Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...number of Russian writers have vilified Kuznetsov-most of them party hacks. Last week a voice was raised in the Soviet Union which, for the first time, had the ring of legitimate reproach. Andrei Amalric, 31, is no hack, but one of Russia's most promising young writers. In an open letter to Kuznetsov, Amalric criticized his fellow writer not for defecting but for paying the price of being a KGB informer in order to obtain permission to go abroad. By his own admission, Kuznetsov told the KGB "a pure fiction"-that Evgeny Evtushenko, Vasily Aksyonov and other liberal...
...general account of the mood of the intelligentsia, and I equally courteously refused, upon which the matter ended. In 1963, I was taken by night to the Lubyanka prison and ordered to write a report against an American diplomat to the effect that he had subjected me, and other Soviet citizens, to malicious ideological brainwashing. I again refused, although they then threatened me with criminal proceedings. In 1965, I refused outright to talk with them, which cost me exile in Siberia. That is why I think I have the personal right to reproach...
...seems to me that no oppression can be effective without those who are willing to submit to it. It sometimes appears to me that the Soviet 'creative intelligentsia'-that is, people accustomed to thinking one thing, saying another, and doing a third-is, as a whole, an even more unpleasant phenomenon than the regime that formed...
Amalric's entire argument is in line with the very Russian attitude that the best man is the one who stands and fights -or suffers. Two of his books, both critical of Soviet policy-Involuntary Journey to Siberia and Can the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?-will be published in the West next year, but without the approval of official Soviet organizations. As a result, Amalric has been denied his hard-currency royalties. That, in turn, prompted him last week to send a second open letter to six Western newspapers: "Stalin would have executed me for the fact that...
...dated but still pertinent case in point is Lillian Hellman, who signed a statement in the Daily Worker supporting the 1938 Great Purge trials in Moscow. The trials brought about the execution of Russia's greatest writers, together with millions of other innocent Soviet people...