Shatz, The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial and its aftermath: legal tactics and organizational efforts

"Signs of 're-Stalinization' had been appearing since the removal of Khrushchev from power in the autumn of 1964. Public references to the STalin era were beginning to play down the negative sides-the purges, te executions, the camps-and to stress he more favorabl e aspects, such as the heroic efforts of the first Five Years Plans and the war years. Stalin's role as war leader, which Khrushchev had criticized with particularly harshness was partially refurbished and articles extolling the victims of Stalin's purges began to disappear from the press. Finally, early in 1966, Pravda printed a statement ruling out further use of 'period of the cult of personality.'" (Shatz, 118)

"The embarrassing problem facing the prosecution was the two writers had not in fact committed an illegal act. There was no law on the Soviet statute books prohibiting an author from sending manuscripts abroad for publication." (Shatz, 119)

"Complaints came from many quarters that legality had not been observed in the treatment of Siniavskay and Daniel: the charge against them was false; the standards of evidence and trial procedure had been deplorable; the trial was not truly open to the public as required by law; and the reports in the press had been scanty and grossly biased against the defendents.")120

"In making this demand, the critics and protestors were calling for the redemption of one of the promises Khrushchev had made in his 1956 speech. Agter detailing the arrrests and executions of the STalin period, Khrushchev had assured his audience that 'socialist legality' woudl be restored and violations of it no longer tolerated.'" 120

"The Soviet legal system is under considerable pressure to apply Party policy, that is, to respond to political considerations, in the determination of individual cases."

Article 70

"They were accused of slandering the Soviet government and people, of slandering Lenin and of enabling some WEstern commentators to use their works for anti-Soviet purposes-hardly the 'especially dangerous crimes against the state' referred to in the law code." (Shatz, 119)-airing dirty laundry

"By putting the writers on trial, the authorities tacitly confirmed the political significance of literature and validated the role of the writer as a social critic. LIterature is recognized by the Soviet government as such a powerful force that it insists on monopolizing it for its own purposes punishing any use of it for unauthorized sentiments-writers, after all, are 'engineers of human souls.'" (Shatz, 120)

"The management of the trial reflected the government's general policy toward the issue of Stalinism in the wake of Khrushchev's departure from office. On the one hand, it wished to impose greater restrictions on criticism of the Stalinist past, with its inescapable implication of criticism of the post-Stalin present; on the other hand, it showed no desire to revert to the outright terrorism of the previous era. Therefore it sought to manipulate the courts and the legal system, giving a veneer of legality to the curtailment of political self-expression. The result was a glaring infringement of legal due process; it shocked many Soviet citizens who felt they had been assured by the Party that such travesties of justice were a thing of the Stalinist past and would not be permitted to recur. This was the main issue on which the various currents of dissent now concentrated." (Shatz, 121)

"The wave of indignation elicited by the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial advanced two major themes. First, putting writers on trial for the content of their fiction struck many observers as an absurd and shocking violation of the sanctity of literature." (Shatz, 121-122)

"The second major theme which gave Soviet dissent a new dimension, was a demand for dure process of law....Many of those who voiced such complaints stated that they disagreed with the writers' views or with the methods they had used to publish them. Nevertheless, they felt compelled to protest against the abitrariness and unfairness with which teh case had been handled. There were no public complaints about te laws themselves, or about the judicial process or the legal system in general; it was assumed that the law was just but had not been properly applied. The critics therefore demanded that the trial be reviewed and the writers acquitted (because they had obviously not violated the laws under which they have been tried) or at least that their very hard sentsences be reduced" (Shatz, 122)

-first it was petitions

then (Again younger generation)

"At the same time, some younger individuals decided to adopt bolder though still technically legal, forms of protest. Even before the trial itseld, on December 6, 1965, Soviet Constitution Day, some 200 students from the Gorky Institute of World Literature, where Siniavsky worked, had staged a rally in Moscow's Pushkin Square to demand a fair and open trial for the two writers. (This began something of an annual tradition: silent demonstrations in behalf of dissidents hae been held at the same spot on the same day in subsequent years.) THe rally was he first public protest Moscow had seen since the 1920s. (Shatz, 123)

124: trial documents, you're working against us (Socialist realism?)

"THe trials of 1967 and 1968, like the Siniavsky-Daniel trial, generated a series of petitions and open letters to the authorities protesting these new violations of due process and calling for review of the conviction and sentences." (Shatz, 126)

Ginzburg protest-126

"The most conspicuous effort in behalf of freedom of expression-and in retrospect, the highwater mark of the tide of dissent in the late sixties, at least in terms of public assertiveness-was the demonstration in Moscow's Red Square on August 25, 1968...The word 'demonstration' somewhat magnifies what actually occured: seven individuals gathered at noon at the ancient Execution Place in Red Square and unfurled a few hand-letered banners protesting the invasion." (shatz, 127)

"What was so unique about this event was that , for the first time in the history of Soviet dissent, the demonstrators were not protesting a specific case of injustice in the Soviet Union or even an issue that directly concerned them (although in the crushing of the Czech experiment in 'democratic socialism'  they percieved a real threat to their aspirations for their own country). The demonstrations in Red Square was purely an act of civic duty and inficidual conscience. This is amply confirmed by the statements of the defendants at their subsequent trial."

Larisa Bogoraz" "I was faced by the choice of protesting or staying silent. Staying silent would have meant for me sharing in the general approbal of actions which I did not approve. STaying silent would have meant lying." - just like Lie essay (Shatz, 129)

128-this trial is how the W. discovers samizdat

Birth of the Chronicle

"Some kind of permanent cohesive organization was essential in order to mount a sustained campaign for civil liberties instead of merely responding to the government's acts of repression; it was also essential if such a campaign were to survive the arrest of individual dissidents by the police. With an organizational base, the scattered and highly vulnerable individuals and circles that had emerged in the late sixties might be able to transform their expression of criticism and protest into a real "movement" on behalf of civil liberties." (Shaztz, 131)

"One of the first, and most successful, of these organizing efforts was A Chronicle of Current Events....A number of other underground journals have made their appearance in the last two decades, some of a literary nature and others devoted to political and social themes. Like the intelligentsia's 'thick journals' of the nineteenth century, they have served as behicles for the expression of a variety of nonconformist ideas, though most of these publications have been of brief duration. The Chronicle was the first one devoted exclusively to dissent itself." (Shatz, 131)

"More broadly, the rise of autonomous public associations represents a new stage of political consciousness on the part of at least some Soviet dissidents. Post-Stalin dissent in its initial phas was limited to moral appeals to the authorities for more humane treatment, and in its seconde phase to peitions and protests against violations of Soviet law and judicial procedure. It did not challenge the authorities' right to rule, nor did it question their legitimacy or demand that they be held accountable for their actions except in a moral sense. But the attempt to create citizens' organizations independent of the Party and state represents a significant break with the paternalistic principle of authority comparable to that achieved by the early intelligentsia at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century." (Shatz, 135)

Shatz, Khrushchev and the de-Stalinization campaign: the development of literary dissent

Shatz, Marshall. 1980. Soviet dissent in historical perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


"Open criticism of the past and demand for improvement in the present did not well up spontaneously from below as soon as the heavy hand of the dictator was removed; Soviet society in the preceding decades had been too thoroughly atomized and effectively cowed for that. Instead criticism filtered down from the very summit of the political structure, initiated by non other than the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, in his 'secret speech' of 1956." (Shatz, 95) 


Motivations:


"It is certainly not inconceivable that he genuinely wished to provide the Soviet people with a greater degree of security in their daily lives in renouncing the use of mass terror. The pervasive gear and insecurity that Stalin had encouraged, and which appeared to building a to new climax on the eve of his death were repulsive in their barbarity." (Shatz, 96)


""STalin's methods of rule were not just inhumane; they threatened to paralyze the system itself by so terrorizing those responible for running it that they could no longer work effectively." (Shatz, 96)


"By claiming that from this point had Stalin gone astray without opening to questions the foundations of the Soviet system and the methods by which it had been constructed." (Shatz, 97)


"Conspicuously absent from his speech was any reference o the legal, political or institutional sources of STalinism, and the necessity of change in these areas. He dealt exclusively with the symptom of Stalinism- the arbitrary misuse of power-while carefully avoiding any mention of its underlying causes, the features of the Soviet system that gave Stalin his power and permitted him to misuse it." (Shatz, 99)


"More specifically, the central feature of the Soviet political ststem the Communist PArty's monopoly on power, never came into question in Khrushchev's speech. Instead Khrushchev sought to disassociate the Party with Stalin's atrocities while crediting it with all the positive accomplishments of the Stalin period." (Shatz, 99)


"By and large, unofficial criticisms of Stalinism accepted the limits Khrushchev had imposed on the subject. For the next ten years, until the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial of 1966, the voices of dissent evoked by Khrushchev's speech confined themselves largely to the moral plane, calling for a change in the character and atitudes of the people running the Soviet system while exempting the system itself from direct criticism of serious analysis." (Shatz, 100)


-lit played a significant role 


"Not only did dissidents resort to literature to express their views but Khrushchev and his supporters were attempting to bend literature to their own purposes, utilizing it as an instrument of de-Stalinization while at the same time trying to ensure it did not cut more deeply than they wished." (Shatz, 100) 


110: One day in the life- "highwater in the de-Stalinization" tide


"What Solzhenitsyn's novel implied by subtle omision rather than explicit stateme, but nonetheless unmistakabely-was that Stalinism was a mass phenomoneon. It was not simply the product of individual 'excesses' that claimed individual victims, but something that affected the whole of Soviet society." (Shatz, 111)


"To a Western observer, one of the most distinctive features of Soviet dissent as the preceding discussion demonstrates, is the prominence of literature as its form of expression. Under Khrushchev, the boldest ststements of unofficial criticism were embodied in novels, stories and poetry; greater freedom of artistic expression was of of the demands most frequently made of the authorities and one of the yardsticks used to measure the extent of de-Stalinization; and the rewards and punishments accorded to writers and editors showed which way the political wind was blowing at any given moment." (Shatz. 112)


historical precedent- lit bears a "heavy burden of social resposibility."


"Few Western political figures would pay much attention to anything from the pen of a poet, but in the Soviet Union literatures has always be a very serious matter, sometimes deadly serious. 'Why do you complain?' the great poet Osip Mandelstan, who died in one of Stalin's camps, would ask his long-suffering wife. 'Poetry is respected only in this country-people are killed for it. There's no other place where moer people are killed for it.'" (Shatz, 114)


Solzh letter to Congress


"Literature, or disciourse, are the most convenient and effective camouflague for ideas or complaints that cannot be stated directly. Hence the rise in imperial Russia, and prersistence in the Soviet Union, of a tradition of 'Aesopian language,' a language of hints and allusions which the writer or literary critic uses to evade censorship and which the initiated reader knows how to translate. In a society where a variety of channels are available for the expression of public opinion, literature takes its rightful place as one of the many ways of commenting on pulbic issues. But in a society where censorship prevails, literature inevitably comes to bear far more of the burden." (Shatz, 114)

Connection between Lit and Chonicle

The Chronicle and Legal samizdat was more about openness than lit. More radical. No more doublespeak!

Sinyavsky "The Literary Process in Russia"

Sinyavsky, Andrei. "The Literary Process in Russia." Kontinent. New York: Anchor Books, 1976.

satirical

 "The Russian author does not want to write to the state's direction has assumed the nightmarish status of an underground writer, that is to say, from the state's point of view he has chosen a life of crime for which  strict penalties and deterrents are laid down. Literature has become a forbidden, risky and thus all the more fascinating activity." (S, 77)

"The writer had to be reduced to the status of a criminal, a lawbreaker-to which some writers first had to be driven to suicide, others expelled, still others tortured. Thousand of writers had to be corrupted and castrated-a task undertaken for several decades by the founders and stormy petrels of Soviet literature." (S, 78)

"Thus at a certain stage the literary process has assumed the character of a double-edged game, an escapade which in itself could well provide the plot of an entertaining novel. Authors have been turned into the heroes of as yet unwritten books; they have tasted the savor of an intrigue which may end in disaster ('If you play with fire, you can burn your fingers,' as Khrushchev warned writers with his customary bluntness), but which on the other hand lends a certain higher meaning-a gaiety, an interest, 'a pledge who knows, of immortality'--to the writer's otherwise drab existence." (S,79)

"The wrier nowadays is walking a knife-edge; but unlike the old days, when writers were simply eliminated one after another, he now derives pleasure and moral satisfaction from this curious pastime. The writer is now someone to be reckoned with." (S, 79)

"When they discovered that a woman of my acquaintance going to Russia from the West, was carrying a copy of Doctor Zhivago in her suitcase, she was immediately put into a gynecological chair and subjected to a medical examination to find out whether she might be carrying any more banned novels. This is excellent. This all to the good. It means that a book is worth something, it is sought after pursued; and by escaping, hiding, or being buried in the ground it gathers weight and power." (S, 80-81)

"We shall not be far wrong if we say that the major topics are prison and labor camps. The themes which inspire the Russian writer today are not stories about collective farms, or factories, not love stories or even the pangs of youth, but how people are imprisoned, where they are sent into exile and exactly how (interesting topic, you must admit) they shoot you in the back of the neck. The labor camp is now the central, the dominant them of literature." (S, 81)

"Whether we take Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, or for greater respectability Tolstoy's Resurrection, we will notice that both of them are based on the notion of escape, of breaking the bounds; that the writer's very soul longs to escape; that the savor, the sense, the ideal of being a writer has nothing whatever to do with 'telling the truth' (go an tell it if you want to-in a tramcar), but it has to do with planting that so-called 'truth' across the tracks of the 'lie' which is universally, legally, and publicly accepted as truth-- and thus to assume, as a duty, the role of 'criminal,' 'lawbreaker,' 'renegade,' 'degenerate,' or (what an apt new word  they have invented) as 'ideological saboteur (hell-no dynamite!) and as he surveys the horizon wondering what to write about, more often than not he will chose some forbidden topic." (S, 84)

"It would be hard to invent a more precise and more inoffensive name than samizdat, indicating no more than that a person has simply written everything he wanted to say as he thought fit, and has published it himself, regardless of the consequences, by passing a wad of typewritten sheets to a friend. The friend has gone running to boas about it to two more like-minded drop-outs-and we are witnessing the conception of something great, fantastic, unique, incomparable: the embryo of Russian literature, which once before in the in the nineteenth century, delighted mankind, and is now once more feeling the urge to return to the old battleground." (S, 87)

"In historical perspective of the literary process in Russia, that period which for convenience we have marked with the searing brand of 'Stalinism' has also, perhaps made its modest but legitimate contributin to this process. It may be that too long a spell of silence and despair has made us speak up with such passion and fervor in the conditions of today's relatively tolerable (and even, as I have said, in some ways beneficial) unfreedom--in other words, as soon as the writers were able so much as to open thier mouths. If nowadays we shout so loudly to the world at large about the terrible and shameful things that are being done in Russia, then it is because among other things we have had direct experience eof the 'cold and murk of days to come' which Alexander Blok prophesied for us all." (S, 90)

"It is at this point that literature must be on its guard and must not give way to the seductive spell of speaking the truth and nothing but the truth. The  danger threatening modern Russian literature--banned literature, of course (the other literature is not worth considering, since artistically it is about two hundred years out of date)--is assuming the role of a sort of whining complaints book, supposedly to be pursued by the leaders (who don't give a damn anyway), or to be stored away in a cupboard untli the advent of those better times when people will have learned to live by the light of truth." (S, 104)

"We are again faced by the eternal Russian dilemma: Where is your allegiance, you profession purveyors of culture? Whose side are you on? Are you for truth, or for the official lie? When the question is put like that,  the writer obviously has no choice but to answer proudly: for truth! And that is the only fitting reply in such a situation. But in proclaiming oneself to be on the side of truth, it is worthwhile remembering what Stalin said when some brave members of the Union of Writers asked him to explain once and for all what socialist realism was, and how, in practical terms, to attain thos glittering heights. Without taking a moment's thought or batting an eyelid, the leader replied:

'Write the truth--and that will be socialist realism!'

The point has been reached where we should feat the truth, lest it hang round out necks again like an albatross. Let the writer refuse to tell lies, but let him create fiction--and in disregard of any kind of 'realism.'" (S, 104)

"All this is simply a set of variations on my original theme: the belief in the power of words. Everyone shares this belief: the common people, the writers, the authorities (who, having investigated the leaflets, immediately, as the rules prescribe, arrested and imprisoned the young truth-seekers), as well as the writers of those countless letters, complaints, and appeals to those same authorities. That is why people write, and why they are forbidden to write." (S, 108)

Nelidov "Ideocratic Consciousness and Personality"

Nelidov, Dmitiri.  "Ideocratic Consciousness and Personality." In The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian 'Samizdat'- An Anthology.  Edited by Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shagrin. Translated by Nicolas Lupinin. 19-46. Massachusetts: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977.


1973


"The culture of social adaptation or the negative ideology of which we speak and which firs into a sepcial, semi-displaced, semi-conscious part of the soul, is at the same time a system of internal filters or censorship.  Censorship forms as the results of the hardening of settled reactions to ideological energy impulses which are regularly sent and organized in a special way. It pre-determines the mastering of information being received, enlivening and coloring some, sterilizing and ousting others." (M-A, 274)


"Today we see the consequences of this process in the culture of social adaptation (i.e. in the meaning which this idea acquires), in the attempt to raise a new type of people whose ctions and views are already predetermined prior to birth. People are born condemned to atheism, doublethink, and ideological instincts. The oppresion of the truth imposed on them is far more serious than the oppression of sultan or dictator. Truth not only demands that you sacrifice be brought to it. Truth breaks into the consciousness and creeps into the heart. It wishes to rule you from the outside." (M-A, 278)


healing the double speak


"A government, after al, which endlessly speaks about freedom and the thorough development of the personality, cannot simply write in its constitution: there is no freedom of conscience, there is no freedom of the press, there is no freedom of speech nd of demonstration. It acs much more cunningly. It concludes something like a secret agreement with its citizens. I will speak to you of your freedom but you act as if there was no freedom. And, in general, that was how the citizens behaved. Otherwise they would not have had to pay so deatly. These are the elementary ethics of doublethink, understandable to a child." (M-A, 281)


"An elementary reflection, i.e. a certain rejection of these contradictions, speaks of erosion of such consciousness. Reflection makes the accommodation purely external. It makes its realization possible and, in individual cases its repudiation. It is precisely from this simple realization (accepted spiritually, not cynically) and the rejection of doublethink which followed that the 'Democratic Movement' began." (M-A, 282)


"Special mention must be made about the publication of the Chronicle of Current events which, it is possible, was not the direct labor of the 'movement,' but which was contiguous to it. The Chronicle elicited the greatest fear in the State's subconscious. This was not slow in appearing in those repressions which it drew upon itself. In its form, the Chronicle is most inoffensive. It has only information regarding the persecution of ideologically inconvenient people: the arrests, searches, protocols of trials, starvation in camps, the closing of churches, or simply the addresses of the incarcerated. Only information, almost no commentary, and no emotion. Here is just on example..." (M-A, 282)


"These names are not a secret and nothing will happen if they will be known. These, after all, are criminal offenders condemned by Soviet laws and for the most part, probably in juridically normal trials. Nothing will hapen even if the facts about them are openly published and anyone who wishes will be able to find them out, to know the length of their sentences, their guilt, their age. Everyone knows that the State is is not the kind fairy, that is has long hands and cold nerves. And no one will be particularly surprised at such publicity. Nevertheless, some instictive, not fully realized wisdom forces it conceal this as much as military secrets. If one speaks of this publicly, some rules of the game are violated. Toorrow there may be other rules but today in our country, as well as in the "international arena," as few people as possible should know about the composition of the women's labor camp, ZhKh 385/3, or about political prisoners in the Soviet Union in general. All of these not even longs lists somehow out of rhythm with the great stride of the magnanimous patron of of the poorly developed nations and the implacable champion of democracy And it is quite indecent to recall this after so many words regarding the 'thorough development' or 'dirty slanderers,' know all the properties very well and know perfectly well how to exclude all that people should not know about." (M-A, 284)


"The Chronicle witnesses to coercion and, in so doing, draws coercion upon itself. IT cites facts of government cruelty which are so systematically and shamelessly concealed. It thus forces one to look at that which is forbidden by some unaccountable law. All of this is done with blindfolded eyes so as not to know, not to see, so as to forget. Even those at whose hands this is done are afraid to take full account of themselves." (M-A, 284)


"The perversion of consciousness becomes a principle which attempts to impose itself on vision, hearing, and speech. The Chronicle, in calling things by their real names, opposed this perversion. It is percisely to the perverted consciousness that it  appears to be deliberatley criminal. If this is analyzed, the whole system of the coercions of a totalitarian state proves to have grown out of the ancient sub-conscious fear of the magical significance of certain works." (M-A, 285)


"The essential point is not that a person is put in jail for expressing his convictions (even though they be in the form of objectionable information). It is in the fact that even prior to any jailing he is deprived of the right to the fundamental, universal choice of his spiritual orientation. Then, by the very means of punishment, the attempt is to physically destroy the possibility of this choice. It has already left the sphere of ideological hypnosis and ceremony is not stood upon in relation to it. What is particularly astounding is a certain petty calculatedness of this overwhelming cruelty: the instructions to organize starvation, cold, searches, denunciations, eavesdropping and the sadism of political indoctrination. THe idea of the punishments is to have the political prisoner lose his personality, to have him accept the imposed scenario or vanish completely. But the pressure of the jail is not enough and someone's fantasy events imprisonment in psychiatric hospitals." (M-A, 285) 


"This is no simply a 'change in the means of repression.' It is a revolutionary leap. The quantity of the punishment transforms into quality. The political prisoner remains a personality. He can announce a hunger-strike write a letter to the prosecutor on a scrap of paper, and no matter how much was added on to his sentence, it would still end one day and he would be released. The mental patient is deprived of being a personality. His protests can be ignored, his hunger-strike may only be a symptom of his illness, he can be legally beaten, poisoned with medicine for the sake of his well being, and subjected to insulin shock. He is not given a pen, is kept with the truly ill, and can only leave when he is considered by the doctors to have recovered. Healthiness means the acceptance of stipulated rules,of the laws of doublethink, of the 'culture of social adaptation.' What is demanded are not prescribed thoughts but accepted gestures, and conditioned instincts. The norm of doublethink put forth its human norm and man's full value was gauged by it. THe whole idea of the political protest of the 'democratic movement; consisted in the fact that it showed a different norm of human health which turned out to be intolerable to a society infected by a spiritual epidemic." (M-A, 286)

Chalidze, "Important Aspects of Human Rights in the Soviet Union."

Chalidze, Valerii. "Important Aspects of Human Rights in the Soviet Union." In The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian 'Samizdat'- An Anthology.  Edited by Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shagrin. Translated by Nicolas Lupinin. 19-46. Massachusetts: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977.


Dec. 10 1970


"Soviet jurists are working together with their Western colleagues to draft U.N. instruments on human rights. In view of the refusal to collaborate in oter fields of law, this fact is so important that the reaction of the press and official organs to this cooperation of countries with different legal doctrines does not matter at all...It is important that Soviet legislators and jurists recognize the general significance of fundamental human rights." (M-A, 204)


"Article 4 of the former civil code of the R.S.F.S.R declares: 'In order to develop the productive forces of te country, the R.S.F.S.R. grants civil legal capacity (the capacity to enjoy the rights  and obligations of a citizen) to all citizens not restricted in their rights by a court.' We should not be surprised if people have distorted idea of human rights in a country where, for more than forty years, the rule prevailed that a man enjoys civil rights not simply because he is a man, but because they are granted by the state." (M-A, 204) 


"The progress of law, spurred on by the struggle for rights, led to the principle 'anything not prohibited is permitted.' This means that a man may lawfully do anything that is not prohibited by statute" (M-A, 204-205)


"There are always difficulties in the correct interpretation of legal norms if only because of the poor language of the legislation and naturally the improvement of this language is desirable. Sufficient examples of imprecise laws (perhaps intentionally imprecise) are known. In recent years public appeals have directed attention to major defects in Articles 70 and 190-1 of the Criminal Code of the R.S.F.S.R.' in particular to the understanding of such concepts as 'dissemination,' 'deliberate fabrication,' 'anti-Soviet propaganda.' 'Soviet system' and others. This criticism is timely. This imprecise prohibition impairs the guaranteed (here a constitutional guarantee) of free speech and makes persecution for beliefs easier." (M-A, 208)


"Here is an example of a construction which abolishes a right guaranteed by law. Article 479 of the Civil Code of the R.S.F.S.R. guarantees the right of an author 'to the publication, reproduction and dissemination of his works by all means permitted by law.' A commentator connects this right exclusively with the impermissibility of publication without the author's consent although this safeguard is not contained in the article cited (it might have read 'only the author of the work enjoys the right...') The guarantee of the author's right of publication disappears in the commentary: 'Without the author's consent, the publication of his work is prohibited, but as to the necessity of publishing his work-this question is decided by the socialist organizations responsible for the selection and dissemination of useful works...' The author's right cited above, which the commentator annuls, includes not only the right of publication but also the right of dissemination by all legal (here it is to be supposed 'not prohibited') means. The abrogation of this right can place in jeopardy in the U.S.S.R. the freedom to produce copies on a typewriter and the freedom to indulge in amateur photgraphy and therefore the right to produce samizdat. But published acts of the R.S.F.S.R. do not contain any restriction on the reproduction of texts on a typewriter or by photocopying...


Another commentator provides an example of a construction which restricts the extent of the right guaranteed. Article 125 of the Constitution provides, in part: 'In conformity with the intersts of the working people, and in order to strengthen the socialist system, the citizens of the U.S.S.R are guaranteed by law:
a. freedom of speech
b. freedom of press
c. freedom of assembly and meeting
d. freedom of street processions and demonstrations.'


In the above text the legislator states that the legal guarantees in question correspond to the interests of the working people and to the foal of strengthening the socialist system. The commentator found it possible to twist the meaning of the law: 'The Constitution of the U.S.S.R., guaranteeing citizens freedom of speech, press, assembly, meeting, street processions and demonstrations, requires that these freedoms be excersised in conformity with the interests of the working class and in order to strengthen the socialist system.' P Litinov (when he was on trial) called attention to similar distortions of interpretation." (M-A, 211)


"We must strive for publicity in all matters pertaining to the defense of rights. Open court proceedings, public discussion of administrative decisions on rights, press coverage of the problem of rights--only when all this becomes customary can we hope for increasing effective protection of human rights. The last five years have demonstrated the great interest of society in the protection of human rights--individuals have suffered many hardships but they have never ceased to speak out publicly expressing their views on violations of the law and on human rights. Thanks to this society has found out about the most important court proceedings and about extralegal violations of human rights." (M-A, 218) 

Meerson-Aksenov "The Dissident Movement and Samizdat"

Meerson-Aksenov, Michael. "The Dissident Movement and Samizdat." In The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian 'Samizdat'- An Anthology.  Edited by Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shagrin. Translated by Nicolas Lupinin. 19-46. Massachusetts: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977.

"The dissident movement and samizdat are two sides of the very same process which may be called the awakening of the consciousness of Soviet society." (M-A, 19)

"Literally ideocracy means the supremacy of an idea-in our age of totalitarian societies, it means the supreme rule of a government ideology. The later is possible only in the absence of competing ideas. Ideology predominates only in full isolation, for there is a great difference between ideology in the singular and the plural. In free press societies competing ideologies exist with political groupings behind them. Any kind of party membership assumes the sense in which totalitarian society knows it. (M-A, 19)

"Reality begins to demand ideological interpretation; ideology is a deformation of this reality. For example, key ideas of communism such as "proletarian revolution," "class enemies," "ideological struggle," "enemies of the people," "building communism," and others do not reflect reality." (M-A, 20)

"In this way, irrespective of the private opinions of ideologues, ideology must remain true to itself. Aristing from this, at the level of principle, in the necessity of correlating it with objective information. This, in turn, leads to dual consciousness. However, this trait is particularly inherent in the layer of the Soviet intelligentsia whose function is, on the one hand, the preparation of ideological information, and, on the other, the extraction of 'pure' information to supplement ideology." (M-A, 22)

"Ideocracy needs a mentor in ideological catechism,--the intelligentsia which simultaneously turns out to be the servitor and the victim of ideology. It is the servitor because it is precisely to it, and not to the strata of administrators, party workers, manufactures and the military, that ideology is obliged for its worldly activity. At the same time it is the material foundation of its being. It is the victim because, consciously or unconsciously, it suffers from its mercenary role and the subjection of its labors to ideological goals which deprive it of its own professional values and which subsitute for professional honest. The historian, philosopher, literateur, teacher, journalist, writer, etc...are judged not by their professional qualities but by the degree of their 'ideological function.' (M-A,23)

"The ruling party apparatus, recognizing its dependence on ideology, and through it also its dependence on the intelligentsia, watches the latter with a sleepless eye. From the start it attempts to quash any tendency toward free thought or even cultural pluralism in the intelligentsia, for this would be destructive to its monolithic nature. If a significant part of the intelligentsia considers this position of "service" to be normal and even propitious insofar as it guarantees certain privileges, then it produces a moral conflict in the other sector of the intelligentsia between its professional consciousness and human virtue and that ideological role which it is forced to play. In the main this relates to the humanitarian intelligentsia whose activity is wholly drawn into the sphere of "ideological struggle." (M-A, 23)

"This Anglo-Saxon term, which initially signified a certain sectarian alienation of the minority from the ideological 'monolith' of the majority, especially in reference to the opposition movement in the USSR, is unusually good. A. Amal'rick very accurately noted that opposition first arose among the acadmic and creative intelligentsia and that the dissident movement commenced in the form of 'cultural opposition.' The intelligentsia came out for the 'separation of ideology from culture' not in the form of some kind of public announcement or an appeal to the party, but in the form of a free creativity frequently parallel to teh activity within the framework of the system's "official culture." This was the birth of samizdat an independent, subculture in the womb of of which a social consciousness began to be formed." (M-A,24)

"Furthermore, the possibility of 'ideocracy' assures an ideological hypnotization of society, its rejection whether voluntary  or forced, of consciousness. It assumes an ideological state signifies the rejection of personal values with that which is called ideology." (M-A, 25)

"In a certain sense, samizdat always existed in Russia, whether in the form of Prince Kurbskii's letters to Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the writing of archpriest Avvakum, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the unpublished letters of Chaadeaev, or, finally in the Soviet period, in the from of factional party polemics in the '20s and various works in the '30s that could not be published." (M-A, 25)

"Despite Stalinist terror, samizdat in this form was bever crushed. Even in the fiercest year, 1936-1938, there were small groups of intellectuals that passed around within the group typed literature which was forbidden or not publishable." (M-A, 25)"

"It was transformed from an incidental use of forbidden information to a form expressing social consciousness, when it began to grow into an independent area of culture that saw itself not as a corrective or a supplement to official Soviet culture but as a self-contained and singularly original sphere for the realization of society's spiritual and intellectual life." (M-A, 26)

27: Pasternak as catalyst- "With its full weight it fell upon the writer. It showed all the intellifentia what an improper interpretation of "freedom," "liberalization," and "Creative collaboration" could lead to." (M-A, 27)

"Historical foresight has chosen as the creator of samizdat as a phenomenon which arouses man's social being toward independence-a quite unexpected social champion, one quite distant from this role, a writer taken up with the inner life of the spirit, deaf to political history and a social in the whole tone of his works. Spirit stands at the cradle of Russian samizdat. With Pasternak it began as process of the creative formation of consciousness. At first it was in literature, the poetry, the arts...Then it grew into a spontaneous social process expressed in hundreds of letters, complaints, witnessing the violation of 'human rights.' Finally, it gave birth to independent political and social thought. (M-A, 28)

"The subsequent growth of a 'legal' samizdat literature revealed: letters of protest to native and foreign organizations which witness widespread violations, a whole literature that calls for a formal adherence to socialist law and, finally, the emergence of the bulletin Khronika and the Committee for for teh Defense of Human Rights in the USSR." (M-A, 31)

"The movement is characterized by an 'absence of ideals' and by empiricism: its purpose is to defend, on the basis of law, those who are under attack by the regime; and hence it can function without overly concentrating on the nature of the regime itself." (M-A, 33)

"In the role of a disseminator of samizdat, typed in six to fifteen copies on a typewriter, I have heard the following requests many times from the reader: 'Please give me one of the first copies. In five years of reading samizdat I have managed to ruin my eyesite. In the last five year an anecdote about samizdat has made the rounds: a father of a family type out Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace--a classic Russian work that may be bought cheaply in any book store. When he is asked why he is doing this he answers: ''My son is in school where they are studying War and Peace. He must read it for the course but he refuses to read anything that is not in samizdat.' This anecdote, by the way, demonstrates a growing lack of faith in the printed word in the USSR as such, no matter what is printed." (M-A, 38)