circle of friends --usually limited to two or three-- meant multiplying the chances of having your offhand remarks reported to the authorities (A & G, 32)."

-Mandelstam as an example

A & G 33-34: bond w/ the Decembrists

"Newspapers, books, and journals were now devoted exclusively to praises of Comrade Stalin, our Communist party, the Soviet motherland, the Great Russian People, and Our Valorous Armed Forces. No book could be "idealess." A love story, a poem, or an adventure for its own sake was no longer acceptable. Every work had to be of ideological value. Otherwise, it was classified as "bourgeois diversionism (A & G,  38)."

"As far as I was concerned, the Soviet system was sound, Marxism-Leninsim was the most progressive ideology in the world, and all Russia's problem could be attributed to the large number of "careerists" who had joined the party for personal gain(A & G, 48)."-it's not the system that's broken...this is her early on 

A & G 65: Bloodshed in history, but she's no longer cool with it 

A & G 66: Dissent begins with Lenin

****A & G 71:**** Beria trial

A & G 72: "In December 1953, Novy mir published an article innocuously title "On Sincerity in Literature." In it, Vladimir Pomerantsev, a little-known writer, accused the Soviet literary establishment of "varnishing reality" and churning out contrived, formulaic work that portrayed universal prosperity."

A & G 73: The Thaw

A & G 76: Secret Speech

A & G 86: Sybarites- dissident group

A & G 96: One Day in the Life...

A & G 97: " Sometime in the mid-1950s, poet Nikolai Glazkov decided to act as his own publisher.  Glazkov, a fine poet and a bear of a man who made a living in menial jobs, folded blank sheets of paper and typed his verse on all four sides. Then he took a needle and thread and sewed the pages together at the crease. The result was something like a book.

On the bottom of the first shhet, Glazkov typed "samsebyaizdat" which was both an acronym for "I published myself" and a parody of "gospolitizdat," the name of an official publishing house. Later  "samsebyaizdat" lost the reflexive sebya and was shortened to samizdat, "self-publishing."

Samizdat sprung up on its own, arising naturally from kompanii. It could not have existed without them. My friends and I helped each other fill the enormous void of information, and soon the izdat, publishing, part of samizdat became a kompaniya ritual: if you liked a manuscript, you borrowed it overnight and copied it on your typewriter. Generally, I made five copies. Three went to friends, the fourth went to the person who let me borrow the poem, and the fifth remained in my possession." 

A & G 99: deals with translations

A & G 110: Daniel!!!

A & G 113: Daniel's publications

A & G 117: S & D arrested

120-leaflet to promote Pushkin Square

"Several months ago the organs of state security arrested two citizens: writers A. Sinyavsky and Yu. Daniel. There are reasons to fear violation of glasnost of the legal process. It is commonly known that violation of the law on glasnost (Article 3 of the Constitution of the USSR and Article 18 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republic) constitutes an illegal action. It is inconceivable that the work of a writer could constitute a crime against the state.

In the past, unlawful actions by the authorities have taken the lives of millions of Soviet citizens. This blood stained past demands vigilance in the present. It is more prudent to give up oe day of tranquility than to spend years suffering the consequences of lawlessness that has not been stopped in time.

Soviet citizens have a means for resisting capricious actions of the authorities. That method is the Glasnost Meeting whose participants chant only one slogan: WE DE-MAND GLAS-NOST FOR THE TRIAL OF (followed by the last names of the accused)!" or where the participants display a corresponding banner. Any shouts or slogans that depart from demands of strict adherence to laws must be regarded as counter-productive or, possibly, provactional must be halted by participants of the meeting." (A-G, 120_

A & G 124: "It was hard to imagine the number of intermediate steps that went into te production of the book I held in my hands. There was the act of smuggling the manuscript to the West, then the no less dangerous act of smuggling the published books back into the country.

Inside was Yulik Daniel's voice and real people in surrealistic situations. There was the story of a young man who in siring children can guarantee which of them will be boys and which will be girls. If at the moment of ejaculation he visualizes Karl Marx...