The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  Kronid’s talk was the bombshell of the conference. As he spoke, those present followed intensely the reactions of the Soviet representatives. Would they walk out? What could be read into their body language, their facial expressions? Were they smiling? Were they incensed? Were they talking among themselves, discussing how they should react? What were they thinking? How far could free speech be taken under Gorbachev?

  Only two years before, Gorbachev had claimed that there were no political prisoners in the Soviet Union and had rejected the charge that Soviet courts were sending people to labor camps because of their convictions.

  That emotional spring day in Denmark, Kronid touched an issue that despite glasnost and perestroika remained a taboo in the official Soviet press. He spoke of the role of the human rights movement in the reform process. He spoke of the individuals who 20 and 25 years before had pointed to the very same weaknesses that the Kremlin, Soviet economists, and social scientists were now acknowledging, but who then in the 1960s, 1970s, and even the 1980s had paid for their critical analyses with internment in the camps, exile, and destroyed livelihoods.

  In Kronid’s view, it was the dissident community that had opened Gorbachev’s eyes, whether the Soviet leader realized it or not. He had taken their insights and their slogans as his own, and the very problems the dissidents had illuminated in their work were now firmly setting the agenda. Calls for glasnost had come from the dissident community, just as demands for transparency in relevant matters of society had been central to dissident thought and action. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1988, many of them were still behind barbed wire in Soviet prison camps.

  Kronid’s talk made an indelible impression on those present. In 2000, Kronid was one of 50 journalists and editors who, on the 50th anniversary of the International Press Institute, were named World Press Freedom Heroes for their efforts to ensure press freedom in the face of particularly adverse conditions. Although the West allowed itself to be carried away by Gorbachev’s fluffy talk of a common European house in which the Soviet Union was a part, Kronid continued to keep a watchful and objective eye on his homeland.

  A year and a half later, Kronid moved back to Moscow, becoming the editor of the liberal weekly Novoye Vremya (New Times) for whom he penned a flow of dazzlingly insightful articles on such varied topics as the transition of a totalitarian regime into democracy, the adoption of constitutions in Germany and Italy following World War II, Portugal and Spain in the 1970s, President Boris Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Supreme Soviet and the deployment of troops to Moscow in October 1993, ballot rigging, and the unconstitutional decision to wage war on Chechnya in December 1994. He was involved in wording new legislation restoring citizenship to all exiled Russians. It was typical of him. He would never be satisfied with a decree that encompassed only a few select groups; he called for legislation institutionalizing changes to benefit all citizens. He took part in hammering out the constitution that was adopted in December 1993, and he stood for parliament and lost.

  Kronid resumed his work for human rights in Russia that had occupied him so fully during his exile. In 1989, he was among those who initiated a revival of the Helsinki Group, whose chairman he was from 1994 until his death.

  When I began studying Russian at the University of Copenhagen, my life changed. I was drawn, for some reason, to the language and culture of Russia; somehow, I sensed that immersing myself in this strange and distant world would help me gain an understanding of myself and of the deeper layers of existence. I was so eager to learn that in my first year of study, I went all out, reading day and night so as not to fall behind. It was as though a whole new world was opening up: a republic of scholarship. Almost from one day to the next, I gave up soccer. Most of my time was spent immersed in Russian grammar and phonetics, painstakingly spelling my way through incomprehensible rows of words aided by dictionaries as heavy as bricks. Occasionally, I would have time to read a proper book. Two in particular made an impression on me, though their influence at first was rather modest. Yet they were to become important sources for my understanding of Soviet society.

  The first of those books was Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope,10 a memoir of her 19 years with the poet Osip Mandelstam, from the first years following the 1917 Russian Revolution until he perished in a transit camp near Vladivostok in late 1938. Mandelstam was briefly imprisoned in 1934 after having written a poem critical of Joseph Stalin, but he escaped lightly at first, being sentenced to three years of exile in the Russian provinces. Her memoir was written in the certain belief that no one elsewhere had the slightest idea of what was actually occurring under Stalin, that sheer barbarity had caused a silence to descend on the great country, allowing only lies and propaganda to slip out. Besides her wish to secure her late husband’s work for posterity, she saw her book as a message to future generations, the endeavor of a single voice to penetrate the lies and the repression. As she so graphically described it, on each day that passed, it became more and more difficult to speak with a tongue torn from the mouth.

  What struck me in reading Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs was the significance attached to literature in the Soviet Union. Osip Mandelstam, presumably not without irony, even considered the regime’s persecution of dissidents, himself among them, to be a kind of homage. To think, he said to his wife, in our country people get killed on account of a poem. That’s how we honor and respect literature. We are afraid of literature because it is power.

  The second book to make an impression on me was The Oak and the Calf,11 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s memoir of the period extending from his sensational 1962 debut One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to his enforced exile 12 years later following publication in the West of The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn was the calf, the regime the oak, but now and then the reader found himself believing it was the other way round. David inflicted on Goliath a succession of calculated, painful blows, and deportation of Solzhenitsyn to the West was in reality the Kremlin’s capitulation to a writer whose words were feared more than the long-range missiles of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

  Once again, I was amazed by how seriously the Soviet government and its people took literature and the written word. That was brought home to me by Solzhenitsyn’s harrowing depiction of the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the journal Novy Mir, which broke open one of the greatest of all Soviet taboos: discussion of the labor camps. Every word in it was weighed. Party leader Nikita Khrushchev had an adviser read the manuscript aloud to him while vacationing on the Black Sea coast before approving it personally. Subsequently, the novella was discussed in detail at a plenary meeting of the Central Committee.

  Solzhenitsyn’s life as a writer—first in a labor camp after the war, then in exile in central Asia, and eventually as a teacher in the Russian province in the latter part of the 1950s—revealed an astonishing confidence in the power and capability of the written word to survive and exert influence through centuries. He viewed the word in an eternal perspective, convinced he would never have so much as a single line of prose published as long as he lived. He was writing for future generations.

  Like Nadezhda Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn learned lengthy stretches of prose and thousands of lines of poetry by heart, but he found himself spending an increasing amount of time remembering what he had written. Whenever he completed a new version of a work or edited it, he would burn the draft. It was a practice he was forced to give up in 1953 when he was struck by what was deemed to be an incurable cancer. He found himself in a dilemma: how was he to ensure that his work survived if it was to vanish along with his memory? He set about writing everything down in the evenings and at night, hiding it in small tubes pushed into champagne bottles and buried in the garden, before leaving for Tashkent, certain that he now was to spend his final days in a hospital.

  But he survived. Not only that, he shook the world when in 1973, his Russian-language publishers in Paris released The Gulag Archipelago, a harrowing depic
tion of the development of the Soviet Union from Lenin’s decree to establish labor camps, shortly after the revolution, to Khrushchev’s so-called Secret Speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin’s purges.12 To Solzhenitsyn, Stalin’s regime was a logical progression of the political project Lenin had initiated; labor camps and an economy based on slavery were integral to the Soviet project. His account detailed massacres and riots in the camps, and waves of purges. That lent a documentary style to the narrative and shocked the West profoundly.

  The Soviet authorities considered The Gulag Archipelago to be a ticking bomb. Simply possessing a copy of it could cost you seven years in the camps. It would not be published in Solzhenitsyn’s homeland until 1989. Six months before, Gorbachev’s chief ideologist, Vadim Medvedev, had declared that the work would never be published in the Soviet Union. But at that time, things were moving so quickly that the Kremlin was far from fully aware of what was actually going on and how close the people were to regaining control of the printed word.13

  Solzhenitsyn had originally wanted his compatriots to be able to read The Gulag Archipelago before it became available elsewhere. However, when the KGB got hold of a copy in the summer of 1973, he realized that he would be unable to hold off any longer on publishing. His loyal aid, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, had been coerced by the KGB into revealing the whereabouts of one of just three complete copies. Following her detainment and interrogation, Voronyanskaya was released and committed suicide.

  As the drama of The Gulag Archipelago was played out, Solzhenitsyn had installed himself in a rented house northwest of Moscow where he completed an appeal to the Russian people, an essay titled “Live Not by Lies.”14 That essay was a call to challenge fear, to no longer take part in the official lie that served as the basis of the regime, a lie that concealed violence, intimidation, and coercion. It read: “The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.”

  Andrei Amalrik, author of the prophetic essay “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” would later word his view on self-censorship as follows:

  I prefer the police to silence me rather than to do so myself. The need to change the outside world through one’s own creativity is greater than the need to adapt to it. If a person refuses the opportunity to judge the world around him and to express that judgment, he begins to destroy himself before the police can destroy him.15

  One insight came in 1994 in Moscow, when classified documents were made public containing minutes of Politburo discussions on Solzhenitsyn in the period 1963 to 1979.16 The arguments put forward by the communist high priests were riddled with religious metaphor, and rank-and-file communist fury at Solzhenitsyn’s scorn, mockery, and ridicule of their faith was born along by a sense of grievance that brings to mind that of many Muslims during the Cartoon Crisis. In fact, I find it genuinely difficult to distinguish between causing affront to Muhammad, Moses, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or any other prophet we may care to mention, or indeed their ideas, whether they be inscribed in the Koran, the Bible, The Communist Manifesto, or a treatise hailing the blessings of the free market.

  For the Politburo, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago had the same effect as a satirical cartoon depicting Lenin with a bomb in his turban and excerpts from The Communist Manifesto printed on his headband, the only difference being that Solzhenitsyn did not stop at pointing to Stalin’s or other communists’ abuse of a fundamentally beautiful idea aiming to eradicate social injustice. Solzhenitsyn was boiling with rage, his gall dripping from the pages: the Marxist-Leninist ideology was the very embodiment of evil and the root of all misfortune that had befallen 20th-century Russia and those countries that had fallen under the communist yoke.

  The documents that were published made it clear that even people who had spent 10 or 15 years in the Soviet camps for anti-Soviet activity fiercely defended Lenin and the regime against Solzhenitsyn’s criticism. One factory worker in Moscow wrote as follows to a Soviet newspaper in late 1973 when news of The Gulag Archipelago first emerged: “Solzhenitsyn smears our socialist system and its advances. All we have achieved thanks to the work of the Soviet people, all that is sacred and dear to each and every Soviet citizen, is rejected by this apostate.”17

  Solzhenitsyn had violated what was held to be “sacred” and was therefore branded an apostate. In the view of the Politburo, Solzhenitsyn had to be punished: he had committed sacrilege and had defamed what was held to be sacred. He had, as the Politburo put it, “slandered the Soviet system, the Soviet Union, the Communist Party and their domestic and foreign policies, and smeared the memory of V. I. Lenin and other prominent persons of the Communist Party and the Soviet state, victims of the Great Patriotic War and the Fascist-German occupation.”18

  At a meeting of the Politburo in January 1974, at which the guardian council in the Kremlin discussed whether the heretic Solzhenitsyn should be sent into exile or incarcerated, Party Leader Leonid Brezhnev resorted to religious imagery in arguing the need for firm action: “We have every reason to imprison Solzhenitsyn, for he has attacked the most sacred of all—Lenin, our Soviet system, the Soviet power, and everything we hold dear.”19

  If you believe in maintaining—or even, as in a number of European countries, extending—present laws that criminalize verbal offense, and if you believe that insulting people by words or images is to be consistently avoided at all costs, then no fundamental distinction exists between offending the feelings of communists or Muslims, whether it be in Denmark (where both groups are minorities); or in Islamic countries, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia (where Muslims make up the majority and religious and political minorities are persecuted); or in communist countries, such as Cuba and North Korea. Of course, there may be slight differences here and there, but none are substantial, unless you believe that some feelings deserve to be protected more than others.

  Would the world have been a better, more peaceful place if Soviet dissidents had followed the examples of West European museums and galleries, newspapers, visual artists, and filmmakers—if they had submitted themselves to self-censorship rather than offend communist sentiments? Would radical leftists and terrorists in Western Europe, from communist parties to the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades, have moderated themselves if criticism of their methods and ideology had been withheld?

  The answer, of course, is no. But that is precisely the kind of warped logic that gave rise to double standards in the debate on freedom of speech in the new millennium. There was a strong desire to protect groups that the political left saw as being particularly vulnerable, while groups and sentiments that did not enjoy the same kind of attention, or whose opinions one disagreed with, were not protected in the same way.

  One baking hot day in the summer of 2007, many years after Solzhenitsyn had penned his poignant appeal not to go on living with lies, I found myself seated in Natan Sharansky’s tiny office on a quiet residential street in Jerusalem. It was the third time I had met him. The second had been during his term as Israel’s interior minister, when he had been leader of the Russian Jewish party Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home). The first time, he had greeted me on a breezy terrace in Jerusalem wearing shorts, flip-flops, and his characteristic cap. At the time, he was leader of the Zionist Forum, a forerunner of the parliamentary party that looked after the interests of a million immigrant Jews from the former Soviet Union. Sharansky, who spoke quickly, often snapping off words and half sentences in midspeech, grinned as he divulged his recipe for making a career in politics:

  “I got here first, then a million voters followed me.”20

  More than 21 years had passed since Sharansky was released from Perm-35 in the northern Urals, where he had been imprisoned for 9 years, falsely convicted on trumped-up charges of high treason and spying for the United States. Exchanged for a Soviet spy, he was immediately flown to
Israel.

  “I involved myself in two movements at once,” Sharansky recalled. “I got into the movement for the rights of Jews to emigrate and the human rights movement that was informally led by Andrei Sakharov. For me, the two movements were a natural extension of each other,” he explained. “On the one hand, I’d been deprived of my right to go back to my Jewish roots, to find my place in history, and on the other, they’d taken away my freedom and rights as a citizen of the Soviet Union.”

  Solzhenitsyn’s call to stop living with lies was still clearly of key significance as Sharansky endeavored to put into words what in particular had marked the dissident movement:

  The notion of no longer upholding the lie, of no longer pretending, playing the game of the regime, submitting to its intimidation—that had the most tremendous liberating effect on us. As dissidents, we found it gave us enormous strength to free ourselves from the second-guessing that so permeated Soviet society. The regime understood that perfectly, so it spent considerable amounts of energy trying to shut dissidents up, even though at first sight we were a small and insignificant group. But in the end, the Soviet Union did collapse. And what made the difference was the desire not to go on living a life of lies.

  In Sharansky’s view, the dissident community made doing business very uncomfortable for Western politicians such as Henry Kissinger, who emphasized a “realistic,” pragmatic approach to the Soviet Union. And here he saw parallels with the West’s relationship with oil- producing dictatorships in the Middle East today:

  The West’s fear of the Soviet Union and its policies of appeasement is something I still see now. Supporting dissidents and listening to their insights were embarrassing and awkward because it involved confrontation with the regime. So what happened was they tried to reduce it down to a minor humanitarian problem of no real importance for what was happening elsewhere in the Soviet Union or for its relationship to the outside world. Kissinger and those who were in agreement with him said they wanted to help Sakharov, but that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship that was going to be around for a very long time, and for that reason it was essential to remain on good terms with Moscow, and in so doing, they would in Kissinger’s view be able to do more for Sakharov and other dissidents. Sakharov tried to explain to them that it wasn’t about helping dissidents, but about how the West could help itself, defend the free world, and not become a victim of its own illusions.