The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  She wrote:

  I have seen and heard a lot of things about the Cartoon Crisis, but only through my work today did I discover the details of what occurred and I feel the need to thank you. I am sure that thanks have been few from my part of the world, but I would like to be among those to express gratitude, for I find your viewpoint highly respectful and forthright. I wish our own media would present the events in all their detail in order that people might get the full picture before condemning.

  Such expressions of support helped convince me that my taking part in debates and discussions around the globe had not at all been in vain.

  8. From Russia with Love

  Silence is a way of talking, of writing. Above all, it is a way of thinking that obfuscates and covers up for the cruelty that should today be a central preoccupation of those who make talking, writing, and thinking their business.

  —Kanan Makiya

  It was October 30, 1972, and a 38-year-old Russian astrophysicist and biologist stood accused of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. The trial was taking place in the small town of Noginsk, and the man’s name was Kronid Lyubarsky. Until then, Lyubarsky had been pretty much unknown to the state security agency KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti), despite being a key figure in the underground dissident press, or samizdat. He held a position in a research facility just outside Moscow that worked on the Soviet space exploration program for the planet Mars. He had been arrested 10 months earlier in the wake of KGB raids targeting people who edited, stored, and distributed the Chronicle of Current Events, the most important publication of the Soviet human rights movement.

  The trial was taking place away from Moscow to discourage Western media and activists from following the case. But when Lyubarsky was eventually allowed to speak, eyewitnesses said the tension in the courtroom was electric.1 He laid out arguments against Soviet censorship: the tyranny of silence that forbade Soviet citizens to discuss or even to mention a long list of issues. He pointed to the double standards of the Soviet regime and the variability of prohibitions over time.

  Lyubarsky did not take part in public demonstrations against the regime. His “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” limited itself to editing and distributing the Chronicle, possession of several hundred samizdat publications that he lent to friends and acquaintances, and political opinions that he aired in private company, in particular criticism of the gradual rehabilitation of Stalin and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

  “Information is the staple diet of the scientist,” Lyubarsky stated in his concluding defense speech. “A farmer works with corn, a worker works with metal; in the same way, an intellectual works with information. One can only form an independent opinion to the extent that one possesses information.”2

  Kronid Lyubarsky was sentenced to five years in a labor camp. He was released in January 1977, though he was prevented from returning home by laws denying former convicts the right to live within a 100-kilometer radius of Moscow. Lyubarsky resumed his work collecting information on violations of human rights and headed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s fund for the aid of political prisoners. Within months, the authorities were threatening him with renewed internment of 10 years or emigration. As a result, he and his wife Galya left the Soviet Union in October of the same year, with the firm conviction that they would never see their homeland again.

  “I felt like I was in a crematorium, saying goodbye to friends and family at the airport,” he would recall years later.3

  The majority of Soviet dissidents, including Lyubarsky himself, were sentenced under Article 70 of the Soviet Penal Code. That article prohibited anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda whose effect was to undermine or weaken Soviet power, along with the propagation of slanderous fabrications targeting the Soviet political and social system, and the production, dissemination, and storage of anti-Soviet literature. The Kremlin exploited such insult codes to muzzle human-rights activists. To my mind, legislation in Islamic countries and calls by Muslim groups elsewhere to ban speech critical of religion on the grounds of causing offense to Islam echo the Soviet Union’s use of such laws to persecute freethinkers. Indeed, there are many similarities between dissidents in communist and Islamic regimes.

  Kronid Lyubarsky was an extraordinary individual. I got to know him after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, though I had followed him for some years through my contacts in dissident circles in the West. For 10 years, I enjoyed the privilege of working with him. I contributed to his bulletin and carried messages back and forth between him and his contacts in Moscow. When he returned home in the wake of the Soviet collapse, I was a frequent guest at his office on Pushkin Square, where I related impressions from my travels around the great country, and he told me what was happening in the corridors of power. He was a fantastic conversationalist, never concerned with his own vanity or endeavors to display the depth and breadth of his knowledge, always focused on content and substance, effervescent with insatiable curiosity and dedication.

  My 10 years of dialogue with Kronid came to an end when he drowned in May 1996 while on holiday. The news of his death was a shock; even today, some 15 years later, I still think of him. Our discussions shaped my understanding of the upheavals that took place in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His moral clarity gave me insight into the essence of totalitarianism and the significance of the dissident movement for Russia’s development during those years. All of that information considerably informed my view of the Cartoon Crisis.

  Two groups of events in particular proved significant for the Soviet human rights movement.4 The first was the imprisonment in the autumn of 1965 of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, both of whom had published satirical work in the West under pseudonyms. Stalin was dead; the reins of power appeared to be growing slack; but again, writers of fiction were imprisoned because of the content of their books. To the great surprise of the authorities, the charges brought against Sinyavsky and Daniel triggered a wave of protest that marked the birth of the Soviet human rights movement, including the first public demonstration since 1917 in support of human rights.

  Then in August 1968, the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia, crushing the dream of socialism with a human face. That prompted eight demonstrators to protest against the invasion in front of the Kremlin on Red Square. “Long live a free and independent Czechoslovakia!” proclaimed one of their banners in the Czech language. Others carried the words “Shame on the occupiers!” and “Hands off Czechoslovakia!” The eight were arrested after 20 minutes, several of them subsequently receiving prison sentences or being sent into exile.

  Next came Andrei Sakharov’s 1968 manifesto, “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom,”5 the document that most clearly voiced the intellectual basis for the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. Some 18 million copies were published around the globe, unheard of for an essay on social issues and international politics. Sakharov highlighted the correlation between the way a state treats its own citizens and its ability to exist in peace with its surroundings, that is, the link between democracy and security. The world, Sakharov said, cannot be dependent on leaders who are not dependent on their own peoples. Any state that respects the rights of its citizens to free speech, free religious exercise, free assembly, and free movement will also likely respect the rights of citizens in other countries, including their right to decide for themselves the kind of society in which they want to live. In such a society, elected representatives of the people will have a stake in solving conflicts between government and society by peaceful means, whereas states that oppress their citizens will be more likely to solve conflicts with violence, be it at home or abroad.

  The second significant milestone in the history of the Soviet human rights movement was the founding of the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1976. Formed to monitor Soviet implementation of the Helsinki Accords of 1975, which called for the recognition of universal human rights, the Moscow Helsinki Group was
a shining example of how a small group of people with no power or standing in society—among them Yuri Orlov, a 52-year-old physicist, and Lyudmila Alekseyeva, a 49-year-old historian—could, with acumen, courage, and good fortune, succeed in setting an international agenda by consistently defending the ideals of freedom.

  Thanks largely to their monitoring of the groundbreaking 1975 Helsinki Accords between the Soviet Bloc and the West, Soviet violations of human rights increasingly became a focus in the Western media, and the Soviet image became ever more tarnished, not least in the eyes of leftist intellectuals.6

  Although the KGB kept their group under constant surveillance, from time to time issuing warnings and harassing its members, no arrests were made until January 1977. In the meantime, they produced thousands of typewritten pages documenting evidence of everything from conditions endured by political prisoners to how the authorities were cutting off the private telephone connections of difficult citizens. They detailed the harsh sentence imposed on the leader of a movement for the right of Tatars to return to their Crimean homeland, from which they had been deported during World War II; they registered the unlawful exclusion of six Catholic boys from a school in Lithuania, violating the right of Christians to exercise their religion freely; and the authorities’ refusal to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. As word of the group’s efforts spread, individuals, groups, and organizations all over the Soviet Union turned to Yuri Orlov seeking help in their struggle for rights: Catholics, Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, and followers of the Pentecostal movement; Jewish activists wishing to emigrate; Crimean Tatars; Russian nationalists, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Ukrainians, all striving for severance from the Soviet Union.

  Helsinki watch groups were established in the same year in Ukraine and Lithuania; later, others were set up in Georgia and Armenia. The same thing was happening in Poland and in Czechoslovakia with its Charta 77. As 1976 progressed, reports of the Helsinki Group’s work found their way increasingly onto the front pages of newspapers in the West. In 1978, the Helsinki Watch Committee was formed in New York following Orlov’s example. Later, it evolved into Human Rights Watch, one of the largest human rights organizations in the world, with offices in cities throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. Inspired by Orlov’s work, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights was established as an umbrella organization with locations in 41 countries, from the Netherlands to Uzbekistan. Following the Soviet collapse, the Helsinki Group established offices throughout Russia, manned by scores of full-time staff members and hundreds of volunteers.

  The key to the group’s success lay in its use of foreign media—not only those that broadcast to the West, but also Western radio stations broadcasting in Russian to the Soviet Union—to spread information about Soviet violations of human rights to millions of people all over the world, thereby exerting pressure on the Soviet government. The huge scope of media coverage turned the issue of human rights behind the Iron Curtain into a legitimate concern for politicians in the West. By focusing so clearly on an international agreement between East and West, and by his highlighting of the ties between peace, security, and human rights, Orlov smoothed the way for Western politicians to understand and identify with the Helsinki Group and its efforts. Several of its members were accorded celebrity status in Western media.

  Orlov and the Helsinki Group even gained rare success in the Soviet dissident community, which so often had difficulty collaborating because the aims, methods, and standpoints of the various groups and factions were so disparate, and internal suspicion and skepticism were widespread. Nevertheless, the Helsinki Group managed to unite dissidents across national, political, religious, and cultural boundaries. It was a first.

  In early 1977, the leading figures in the group were arrested or forced into exile. Yuri Orlov was sentenced to 7 years in a labor camp, and Aleksandr Ginzburg was sentenced to 8, both on the grounds of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda; whereas Natan Sharansky was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to 14 years’ internment. Lyudmila Alekseyeva immigrated to the United States, returning to Russia following the Soviet collapse to resume her work in the human rights movement and stepping in as leader of the reestablished Helsinki Group after its previous leader, Kronid Lyubarsky, died in 1996. It was in Russia that I interviewed her in 2001 on the occasion of the group’s 25th anniversary, celebrated with pomp and circumstance at the Hotel Kosmos, one of the hotels built for the Olympic Games in 1980 at a time when several of the group’s members were incarcerated in the camps. Now, a weighty three-volume work had been published documenting the group’s history and containing essays on its work.

  Alekseyeva was by no means resting on her laurels, being heavily involved in the struggle to establish a true constitutional state in Russia. On New Year’s Eve in 2009, dressed as Snow White, the 83-year-old Alekseyeva was detained by police in Moscow for taking part in an unlawful protest against the authorities’ repeated violations of the right of free assembly, otherwise guaranteed by the Russian Constitution. Orlov, Ginzburg, and Sharansky all left the Soviet Union after having served their sentences. Orlov settled in the United States; Ginzburg became a journalist on the Russian emigrants’ bulletin Russkaya Mysl in Paris; and Sharansky went to Israel.

  While Sharansky awaited arrest in January 1977—everyone knew it was but a question of time—he confided in Alekseyeva.

  “Do you know something?” he said. “The last eight months have been the happiest time of my life.”

  “Indeed,” Alekseyeva replied. “I’ve been living that way for ten years. Allowing yourself to think freely and to live accordingly is wonderful. The only drawback is they put you in prison for it.”7

  Following imprisonment of the group’s leading members in 1977, the KGB further tightened its grip on Soviet society, and in 1982, a decision was made to cease the group’s activities when one of the three members yet to be imprisoned was detained for slander against socialism. The Chronicle of Current Events, published since 1968, also folded, since no one was available to continue the work. The human rights movement in the Soviet Union was largely wiped out. Its most prominent figure, Andrei Sakharov, had been deported to the closed city of Gorky, and most others were either interned in the labor camps or had been sent into exile in the West, from where, however, human rights monitoring continued. Kronid Lyubarsky devoted most of his time to it after emigrating.

  The apparent stability and the absence of a visible opposition prompted American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to speak optimistically of the perseverance of the Soviet regime following a visit to Moscow in 1982: “Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse are wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.” Yet although in 1982, it seemed like the human rights movement had lost its confrontation with the regime, it soon turned out that the processes that had been set in motion were unstoppable, regardless of the numbers imprisoned. The movement found resurgence with the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1990, when I asked an acquaintance belonging to the new generation of activists to sum up the history of the Soviet human rights movement, he said this: “If you think of the last 30 years of the Soviet Union as a struggle between dissidents and the Soviet authorities, you would have to say that the dissidents won in the sense that their ideas were absorbed by Gorbachev. They have become the common property of the society.”

  In the spring of 1988, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, located north of Copenhagen, was the scene of a historic event that demonstrated that the Soviet human rights movement, after decades in the cold, was on its way to being rehabilitated in Moscow. The occasion was a conference on literature and perestroika, in which Soviet intellectuals met with exiled Russians for the first time.8 Soviet participation had been approved by the highest powers—according to one of those taking part by Communist Party second-in-command Yegor Ligachev. The Soviets were represented by leading figures of the liberal reform movement, while the
emigrant Russians sent writers and intellectuals who acknowledged that change was under way in the Soviet Union. Among them were three former political prisoners: author Andrei Sinyavsky, who had emigrated to France after having served seven years’ exile and imprisonment in the camps; Boris Weil, who, with the aid of Amnesty International, had been granted asylum in Denmark in 1977; and Kronid Lyubarsky, who had left the Soviet Union with Weil, but had settled in Munich, where he occupied the same tiny apartment during his 15 years in exile before returning to Russia and entering the struggle for an open and democratic society.

  I was the go-between for Kronid and the organizers of the conference. As an active campaigner for human rights and political prisoners in the Soviet Union, he was its most controversial delegate. He was the driving force behind three publications that, in their own ways, influenced decisionmakers in the West and Russian opinion. One was a twice-monthly bulletin on Soviet violations of human rights, a source of information favored by the foreign ministries of governments in the West. The second was the yearbook Political Prisoners in the Soviet Union, published annually in Russian and English, and the third was the journal My Country and the World, which published essays on and analyses of developments in the Soviet Union, as well as translations of Western philosophers, authors, and historians, such as Isaiah Berlin, Francis Fukuyama, Karl Popper, Arthur Koestler, and Richard Pipes.

  My Country and the World also published an excerpt from the most controversial chapter of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, complete with an introduction penned by Kronid himself, in which he defended publishing material that allegedly was offensive to Muslims. “We do so not to provoke, but because we believe that no restrictions can be placed upon free speech other than the ban on incitement to violence,” he wrote in his preface.9