The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia (East European Studies)

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The Legacy of Soviet Dissent During the 1970s, dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn dominated Western perceptions of the USSR, but were then quickly forgotten, as Gorbachev’s reformers monopolised the spotlight. This book restores the dissidents to their rightful place in Russian history. Using a vast array of samizdat and published sources, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent shows how ideas formulated in the dissident milieu clashed with the original programme of perestroika, and shaped the course of democratisation in postSoviet Russia. Some of these ideas—such the dissidents’ preoccupation with glasnost and legality, and their critique of revolutionary violence—became part of the agenda of Russia’s democratic movement. But this book also demonstrates that dissidents played a crucial role in the rise of the new Russian radical nationalism. Both the friends and foes of Russian democracy have a dissident lineage. Robert Horvath is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of History at Melbourne University. He teaches courses on East European history and the history of human rights.

East European Studies Series editor: Richard Sakwa, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent

Editorial Committee: George Blazyca, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, University of Paisley Terry Cox, Department of Government, University of Strathclyde Rosalind Marsh, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath David Moon, Department of History, University of Strathclyde Hilary Pilkington, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham Stephen White, Department of Politics, University of Glasgow This series is published on behalf of BASEES (the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies). The series comprises original, high-quality, research-level work by both new and established scholars on all aspects of Russian, Soviet, post-Soviet and East European Studies in humanities and social science subjects. 1. Ukraine’s Foreign and Security Policy, 1991–2000 Roman Wolczuk 2. Political Parties in the Russian Regions Derek S.Hutcheson 3. Local Communities and Post-Communist Transformation Edited by Simon Smith 4. Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe J.C.Sharman 5. Political Elites and the New Russia Anton Steen 6. Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness Sarah Hudspith 7. Performing Russia—Folk Revival and Russian Identity Laura J.Olson 8. Russian Transformations Edited by Leo McCann 9. Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin

The Baton and Sickle Edited by Neil Edmunds 10. State Building in Ukraine The Ukranian Parliament, 1990–2003 Sarah Whitmore 11. Defending Human Rights in Russia Sergei Kovalyov, Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969–2003 Emma Gilligan 12. Small-Town Russia Postcommunist Livelihoods and Identities A Portrait of the Intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1999–2000 Anne White 13. Russian Society and the Orthodox Church Religion in Russia after Communism Zoe Knox 14. Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age The Word as Image Stephen Hutchings 15. Between Stalin and Hitler Class War and Race War on the Dvina, 1940–46 Geoffrey Swain 16. Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe The Russian, Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes 1988–98 Rajendra A.Chitnis 17. The Legacy of Soviet Dissent Dissidents, democratisation and radical nationalism in Russia Robert Horvath 18. Film Adaptations of Literature in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1917–2001 Screening the Word Edited by Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitski

The Legacy of Soviet Dissent Dissidents, democratisation and radical nationalism in Russia

Robert Horvath

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2005 by RoutledgeCurzon 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 270 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016 RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” © 2005 Robert Horvath All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN 0-203-41285-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67176-7 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-33320-2 (Print Edition)

Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1

Children of terror

7

2

‘Honest and total glasnost’

42

3

The rights-defenders

70

4

The invention of Russophobia

130

5

The politics of Russophobia

160

Conclusion

205

Notes

207

Bibliography

247

Index

254

Acknowledgments This book was conceived when the Soviet Union was still in existence, formulated during the post-August 1991 euphoria, researched during the political crisis that culminated in the bloodshed of October 1993, written in the shadow of the Chechen conflagration, and finished as Russia prepared to re-elect a president who makes no secret of his pride in his Chekist past. In the course of this tumultuous period, I have incurred many debts. The greatest is to my thesis supervisor, Associate Professor Stephen Wheatcroft, whose contagious enthusiasm and constructive scepticism have shaped my research and my argument. Julie Elkner read the entire manuscript and saved me from numerous pitfalls. I am also grateful to my associate supervisor, Professor Peter McPhee, who provided constant support. I owe a special debt to the people of Moscow Memorial, who showed me vast hospitality and the persistence of dissident ideals in post-Soviet Russia. Aleksandr Daniel, the head of Memorial’s research programme on the history of the dissident movement, gave freely of his time, and corrected many misconceptions. As I make clear, his own ideas have exerted a profound influence upon the general argument of this book, though he bears no responsibility for the faults of its execution. I am also particularly indebted to Natalya Kravchenko, the guiding spirit of Memorial’s oral history programme, for conversation that brought the past to life and for inspiring many insights. Other rights-defenders who have assisted me include Tatyana Bakhmina, Leonid Vul, Yurii Shikhanovich, Mikhail Kukobaka, Yan Rachinskii, Venimian Ioffe, Vyacheslav Dolinin, Boris Belenkin, Olga Kosares, and Aleksandr Podrabinek. I gained important insights from Emma Gilligan’s research on Sergei Kovalyov. My work has benefited from discussions with Stefan Auer, Tony Phillips, Dan Rabinovici, Cecile Vaissie, Aleksandar Pavkovic, Gennadii Kuzovkin, Peter Horvath, Krystyna Duszniak, Richard Pennell, Greg Burgess, David Christian, and Wynne Russell. I am also grateful, in different ways, to Les Holmes, Philomena Murray, David Lockwood, Svetlana Epshtein, Aleksandr Pavokyan, Masha Kravchenko, Elena and Volodiya Rachko, Michaela Petiskova, Ed Kline, Rob Stewart, Louis and Jessie Maroya, Genie Grieg, Rebecca Glover, Stan Klan, Charles Schenking, Steven Welch, Erik Lloga, Roland Burke, Zoe Knox, David Philips, Charles Zika, Julie Evans, Hana Zappner, Viktor Zappner, Sebastian Job, Greg Dolgopolov, Nina Christesen, Pip Cummings, Richard Sakwa, Marko Pavlyshyn, Peter Reddaway, Pat Grimshaw, Anne Gilmour-Bryson, and Ron Ridley. A version of Chapter 3 was previously published in Stephen Wheatcroft (ed), Challenging Traditional Notions of Russian History (Palgrave, 2002). Material from Chapters 4–5 was published as ‘The Specter of Russophobia’ in The Soviet and PostSoviet Review, Vol. 25, No. 2, (1998). I am grateful to Palgrave and Charles Schlacks Jr for permission to reuse these materials.

Introduction This is a book about dissidents and the terminal crisis of Soviet totalitarianism. It seeks to illuminate the ways in which dissidents and their ideas influenced the course of Gorbachev’s reforms, and laid important foundations of a democratic political order. Its central contention is that what happened in dissident circles during Brezhnev’s era of stagnation had a profound impact upon the Russian public mind. On the one hand, dissident defiance of the regime violated long-standing taboos and set new standards of courage. On the other, the samizdat debates of the 1970s formulated new definitions of some of the most contested terms in the lexicon of liberalisation. When the official reformers, the so-called ‘foremen of perestroika,’ extolled the virtues of glasnost or pluralizm, they were appropriating terms that had radical connotations, terms which had been shaped by decades of dissident protest. As Lev Timofeev, who had just been released from the camps, warned in a 1988 samizdat essay: ‘Remember, our esteemed, bold intelligenty, you repeat alien words, whilst continuing to hold under lock and key those who pronounced those words, those who pronounced them at the right time.’1 The central preoccupation of this book is the dissident legacy. Contrary to those scholars who pointed to the suppression of the movement in the early 1980s as evidence of its irrelevance to perestroika,2 this book suggests that the dissident phenomenon mattered because it happened. For two decades, a group of Soviet citizens had behaved like free citizens in an unfree society. Individuals might be arrested, but the precedent of their defiance could not be suppressed. Ideas that had been elaborated in the great monuments of samizdat were part of the consciousness of the intelligentsia. For many educated Russians like the critic Vladimir Potapov, the experience of reading Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago in secret was like hearing ‘a trumpet calling to the terrible court of history.’3 No amount of repression could erase the memory of that summons. Indeed, there were important ways in which repression added force to the dissident legacy. In a society where opportunistic apparatchiks had long ‘hesitated with the party line,’ dissidents suffered for their beliefs. Some, like Anatolii Marchenko and Vasyl Stus, died in the gulag, martyrs to the cause of human rights. Others, like Andrei Sakharov and Sergei Kovalyov, emerged from captivity as defiant heroes. Their refusal to repent, their ordeal at the hands of the KGB, their unending struggle against lawlessness, all meant that their words carried the force of conviction. The authority of some prominent dissidents was also magnified by the Soviet regime’s habit of subjecting ‘renegades’ to massive public vilification campaigns. Intended to demonstrate the ‘ideological and political unity of Soviet society,’ such carnivals of calumny inevitably evoked sympathy for the victims. Too many ordinary citizens had learned to resent the bureaucratic bullying and petty humiliations that were ingrained in the fabric of Soviet life, a circumstance ignored by those Sovietologists who dismissed the dissidents because ‘political culture links the bureaucratic elite and the masses more closely than it links the dissidents to either.’4 What linked many ordinary citizens to the

The legacy of Soviet dissent

2

dissidents became clear during the 1973 propaganda campaign against Sakharov, when the newspaper Izvestiya compiled an analysis of the 809 letters received in connection with the affair. It concluded that 402 of those letters possessed a ‘negative, sometimes anti-Soviet character,’ and that ‘a large group of letter-writers supported Sakharov.’5 This substantial minority may have expressed the sympathies of a far larger segment of public opinion, because the very act of writing a letter that might be perceived as ‘anti-Soviet’ was in itself an act of courage. During the perestroika years, the potential of this constituency was sensed by politicians like Boris Yeltsin, who declared on the morning after Sakharov’s death that ‘We must come to the end of the path that Sakharov began. Our duty is to Sakharov’s name, to the persecution he suffered.’6 It is difficult to imagine a similar eulogy being uttered in memory of the ideologues of perestroika. Some of those ideologues vehemently denied that dissidents had any influence on the course of perestroika. In a widely cited volume of interviews, Fedor Burlatskii dismissed the dissidents as obstacles to reform: Our dissidents never had a direct or serious influence on the political process. Individuals like Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn had a large impact on public opinion but not on political practice because they were rejected by the political system. Conservative forces even used them to roll back and narrow permitted political and ideological boundaries…. When one of us expressed a similar opinion, or any view that reactionary and conservative forces didn’t like, they immediately said, ‘So you’re drifting towards the dissidents are you?’ Or, ‘Ah, you’re repeating the words of Roy Medvedev.’ And that made it harder for us.7 The notion that dissidents were an obstacle to reform had been a stock-in-trade of KGB interrogators since the early 1970s, and it was echoed by Western scholars like Alec Nove, who extolled the role of institutional intellectuals as ‘constructive dissidents,’ as if the activities of the real dissidents prematurely advocating glasnost, human rights, and democratic freedoms were not constructive.8 But there was an element of truth in Burlatskii’s complaint. Even during the terminal crisis of the Soviet regime, advocates of dictatorship like Aleksandr Prokhanov vilified reformers as bearers of dissident ideas. On the eve of the August 1991 coup, he complained that ‘for five years yesterday’s dissidents have been heading up the government,’ and indicted Gorbachev as ‘the chief dissident.’9 After the failure of that coup, he added mournfully that ‘the conception of Elena Bonner has won.’10 Some prominent dissident exiles offered a mirror image of Prokhanov’s argument about their influence on perestroika. A founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Ludmila Alexeyeva claimed that ‘we take no offence at Gorbachev and his associates for not citing us as sources. We are happy that our ideas have acquired a new life.’11 Another émigré, Andrei Sinyavskii noted that ‘Mikhail Gorbachev borrowed the term [glasnost], evidently from the dissidents.’12 He added that ‘I am glad of the glasnost proclaimed by ‘General Dissident’ Gorbachev, who has transposed certain of Sakharov’s ideas into the party idiom.’13 By 1992, Gorbachev himself would give credence to the accusations, by joining the dissidents Andrei Sinyavskii and Sergei Kovalyov in the ‘Free Press’ Foundation, headed by Nezavisimaya Gazeta editor Vitalii Tretyakov.14 A few months

Introduction

3

earlier, Gorbachev had reflected upon the progress of perestroika, and asked: And the whole dissident movement—was that not really the wish for reform? These are all stages in one process.’15 Dissidence and Gorbachev’s reforms may have been stages in one process, but their relationship was far more complex than a linear progress from inspiration to action. Much of the early rhetoric of perestroika was framed in terms of a struggle against the West’s ‘psychological warfare,’ a euphemism which connected ‘foreign ideological centres’ and domestic ‘renegades.’ From the outset, perestroika was justified as a way of extirpating dissent. In his speech to a propaganda conference in December 1984, often cited as a manifesto of liberalisation, Gorbachev had warned that ‘political vigilance and implacability toward views that are alien to us, ideological work that is creative and aggressive, businesslike efficiency, boldness and persistence are needed as never before.’16 Such ‘creativity’ and ‘boldness’ in the ideological struggle enabled the foremen of perestroika to transgress the bounds of the permissible, and appropriate dissident ideas without retribution from the defenders of orthodoxy. No event so epitomises this process as the hysterical vilification in the spring of 1987 of ten émigré dissidents, who had signed a sceptical letter titled ‘Let Gorbachev Give Us Proof!’ It was not a bastion of Stalinism, but one of the flagships of perestroika, Moscow News that pilloried the ten as spies and terrorists, and then hosted a round-table of leading reformers who contemptuously speculated about the moral degradation of these exiles who had ‘chosen the opposite side of the barricades.’17 But it was this recrudescence of Stalinist hatespeech that enabled Moscow News to publish ‘Let Gorbachev Give Us Proof!’ Vilification of dissidents facilitated the dissemination of dissident ideas. From the March 1985 plenum to the August 1991 putsch, dissidents were the ultimate taboo of perestroika. Most of the prisoners of conscience released after 1987 retained their criminal records, and were only rehabilitated after the failure of the August 1991 putsch—long after the rehabilitation of Bolshevik victims of Stalin, like Bukharin and Zinoviev, who were themselves culpable for gross human rights abuses during the first decade of Soviet power. As late as October 1988, the Central Committee saw fit to veto the announcement of the impending publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, with an order to the printers for the covers to be removed from the latest issue of Novyi Mir. Despite such acts of repression, some Sovietologists, like Alexander Motyl, have extolled the role of Gorbachev in eliminating dissent by co-optation, and argued that Sakharov ‘ceased to be a dissident once Gorbachev permitted him to return to Moscow’18 But Sakharov remained a dissident in the eyes of hardliners like KGB chairman Kryuchkov, whose detailed reports to Gorbachev on Sakharov’s subversive activity as the instigator of the democratic opposition in 1989 reveal the same preoccupations as those compiled by Andropov in the 1970s. Elena Bonner, who was handed the reports by the KGB’s successor in 1994, commented that ‘reading [Kryuchkov’s reports] creates the impression that the ‘stagnation’ did not end, that there was no perestroika.’19 In fact, Kryuchkov’s denunciations were merely an extreme manifestation of an essential element of official perestroika, which identified dissidents as public enemy number one. The result was a profound reticence to acknowledge the influence of dissidents upon the agenda of reform. When Len Karpinskii was asked to address the dissident issue in Moscow News in early 1987, he was asked in the most evasive terms: ‘Don’t you think it’s high-time we return to a certain controversial subject considering

The legacy of Soviet dissent

4

the lesson of truth that was taught us?’20 Official anxiety over that ‘certain controversial subject’ is mirrored by the obsessive denials of dissident influence offered by reformers like Burlatskii. Dissident ideas were persecuted ideas, and an understanding of their seepage into official texts requires a particular sensitivity to the nuances of debate and the techniques of Aesopian language. This is not a new problem. As early as 1952, Leo Strauss criticised the tendency of Western scholars, citizens of democracies, to interpret medieval texts literally, without considering how cultural communication is shaped by regimes that police thought and punish dissent: [p]ersecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only. It has all the advantages of private communication without having its greatest disadvantage—that it reaches only the writers’ acquaintances. It has all the advantages of public communication without having its greatest disadvantage—capital punishment for the author. In the case of perestroika texts, the truth between the lines was the existence of dissident works, like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or Igor Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya, that could not be mentioned publicly, but which informed and shaped debate. Long before these figures became mentionable, allusions to their work filtered into the official press. In 1990, when the masks were removed, Alla Latynina observed that the critic Lakshin, in a 1988 debate, ‘was formally arguing not with Solzhenitsyn, but with Kozhinov, yet he attacks the circle of ideas advanced by Solzhenitsyn.’21 The importance of the dissident legacy was that it shifted the ideological centre of gravity. The failed reforms of the Khrushchev era had been shaped by a struggle between the advocates of a return to Leninist purity and the defenders of Stalinist orthodoxy, and the result was a consensus on the necessity of a repressive one-party state. By contrast, the ideological lines of the Gorbachev era were more open to democratic possibilities. After two decades of dissident protest and samizdat, non-Bolshevik conceptions of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and glasnost were widely understood in the intelligentsia. At the same time, the premises of official ideology had been seriously undermined by revelations about mass repressions and by attempts to explain them. The October Revolution, and even the figure of Lenin, were no longer sacrosanct. Despite the numerous obituaries of the dissident movement, dissidents played a conspicuous role in Russia’s transition to democracy. The ‘new samizdat’ of the perestroika years was dominated by publications like Glasnost and Ekspress-Khronika, which were edited by veterans of the dissident movement, and which were founded upon the old information networks of dissent. Leading dissidents were engaged in a protracted dialogue with the foremen of perestroika, which culminated in their convergence in the Memorial Society and the Interregional Group, two of the crucibles of Russian democracy. In this convergence, Andrei Sakharov was a crucial figure, whose authority as a persecuted dissident lent authenticity to ventures that might otherwise have been dismissed as conveyer-belts of party directives. Sakharov’s stature also conferred legitimacy on Gorbachev’s reforms. No event was more symbolic of the radicalisation of

Introduction

5

perestroika than Gorbachev’s December 1986 telephone call to Sakharov, which became, in the words of Yurii Karyakin, ‘the beginning of the sharp and profound GorbachevSakharov dialogue, a dialogue which became one of the engines of our progress.’22 Unlike in Eastern Central Europe, dissidents did not come to power in Russia. But they played a crucial role in the establishment of democratic institutions. It was Andrei Sakharov who spearheaded the campaign against Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which enshrined the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party. It was Sergei Kovalyov, one of the founders of the Initiative Group on Human Rights (1969), who became the chairman of the Human Rights Committee of the RSFSR parliament, and presided over the drafting of the human rights provisions of the new Russian constitution. It was Boris Zolotukhin, the lawyer expelled from the Communist Party for his courageous defence of Aleksandr Ginzburg in 1968, who became the leading architect of judicial reform. And it was Mikhail Fedotov, who had mingled in the dissident milieu in the 1960s, who drafted the law on the press, which transformed glasnost from a slogan to a legal reality. Russia’s transition to democracy may be unthinkable without the dissidents, but the uncensored debate of samizdat also contributed to the perils of democracy. In a despairing 1995 essay, written in the shadow of the carnage in Chechnya, Aleksandr Daniel observed that ‘the so-called ‘democratic movement’ of 1987–93 developed in some sense along a vector, worked out in the dissident epoch, but speaking honestly, this can also be said of many contemporary anti-democratic groups.’23 Perhaps the most important anti-democratic vector is that formulated by the dissident mathematician, Igor Shafarevich, a courageous human rights activist whose polemic Rusofobiya is arguably the most influential anti-Semitic text since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This book is a study of four dissident ‘vectors’: the repudiation of revolutionary violence; the theory and practice of glasnost; the defence of law and rights; and Russophobia. It records the genesis of these tendencies in the dissident milieu, and their dissemination in samizdat, in émigré publications, and in the broadcasts of Radio Liberty. It shows how they exerted pressure upon the totalitarian regime, calling into question its legitimacy, and provoking countermeasures that became milestones of perestroika. It analyses the dissidents’ collision with Gorbachev’s Leninist renovation, and the fatal ambiguity of perestroika, which enabled reformers to vilify the dissidents whilst appropriating their slogans. It traces the political struggles around these vectors during the terminal crisis of the Soviet Union, and their profound impact upon the agendas of democrats and authoritarian nationalists in Yeltsin’s Russia. A common feature of these vectors was their fundamental divergence from the agendas of party reformers, and the illumination of these divergences is crucial to the argument of this book. Dissidents did not merely articulate ideas prevalent in the intelligentsia, and leave the real work of emancipation to be performed by the foremen of perestroika. Each of the four vectors under discussion may have intersected with official slogans, but each also differed profoundly from the original designs of Gorbachev’s reformers. Both sides may have addressed the legacy of Stalinism; but the dissidents traced the catastrophe to Lenin’s celebration of revolutionary violence; whilst the reformers, reviving the interrupted line of Khrushchev’s thaw, placed exclusive blame on Stalin, and advocated a return to Leninist purity. Both sides may have emphasised glasnost, but for the dissidents, glasnost was a weapon against state repression; for the neo-Leninists, it was a means of enforcing discipline upon society. Both sides may have

The legacy of Soviet dissent

6

emphasised the rule of law, but for dissidents, law was inextricably connected with the idea of human rights; for many reformers, it was connected with state security. Even the idea of Russophobia, which became the rallying cry of anti-democratic tendencies in the 1990s, conflicted profoundly with the National Bolshevism that was fostered by elements within the military-security apparatus. The reasons for this divergence are both institutional and intellectual. Dissident ideas were formulated in an embattled civil society, and inevitably reflected the lessons of persecution at the hands of the state; reformist ideas were formulated in state institutions, and were inevitably concerned with offering solutions to the state’s problems. Moreover, dissident ideas were tested, refined, and developed in the free debate of samizdat, which privileged originality, iconoclasm, and pluralism, and which resembled the conditions of a democratic society: hence the durability of dissident ideas in post-Soviet Russia. By contrast, reformist ideas were confined by censorship, by fear of party conservatives, and by the straitjacket of the official ideology, and thus were doomed to rapid obsolescence under conditions of liberalisation and ideological relaxation. The vectors that are the focus of this book have been chosen because of their obvious significance for Russia’s transition, because they exemplify the pervasiveness and the complexity of the dissident legacy. But the dissident movement was a vast and diverse phenomenon, and this book does not claim to be comprehensive. It does not discuss the important dialogue between Russian and non-Russian dissidents about the fate of the Soviet empire, nor does it address the contribution of the Russian Orthodox renaissance to the de-Bolshevisation of Russian nationalism. It ignores the social-democratic tendency in dissent, which can be traced from the journal Poiski to the prominent role of Vyacheslav Igrunov in the Yabloko movement. It barely alludes to the pacifist impulse in the dissident movement, which connects those who demonstrated in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Sakharov’s condemnation of the invasion of Afghanistan, and Sergei Kovalyov’s campaign against Yeltsin’s war in Chechnya. Perhaps the most significant omission is the dissident challenge to the ‘spirit of Munich’ in the West, which helped to make human rights a central aspect of East-West relations, and to stimulate the ‘human rights boom’ of the late 1970s. Nor does this book argue that the dissidents were the sole cause of perestroika and the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism. Clearly the architects of perestroika were also reacting to the reality of economic decay, to foreign policy disasters like the war in Afghanistan, to the pressures of the arms race, and to the logic of their own ideology. But this book does seek to demonstrate that the dissidents had a profound influence upon the course of change, and upon the outcome of that change. Russia’s relatively peaceful transition from totalitarianism was facilitated by the dissidents’ repudiation of violent revolution, by their preoccupation with human rights, and by the fact that they served first as the symbolic axis of the emerging democratic opposition, and then as a restraining influence upon the post-Soviet leadership. The major tendencies in contemporary Russian politics, from liberal democrats to radical nationalists and communists, all espouse ideas that have a dissident lineage. Ultimately it is the clash of these ideas that will determine the fate of Russian democracy.

1 Children of terror I want an investigation, screw by screw, of the machine which transformed a full life, the flowering activity of a human being, into a cold corpse. I want sentence to be passed. In a loud voice. (Lidiya Chukovskaya, February 1968)1 Wherever social memory is destroyed, the possibility for all kinds of misfortune exists…. Without the past, the future is closed. (The editors of the samizdat historical almanac Pamyat, 1916)2 To publish Solzhenitsyn’s work is to undermine the foundations on which our present life rests. (Vadim Medvedev, Central Committee Secretary for Ideology, to a closed party conference in Riga, November 1988)3

There are two ways that the hegemony of democratic values is achieved in a society with an authoritarian past. One is to forge a lineage of democratic struggle from personalities, documents, and events that played a role in the advance of liberty. The other is the indictment of the catastrophe inflicted by dictatorship, whose perpetrators are condemned to eternal infamy and whose victims are mourned. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century inflicted such catastrophes on a scale unprecedented in human history. They also engaged in a relentless struggle against memory, silencing and discrediting witnesses, destroying evidence, falsifying the historical record, and murdering historians. The Nazi cover-up ended with the liberation of the death camps by Allied armies, but the victorious Soviet regime waged a protracted campaign to obscure the atrocities committed in its name. During the two decades between Khrushchev’s fall and the initiation of perestroika, Russian dissidents publicly challenged the official version of the Stalinist past. They accumulated suppressed facts to fill in blank spots. They contested the alibis that the regime offered in self-exoneration. The result was a counter-history, founded upon Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which became an indictment of the Soviet regime, its creators, its ideology, and the very idea of violent revolution. The importance of this indictment is not only that it undermined the dictatorship, but also that it shaped the course of change. It helped to short circuit what might have become a cycle of vengeance. The cataclysm that occurred in Soviet Russia between the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the death of Stalin was so vast and so pervasive that its aftershocks would be felt for generations. Its magnitude still defies comprehension. Even the cautious review of the available evidence by Getty, Rittersporn,

The legacy of Soviet dissent

8

and Zemskov concedes the deaths of over a million people in the gulag between 1934 and 1953, the execution of 786,098 ‘counter-revolutionaries’ between 1930 and 1953, and the death of 389,521 peasants in places of ‘kulak’ resettlement.4 But as these authors acknowledge, such a ‘cold numerical approach’ risks overshadowing the individual personal and psychological horror of the event: Millions of lives were unjustly taken or destroyed in the Stalin period; the scale of suffering is almost impossible to comprehend. The horrifying irrationality of the carnage involves no debatable moral questions— destruction of people can have no pros and cons.5 Yet for the Soviet leaders, these were debatable moral questions: the regime had come into being through revolutionary violence, and that violence found its supreme vindication in the works of Lenin, the immortal, mummified founding father, the icon of the regime and the infallible theorist of its ideology. Precisely because the legitimacy of the Soviet regime was derived not from the electoral consent of the governed, but from a revolutionary lineage that marked the unfolding of historical truth, these sources were beyond criticism. From the perspective of human rights, Lenin’s ideological heritage was acutely dangerous: a compendium of moral and immoral justifications for the destruction of people. It was axiomatic for Lenin that the state was ‘an organisation of violence for the suppression of some class.’6 It was equally obvious to him that ‘violence is always the midwife of the new society,’ and that the dictatorship of the proletariat meant ‘a state of simmering war, a state of military measures of struggle against the enemies of proletarian power.’7 No less pernicious was Lenin’s enthusiasm for spontaneous popular violence at the height of the revolution. He scorned the ‘present wail raised by the spineless intellectuals…against violence on the part of the proletariat and the revolutionary peasants.’8 Whilst abhorring pluralism in debate, he welcomed diversity in repression: Variety is a guarantee of vitality here, a pledge of success in achieving the single common aim—to cleanse the land of Russia of all sorts of harmful insects, of crook-fleas, of bedbugs—the rich, and so on and so forth. In one place half a score of rich, a dozen crooks, half a dozen workers who shirk their work (in the hooligan manner in which many compositors in Petrograd, particularly in the Party printing shops, shirk their work) will be put in prison. In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with ‘yellow tickets’ after they have served their time, so that all the people shall have them under surveillance, as harmful persons, until they reform. In a fourth place, one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot.9 The extent of Lenin’s dependence upon Marx and Engels, and the extent of his responsibility for Stalinism, is a matter of debate. What is incontrovertible is that a dictator whose own writings exhibited such indifference to human life, such enthusiasm for violence, and such contempt for the legal process, was a poor model for future generations. The Soviet regime’s cult of Lenin, which transformed him into the

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exemplary Soviet man, and his works into a fount of infallible wisdom, boded ill for the future. The destructive potential of Lenin’s ideas about violence and about ‘cleansing’ Russia of ‘harmful insects’ was magnified by Soviet ethnic policies, which aggravated both national sentiment and national grievances. On the one hand, Lenin’s anti-colonial rhetoric legitimised the idea of national liberation struggles, and ensured that discontent was channelled into nationalist discourse. On the other, the mass repressions of the Stalin period frequently assumed an ethnic dimension, real or perceived. The most obvious were the deportations of nations during the Second World War: the Chechens, the Crimean Tartars, the Kalmyks, and the Volga Germans.10 Whatever the Kremlin’s intentions, the Ukrainian famine would also be perceived as an act of imperial tyranny, a pre-meditated attempt to suppress Ukrainian nationhood. Non-Russian resentment was exacerbated by Stalin’s perverse adoption of Russian nationalist rhetoric, which ensured that for nonRussians, the atrocities of his reign would be interpreted as a form of Russification. Yet Russian national sentiment was no less traumatised by the Bolshevik experiment. The anti-religious campaigns and the collectivisation of agriculture had devastated two sources of traditional Russian culture: the Orthodox Church and the village. Yet national resentment was deflected by Stalin’s discovery of Russian nationalism, and redirected against the Jews by his anti-cosmopolitan campaign. A multitude of grievances, obvious scapegoats, and an elite educated in the uses of political violence: this was the volatile reality of the ‘friendship of the peoples.’ As long as the regime outlawed discussion of the relationship between the Stalinist cataclysm and the theory and practice of Leninism, demands for justice and vengeance were channelled into an acrimonious debate between two elite factions. A leftist tendency assailed the bureaucrats, drawing on Lenin’s later writings, and hinted that Stalinism represented a recrudescence of Russian authoritarian traditions. The possibilities for mass mobilisation against the ‘new class’ and ‘vestiges of the past’ would soon be demonstrated by Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The right alternative was National Bolshevism: anti-Semitic nationalism, using Trotskii as a cipher to blame the Jews for the atrocities of the revolution and its crimes against Russian culture. The tension between these tendencies erupted into sporadic public recriminations during the Brezhnev era, in the 1969 clash between the ‘liberal Leninists’ of Novyi Mir and the patriots of Molodaya Gvardiya, and in the notorious 1977 debate at the Central House of Writers, ‘We and the Classics.’11 With the relaxation of censorship under perestroika, the struggle was resumed with renewed virulence. And the very exclusion of Leninism from the field of contention served to radicalise and pathologise both parties, since Lenin authorised aggressive, intolerant rhetoric and the resort to violence as the ultimate answer to one’s opponents.

The Great Alibi When Lenin theorised the cleansing of Russia from ‘harmful insects,’ he did not contemplate the possibility of facing justice for the atrocities he was inciting. Only in 1946 did the Nuremberg tribunal establish the principle that perpetrators of crimes against humanity might be punished by the international community. This precedent

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posed a major dilemma for the Soviet leadership, which had previously benefited from the explicit character of Nazi repression. Even during the war, Soviet anxieties about the similarity of their prolonged revolutionary violence to the Nazi Holocaust were evident in the belated and ambiguous response of deputy foreign minister Andrei Vyshinskii, the show-trial prosecutor, to allied inquiries about Auschwitz after its liberation by the Red Army in 1945. At the Nuremberg proceedings, the likeness of the two totalitarian regimes was suggested by the Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko—a future Chief Prosecutor and architect of dissident trials in the 1960s and 1970s—who attempted to blame the Nazis for the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers; when the ploy failed, the Western powers saved their ally embarrassment by consenting to the removal of the item from the indictment. Soviet insecurity was also evident in the fate of the Soviet Black Book, which recorded the experiences of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust. In 1949, at the height of the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign, the plates of the Black Book were destroyed.12 It may have been a counterproductive move. One of the authors of the Black Book was Vasilii Grossman, a war correspondent who had been one of the first outside observers to witness the gas chambers of Auschwitz after its liberation. The fate of the Black Book was to prefigure the central theme of his later writings: the identity of Nazism and Stalinism. The death of Stalin in March 1953 offered the Soviet leadership a unique opportunity. Two decades of glorification of Stalin—‘the Father of the Peoples,’ ‘The Great Teacher,’ ‘The Great Shepherd,’ ‘The Shining Sun of Humanity’—made him the ideal subject for one more myth: that he was the sole architect of Soviet mass terror, a scapegoat for the regime and the millions who had made possible its crimes against humanity. The gradual disengagement of the Soviet leadership from Stalin began with the exonera-tion of the Jewish Doctors, a Pravda editorial on ‘Socialist Legality,’ and in June the arrest of the ‘British spy’ Lavrenti Beria. The state of political flux produced a tenuous cultural liberalisation, but the limits of the permissible were quickly defined by the hostile reaction to the publication of Pomerantsev’s article ‘On Sincerity in Literature,’ which forced Tvardovskii to resign as editor of Novyi Mir.13 While establishment intellectuals debated literary aesthetics and the role of the artist under socialism, a far more momentous agitation was underway behind the scenes. After Beria’s fall, the simmering turmoil in the camps of the gulag erupted into strikes and open revolts at Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Kengir.14 At the same time, the regime was being bombarded by increasingly insistent appeals from victims of repression and their families. Zhores Medvedev, who wrote letters with his brother Roy calling for their father’s rehabilitation, later reflected on the magnitude of the petition campaign: ‘Thousands of letters can be ignored, but when millions start to arrive they must make a certain impact.’15 The insurgencies in the camps and the chorus of the victims made possible what Solzhenitsyn called the ‘Khrushchevian miracle’: that ‘unpredictable, improbable miracle, the release of millions of innocent prisoners.’16 The miracle culminated in Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the 20th Party Congress. Allegedly written by the former camp inmate and old Bolshevik, A.V.Snegov, it was an act of catharsis, self-exoneration, and containment.17 Khrushchev admitted the fact of mass repressions, the use of torture for obtaining false evidence, and the deportation of nations, but devoted most of his compassion to the victims of the purge of 1937, who ‘included many honest, outstanding

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activists of the party, devoted to the cause of communism.’18 All the blame was placed on one man, whose crimes were summed up with the euphemism ‘the Cult of Personality.’ In a sense Khrushchev did not abolish the Cult of Personality, he simply inverted it: from being the source of every success, Stalin became the source of every failure. The negative Cult of Personality inaugurated by Khrushchev was a vindication of Lenin and the Party, exonerating them of responsibility for Stalin’s atrocities. Deriding the axiom ‘Stalin is Lenin today,’ Khrushchev proposed a dichotomy between the two dictators. Every clash between Lenin and Stalin was enlarged to create a pattern of antagonism, culminating in Lenin’s ‘Testament,’ which was held out as a prescient warning against the threat posed by Stalin’s character. Lenin’s ‘modest’ personal qualities were contrasted with Stalin’s megalomania. Ignoring the hostage-taking and mass executions of the Red Terror, Khrushchev extolled Lenin as the incarnation of tolerance and compassion, a benign ruler who resorted to repression only against irreconcilable class enemies. At the same time, the idea of revolutionary violence that Lenin celebrated was left intact: Khrushchev was questioning not the principle of violence, but its use against faithful communists, who may have blundered but might have been led back to the true path. Thus most of Stalin’s victims were passed over in silence. The horrors of ‘de-kulakisation’ were not mentioned. Even Stalin’s pre-1934 persecution of his political opponents, ‘trotskyites, rights, bourgeois nationalists,’ was defended as ‘the crushing of the enemies of Leninism.’19 The idea of revolutionary militancy was fortified by the notion of the Cult of Personality, with its associations to religion and bourgeois individualism. Stalin failed to submerge himself in the collective: his crimes were a manifestation of the exaggeration of one man’s rights over his socialist responsibilities, a metastasis of malignant liberal democratic values. Soon writers who refused to adhere to the party line would be vilified as exponents of their own Cult of Personality. In 1959, Khrushchev would declare: Among the writers in our country are individuals who say: ‘How can there be Party guidance of literature?’ …One writer or another may sit at his country house, hatching a sniveling book, yet want it to be recognised as an expression of the sentiments of the people of our times, of all the people. Is that not a real cult of one’s own personality, which, you see, does not want to suffer the guidance of the party, expressing the will of millions? Such a man, with his contrived book, wants to rise above the party, above the people.20 In responding to the Stalinist cataclysm, Khrushchev was a captive of the conceptual poverty of the ruling ideology: his solution, based on the rhetoric of illiberalism, was also part of the problem. The limits of the new dispensation were tested at meetings of party branches held to discuss the contents of the Secret Speech. One of the most outspoken challenges was made at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics in Moscow. Yurii Orlov, a 33-year-old physicist, delivered a speech that would be recalled by TASS two decades later in a press release denouncing his role in the foundation of the Moscow Helsinki Group.21 Orlov went far beyond Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin, assailing the moral legacy of political terror, which manifested itself in mass conformism, the habit of always

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voting ‘yes.’22 He proceeded to draw an implicit parallel between Stalinism and fascism, by asserting that just as capitalist economies produced a spectrum of political systems, ranging from democracy to fascism, so socialist economies had produced the moderate Yugoslav variant and full-blown Stalinism. But what attracted applause was his concluding call for ‘democracy on a socialist base.’ Three of Orlov’s colleagues also made controversial speeches; all four were promptly dismissed from the Institute, whose director was warned by Khrushchev: ‘I’m not alone in the Politburo; others demanded their arrest.’23 In early April the verdict was confirmed by an article in Pravda, which denounced unnamed party members of Orlov’s institute for singing in ‘SocialistRevolutionary and Menshevik voices.’24 The debate over the consequences of the Cult of Personality was mirrored in the polemics around Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone, an expose of Stalinist repression passed by the censors and published in the summer of 1956 after the plot was amended to give the secret police a ‘human face.’25 In the revised version, the same investigating officer who had run the hero into gaol suddenly realises that the man was innocent and leads a heroic struggle for his release from camp.26 Nevertheless, in the shadow of the growing anti-Stalinist turmoil in the East European satellites, the novel became the object of a struggle within the literary establishment to define the limits of the permissible. After Khrushchev excoriated Dudintsev’s work as ‘a stinking bouquet,’ Novyi Mir editor Simonov adroitly repudiated it. The showdown, at a meeting of the prose section of the Moscow Section of the Writers’ Union, coincided with the outbreak of the Hungarian uprising. Konstantin Paustovskii praised Dudintsev for discovering the psychology of the ‘Drozdovs,’ the new petit bourgeois stratum in Soviet society, marked by arrogance, brutality and lack of culture.27 This speech, so daring that it was soon circulating in samizdat, was a paradigm of Leninist anti-Stalinism: a critique of bureaucrats, not of the ideology of revolutionary violence or the institutions of repression. This limited de-Stalinisation came to a halt in the streets of Budapest. It was succeeded by a campaign against ‘revisionism’ and a tightening of cultural controls throughout the Warsaw Pact, partly in response to the conspicuous role of Polish and Hungarian writers as instigators of popular unrest. The dangers of challenging the new limits of the permissible were demonstrated by the virulent propaganda campaign unleashed against Pasternak after his receipt of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, partly in recognition of Dr Zhivago. Whilst the anger of the regime was inflamed by the circumstances of the novel’s unauthorised publication in Italy, Pasternak’s bleak account of the revolution as something to be survived transgressed the limits of de-Stalinisation, a fact missed by critics who point to his caution in ending before the onset of Stalinist terror. The repercussions of the Pasternak affair were felt by Vasilii Grossman, when he submitted his novel Life and Fate to Znamya in 1960. In this bitter epic about war and tyranny, Grossman drew an explicit parallel between the reign of violence in the USSR and Nazi Germany. He delineated the similarities between Hitler and Stalin, as personalities and as masters of concentration camp systems. After one of Znamya’s reviewers warned that the novel could not be published ‘for 250 years,’ the manuscript was returned with a cursory refusal labelling it ‘anti-Soviet.’ In February 1961 State Security officers raided Grossman’s home with orders to confiscate the novel, every copy and every trace of its composition, even used sheets of carbon paper.28

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Within eight months of the ‘arrest’ of Grossman’s novel, a new wave of anti-Stalinism was launched at the 22nd Party Congress. Unlike the closed proceedings of the 20th Congress, now Stalin was denounced in public and there were public repercussions, such as the removal of Stalin’s corpse from the Lenin mausoleum, and the renaming of Stalingrad. For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn it was ‘the long awaited moment of terrible joy, the moment when my head must break water.’29 In November 1961 the writer Raisa Orlova, wife of Solzhenitsyn’s sharashka companion Lev Kopelev, delivered a manuscript titled Shch-854, written during six weeks in 1959, to the editorial office of Novyi Mir. Editor Tvardovskii, at the pinnacle of his career and recently elevated to the Central Committee, spent a year preparing the ground for the publication of the novella, renamed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. His caution was justified: in July 1962, Grossman had been granted an audience with the party ideologist Mikhail Suslov, who assured him that whilst he had not read Life and Fate, he agreed with the reviewers that it could be more harmful than Dr Zhivago, and attributed its ideological shortcomings to Grossman’s personal isolation and his unhealthy interest in the dark side of the period of the Cult of Personality.30 That summer, thanks to Tvardovskii’s machinations, such unhealthy interest was to be found in high places: Ivan Denisovich was read to Khrushchev by his personal assistant, and the Soviet leader was won over by the tale of a hard-working peasant in the gulag. His approval compelled the presidium of the Central Committee to authorise its publication in the November issue of Novyi Mir.31 The publication of Ivan Denisovich marked the apogee of official de-Stalinisation. Never before had the world of the camps been described in the pages of a Soviet journal. Its impact was magnified by Solzhenitsyn’s brilliant prose, which combined camp argot and elevated literary diction, a synthesis utterly unlike the classics of socialist realism: in the words of Alla Latynina, ‘Solzhenitsyn did not simply speak the truth, he created a language.’32 The resulting narrative offered not atrocities, but something more shocking: constant understatement, confronting the reader with the routine dehumanisation that constituted the zek’s working day. Nevertheless, many readers, including some future dissidents, failed to appreciate the significance of the tale.33 Solzhenitsyn’s choice of a peasant protagonist rather than an intellectual enabled him to avoid polemical reflection about the implications of the gulag for the reader’s understanding of the Soviet system. Where Grossman had drawn conclusions, Solzhenitsyn merely presented evidence, minutiae of life in ‘the zone.’ And the camp he describes is not one of the ‘destructive labour camps’ of the late 1930s, which attained ‘the heights of all that is disgusting, terrible, depraved.’34 In a November 1962 letter to Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, a survivor of Kolyma during the 1930s, pointed out Ivan Denisovich’s good fortune: he has not lost his teeth from scurvy, he possesses a spoon, he suffers no beatings, he safely hides bread under his mattress, and he observes a cat which would have been eaten long ago in a severer camp.35 The interpretative lacunae of Ivan Denisovich were exploited by official critics, who were saddled with the task of justifying Khrushchev’s latest protégé. To the functionaries of the cultural bureaucracy, the struggle of the zeks to build a camp wall suggested parallels with socialist realist ‘produc-tion novels.’ Thus L.F.Ilichev, a Central Committee Secretary, praised Ivan Denisovich for inspiring respect for the labouring man and for being ‘written from a constructive standpoint and filled with the ideals of our society.’36 In late 1962, the Writers’ Union admitted Solzhenitsyn without even waiting

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for a membership application. He had become, in the words of Konstantin Simonov, ‘a true helper of the party in a sacred and vital cause.’37 It was a time of fulsome praise. Vladimir Ermilov, a notorious secret police informer within the literary bureaucracy, forgot the truths of his own career to commend Solzhenitsyn for telling ‘a truth that cannot be forgotten, that must not be forgotten, a truth that is staring us in the face.’38 To explain that unforgettable truth, the custodians of ideological orthodoxy revised the Great Alibi to take account of the camps. According to the new version, the camps were exclusively a product of the Cult of Personality, and Lenin was in no way culpable. Moreover, the victims of illegal repression were mainly communists, for whom the experience of repression was a test of faith and a source of moral enrichment. And the Party had corrected all abuses: camps for political prisoners were a thing of the past. The new line was preached by communist camp inmates, who were deployed as moral counterweights to Solzhenitsyn. Boris Dyakov, a known collaborator with the camp authorities, published a short story titled ‘Endurance’, in which he maintained that ‘true communists, no matter what terrible tribulations befell them, remained true communists.’39 At the same time, an article by another zek, Aleksandr Gudzenko, extolled his years in the gulag as a spiritually uplifting experience: ‘Human feelings did not die out, even there, but on the contrary grew stronger.’40 The chorus of praise encouraged other survivors to submit their own recollections of the camps. Within five months of the publication of Ivan Denisovich, Khrushchev complained to a meeting of cultural figures that ‘magazines and publishing houses are said to be flooded with manuscripts about the life of people in exile, in prisons and in camps.’41 It was time to close the floodgates. Echoing Lenin’s rhetoric about dangerous insects, Khrushchev explained that this ‘very dangerous theme’ was a menace to ideological hygiene: ‘This spicy stuff will, like carrion, attract flies, huge fat flies, and all kinds of bourgeois scum will crawl from abroad.’42 It was also dangerous for Khrushchev’s leadership: as power slipped from his grasp, critics began to examine the implications of his protégé’s story. When Ivan Denisovich became the favourite to win the 1964 Lenin Prize for literature, Pravda printed a front-page article pointing out that it lacked the necessary party spirit.43 During the ensuing months, party ideologues avoided confronting Solzhenitsyn directly, but conducted polemics against his most vocal supporters. G.Brovman attacked the credentials of Novyi Mir critic Vladimir Lakshin, author of a celebrated essay about Ivan Denisovich, stressing that ‘at the time when the hero of the tale was innocently languishing in prison, V.Lakshin himself, by his own admission, “was composing the scenarios of student plays, and rushing to friends’ parties.”’44 After Khrushchev’s ouster, Solzhenitsyn himself, once the ‘party’s true helper,’ was subjected to increasing criticism, and the camp theme was barred from publication. In the spring of 1965, amid a spate of pro-Stalinist articles occasioned by the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, the new dispensation was confirmed by an authoritative article in the party’s theoretical journal, which diagnosed Ivan Denisovich as ‘a work which from the ideological…point of view is unquestionably suspect.’45 In September the end of de-Stalinisation was signalled by the arrest of Daniel and Sinyavskii, and the simultaneous seizure of Solzhenitsyn’s archive and his novel The First Circle.46 The Great Alibi was sustained in samizdat, which provided an arena for dissident Leninists to oppose the surreptitious rehabilitation of Stalin. Unsurprisingly, the most

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vociferous protests came from children of Stalin’s victims: they were unlikely to query the role of their martyred parents in Bolshevik atrocities, and they had been the greatest beneficiaries of official de-Stalinisation, true believers readmitted to the fold. The passionately loyalist tenor of their protests was exemplified by the letter sent to the Central Committee in September 1967 from forty-three ‘children of the innocent Communist victims of Stalin,’ implying that others were less innocent. Their opposition to the Stalin revival was expressed as concern for the ultimate success of communism: praise of Stalin ‘shackles our movement, weakens our ranks, destroys our power, and makes the triumph of Communism impossible.’ In rhetoric indistinguishable from official propaganda, they proclaimed that ‘we must celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the great October Revolution under the banners of the party, bearing like a torch the immortal name of Lenin,’ and they pleaded for their letter to be regarded ‘as part of the struggle for communism.’47 The list of signatures under the petition was headed by Pyotr Yakir, who epitomised the transformation of official de-Stalinisation into Leninist dissent: in 1963 he had edited an officially published volume about his father, the famous Red Army commander and purge victim. In an open letter to the journal Kommunist in March 1969, Yakir would take Leninist dissent to its logical extreme. Basing his arguments from the outset on the decisions of the party, he approvingly cited the resolution of the 22nd Congress about the removal of Stalin’s corpse from the Lenin mausoleum, which marked the symbolic dissociation of the two dictators. But then he went further, implicitly dissociating Stalin even from the repressive apparatus. Setting out what purported to be a legal indictment, Yakir enumerated Stalin’s crimes and the corresponding articles of the Criminal Code: high on the list were the deaths of prominent NKVD officials, and the liquidation of ‘many leading figures in our intelligence service.’48 The definitive statement of the Great Alibi was Let History Judge by Roy Medvedev, also the child of ‘an innocent communist victim of Stalin.’ In the introduction, Medvedev established his ideological pedigree by noting that his ‘study of the origins and consequences of Stalinism’ was ‘conceived’ after the 20th Congress and written after the 22nd49 Although the book played a major role in the author’s expulsion from the Communist Party in 1969, it was written from an explicitly Leninist standpoint and littered with Lenin citations. Following Khrushchev, Medvedev celebrated collectivisation as ‘the major revolution…that determined the victory of socialism’ and ‘an epic [that] abounds in great achievements by thousands of party members.’50 He denied the ‘inevitability’ (without addressing the probability) of Stalinism and assailed ‘opportunists of all kinds [who] now malign socialism, trying to deny the democratic and humanist nature of the October Revolution.’51 This was a manifesto of establishment anti-Stalinism, written for publication in the official press, not samizdat. Medvedev’s research was assisted by reformist party luminaries and by the memoirs of fourteen old Bolsheviks. In 1965 a draft was read by Yurii Andropov, then a Central Committee Secretary for Relations with Communist States, who expressed his approval through an aide.52 Three years later, as the new KGB chairman, Andropov would counsel against persecuting Medvedev, recommending instead that ‘we should not exclude the possibility of employing Medvedev to write a work on the period of the life of our state that interests him, under appropriate party control.’53 In 1966 Andrei Sakharov, still a pillar of the establishment, read the manuscript and advised Medvedev about the Stalinist repression of science. Even then Sakharov ‘couldn’t accept Medvedev’s tendency to attribute all the

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tragic events of the 1920s to the 1950s to the idiosyncracies of Stalin’s personality.’54 Sakharov’s opinion was prescient, anticipating history’s judgement on Roy Medvedev’s opus magnum. Although an English translation of Let History Judge appeared in 1970, the Russian version was only issued in 1974 and was immediately eclipsed by Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Even Medvedev’s closest collaborator, his twin brother Zhores, acknowledged the marginal influence of Let History Judge.55 Khrushchev’s Great Alibi, the Cult of Personality, was unsustainable as an explanation for Soviet mass repressions even within the framework of the official ideology. The notion that one man was responsible for such a massive distortion of history contradicted Marxist determinism. Moreover it was undermined by revelations about Stalin’s failures: the very destruction of the Cult of Stalin made him less plausible as a universal scapegoat. As a result, the enemies of de-Stalinisation were able to do battle on relatively favourable terrain, defending the character of Stalin rather than the atrocities of Soviet rule. Emboldened by the end of the thaw, they undertook serious attempts to rehabilitate Stalin, first in 1966, and then in 1970, when a small statue of the dictator was erected at his grave beneath the walls of the Kremlin. Favourable allusions to Stalin appeared in the press sporadically throughout the Brezhnev years. The danger of this tendency was not that Stalin could ever be restored to his former glory, but that the crimes against humanity revealed by de-Stalinisation would be vindicated. The Cult of Personality, based on mass deception about the humanistic virtues of the Father of the Peoples, would be superseded by unashamed adulation of a genocidal dictator. Such a resurrection would signify the return of revolutionary violence as an explicit and active component of the official ideology, rather than a dormant possibility. As Grigorii Pomerants, Orientalist and former zek, declared in a famous address to the Institute of Philosophy in December 1965: ‘Consciously to restore respect for Stalin would be to establish something new: respect for denunciation, torture, executions.’56 But the real danger of Khrushchev’s alibi was the consolidation of the Leninist heritage. By excluding the atrocities of the post-revolutionary period from criticism, by damning Stalin for betraying Leninism, Khrushchev reinforced the lethal precedent of revolutionary violence in Soviet public discourse. The danger was exemplified by Mikhail Sholokhov’s notorious speech at the 23rd Party Congress in March 1966, his first major statement after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Denouncing foreign appeals for him to intercede on behalf of the imprisoned Daniel and Sinyavskii, Sholokhov lamented that the writers had not faced ‘revolutionary justice,’ as during ‘the memorable twenties.’57 Such nostalgia for revolutionary violence would become less fashionable during the coming decade, under the impact of a different interpretation of the Bolshevik revolution and the Stalinist cataclysm.

The dissident interpretation of Soviet history While the public campaign against the Cult of Personality was proposing an unambiguous explanation of the Stalinist era, a profoundly subversive inquiry into the meaning of the catastrophe was being held in private apartments. During the efflorescence of kompanii in the late 1950s, Khrushchev’s revelations were discussed in a myriad secret speeches, pronounced not from party rostrums but in kitchens over tea or

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vodka. Although few records survive of these dialogues (except perhaps in the archives of State Security), they were an obvious enough fact of the life of the Moscow intelligentsia for one dissident historian to remark in the 1970s: ‘Who does not know that the years 1956–59 were years of searching for answers to questions posed by Khrushchev’s report to the 20th Congress, and above all to the question of the necessity or accidental nature of what had happened?’58 The foundation of this inquiry was knowledge of the extent of the calamity, based on the testimony of the gulag survivors who returned en masse in the wake of the 20th Congress. Their ranks included such future dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lev Kopelev, Dmitrii Dudko, Grigory Pomerants, Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov, Pyotr Yakir, and Viktor Krasin. All brought with them harrowing tales of the atrocities they had witnessed and the degradation they had experienced. In the late 1950s a pleiade of survivors were engaged in the effort to preserve their experiences and impressions in literary form for posterity. From this period dates the composition of the memoirs of the Siberian camps by Evgeniya Ginzburg and Dmitrii Vitkovskii, and Nadezhda Mandelshtam’s first volume of recollections about her husband’s fatal confrontation with the regime. Varlam Shalamov was writing poetry and short stories about his years in the mines of Kolyma: when Solzhenitsyn read some of his camp verses in the summer of 1956, he trembled ‘as I recognised a brother…. One of secret brothers of whose existence I knew beyond doubt!’59 Solzhenitsyn himself was at work on The First Circle, his novel of life in the sharashka, and in the spring of 1958 he conceived the structure for the history of the camps that was to become The Gulag Archipelago.60 When most of these survivors began to write, publication was an impossible dream: they wrote for a posthumous future. Nadezhda Mandelshtam believed that the Soviet regime would last a thousand years.61 After his rehabilitation, Solzhenitsyn hoped only that ‘our books, preserved by faithful and ingenious friends, would rise and not our bodies: we ourselves should be long dead.’62 This pessimism diminished with the apogee of de-Stalinisation and the inauguration of the camp theme in official literature, with the publication of Ivan Denisovich. The withdrawal of official approval after Khrushchev’s downfall did not put a halt to the memoirs of survivors, which played a leading role in the samizdat boom of the mid-1960s. The interlude of official approval did have important practical consequences. It put Solzhenitsyn in touch with other survivors. In the editorial offices of Novyi Mir he met Varlam Shalamov, and initiated several years of dialogue in correspondence and conversation about the camps, their meaning and representation, the alibis dispensed by the regime, and the crisis of culture in an age of mass annihilation.63 In a 1966 letter, Shalamov praised The First Circle, but pronounced the death of the novel: To the reader, who has experienced Hiroshima, the gas chambers of Auschwitz, who has seen the war, invented subjects are insulting. In contemporary prose and in the prose of the near future what is important is a way out of the limits and forms of literature. Not to describe new manifestations of life, but to create new means of description.64 Solzhenitsyn’s already well-advanced ‘experiment in literary investigation,’ The Gulag Archipelago, was precisely such an attempt to create means of description equal to the

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cataclysm. He even proposed to Shalamov that they co-author the work, but Shalamov declined because, as he confided to his notebook, ‘I consider my own work in prose immeasurably more important than all of Solzhenitsyn’s poems and prose.’65 But there was no shortage of collaborators from the ranks of the camp survivors who had found the first honest record of their own fate in Ivan Denisovich and wrote to Solzhenitsyn with offers to recount their own experiences. The resulting testimony of 227 witnesses gave new impetus to The Gulag Archipelago, which Solzhenitsyn had suspended because of his awareness of the limits of his own experience in the camps.66 The chronicles of the survivors contested the logic of official de-Stalinisation by turning from the personality of Stalin to his victims, from criminal psychology to grief and remembrance, from the dilemmas of the party to the catastrophe of the nation. Against the reassuring euphemisms and selective amnesia of the authorities, the survivors reclaimed the memory of the human lives destroyed and deformed by the gulag. They were staking a claim to posterity, proposing their experiences as an integral and inalienable part of Soviet history and the collective memory of society. In their narratives, the decades of terror became visible within the framework of individual lives. Instead of sensationalism, the survivors offered understatement, recalling without malice details of the routine brutality of everyday life in the gulag. The survivors also ‘discovered’ the punitive apparatus. They never confronted Stalin’s personality, but a dehumanised bureaucracy of informers, investigators, prison wardens, camp guards, criminals. They charted journeys through its vast machinery of prisons, transit centres, camps. Instead of being a repercussion of one man’s quirks, the gulag was revealed as a system of power, repression, and destruction, a kingdom unto itself which seemed to have its own logic. By focusing on the institutions of the gulag, which had preceded and outlived Stalin’s ascendancy, the manuscripts of the survivors constituted an implicit challenge to the chronological limits of official de-Stalinisation, which confined the period of abuses to the years between the Great Purge and Stalin’s death. According to Soviet propagandists, Stalinist aberrations were a thing of the past, consigned to history by the courageous actions of the party in exposing the Cult and rehabilitating its victims. Many were convinced by Khrushchev’s declaration that there were now no political prisoners in the USSR. Official triumphalism was even endorsed by Evgeniya Ginzburg, who concluded her account of the horrors of the Siberian camps by praising the 20th and 22nd Congresses, after which ‘all that this book describes is over and done with’ and ‘the great Leninist truth has prevailed in our country and party.’67 In 1967 this happy ending was shattered by Anatolii Marchenko, who released into samizdat a manuscript titled My Testimony, a record of his experiences in the Mordovian camps that demonstrated that the political prisoners were languishing in the gulag even as Khrushchev was denying their existence. From 1968, the samizdat journal The Chronicle of Current Events emphasised in its very title the contemporary relevance of the camps: for the next fifteen years it provided news about the plight of dissidents in the gulag. Their experiences gave new urgency to the ‘camp theme,’ and seemed to demonstrate an essential continuity between the Stalinist era and the present. The growing consciousness of the magnitude of the catastrophe and the persistence of its consequences demanded a more sophisticated explanation than one man’s flaws. Ironically, Khrushchev facilitated the search for such an explanation by his celebration of Leninist norms as an antidote to Stalinism. Amongst those inspired to return to Lenin’s

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writings was Lyudmila Alekseeva, who later recalled that when she began her reading, ‘I could not have suspected that people who would mean so much later in my life—Anatolii Marchenko, Yurii Orlov, and Pyotr Grigorenko—also traced the beginning of their dissent to the instant they turned to page 1 of volume 1 of the collected Lenin.’68 Although Grigorenko’s research would sustain his Leninist convictions until the mid1970s, Alekseyeva ‘realised that [she] had lost all respect for Lenin’ by the time that she reached his writings from 1917.69 Similarly Vladimir Bukovskii found in Lenin’s works ‘a living history of the crimes of the Bolsheviks’ and later acknowledged his debt to the founder of the Soviet state: ‘Ah, our beloved Ilich, how many people he has lured into darkness, how many supplied with justification for their crimes! But to me he brought light.’70 Whilst no one dared to question Lenin’s guilt openly during the thaw, in private an indictment was being formulated. When Solzhenitsyn accepted a nomination for the 1964 Lenin prize and edited out the anti-Lenin chapter ‘The Word Will Smash Concrete’ from The First Circle to ease its publication in Novyi Mir, he was hard at work on the indictment of Lenin in The Gulag Archipelago.71 He later reflected on Khrushchev’s fall that ‘I, who had been raised up by Khrushchev, would never have enjoyed real freedom of action while he was there.’72 Official favour was not a problem for Vasilii Grossman, in disgrace after the confiscation of Life and Fate. He devoted the final years of his life to the composition of a far more heretical work, Everything Flows, an essayistic novella that included an extended polemic against Lenin. Scorning the sentimental tales about grandfather Lenin cultivated by official iconographers, Grossman pointed to ‘Lenin’s intolerance, Lenin’s implacable drive to achieve his purpose, his contempt for freedom, his cruelty toward those who held different opinions.’73 Rejecting the arguments of the official de-Stalinisation, he contended that Stalin’s terror realized ‘Lenin’s innermost essence’ and that ‘the state Stalin built, the state without freedom, lives on.’74 But the impact of Grossman’s iconoclasm was diminished by his vehement cultural determinism, which repeatedly contrasted ‘the great slave’ Russia and ‘the revolutionary, freedomloving West.’75 Thus Lenin was partly exonerated: he became the ‘slave of Russian history’ who was ‘chosen’ by Russia in 1917.76 While Solzhenitsyn withheld his more sophisticated treatment of this problem, Everything Flows was released posthumously into samizdat in the late 1960s and published in the West by Possev in 1970. According to one dissident observer, it caused many dissidents to lose their faith in Lenin.77 The incipient attack on Leninism influenced the second component of the dissident interpretation: how to deal with the legacy of the catastrophe. The problem was posed metaphorically by Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward, set at the beginning of the thaw, in the form of the struggle of cancer patients against their tumours and the memories of their different ordeals under Stalin. Like cancer, the Stalinist terror struck fear into people, and was surrounded by silence; like treating cancer, dealing with the Stalinist legacy was a dangerous venture, but a critical one: ‘A man dies from a tumour, so how can a country survive with growths like labour camps and exiles.’78 More explicit, but no less emotive, was the approach in Grossman’s Everything Flows, which presented a mock Nurembergstyle trial, where a prosecutor confronted a series of ‘Judases,’ the informers who made Stalinism possible. After each set out various mitigating circumstances, social and psychological, they confronted their accuser:

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Why are you determined to expose particularly those like us who are weak? Begin with the state. Try it! After all, our sin is its sin. Pass judgment on it. Fearlessly, out in the open, out loud.79 A similar call was made by Lidiya Chukovskaya in her celebrated samizdat essay, ‘By Words, not Deeds,’ written in 1968 for the fifteenth anniversary of Stalin’s death. She assailed the inadequacy of de-Stalinisation, which meant that widows received notices of their husbands’ posthumous rehabilitation, but nothing about those who destroyed their lives: Where are those who were the cause of all that happened? Those who invented the crimes of millions of people? …Where are these people and what are they doing today?80 Like Grossman, she repudiated the idea of vengeance and called for judgment by the ‘court of public opinion.’ In particular, she called for ‘an investigation, screw by screw, of the machine which transformed a full life, the flowering activity of a human being, into a cold corpse. I want sentence to be passed. In a loud voice.’81 She knew that such an investigation was almost finished. For a decade Solzhenitsyn had been composing his ‘experiment in literary investigation,’ The Gulag Archipelago, which had become a three-volume history of the camps, combining autobiography, history, and indictment. Although a copy of The Gulag Archipelago was smuggled to the West in 1972 by the writer V.L.Andreev, it remained unpublished, because Solzhenitsyn judged that his debt to his living sources outweighed his debt to the dead.82 But its central metaphor, elegiac tone, and rejection of violence were divulged in Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel lecture, released in August 1972, two years after winning the prize. To mount the platform from which the Nobel lecture is read, recalled Solzhenitsyn, he had climbed thousands of steps, ‘unyielding, precipitous, frozen steps, leading out of the darkness and cold where it was my fate to survive, while others—perhaps with a greater gift and stronger than I—had perished,’ and that of these dead writers, ‘I myself met but a few on the Archipelago of Gulag, shattered into its fractionary multitude of islands.’83 Anticipating his efforts to disengage Russian culture from the Bolshevik experiment, he lamented that a ‘whole national literature’ was lost in the gulag, ‘cast into oblivion not only without a grave, but without even underclothes, naked, with a number tagged on to its toe.’ The destroyers were not named, but Solzhenitsyn made an obvious allusion to Lenin and the October Revolution when he noted that ‘at its birth, violence acts openly and even with pride,’ but that later ‘it cannot continue to exist without a fog of lies, clothing them in falsehood.’ Thus the antidote to violence was art, which would conquer falsehood, ‘and no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness—and violence, decrepit, will fall.’84 What seemed a naïvely optimistic conclusion was in fact prophetic of the impact of The Gulag Archipelago during the coming decades. Whilst Solzhenitsyn held back his massive indictment of the regime, the challenge to the Great Alibi was gaining force. An influential samizdat article, published under the pseudonym ‘K.Zhitnikov,’ traced the decline of the ‘democratic movement’ to its adherence to Khrushchev’s line on Stalin, to the fact that it was merely ‘the last splash of

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the wave whose crown was the 22nd Congress.’85 According to Zhitnikov, ‘the contraposition of Stalin to true socialism, the idea of the perversion of socialism under Stalin, is typical of almost all the documents of the ‘democratic movement’.’86 Like Khrushchev, the movement’s most prominent spokesmen—Yakir, Grigorenko, Medvedev, Sakharov—reserved their greatest compassion for the ‘innocent’ communist victims of the Stalin dictatorship, and had little to say about the horrors of collectivisation and the anti-religious campaigns. In particular, Zhitnikov assailed the lament for NKVD martyrs in Yakir’s letter to Kommunist, and the pro-Leninist statements in Sakharov’s Reflections. If Yakir’s solicitude towards the repressive organs clearly prefigured his capitulation at his 1973 show-trial, Sakharov’s Reflections contained the seeds of his public repudiation of socialism that same year. Both events were milestones in the decline of Leninist dissent. At the height of the propaganda campaign against Sakharov, the KGB precipitated the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. Although the authorities had been aware of the book’s existence since 1965, they only obtained the complete text in August 1973 after the brutal interrogation of one of Solzhenitsyn’s elderly assistants, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, who apparently committed suicide after divulging the location of a manuscript she had preserved in spite of the author’s instructions to destroy it.87 Ordering the book’s publication, Solzhenitsyn later declared that ‘in this seizure I saw the hand of God, and realised the time had come,’ adding that ‘as Macbeth was told: Birnham Wood will come.’88 The fate of the Shakespearean tyrant, whose crimes precipitated his downfall, became a defining metaphor for the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago. The work defies synopsis, but its most influential themes are easily outlined. It traced the origins of Stalinist mass terror to the Bolshevik Revolution, contending that ‘the Archipelago was born with the first shots of the cruiser Aurora.’89 It was an uncompromising indictment of Lenin’s role, which was substantiated by extensive citations to his Collected Works. It was a vindication of Russian culture and the pre-revolutionary era, disengaging them from Bolshevism and the Revolution. It was an exhortation to defiance, reclaiming the suppressed tradition of anti-Bolshevik resistance stretching from Tambov peasants to the Vlasovites, the Kengir camp rebels and the Novosibirsk workers. It was a monument to the generations destroyed by the gulag, a compendium of tales, fantastic and horrific, gleaned from Solzhenitsyn’s 227 witnesses. In the words of one perestroika-era reviewer, it challenged its readers ‘to take in the pain of millions, concentrated in this book, and not to fall into anaesthetised cynicism.’90 It was also a sustained and elaborate refutation of Khrushchev’s Great Alibi. In a crucial chapter, ‘The Loyalists,’ Solzhenitsyn confronted the myth of 1937 and the official lamentation for faithful communists swept into the camps during Stalin’s purges: ‘Judging by our press and publishers, you were the only ones imprisoned, by and large. Only you suffered. You are the only ones we are allowed to write about.’91 In redressing the balance, Solzhenitsyn pointed to the culpability of communist victims: ‘They remained calm while society was being imprisoned. Their “outraged reason boiled” when their own fellowship began to be imprisoned.’92 The unlucky ‘goodthinkers’ were not even political prisoners, ‘since the renunciation of their beliefs would not secure their release.’93 Nor were they representative of the prisoner populace, but rather a special, privileged stratum. Pouring scorn on the purveyors of official camp literature,

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Solzhenitsyn nevertheless drew details from their works to substantiate his case. In his review of Shelest’s Kolyma Notes, he recounted the poignant scene where a high-ranking interior ministry official on a visit to a camp recognises his former civil war commander amongst the prisoners, and persuades him to accept ‘special food from the kitchen and to take as much bread as he needed.’ Solzhenitsyn explained: ‘In other words, to eat the bread of the sloggers, since no one was going to prescribe a new ration norm for him.’94 As in Ivan Denisovich, the impact of Solzhenitsyn’s history of the gulag was magnified by his use of language. Its central metaphor, the archipelago, gave imaginative form to a system that had hitherto defied description. The result was a macabre kind of travel literature, charting the fatal islands of the gulag, introducing its readers to the barbaric customs of its rulers. At the same time, Solzhenitsyn subjected official discourse to ruthless satire, making the ‘vanguard ideology’ a synonym for rationalised brutality, and repeatedly scorning the rhetoric of the radiant future: ‘How in establishing the dictatorship could they delay with a new kind of prison?’95 Guiding the reader through this labyrinth was the author’s voice, both chronicler and survivor, a member of the ‘tribe of zeks.’ Andrei Sakharov’s reminiscence of his first reading was typical: ‘From the outset, [Solzhenitsyn’s] voice—angry, mournful, sardonic—evokes a sombre world of gray camps surrounded by barbed wire, investigators’ offices and torture chambers flooded with merci-less electric lights, icy mines in Kolyma and Norilsk.’96 Fifteen years later, at the height of perestroika, the text had lost none of its original force: according to critic Vladimir Novikov, ‘It can be opened at any place—and it tugs, forcing us to read, experiencing anew tragic events.’97 It is impossible to underestimate the significance of the literary power of The Gulag Archipelago. As Georges Nivat observed, ‘without Solzhenitsyn’s artistry, there would simply have been one more document, and documents are powerless against ideology.’98 The threat posed by Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece was understood in the Kremlin. At the Politburo session on 7 January 1974, Brezhnev declared that ‘we have every basis to imprison Solzhenitsyn, for he has encroached on what is most sacred—on Lenin, on our Soviet system, on Soviet power, on everything that is dear to us.’99 Urging that Solzhenitsyn should be banished like Trotskii, KGB chairman Andropov observed that the writer was ‘speaking out against Lenin, against the October revolution, against the socialist system.’ According to Andropov, The Gulag Archipelago was ‘not an artistic work, but a political document,’ and ‘this is dangerous.’100 The regime’s counter-measures were at once massive and ineffectual. The propaganda machine made Solzhenitsyn the most pilloried figure in Soviet history since Trotskii, and so transformed him into a mythic presence, comparable in stature to a biblical prophet. The barrage of vilification ranged from the clichés of Leninist invective to the exploitation of people close to him, such as his former wife who claimed that The Gulag Archipelago was ‘folklore’ based on unreliable sources, and his former school friend and fellow defendant, Nikolai Vitkevich, who alleged that Solzhenitsyn had informed on him after their arrest in 1945.101 For popular consumption, a large poster, identifying Solzhenitsyn as a traitor, appeared in a display window in central Moscow.102 TASS denounced Solzhenitsyn’s work as a ‘blanket slander of the Soviet people’ born of the author’s ‘impotent rage,’ but that was a better description of the predicament of the authorities.103 Every attack, every act of ‘negative glasnost’ paid tacit tribute to

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Solzhenitsyn’s importance, and demonstrated that one man had shaken the confidence of the world’s most powerful dictatorship. The Kremlin went to great lengths to silence and to distort Solzhenitsyn’s message, which only increased its impact on deceived citizens when they discovered the truth. When Deutsche Welle began to broadcast excerpts, the Soviet authorities promptly reimposed jamming, which had only been lifted months earlier.104 The move did not prevent the broadcasts becoming a landmark in the history of the Soviet public mind: tape recordings of them would circulate clandestinely for the next decade.105 Whilst the Politburo’s anxieties had been focused upon Solzhenitsyn’s indictment of Lenin, the propaganda organs presented the work as an apologia for fascism and an attack on the Soviet people. Literaturnaya Gazeta’s claim that he ‘equates the Soviet people with fascist murderers’ provoked a devastating response from the author: A minor juggling: Yes, I equated fascist murderers and murderers from the Cheka, the GPU and the NKVD. And Literaturnaya Gazeta drags in the phrase ‘Soviet people’ so that our hangmen may hide more conveniently among them.106 This was the charge that the Soviet authorities never answered. Never did they offer a cogent response to Solzhenitsyn’s arguments about the continuity between the October Revolution and Stalinism, and about the fatal consequences of Lenin’s belief in revolutionary violence. The media campaign also encouraged prominent dissidents to rally behind Solzhenitsyn. When TASS warned about the impending prosecution of Solzhenitsyn, an open letter from five dissidents (Sakharov, Aleksandr Galich, Vladimir Maksimov, Vladimir Voinovich, and Igor Shafarevich) praised his ‘honest effort to collect and publish people’s historical testimonies about a part of those crimes which are on our collective conscience,’ and called upon decent people throughout the world ‘to defend the pride of Russian and world culture—Alexander Solzhenitsyn.’107 Lidiya Chukovskaya hailed the publication of The Gulag Archipelago as ‘a tremendous event’ whose consequences could only be compared to Stalin’s death two decades earlier.108 Even Roy Medvedev declared that ‘all the basic facts given in [The Gulag Archipelago] and all the details about the life and torments of prisoners…are completely authentic.’109 When Solzhenitsyn was finally arrested on 12 February 1974, prior to his deportation to West Germany, dissidents gathered in Sakharov’s apartment and drafted a four-point document that became known as the ‘Moscow Appeal.’ It was signed by ten leading dissidents (Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner, Vladimir Maksimov, Mikhail Agurskii, Boris Shragin, Pavel Litvinov, Yurii Orlov, Rev. Sergei Zheludkov, Anatolii Marchenko, and Larisa Bogoraz) and endorsed by others in subsequent collective letters. It demanded: (1) That The Gulag Archipelago be published in the USSR and made available to every citizen; (2) That archive and other materials be published which would give a full picture of the activity of the Cheka, NKVD and MGB; (3) That an international public tribunal be set up to investigate the crimes perpetrated; (4) That Solzhenitsyn be protected from persecution and allowed to work in his homeland.110

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This declaration marked the revival of the dissident movement, six months after the public capitulation of Yakir and Krasin. By calling for an international tribunal to investigate the Soviet terror, the signatories of the Moscow Appeal invoked the memory of Nuremberg and treated Solzhenitsyn’s ‘experiment in literary investigation’ as an indictment of the Soviet regime. The authorities took summary revenge on Solzhenitsyn’s sympathizers like Lidiya Chukovskaya (expelled from the Writers’ Union), Efim Etkind (dismissed from his university post after being accused by the KGB of hiding a copy of The Gulag Archipelago), and Mstislav Rostropovich (driven into exile).111 But they could not contain the new spirit of outrage that was exemplified by Lev Regelson’s letter to the Soviet leaders: you have still not realized that with the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago, that hour in history has struck which will be fatal to you…. You have still not realized that Birnham Wood is already on the march…that tens of thousands of murdered millions have risen up against you…. They have long been knocking for entrance into our lives, but there was no one to open the door…. The Gulag Archipelago is the indictment with which your trial at the hands of the human race begins.112 The importance of that indictment was emphasised by the appearance of a samizdat White Book, ‘Live not by Lies,’ which documented the events leading to its publication, and included extensive citations from the text.113 Thus The Gulag Archipelago became the central text of dissident literature, and the definitive repudiation of Khrushchev’s Great Alibi in dissident circles. The publication of The Gulag Archipelago also became a stimulus for others to reclaim the suppressed past. On the first anniversary of the Moscow Appeal, Larisa Bogoraz wrote Andropov an open letter announcing her intention to establish an archive to assemble information about ‘the crimes of the recent past’ and to publish its contents.114 A few months later, the manuscript of Vasilii Grossman’s confiscated masterpiece, Life and Fate, was delivered to the novelist Vladimir Voinovich, who photographed it, then took it to Sakharov, who rephotographed it.115 Two copies were dispatched to the West, but by contrast with the furore that erupted around The Gulag Archipelago, it attracted little attention. Although excerpts were serialised in Kontinent, the novel that could not be published for 250 years waited four more years for complete publication.116 The most durable historical initiative inspired by Solzhenitsyn was the almanac Pamyat (‘Memory’), launched in 1976 by a group of Leningraders, headed by Arsenii Roginskii, and published in Paris under the supervision of Natalya Gorbanevskaya. The anonymous editors declared in their introduction that ‘The Gulag Archipelago is for us not only a completed historical work, but above all, a stimulus for further research, and not only on the prison camp theme.’117 Each issue contained memoirs, documents, and articles, many of which illuminated episodes of Solzhenitsyn’s narrative. Six volumes appeared before it was suppressed by the authorities: one editor, Sergei Dedulin, was forced into exile, while Arsenii Roginskii was sentenced to a camp term for forging a certificate to gain access to archives. Of course, these historical symposia bore no relation to the anti-Semitic Pamyat society which acquired instant notoriety in the mid-1980s

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when it provided a forum for public readings of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and allegations about the role of Jews in the destruction of Russian cultural monuments in Moscow. But the emergence of this rival namesake does dramatise the warning of the Pamyat editors that ‘wherever social memory is destroyed, the possibility for all kinds of misfortune exists.’118 The release of The Gulag Archipelago also had repercussions for the present victims of the punitive apparatus. In April 1974 Solzhenitsyn announced the creation of the Russian Social Fund (‘the Solzhenitsyn Fund’) to direct the proceeds of all royalties from its publication to Soviet political prisoners and their families.119 This institution, which consolidated several dissident charitable initiatives, became a tangible link between past and present victims of repression. Their predicament soon became part of the dissident calendar. On 30 October 1974 Sergei Kovalyov, who had publicly protested to Andropov when his copy of The Gulag Archipelago was confiscated, organized the Moscow press conference for the first Day of Soviet Political Prisoners.120 Marked by annual hunger strikes in the camps, the commemoration became an ironic counterpart to the official Soviet festivities for the Day of Miners or the Day of Fishermen.121 For his daring, Kovalyov was soon arrested, and sentenced to spend the next seven Political Prisoners’ Days within the confines of the gulag. Meanwhile Birnham Wood was on the march. Over the next decade, copies of The Gulag Archipelago silently circulated and proliferated, casting a vast shadow over the cultural landscape. Tamizdat editions, photographed copies, and samizdat typescripts were even supplemented by a Soviet edition: in Shevardnadze’s Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia connived to gain access to a printing press, and envoys arrived at Asya Velikanova’s Moscow flat with suitcases full of unbound pages of the first volume (though at his trial, Gamsakhurdia would repent for disseminating this book which was ‘written with great venom’ and ‘saw everything in a black light’).122 In the argot of the dissidents, The Gulag Archipelago was designated ‘Treasure Island,’ prompting jokes about what the KGB was making of this sudden enthusiasm for R.L.Stevenson.123 At the height of perestroika, Natalya Eksler recalled the peregrinations of a copy of volume two that Amalrik gave her in 1976: It was borrowed by friends, then returned, then borrowed for the friends of friends, and the book left home for longer and longer intervals before reappearing. Then it somehow vanished for an extended period. And since some friends wanted their children, who had come of age, to read it, we tried to call it back. After a while we were told: ‘Wait a little, please. It’s in the Urals: let it circulate, since it might be the only copy there.’ We waited. After a year, we tried again, and were informed: ‘The book is in the Baltics, there is an enormous queue, which they call the queue for The Book.’ We waited another few years, and learned that it was now in the Ukraine.124 Hints of its invisible progress appear in samizdat records of trials and literature confiscated at searches, which can only have touched a minuscule fraction of its readership. In 1974 it was discovered in Leningrad University;125 at Moscow University, where the Komsomol secretary announced that ‘it was known’ that the book was being

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‘passed round among the staff’;126 and Odessa University, where a lecturer admitted receiving it from Gleb Pavlovskii, who in turn implicated Vyacheslav Igrunov.127 Shortly thereafter it appeared in Lithuania, where B.Gajauskas was accused of planning to translate it into Lithuanian.128 During the ensuing years, possession or distribution of The Gulag Archipelago featured in the indictments of such prominent dissidents as Sergei Kovalyov, Yurii Orlov, Aleksandr Ginzburg, Mark Morozov, Aleksandr Lavut, Tatyana Osipova, Anatolii Koryagin, Genrikh Altunyan, and Ivan Kovalyov.129 In 1978 Ginzburg declared in court: ‘Everyone must read The Gulag Archipelago. I was glad when the investigators and judges read it. I am glad that you read it. Because of this, the world will become a slightly better place.’130 The authorities took a less optimistic view: at his retrial in March 1983, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, a member of the Group to investigate the Political Use of Psychiatry, was accused of recounting The Gulag Archipelago to another prisoner. He responded that ‘this book is 2,000 pages long, and it is simply impossible to retell it.’131 A few months later, Valeriya Novodvorskaya, a one-time member of the self-styled trade union SMOT, released a statement repudiating her mother’s testimony that the defendant Novoseltsev had given her his copy. Insisting that ‘I know this book almost by heart, and have my own copy,’ Novodvorskaya explained that ‘in the conditions of police terror reigning in the country, I do not keep The Gulag Archipelago at home, and refuse to indicate its present whereabouts.’132 While dissidents could be arrested, ‘the Book’ was already proliferating beyond the reach of the authorities: it had become a fact of cultural life. At the apogee of perestroika, the critic Vladimir Potapov likened the impression of reading it in secret to ‘a trumpet calling to the terrible court of history’ and recalled that ‘The Gulag Archipelago became a legendary, forbidden, and sacred book, a book ‘of the depths.’133 In 1979, Feliks Svetov, a former Novyi Mir critic and now a tamizdat author, responded to an article by Vladimir Maksimov in Kontinent about his four years of exile by arguing that a more appropriate point of departure would have been the release of The Gulag Archipelago: ‘from under the rubble, it became a milestone, a point of reckoning, radically changing our life and all our conceptions of it. Those five years demand reflection.’134

The court of society Reflection upon the origins of Stalinist terror was not encouraged by the reformers who came to power with Yurii Andropov. In March 1983 the thirtieth anniversary of Stalin’s death was marked by an article in Sovetskaya Rossiya by the historian and propagandist N.N.Yakovlev, who attributed the emergence of the dissident movement partly to ‘sharp criticism in the latter half of the 1950s of negative phenomena of the period of the cult of personality.’135 When the stalled rehabilitation process restarted in 1984, its first beneficiary was none other than Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s comrade in terror, and there was a spate of rumours that Stalin himself was about to be rehabilitated.136 At the May 1985 Victory Day celebrations, the mere mention of Stalin’s contribution to the war effort in the speech of the new General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, was enough to evoke a long standing ovation from the audience, repeating the scene that had greeted Brezhnev two decades earlier.137 The very term perestroika was a marker of the rhetoric

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of Andrei Zhdanov, herald of the ideologically pure, mobilisational, left-Stalinism that Gorbachev wished to enlist in the struggle against corruption and stagnation.138 Zhdanov’s authority was confirmed in February 1986, when Pravda commemorated the 90th anniversary of his birth with a long eulogy that extolled his ‘brilliant ability to analyze problems of politics, economics, philosophy and culture.’139 That month his spirit haunted the 27th Party Congress, where one orator, a rising apparatchik named Boris Yeltsin, praised the revival of ‘that Bolshevik spirit, that Leninist optimism, that call to struggle against the old and the outmoded in the name of the new,’ but decried ‘the weakening of Party influence over literature and art,’ which he blamed on ‘the ‘nonintervention’ practised by the Central Committee’s Culture department, whose leaders have not been seen at party meetings for years on end.’140 Such non-intervention made possible the renewal of arguments about the carnage of the Stalin’s terror. Unlike Khrushchev, whose campaign against the Cult of Personality was a critical issue for the leadership and a potent weapon against its political adversaries, Gorbachev showed little enthusiasm for examining the atrocities of the Soviet past, and in 1986 he dismissed Stalinism as ‘a concept thought up by the opponents of communism and widely used to slander the Soviet Union and socialism as a whole.’141 The revelations of perestroika were less a deliberate policy from above than a by-product of loosening censorship for the reassertion of the two most militant tendencies within the cultural-ideological bureaucracy. On the one hand, there were the Children of the 20th Congress, Leninists like Shatrov and Rybakov, who sought to recover the heritage of the early years of the revolution, betrayed by Stalin. Against them were ranged the protagonists of patriotic discourse, ranging from village prose writers like Valentin Rasputin to the activists of the Pamyat society. What distinguished the new de-Stalinisation from that of Khrushchev was a shift in the cultural centre of gravity, produced by the existence of the dissident interpretation of Soviet history. These texts were not merely manuscripts waiting in the author’s deskdrawer, but a cultural reality, embedded in the consciousness of the intelligentsia. For over two decades, they had been retyped and read on onion-skin paper, circulated in densely printed foreign editions, debated in kitchens and salons, and the broadcasts of Radio Liberty. They were at once common knowledge and an unmentionable taboo, informing and underpinning a debate whose protagonists ostentatiously pretended to ignore them. The non-person towering over this shadow culture was Solzhenitsyn, whose massive history of the gulag, centred upon an indictment of Lenin, could never be assimilated to perestroika’s project of redeeming the revolution through cathartic revelations and the recovery of lost possibilities. While the KGB continued to arrest readers of The Gulag Archipelago, the Children of the 20th Congress returned to the public stage with a series of works imbued with the spirit and the limitations of the thaw. Assailing bureaucrats but not dictatorship, hazarding no assertion that could not be bolstered by a citation from Lenin, weighted with ritual declarations of loyalty, this literature of transition was doomed to rapid obsolescence. It was launched by Pravda in September 1985 with an anti-bureaucratic poem by Yevtushenko, the authorised herald of thaw anti-Stalinism, who now assailed those responsible for censorship, the liquidation of the kulaks, and the suppression of cybernetics and genetics.142 It was followed a few months later by Yevtushenko’s long poem, Fuku!, which balanced anti-Stalinist allusions—references to Kolyma and an

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interlude describing the ‘hawk-man’ Beria prowling Moscow in search of prey—with vitriolic denunciations of dissident émigrés and paeans to Latin American revolutionaries.143 The resumption of the thaw agenda was marked by the publication of texts dating from the 1960s, such as Aleksandr Bek’s long suppressed The New Assignment, Anatolii Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat, and Tvardovskii’s poem ‘By Right of Memory.’ The blank-spots of the emerging new version of Soviet history were exemplified by Daniil Granin’s novel, The Aurochs, an account of the life of the biologist Nikolai Timofeev-Reshevskii who stayed to work in Nazi Germany during the Second World War and was arrested by Soviet troops. In the Butyrki transit prison, he met Solzhenitsyn, who records the biologist’s camp experiences in The Gulag Archipelago. Of course Granin did not mention Solzhenitsyn in his narrative. Instead his text contested the central contention of The Gulag Archipelago, that Lenin was responsible for the Stalinist terror. Granin contrasted Stalin’s mistreatment of scientists with Lenin’s concern for their well-being, and cites as evidence Lenin’s 1922 offer to a group of Russian intellectuals who did not accept the revolution to emigrate while retaining their Soviet passports. In fact Lenin’s 1922 instructions to Dzerzhinskii described these writers, philosophers, and scientists as ‘open counter-revolutionaries, accomplices of the Entente, a group of its servants and spies who seduce the youth’ and gave orders for these ‘militant spies’ to be rounded up and forced into exile.144 Granin also ignored TimofeevReshevskii’s tribulations after Stalin’s death: the Khrushchev era was still out of bounds. In early 1988 de-Stalinisation was taken to its imaginative limits by the publication of Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate in Oktyabr.145 Never before had the identity of Stalinism and Nazism been so uncompromisingly articulated in the Soviet press. The novel that ‘could not be published for 250 years’ was well received by official critics.146 It was essentially an indictment of Stalinism, not of the Soviet regime. Each of the four instalments was accompanied by an afterword by the critic Anatolii Bocharov, who insisted on Grossman’s ideological soundness, noting that he had rethought many things after the 20th Congress, but ‘unconditionally believed in the necessity of revolutionary reformation, in the lofty force and rationality of revolutionary ideals.’147 Nowhere did Bocharov (or other approving reviewers) mention Everything Flows, Grossman’s final work with its searing denunciation of Lenin that anticipated Solzhenitsyn’s more methodical indictment.148 The new samizdat, which began to proliferate after the release of political prisoners in 1987, had no such inhibitions. Every issue of Aleksandr Podrabinek’s weekly human rights bulletin Express-Chronicle concluded with a petition for the reader to fill in and return to the editors: I consider it essential to publish The Gulag Archipelago and other works of Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union. I consider it essential to give Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn the opportunity to return from exile to his motherland. I consider that those, who will decide this matter, must take account of my opinion.149 At the same time, elaborate critiques of the assumptions of official de-Stalinisation were appearing in Lev Timofeev’s samizdat journal Referendum. Its second issue in December 1987 included a scathing attack by the pseudonymous writer ‘B.P.’ on the official

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campaign for the rehabilitation of Nikolai Bukharin, the ‘favourite of the party’ and the exemplar of non-Stalinist Bolshevism. Against the sympathetic portrayal of Bukharin’s personality in Ogonyok and Moscow News, B.P. pointed to his political quiescence during 1930–7, ‘one of the bloodiest and most criminal periods of our history,’ and cited Bukharin’s ‘Testament,’ where he denied that he had struggled against Stalin’s line. Then he affirmed Bukharin’s culpability: ‘Innocent before the criminal mafia? Perhaps. That’s their business. But guilty before the country and the people.’150 Ironically, official sensitivities about the dissident interpretation of Soviet history were provoked not by Grossman or samizdat publishers, but by Mikhail Shatrov’s ardently loyalist play Onwards…onwards…onwards, dedicated ‘to the people of the October Revolution.’151 Shatrov’s transgression was to defend Lenin against Solzhenitsyn’s still unmentionable accusations. Set on the eve of the Bolshevik coup, the script presented protagonists and antagonists of the revolution, all gifted with hindsight about their own destinies. Their arguments about whether to embark on the revolution are overshadowed by reflections on its fate. Although Lenin magnanimously acknowledges responsibility for Stalinism, the central contention of the play is a denial of the continuity between Lenin and Stalinism. But even to respond to Solzhenitsyn’s charges was dangerous, because it acknowledged that there was a plausible case to answer. In mid-February, three official historians assailed Shatrov in Pravda for portraying Stalin ‘not as an antipode, but as a hypostasis of Lenin,’ in other words, of propagating Solzhenitsyn’s viewpoint.152 The lines of debate were complicated one month later by the publication in Sovetskaya Rossiya of Nina Andreeva’s critique of de-Stalinisation, ‘I cannot give up my principles!’ Complaining that ‘the now commonplace subject of repression [had] become excessively magnified in the perception of some young people,’ she claimed to have heard ‘assertions that it is time to call to account the Communists who supposedly “dehumanised” the country’s life after 1917.’ She proceeded to extol Stalin’s personal qualities and the memory of the ‘era of storms and onslaughts,’ whilst affirming that the principles she refused to give up were those of Marxism-Leninism.153 Thus she was reinforcing Solzhenitsyn’s thesis about the continuity between Leninism and Stalinism from a proStalinist position. After ‘three weeks of stagnation,’ the turgid official response (drafted by Aleksandr Yakovlev) denounced this ‘manifesto of anti-perestroika forces’ and tried to restore the opposition between Lenin and Stalin, declaring that ‘the cult was not inevitable’ but ‘alien to the nature of socialism and only became possible because of deviations from fundamental socialist principles.’154 As polemics, Nina Andreeva’s letter and Yakovlev’s response were rapidly overtaken by events. Their importance was to demonstrate that there was no official line about the Soviet past. Amid the ideological disarray, the partisans of the dissident interpretation infiltrated the public debate. The first move was made in April by the Russophile critic Vadim Kozhinov, who used a critical review of Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat to question the premises of official de-Stalinisation.155 Implying the existence of texts that could not yet be mentioned, Kozhinov predicted the eclipse of the current masterpiece of perestroika: ‘I do not doubt that within a relatively short time…the superficiality and falseness of the conception of the epoch, given by the novel, will become obvious to the overwhelming majority of readers.’156 He derided Rybakov’s emphasis on the year 1937 and his faithfulness to the idea of the Cult of Personality:

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We know that in the course of half a century, all victories and successes were ascribed to this man. But now Rybakov, as if forever enchanted by this ‘conception’ (which, besides everything else, is extraordinarily naive), remains entirely faithful to it, changing only a plus sign to minus and attempting to explain from the personality of Stalin not all the victories and achievements, but all the defeats and misfortunes.157 Echoing Solzhenitsyn, Kozhinov contested the attempt to blame Russia’s Asian heritage for the barbarism of Stalinism, a contention that runs like a thread through The Children of the Arbat, and asked whether Rybakov believed that Nazism was also a product of Asian influence.158 Instead, like Solzhenitsyn, Kozhinov located the source of Stalinist atrocities in Lenin’s writings. Citing Lenin’s description of dictatorship as the rule of violence and his comparison of revolution to an act of birth ‘which transforms a woman into a tormented, mindless from pain, bloody, half-dead, piece of meat,’ Kozhinov proceeded to rebuke the new Leninists for ignoring the insights of their master.159 Stalinism was to be understood as part of a ‘world-historical phenomenon stretching from Madrid to Shanghai,’ an unmistakable allusion to revolutionary socialism.160 This broadside against the assumptions of authorised anti-Stalinism ignited a shadow debate between Solzhenitsyn’s supporters and the liberal Leninists, a debate with the tacit rule that Solzhenitsyn’s name must not be invoked. Vladimir Lakshin, author of proSolzhenitsyn essays in Novyi Mir during the 1960s and a 1977 tamizdat polemic against The Oak and the Calf, assailed Kozhinov as an enemy of perestroika, whose article was written ‘in the wake of Nina Andreeva.’ Both the Russophile critic and the Leningrad chemistry teacher (not to mention Solzhenitsyn) saw Stalin as ‘a direct result of the revolution.’161 (Less than two years later, Alla Latynina would note in a study of Solzhenitsyn’s ideas that Lakshin ‘was formally arguing not with Solzhenitsyn, but with Kozhinov, yet he attacks the circle of ideas advanced by Solzhenitsyn.’)162 Now Moscow News fanned the controversy by opening its pages to two former dissidents. Igor Shafarevich, an erstwhile Solzhenitsyn associate known for his excoriation of socialism and his theorisation of ‘Russophobia,’ defended Kozhinov’s ‘very interesting attempt to examine the entire Stalinist phenomenon as a manifestation of world-historical proportions.’163 He contended that the resistance to revelations about the crimes of the Stalinist period was provoked by the imbalance between the enormity of the disaster and the triviality of the authorised explanation, blaming all the crimes on one person.164 This oversimplification was a product of reluctance to investigate the true sources of Stalinism, which Shafarevich hinted were to be found in collectivisation and War Communism.165 Alongside this polemic, full of latent implications, appeared a rebuttal by the Leninist historian Roy Medvedev, an open critic of Solzhenitsyn since 1974 and now on the threshold of a new career as a paragon of perestroika (only in March his political rehabilitation had begun with Novyi Mir’s publication of a Tendryakov tale praising the objectivity of his figures for the Ukrainian famine).166 In a cursory response to the arguments of Kozhinov and Shafarevich, he excused War Communism as a divergence from the wide ‘democratizm’ of the early days of the Revolution. Then, like Lakshin, he unmasked his adversaries as enemies of perestroika, complaining that it was difficult to argue with those like Kozhinov who ‘grieve for that old Russia, which was destroyed by

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the October Revolution’ and still harder to argue with Shafarevich, the author of a tamizdat treatise describing socialism as ‘an absolute evil and Stalinism as one of the more adequate incarnations of the essence of socialism.’167 Medvedev concluded with an invocation of ‘our slogan, ‘More Socialism”: for an absolute majority of the Soviet people, ‘More Socialism’ is a court sentence for Stalinism, which must be fought not with damnations of Stalin nor even with the scientifically-based uncovering of its roots, but by perestroika, glasnost, democratisation, radical economic reform.168 There is no more striking illustration of the impotence of the Leninist intellectual before the dissident interpretation of history than this dismissal by a historian of the importance of historical inquiry. Even as the friends of Solzhenitsyn were being exposed as the foes of perestroika, a second front was being opened in the May issue of Novyi Mir. Ignoring Medvedev’s injunction about uncovering roots, Vasilii Selyunin’s essay ‘Sources’ traced Stalinism to War Communism and Trotskii’s proposals for the militarisation of labour.169 Although he offered Lenin faint praise for recognizing his mistake and introducing NEP, Selyunin clearly echoed Solzhenitsyn in tracing the emergence of the labour camps to the early period of the Bolshevik Revolution.170 To make his debt clear, Selyunin ended the paragraph about the gulag by noting that the tragedy of the recently rehabilitated Bolshevik victims of Stalinism ‘must not allow us to forget the suffering of Ivan Denisovich. A nation, which forgets its history, is obliged to repeat it.’171 As fragments of Solzhenitsyn’s arguments became lodged in public debate, as the allusions to his illicit oeuvre became more obvious, his name slipped into print. In August Moscow News devoted an entire page to an article about Solzhenitsyn by critic Lev Voskresenskii, who hailed Ivan Denisovich as a classic while conceding that it was still too early to discuss his entire oeuvre.172 A few days later Yelena Chukovskaya, one of Solzhenitsyn’s closest assistants during the early 1970s, appealed in Knizhnoe Obozrenie for Solzhenitsyn’s publication, arguing that ‘it’s time to put an end to our differences with this remarkable son of Russia…a victim of Stalin’s labour camps and a universally acclaimed writer.’173 Once the taboo had been broken, there was a rush of prominent cultural figures to join the pro-Solzhenitsyn campaign, whose diversity testified to the prevalence of his unacknowledged influence. Even the (Jewish) historian Nathan Eidelman and the anti-Semitic village prose writer Viktor Astafev, public enemies after a vitriolic exchange of letters in 1986, were able to agree on the verdict of posterity: in late July Astafev had declared on television that ‘future generations of Russians will one day visit Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s grave to do penance,’ and in September Eidelman predicted that one day there would be streets named after Solzhenitsyn.174 The mounting pressure was exploited by the editor of Oktyabr, Anatolii Ananev, who announced the impending publication of Vasilii Grossman’s Everything Flows, the original attack on Lenin.175 As Novyi Mir prepared to publish Solzhenitsyn, the Central Committee struggled to enforce the boundaries of ‘socialist pluralism.’ On 4 October the new ideology boss Vadim Medvedev denounced ‘irresponsible attempts to cast a shadow over Lenin’s legacy, over the basic values of socialism.’ Alluding to the transgressions of Vasilii

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Selyunin and Yurii Afanasev, he continued: ‘And how else can one interpret those statements in the press claiming that the administrative command system derived from Lenin, those attempts to deny the socialist nature of our system.’176 Behind the scenes, the party still had uses for that command system. The October issue of Novyi Mir was halted by a last-minute phone call from the Central Committee to the printers, ordering the removal of the covers, which carried an announcement of the impending publication of The Gulag Archipelago. According to the samizdat journal Referendum, when Zalygin did the rounds of the Politburo to seek a reversal of the decision, Gorbachev stamped his feet, used the familiar form of address, and warned him that he could not forgive Solzhenitsyn for his views on Lenin.177 A month later Vadim Medvedev warned a closed ideological conference in Riga that ‘to publish Solzhenitsyn’s work is to undermine the foundations on which our present life rests.’178 Carefully noting that he had not read Solzhenitsyn until the recent clamour for his political and literary rehabilitation, Medvedev explained the results of his study of Lenin in Zurich and The Gulag Archipelago: ‘I can say only one thing. That this is not a fighter against the deformations of socialism, against Stalinism or such things. This is an opponent of our system as such. An opponent of Lenin and of all our ideology.’ Then he echoed Nina Andreeva: We want to renew socialism, to give it the most modern appearance. And on the basis of Lenin’s heritage, his views and conceptions, and on the basis of contemporary experience, the experience of socialist countries. But we have no right to give up our socialist choice, and we have no right as communists, as citizens of this country to step back from these positions.179 Vadim Medvedev’s attitude towards Solzhenitsyn was endorsed by his namesake, Roy Medvedev, now a respectable ‘fighter against the deformations of socialism.’ The impending publication of Let History Judge had been announced without hindrance by Znamya. In early December 1988 Roy Medvedev added his authority to the campaign against The Gulag Archipelago, telling the Riga newspaper Sovetskaya Molodezh: ‘The conception of the book, in my view, is false. It is full of slander, false inventions, and to publish intentional slander, in my opinion, is impermissible.’180 Yet the examples of ‘slander’ cited by Medvedev, about Lenin’s illness and the role of Jewish bankers in financing the Bolshevik Party, related not to The Gulag Archipelago but to The Red Wheel. These factual errors were enumerated by the émigré writer Aleksandr Serebrennikov in an extensive rebuttal of Medvedev’s claims that was widely circulated in Moscow samizdat.181 Medvedev conceded, however, that The Gulag Archipelago might be publishable either if the ‘slanderous’ passages were expurgated, an option rejected by the author, or if the entire text were accompanied by a critical commentary by a professional historian refuting the ‘false fragments.’182 Neither Medvedev found much support. When the nationalist critic Aleksandr Kazintsev denounced Oktyabr’s intention to print Grossman’s Everything Flows, he confined his criticism to the Russophobic character of the book and ignored its vilification of Lenin.183 But whilst Grossman’s essay in cultural determinism divided the intelligentsia, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago evoked unprecedented unanimity. Petitions and open letters calling for its publication came from dissidents and

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academicians, from Jews and Russian nationalists, all urging the lifting of the ban.184 The writer’s 70th birthday, 11 December 1988, was marked by several public meetings. The crowd of 1,500 at the House of Cinema was addressed by such eminent foremen of perestroika as Yurii Afanasev and Moscow News editor Egor Yakovlev, as well as older Solzhenitsyn supporters from the thaw like Vladimir Lakshin, who called for his publication as ‘the original trailblazer,’ and Yurii Karyakin, who declared: ‘Let him be an anti-communist. So was Dostoevskii. Was he an enemy?’185 A few miles away, Russophiles gathered at the club of the Bauman factory.186 Vladimir Soloukhin boasted of meeting Solzhenitsyn in Vermont during a visit to the USA five years earlier.187 Vladimir Krupin admitted that he was indebted ‘in many things, if not everything, to Aleksandr Isaevich.’188 Leonid Borodin, imprisoned in the 1960s for participation in the underground group VSKhON and rearrested in the 1980s for publishing fiction abroad, declared that ‘only after I read Gulag did I feel confidence in the complete rightness of my way of life.’189 The leadership, committed to a Leninist renewal, resisted these appeals. But the state was no longer the sole proprietor of historical truth. Whilst the Central Committee issued prohibitions, the informal group Memorial was burgeoning into a mass movement. It had emerged in late 1987 as a small core of activists, who defied official harassment to collect signatures for the fulfilment of Khrushchev’s promise for the construction of a monument to the victims of Stalinism. During the clashes over Shatrov’s Onwards in early 1988, the group attracted the patronage of such eminent advocates of authorised anti-Stalinism as Yevtushenko, Shatrov, Rybakov, Korotich, Ulyanov, and Afanasev.190 They were joined on its public committee by Roy Medvedev, now an ardent advocate of Leninist perestroika. Far more important for the course of Memorial’s activity was the election of Sakharov as the committee’s honorary chairman, a post he regarded as far from ceremonial. Solzhenitsyn had also been invited to join the council, but in September he politely declined, pointing out that he had already created a monument to the victims of Stalinism ‘for which I was awarded with the accusation of treason.’191 A few months later he revealed the source of his reservations in a telephone conversation with Sakharov, explaining that he disagreed with Memorial’s decision to limit its scope to Stalinist repressions.192 Vladimir Soloukhin, the eminence grise of village prose literature, was more openly critical, likening Memoriars project to a group to immortalise the memory of Second World War victims who died in 1944.193 Justifying his refusal to sign the first appeal by pro-Memorial intellectuals in support of a monument ‘to the victims of illegal and baseless repressions of the mid-1930s,’ he complained that no one was willing to answer the question: ‘From which year were [repressions] illegal and baseless, and when were they legal and with a foundation?’194 Memorial’s project, he argued, was to annex its monument to the ‘House on the Embankment,’ the famous apartment block of the party elite, instead of honouring the millions of ordinary victims across the country and instead of tracing the roots of terror to the Revolution (‘Yes, to peep at the twenties, at 1918 and 1919, is terrible and difficult’).195 In fact the agenda of Memorial was still being defined by the evolving confrontations between the public committee and the founding activists, between ‘innocent’ victims of Stalin-era repression and post-Stalinist dissidents, and between the Memorial society and the Soviet regime. These latent tensions burst into acrimonious debate at Memorial’s preliminary conference in October 1988. When Anatolii Rybakov called for Memorial’s

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work to be limited to ‘the concrete evil of a tyrant’s 30-year rule,’ he was rebuked by Larisa Bogoraz for hindering historical inquiry.196 The suppression of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was unmentioned for most of the first day, because the Leninists on the conference presidium had excluded radical voices from the discussion. Finally Sakharov persuaded the moderator to concede the floor to Lev Timofeev, editor of the samizdat journal Referendum, which had been publishing anti-Leninist articles for the past year. Timofeev in turn gave half his allotted time to Viktor Aksyuchits, editor of the Orthodox journal Vybor and an ardent Solzhenityn partisan, who made an open call for Memorial to campaign for Solzhenitsyn’s publication. The resolution was not passed without resistance. As the participants prepared to vote, the Literaturnaya Gazeta delegate to the conference announced that his paper had evidence that Solzhenitsyn had been a KGB informer. Amidst outrage in the audience, Igor Dobroshtan, a leader of the Vorkuta camp uprising, protested that the delegates’ intelligence had been insulted by the presumption that they would believe such tales.197 Memorial’s transgression of the limits of Leninist perestroika continued in late November, when its activists organised an exhibition, titled ‘Week of Conscience’ to publicise designs for a memorial complex and raise donations for its construction. Amongst the exhibits on the ‘Wall of Memory,’ documenting the lives ravaged by Stalinism, was a portrait of Solzhenitsyn and the text of his appeal ‘Live not by lies.’198 The authorities reacted to this incipient radicalisation with a concerted campaign to undermine the movement by splitting the radical activists and their establishment patrons. At the beginning of the ‘Week of Conscience,’ a leading Memorial activist, Dmitrii Leonov, warned in a samizdat statement that bureaucrats were attempting to take over the project.199 His fears were confirmed by a spate of media attacks. Komsomolskaya Pravda denounced young people who had used the Week of Conscience to demand that Stalin be tried for his crimes, and claimed that such radicals were no better than those who had rallied in support of executions during Stalin’s show-trials.200 Sovetskaya Kultura pilloried Memorial activists who believed that the monument should also honour victims of Lenin’s crimes.201 Trud complained about the movement’s ‘isolation’ (read: ‘independence’), and called for it to incorporate such traditional transmission belts of Soviet power as trade unions, women’s and pensioners’ organisations, and the Komsomol.202 Administrative sanctions followed. Pressure was brought to bear on the creative unions that served as Memorial’s official sponsors to postpone its founding congress.203 At the same time, Memorial was denied access to the bank account containing public donations in support of its activity. Its representatives were notified by one of Vadim Medvedev’s aides that a decree adopted by the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers soon after the 19th Party Congress had assigned the task of constructing the monument to the Ministry of Culture, and therefore all funds collected for this purpose belonged to it.204 While promised notices of Memoriars founding conference were withheld by Literaturnaya Gazeta, the rival project was announced by Sovetskaya Rossiya and endorsed by two of Memorial’s founding organisations (the Artists’ and Architects’ Unions) and the Ministry of Culture, the Moscow City Executive Committee, and the USSR Academy of the Arts.205 The Kremlin was clearly seeking to forestall Memorial’s transformation into a social movement engaged in the unsupervised investigation of the atrocities of Soviet history. At the Politburo session on 27 December, Gorbachev expressed alarm that ‘this

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Memorial is mushrooming’ and ‘is trying to get bigger than society.’ To contain this menace, he suggested that ‘somehow we have to de-energise Memorial, to give it a really local character, the Party organisations in the localities should take all this business into their own hands.’ The following day, he urged a resolution on extra-judicial troikas as a way of taking the wind out of Memorial’s sails: ‘if we do this, we will beat off all these Memorials.’206 It was a vain hope. Despite various attempts at obstruction, the authorities failed to prevent the holding of Memorial’s oft-postponed founding conference. The publication of the first issue of Memorial’s newspaper, the Memorial Herald, was halted on orders from the Central Committee, which objected to the inclusion of Sakharov’s election programme and a call for publication of The Gulag Archipelago: testimony to growing official anxiety about the dissident role in the organisation.207 The paper was finally issued after Yurii Afanasev consented to the removal of the statement in support of Solzhenitsyn.208 Permission to hold the conference in a public hall was refused until Sakharov threatened to proceed in private apartments.209 Although the founding conference was dominated by administrative formalities, the growing authority of the dissident interpretation of history was evident during the proceedings. Amongst those elected to posts in Memorial were Vyacheslav Igrunov (the Odessa dissident detained in a psychiatric hospital for symptoms that included distribution of The Gulag Archipelago), Arsenii Roginskii (the editor of the almanac Pamyat) and Aleksandr Daniel (son of Yulii Daniel and Larisa Bogoraz, and a co-editor of Pamyat and the Chronicle of Current Events). Without controversy, the delegates passed a resolution reiterating the call for ‘the restoration of historical justice in relation to Solzhenitsyn’ and demanding ‘the publication without delay of the most important expose and indictment of Stalinism,’ The Gulag Archipelago.210 More contentious was the question of justice for the perpetrators of Stalinism. After the proposal of a resolution advocating trials for those guilty of crimes against humanity, Elena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov intervened in the debate, assailing the idea that ‘Memorial become a prosecutor.’211 Sakharov contended that the precedent of Nuremberg was inapplicable to the Soviet Union, where a huge mass of people, many deceived or under compulsion, participated in Stalin’s crimes: This is an extremely complicated matter. And ethically, we cannot pose this question now.’212 To punish is to perpetuate: I think that Memorial is taking upon itself something completely alien to its function in the moral rebirth of society. Punishment is not at all moral rebirth, it is something else. There is an awareness of profound injustice. There is an awareness that something monstrous occurred in this history of our country. But to begin criminal cases now will not facilitate the rebirth of society, but provoke more bloodshed and injustice alongside deserved punishment.213 When Ales Adamovich and Yurii Karyakin proposed a national referendum on the question of judicial accountability, Bonner appealed to the delegates to ‘calm down a little’ and reflect on the implications of such a step at the dawn of Memorial’s activity, pointing out that ‘we don’t know what kind of a General-Prosecutor we will have in two or three years’ time, and who might be tried as a result of our resolution.’214 The conference voted in favour of a counter-resolution proposed by Bonner and Sakharov:

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With the aim of the moral purification of society, to recognise the mass illegal repressions in the history of Soviet society and to hold a social trial of Stalin and all those guilty of repression, while renouncing the judicial persecution of those remaining alive, in the interests of humanity and mercy.215 Thus Memorial’s vision of the ‘rebirth’ of society was very different from Lenin’s idea of ‘birth’ (‘which transforms a woman into a tormented, mindless from pain, bloody, halfdead, piece of meat’): instead it offered the ‘social trial,’ judgment by publicity, which Grossman and Chukovskaya had demanded in the 1960s. During the ensuing months, the campaign for Solzhenitsyn’s publication gained momentum. On 14 February, the fifteenth anniversary of Solzhenitsyn’s banishment and the Moscow Appeal was commemorated by a public meeting at the Moscow Aviation Institute. The speakers included veteran Solzhenitsyn allies like Elena Chukovskaya and Vadim Borisov (a contributor to From under the Rubble), but the most strident speech was Anatolii Strelyanii’s ultimatum to the authorities, punctuated by the refrain: ‘Print it! …Print it while you are still allowed to decide—to print or not to print Solzhenitsyn.’216 By April 1989, after ‘several deep discussions’ with Gorbachev, Zalygin felt confident enough to announce that ‘We will without doubt publish Gulag in 1989’ and that ‘our promise will be fulfilled.’ Praising Gorbachev as ‘quite receptive,’ Zalygin conceded the force of resistance from writers who were ‘uncomfortable by the fact that they acted against [Solzhenitsyn] in the 1970s.’217 Yet in July 1989, even the notoriously factionalised Secretariat of the Writers’ Union voted unanimously to authorise the publication of excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago in Novyi Mir, almost two decades after it had expelled Solzhenitsyn from its ranks.218 Less than six months after denouncing Solzhenitsyn as a threat to the foundations of Soviet life, the humbled Party ideologist Vadim Medvedev conceded that while he remained opposed to the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, ‘I don’t decide what the journals print…. The party does not deal in interdictions.’219 But the urge to prohibit was still nurtured by Gorbachev’s rival, Egor Ligachev, who exclaimed during a discussion of Solzhenitsyn at a Politburo session in June 1989: ‘How can we allow this sort of thing to be written about Lenin?’ Gorbachev may have been ‘receptive’ to Zalygin’s entreaties, but in the Politburo, his thoughts were focused on the ideological menace: The issue is not about Stalin, but the assertion that he was Lenin’s faithful pupil. That he continued his cause. And [Solzhenitsyn] does it by quoting Lenin’s telephone-tapes and letters…. Anyway, we are faced with The Gulag Archipelago. I don’t think [Solzhenitsyn] is ever going to be our unconditional friend and supporter of perestroika 220 A small band of ‘unconditional friends and supporters’ did not give up their Leninist principles. Ogonyok editor Vitalii Korotich, who had described Solzhenitsyn as a ‘deserter’ in a 1983 propaganda tome, now republished without permission his story ‘Matryona’s House’, which was followed by a long interview with the former KGB chief Semichastnyi, who complained that his agents had exhausted themselves in prophylactic chats with the writer.221 Applauding this feat of glasnost, Benedikt Sarnov declared that

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until now Solzhenitsyn had been beyond criticism ‘and this, naturally, prepares the ground for the emergence of a cult of Solzhenitsyn, which is in no way better than any other cult.’222 The equation of Solzhenitsyn and Stalin inherent in Sarnov’s jibe, echoing Khrushchev’s denunciation of egotistical writers, found little support outside the dwindling ranks of the Leninist faithful and the National Bolshevik fringe.223 Across the rest of the political spectrum, Solzhenitsyn’s publication was greeted with thunderous acclaim. The foremen of perestroika and village-prose nationalists suspended their literary hostilities to hail The Gulag Archipelago as a milestone in Russian history. For Yevtushenko, it was ‘the greatest publishing event’ of the year.224 For Fazil Iskander, it was ‘a great, terrible, essential book…that will forever deliver humanity from utopian dreams and social experiments.’225 In Znamya, Vladimir Potapov called it ‘a force field’ and declared that Solzhenitsyn was not merely an ‘equal-great’ in Russian literature, but an authority whose word ‘perhaps weighs more than everyone else put together.’226 At the opposite ideological pole, Molodaya Gvardiya’s Stanislav Zolotsev concurred, insisting that everything published in recent years ‘cannot be compared to Gulag in the force of its influence on readers’ and proclaiming that the earthy sins of those who secured its publication would be forgiven.227 For Boris Mozhaev, it was ‘the most significant event not only of the past year, but also the past decades’ and the beginning of ‘a new reading not only in literature, but in all our social-moral life.’228 For Igor Zolotusskii, Solzhenitsyn’s publication was the high point of ‘the liberation of our spiritual and social thought from that dream which, according to Goya, gives birth to monsters.’229 Far from engendering a cult as Sarnov feared, the publication of The Gulag Archipelago destroyed one: the cult of Lenin as a great humanist and fount of infallible wisdom. Whilst the outlines of its argument had been taken up by some of the foremen of perestroika, no one dared to offer such an explicit denunciation of the founder of the Soviet state: Grossman’s oftpostponed Everything Flows was only published after the authorisation of The Gulag Archipelago. But while Grossman’s ‘Russophobia’ continued to arouse bitter (and frequently anti-Semitic) polemics, Solzhenitsyn’s exposure of the Leninist roots of Stalinism evoked a landmark consensus in Russia’s fractured public consciousness.230 In the words of Stanislav Zolotsev, ‘for many, reflection upon [The Gulag Archipelago] becomes a farewell to what is probably the main myth of their lives—the myth of the “humane Lenin,” of the “human nature” of the system established after October.’231 The consensus around The Gulag Archipelago was overwhelming. During the June 1989 discussion of Solzhenitsyn in the Politburo, Aleksandr Yakovlev had pointed out that ‘we have to publish it,’ since ‘everyone’s in favour of publication: the Union of Writers, the magazines.’ In a remark that epitomised the predicament of the true Leninists, Gorbachev interrupted: ‘So, are we only the ones left? I’d better read it myself.’232 What made this consensus possible was the fact that Solzhenitsyn identified the cause of the Bolshevik catastrophe neither in particular ethnic groups nor in particular individuals, but in the idea of revolutionary violence. His attack on Lenin was not merely an act of iconoclasm, shattering the image of the ‘humane Lenin,’ but also of exorcism, purging Russian political culture of the demon of revolutionary terror that was vindicated in Lenin’s writings and the early years of the revolution. The farewell to Lenin became a

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renunciation of the European revolutionary tradition stretching back from Lenin through Marx and Sorel to Robespierre. For the Western-oriented foremen of ‘revolutionary perestroika’ this entailed a re-evaluation of the ‘Great’ French Revolution and its historiographical mythologisation, so important to the Bolsheviks, an epic narrative that entangled freedom and violence, human rights and terror. Ironically the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille coincided with the fall of the last bastions of Soviet censorship, which had held back the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s critique of the paradigmatic modern revolution. Aleksandr Yakovlev, speaking in Paris for the anniversary celebrations, rose to the occasion: instead of the expected panegyric to the revolutionary idea, the ideologist of revolutionary perestroika assailed the glorification of violence that had marked the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution.233 Five years later he would be more explicit: ‘All the repressions, camps, hostage-takings, mass deportations, executions without trial, even the execution of children, were not invented by Stalin. He was just the Great Continuer of Lenin’s task. It all began under Lenin.’234 Even more forthright was Yurii Afanasev, a co-chairman of Memorial and a one-time expert on French historiography, who had first demanded the publication of The Gulag Archipelago at a Writers’ Union meeting in early 1988. Now he affirmed its central thesis and echoed Solzhenitsyn’s maxim that a regime that makes violence its method must make the lie its principle: To give a legal foundation to a regime that was brought into being through bloodshed and with the aid of mass murders and crimes against humanity is only possible by resorting to falsification and lies—as has been done until now. It must be admitted that the whole of Soviet history is unfit to serve as a legal basis for the Soviet regime. By admitting this, we would be taking a step towards the creation of a democratic society.235 Afanasev later credited Sakharov, his colleague on the Memorial Council, with ‘opening my eyes’ about Lenin.236 Russophile intellectuals gravitated more slowly towards Solzhenitsyn’s position. Viktor Aksyuchits, editor of the Russian Orthodox samizdat journal Vybor and a staunch Solzhenitsyn supporter, showed the way, exhorting his fellow patriots to shed their revolutionary nostalgia. In a landmark essay he echoed Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the urge to find a scapegoat: ‘Why are our patriots prepared to see enemies of Russia and the Russian people in any one, except in that ideology and that force, which led the country and the people to misfortunes unprecedented in history.’237 According to Aksyuchits, the unwillingness of patriots to renounce the October Revolution, a product of ‘the understandable patriotic urge to accept responsibility for the history of one’s country,’ led to an ‘absurd’ paradox: ‘Love for the fatherland and love for the cannibal of the fatherland—Lenin.’238 Amongst the Russophiles, affection for the ‘cannibal of the fatherland’ was beginning to wane. Shortly after the release of The Gulag Archipelago, the journal Rodina published the essay ‘Reading Lenin’ by Vladimir Soloukhin, who had already established his kinship with Solzhenitsyn by his criticism of Memorial’s unwillingness ‘to peep at the twenties, at 1918 and 1919.’ Now he took that ‘difficult and terrible’ task upon himself, composing a scathing commentary on Volume 36 of Lenin’s collected works, where the

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dictator theorised the use of the bread monopoly (‘a weapon more potent than the guillotine’) to crush resistance to Bolshevik rule.239 It was a devastating response to the efforts of perestroika exegetes to base reform upon Lenin’s democratic rhetoric. In his footnotes Soloukhin ignored their sophisms, but discussed Solzhenitsyn’s account of the massacre of a workers’ crowd in March 1918.240 Although originally issued by the émigré journal Grani, Rodina’s editors insisted that they offered the essay to national debate because of ‘enterprising people, who duplicate the text and trade it on the Arbat and Pushkin Square’: as late as July 1989, a copy was confiscated from Vladimir Osipov by customs officials at Sheremetevo airport as ideological contraband.241 Rodina’s editors also tried to balance the essay with a rebuttal from three official historians, who paid unconscious tribute to Soloukhin by accusing him of putting Lenin on trial.242 For Russophiles as for Westernisers, Lenin’s appearance before the court of historiography was the occasion for a collective disavowal of the revolutionary idea. After Sakharov’s call at the first Congress for a decree on power ‘inasmuch as perestroika is a revolution,’ he was castigated in Moscow News by the Russophile ideologue Mikhail Lobanov: ‘Thus the Nobel Peace Prize winner calls for revolutionary decrees. We know decrees from the times of the October Revolution, and this gives rise to rather sinister parallels.’243 The accusation was unjust: Sakharov was a proven reformer, and reiterated in his posthumously published memoirs that: I am a confirmed evolutionist and reformist, and an opponent, as a matter of principle, of violent, revolutionary changes of the social order, which always lead to the destruction of the economic, social, and legal systems, as well to mass suffering, lawlessness and horrors.244 What is more important than Lobanov’s charge is his use of anti-revolutionary rhetoric: both sides in a dangerously polarised society could agree on the necessity of evolutionary change. The publication of The Gulag Archipelago became ‘the culmination of the glasnost of the 1980s.’245 It marked the triumph of the dissident interpretation of Soviet history and the point of no return for the reform process, where de-Stalinisation became deBolshevisation. By late 1989, even Gorbachev conceded publicly that the vitality of the socialist idea itself was under challenge.246 When Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship was restored in August 1990, the treason indictment remained in force. So did Solzhenitsyn’s indictment of the Soviet regime. As that indictment gained credibility, the authorities struck out at Solzhenitsyn’s most prominent institutional advocates, fomenting clashes between Memorial and a loyalist victims’ organisation, restricting Novyi Mir’s circulation because of an alleged paper shortage, and publicly denouncing renegade foremen of perestroika like Yurii Afanasev. Yet Soviet propagandists never responded to the argument of The Gulag Archipelago. Pravda could offer no more effective rebuttal than a Roy Medvedev review dating from the mid-1970s, testimony to the growing authority of dissident historiography and to the bankruptcy of the regime’s ideologues.247 As Solzhenitsyn had prophesied, the country in which his works were published was a different country to that which had charged him with treason and banished him. From the tribunal of the first Congress of People’s Deputies, soon after Zalygin announced the impending publication of The Gulag Archipelago, Yurii Karyakin called for

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Solzhenitsyn’s return and for Lenin’s burial.248 (Two decades had passed since Karyakin’s expulsion from the party for advising Solzhenitsyn’s adversaries to reflect ‘upon what Solzhenitsyn will be in our culture in 10–20 years and where you will be.’)249 After the first two instalments of The Gulag Archipelago had appeared in Novyi Mir, the KGB headquarters in Dzerzhinskii Square was surrounded by a ‘living chain’ of candlebearing Memorial activists commemorating the Day of Political Prisoners in the USSR, 30 October; one placard called for the Lubyanka to be turned into a museum for the victims of terror.250 A year later the memory of the victims of the Soviet regime was marked by the placing in Dzerzhinskii Square of a boulder from the Solovki islands, where according to Solzhenitsyn ‘the archipelago rose from the sea.’251 The final convulsions of the Soviet regime confirmed the moderating role of the dissident critique of revolutionary violence. When the August 1991 coup unravelled, the victors exacted vengeance not upon the perpetrators, but upon the most notorious monument to Bolshevik terror, Moscow’s Dzerzhinskii statue. Amongst those who addressed the crowd was Sergei Kovalyov, whose 1975 arrest had been preceded by his letter demanding that the KGB return his copy of The Gulag Archipelago. Now he asserted the primacy of law over revolutionary morality: I spent seven years in camp and five in exile. Did not sharp emotions accumulate in me towards these two criminal organizations—the CPSU and the KGB? But an independent court must deal with the CPSU and with the KGB—a parliamentary commission and then also a court. It is not a question of monuments, but that the KGB must cease to exist.252 Such sentiments were expressed at the highest levels of the Russian leadership. At the public funerals for the three young men killed at the barricades, Yeltsin apologised to the nation for failing to prevent their deaths. This penitent tone persisted well into 1992. When President Yeltsin phoned Solzhenitsyn during a visit to the USA in June 1992, his press-secretary declared that ‘[i]n the words of the president, one could sense repentance—the repentance of power before a great writer.’253 But one could also sense a politician’s awareness of Solzhenitsyn’s value in the political struggle against the ‘irreconcilable opposition,’ the alliance of communist and nationalist forces in the Supreme Soviet. One month after Yeltsin’s chat with the author of The Gulag Archipelago, the presidential administration opened its case against the CPSU in the Constitutional Court. The trial was, according to Pravda’s Boris Slavin, a cynical attempt ‘to condemn the past in order to obscure the present.’254 In fact, it marked a turning point in Russia’s readiness to confront the horrors of the Bolshevik record. The testimony of pro-Yeltsin dissidents like Sergei Kovalyov and Vladimir Bukovskii was matched by Roy Medvedev and Petr Abovin-Egides, dissident proponents of socialism with a human face. But the real losers in the trial were not the communists, but the foremen of perestroika. When Aleksandr Yakovlev, echoing Solzhenitsyn, traced Russia’s misfortunes to the ‘ideology of intolerance,’ Marxism-Leninism, the communist lawyers responded with a series of questions implying that he was a CIA agent.255 The ambiguous verdict in the CPSU trial contributed to the growing backlash against the democrats’ preoccupation with Soviet-era repression. As the political crisis intensified in the summer of 1993, Sovetskaya Rossiya opened its pages to Aleksandr

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Zinoviev, who acknowledged the fact of repressions, but insisted that ‘Solzhenitsyn’s conception of the Stalinist period was false.’256 Another émigré, the ‘National Bolshevik’ Eduard Limonov, denounced the myth of the gulag as ‘an unjust myth that deserves to be smashed like an idol.’257 In late September, as the standoff between president and parliament approached its bloody climax, as central Moscow was transformed into a revolutionary spectacle of barricades and red banners, few noticed that Solzhenitsyn had chosen the occasion to denounce the heritage of revolutionary violence at the bicentennial of the Vendée uprising against the French republic.258 In the shadow of the burned-out parliament, Yeltsin still deployed the evidence of communist crimes to bolster his own standing at crucial political junctures. Less than a month after the debacle of the December 1993 elections, the presidential administration announced the rehabilitation of participants in the 1921 Kronstadt revolt. According to a presidential spokesman, the gesture was intended to encourage communists ‘to look at the bloody trail you left and to draw a lesson.’259 But it was vigorously contested by the resurgent opposition. By 1998, it was possible for a majority in the State Duma to demand the restoration of Dzerzhinskii’s statue in Lubyanka Square as ‘an important step in the maintenance of the historical and cultural heritage of Russia.’260 But if the ghosts of Bolshevik terror still haunted post-Soviet Russia, if Solzhenitsyn’s mythic stature rapidly diminished to mortal dimensions, the ascendancy of the dissident interpretation during the debates of 1988–90 was nonetheless of immense importance. It marked a repudiation of revolutionary violence at a crucial juncture, the period of reform that de Tocqueville diagnosed as the moment of maximum danger. That danger was magnified by the legacy of the Stalinist terror, which militated against a democratic transition. The achievement of the dissidents was to advance an explanation that was both commensurate to the tragedy and opposed to the idea of retribution. The result was an incitement to moderation and reconciliation. As Gleb Pavlovskii reflected on the eve of the August 1991 coup: ‘Dissidents did not take up their cudgels against former revolutionaries or their organisations like the CPSU—they demanded an end to the state of revolution in the USSR.’261

2 ‘Honest and total glasnost’ Glasnost is not simply Gorbachev’s present invention, glasnost is the thing that his predecessors feared most of all, because behind the closed doors of the State arbitrary power can rule with impunity. (Julia Voznesenskaya, 1989)1

The Russian word ‘glasnost’ has no precise English translation, a fact which impressed Vladimir Bukovskii on his arrival in the West in 1976: For us there, in the Soviet Union, glasnost was a weapon, a means of struggle with lawlessness and tyranny. Indeed, a means of defence like the safety belt of a mountain climber. Yet the word does not exist in any European language, which substitute the word ‘publicity,’ distorting the sense of the concept. In the Russian word glasnost there is something cold and exact, like a surgical instrument, something very serious and solemn, from which immediately you imagine a duma clerk, bearded and in long robes, declaiming from the Spassky gate a government document. In essence, something like an oath to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.2 The two possible translations of glasnost—‘publicity’ and ‘openness’—were essential aspects of dissident activity during the 1970s and early 1980s. By exposing and publicising political trials and the penal system, dissidents made the regime pay a price for repression. By acting openly, dissidents set a precedent for the development of democratic politics and repudiated the idea of underground revolutionary struggle. Both of these activities were understood by dissidents as aspects of glasnost. In the mid-1980s, when the foremen of perestroika began to dispense rhetoric about the need for glasnost, they were employing a term that had been shaped by two decades of dissident struggle. Yet the dissident role in theorising and practising glasnost has been virtually ignored by Sovietology. Most accounts of perestroika traced the origins of the term to the 1860s, and then leapt forward to Gorbachev’s speech at a December 1984 ideology conference. There were occasional and perfunctory references to dissident demands for glasnost, but their practice of glasnost has rarely attracted scholarly notice. In his 1989 study of Gorbachev’s glasnost, Walter Laqueur mentioned, almost as an aside, that dissidents had used the term, but he proceeded to argue that the fate of Sakharov was less important for Russians than Brezhnev’s housing policy during the 1970s.3 This marginalisation of unofficial meanings of glasnost within Soviet society helped to reinforce Laqueur’s conclusion that ‘there is reason to believe that the glasnost era has now reached its

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climax,’ and that ‘more dramatic and far-reaching progress would be a near miracle, for cultural revolutions involve not just the replacement of one political elite by another, but lasting and radical change in the mentality of the nation.’ For Laqueur, such a revolution seemed ‘not to be at this time part of the historical agenda.’4 Even after the events of 1989–91 demonstrated that the historical agenda had considerably exceeded the expectations of Sovietology, few scholars were prepared to investigate the dissident contribution to the ‘near miracle’ of the emergence of Russian democracy. Typical was Archie Brown’s study of Gorbachev, which mentioned that ‘dissidents, including the most famous of them—Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn—had in the past called for glasnost,’ but then devoted considerably more detail to Brezhnev’s spurious call for the ‘widening of glasnost in the work of the party’ during a 1974 election speech.5 This chapter is about the struggle to set the historical agenda during perestroika. That struggle, and its outcome, makes no sense if we ignore the intellectual context in which Gorbachev made his first calls for glasnost, almost two decades since the first dissident demonstration for glasnost in Pushkin Square. Amongst Russian publicists, the connection between the dissidents and Gorbachev’s glasnost provoked fierce controversy By the late perestroika period, it was plausible for some dissident émigrés to treat Gorbachev almost as a plagiarist of their ideas. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, this thesis was amplified by conservative polemicists, who vilified the architects of perestroika as bearers of dissident ideas and traitors to the party. Such émigré triumphalism and conservative stab-in-the-back myths obscure the complexity of the relationship between dissident glasnost and the course of perestroika. Gorbachev was no Trojan horse: he did not ‘borrow’ glasnost from the dissidents. But he did enlist glasnost, a term drawn from Lenin’s works, but already sharpened by decades of dissident protest, in the regime’s attempt to repulse the West’s ‘psychological war.’ It proved a double-edged sword. Glasnost was supposed to disarm anti-Soviet broadcasters and critics, and to lay the groundwork for an ideological offensive. In the process of this renewal, Gorbachev conceded space to intellectuals who were susceptible to the pressure of the dissident example. Long before Gorbachev, these ‘foremen of perestroika’ experienced the anxiety of influence. On the one hand, they feared being tarred by conservatives as bearers of dissident ideas. On the other, they feared dissident reproaches about their opportunism and their failure to speak out during the era of stagnation. These pressures produced a surreptitious rapprochement of radical reformists and the dissident tradition, and an ultimate convergence that was symbolised by Sakharov’s role, first as the moral leader of Memorial and the Interregional Group, and then as the icon of the democratic movement. During this convergence, the reformers embraced the dissident notion of glasnost as a synonym for freedom of expression, and repudiated Gorbachev’s Leninist glasnost, which was revealed as fragile and reversible by his attacks on the media as perestroika entered its terminal crisis. Antecedents of this complex and contradictory process can be found in the debate over glasnost during the struggle for reform in late tsarist Russia. For nineteenth-century liberals, glasnost had signified a milestone on the road to constitutional democracy. For conservatives, it was a device for reconciling authoritarianism and a degree of cultural freedom. This ambiguity, founded upon hopes for evolutionary change, infuriated radicals like Chernyshevskii, who denounced glasnost as ‘a bureaucratic expression, a

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substitute for freedom of speech.’ But it was much more than a bureaucratic expression for Herzen’s Kolokol, which made incessant demands for glasnost. As Venturi has observed, ‘Herzen, in common with the most active members of Russian society at the time, demanded “publicity” more than “freedom.”6 In a rhetorical address to the Tsar, one article in Kolokol warned that ‘he who is against glasnost, he who is against the liberation of the peasantry, is an enemy of the people, he is your enemy.’7 Another contributor lamented that ‘we want glasnost, but only as a gift of the government.’8 The journal also exposed attacks on glasnost, such as an official document stating that ‘the government sees no use in glasnost, for it considers it humiliating for itself to pay attention to all complaints and notices.’9 In this way, Kolokol did not merely talk about glasnost. Like the dissidents a century later, it was an instrument of glasnost, undermining censorship by offering a forum for debate, and undermining repression by publishing details of trials and extra-judicial persecution. This legacy was significant, because it gave a subversive, anti-establishment undertone to the term. For all the efforts of the Bolsheviks and the architects of Gorbachev’s initial reforms, glasnost would never become merely ‘a bureaucratic expression, a substitute for freedom of speech.’

The Leninist sources of Gorbachev’s glasnost The sources of Gorbachev’s glasnost were embedded in Soviet ideology. After the collapse of the USSR, it would have been fashionable for Gorbachev to consolidate his democratic credentials by boasting about some oblique connection to the dissidents. Indeed, shortly after the outbreak of the war in Chechnya, Gorbachev sent a telegram to the former dissident Sergei Kovalyov, expressing admiration for his courage under Russian bombardment in Grozny.10 But in his own memoirs published within a year, Gorbachev emphasised the profundity of his interest in Lenin and acknowledged that ‘in my own time as General Secretary I was to draw on ideas generated by reading Lenin’s works.’11 Glasnost was one of those ideas. The Bolshevik regime had exploited glasnost as a slogan, even as it was destroying the democratic liberties and the freedom of expression brought by the February Revolution. This contradiction shaped the peculiarly propagandist conception of glasnost preserved in the Leninist heritage. On the one hand, such propaganda exercises as the publication of the tsarist regime’s secret treaties, and the announcement of the ‘abolition of commercial secrecy,’ were presented as exercises in glasnost. On the other, propaganda about glasnost, like propaganda about democracy and legality, became a smokescreen for its abolition. Lenin made a famous call for glasnost in 1918, after a series of decrees subjecting the Russian press to rigid censorship.12 It was fitting that the ‘World’s Most Democratic Constitution,’ proclaimed on the eve of the terror of 1937, should codify the right to glasnost of the judicial process. Few political defendants of the Stalin era enjoyed judicial glasnost, except for the victims of the carefully rehearsed Moscow show-trials, who included the author of the constitution’s provisions on civil liberties, Nikolai Bukharin. But there was more to Bolshevik glasnost than hypocrisy. Lenin also envisaged glasnost as a punitive instrument of mass mobilisation and discipline. He maintained that the absence of glasnost in capitalist enterprises was a source of inefficiency that would be

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rooted out by the use of glasnost under socialism. In the draft for his article on ‘The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,’ Lenin argued that the press would play a crucial role in ‘increasing the self-discipline of the working people and for passing from the old, good-for-nothing methods of work, or methods of shirking work, in capitalist society,’ by exposing ‘shortcomings in the economic life of each labour commune, ruthlessly branding these shortcomings, frankly laying bare all the ulcers of our economic life, and thus appealing to the public opinion of the working people for the curing of these ulcers.’13 The published version of this article was slightly less menacing, admitting the possibility that success stories might also be subject to glasnost. Thus the regime should introduce ‘accounting and publicity in the process of the production of grain, clothes and other things, of transforming dry, dead, bureaucratic accounts into living examples, some repulsive, others attractive.’ On the one hand, the press would ‘give publicity to the successes achieved by the model communes…[and] the causes of these successes.’ On the other, it ‘must put on the ‘black list’ those communes that persist in the ‘traditions of capitalism,’ i.e. anarchy, laziness, disorder and profiteering.’14 It was this Bolshevik heritage of glasnost as an instrument of propaganda and mobilisation that Gorbachev, Andropov’s protégé in the Chernenko Politburo, invoked in his famous speech to an ideological conference on Human Rights Day, 10 December 1984. Many accounts of perestroika have stressed the anti-totalitarian implications of Gorbachev’s vindication of glasnost as ‘an integral aspect of socialist democracy’ and his assertion that ‘extensive, timely and candid information is an indication of trust in people and of respect for their intelligence, feelings and ability to comprehend various events on their own.’ Less attention has been devoted to the militancy of his speech, which was concerned above all with the ‘ideological struggle’ and the needs of propagandists in coping with the West’s ‘psycho logical warfare.’ Certainly for Gorbachev in 1984, glasnost had no connection with freedom of expression: he warned that in the contest with imperialism, ‘political vigilance and implacability toward views that are alien to us, ideological work that is creative and aggressive, businesslike efficiency, boldness and persistence are needed as never before.’ More than implacable, Gorbachev called for an offensive, arguing that ‘the aggressive nature of our ideology consists not only in the debunking of bourgeois ideological myths and stereotypes,’ but ‘above all in the affirmation of our ideals, socialist norms of public life, true freedom and democracy and propaganda of the historic achievements of real socialism.’15 In this endeavour, glasnost had a special role to play, by exposing abuses and thus disarming ideological adversaries. This agenda was made explicit in Gorbachev’s speech to the 27th Party Congress in February 1986, when he identified ‘openness of information, and the bold and creative nature of our propaganda’ as principal weapons against ‘the ingenuity and unscrupulousness of bourgeois propangandists.’16 Echoing Lenin’s call for a glasnost ‘black list,’ Gorbachev warned menacingly that: those who have grown accustomed to doing slipshod work, who engage in hoodwinking, will indeed be uncomfortable in the light of public openness, when everything done in the state and in society is done under the people’s supervision and in full sight of the people.17

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Not for nothing did the Moscow Party boss, Boris Yeltsin, express satisfaction ‘that the atmosphere at our Congress is again marked by that Bolshevik spirit, that Leninist optimism, that call to struggle against the old and the outmoded in the name of the new.’18 The gulf between Bolshevik glasnost and the idea of freedom of expression was exemplified by Yeltsin’s own speech, in which he put the Department of Culture on the glasnost ‘black list,’ blaming its ‘non-intervention’ on the weakening of Party influence on the development of literature.19

The demand for glasnost A different notion of glasnost had been developing in the dissident movement, which was born with a demand for glasnost. The famous 1965 leaflet calling for a demonstration against the Daniel and Sinyavskii trial, declared: There are reasons to fear violation of glasnost of the legal process. It is commonly known that violation of the law on glasnost [Art. 3 of the Constitution of the USSR and art. 18 of the Criminal Procedure code of the RSFSR] constitutes an illegal action. It is inconceivable that the work of a writer should constitute a crime against the state…. Soviet citizens have a means for resisting capricious actions of the authorities. That method is the Glasnost meetings where participants chant only one slogan: ‘WE DEMAND GLASNOST FOR THE TRIAL OF [followed by the last name of the accused]!’ or where the participants display a corresponding banner.20 This appeal, the founding document of the rights-defence tendency of the dissident movement, was drafted by Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin. A prominent mathematician and a survivor of Stalin’s camps and Khrushchev’s psychiatric prisons, Volpin was the original theorist of dissident glasnost. According to the dissident historian, Lyudmila Alekseeva, ‘the word [glasnost] had no political meaning, and until Alek Esenin-Volpin pulled it out of ordinary usage, it generated no heat.’21 Volpin’s own commitment to glasnost can be traced to his attendance at the 1962 trial of three youths involved in the Mayakovskii Square poetry readings. At the time of sentencing, Volpin was barred from the courtroom because of the secret nature of the trial, which involved allegations about a plot to assassinate Khrushchev. Volpin protested that article 18 of the Code of Criminal Procedure required that sentences be handed down publicly, even in cases that had been tried in camera, and the judge conceded the point.22 In his memoirs, Bukovskii recalled of the sentence: Little did we realise that this absurd incident, with the comical Alik Volpin brandishing his criminal code like a magic wand to melt the doors of the court, was the beginning of our civil rights movement and the movement for human rights in the USSR.23

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But the turning point for Volpin was his slander case against an Ogonyok journalist in April 1964, when the prosecutor successfully applied for a closed courtroom, again because secret materials might be revealed. Volpin later recalled: This forced me off the beaten track, because I didn’t expect it. But my legal consciousness underwent a very important shift, since previously I had underestimated the role of glasnost in court proceedings. I had understood its importance, but it was one point out of several, yet here everything depended on it. This court could not threaten me with anything, but they won everything.24 Volpin’s advocacy of glasnost was closely bound up with the legalism that was so central to the notion of the pravozashchitnik, a defender both of inalienable rights and the letter of the law, which guaranteed glasnost during court proceedings. Demands for ‘glasnost of the judicial process’ were fuelled by the closed trials of the late 1960s, where courts were packed with a ‘selected public,’ whilst the defendant’s friends and relatives waited outside behind police cordons. In an open letter to the Chairman of the Presidium, Galina Gabai, the wife of a defendant in the 1967 trial of Pushkin Square demonstrators, derided the pretence of the authorities about ‘open courts’: The trial was officially described as a ‘hearing in open court’ and the ‘public’—consisting of these young men—was there…. To the best of my knowledge, a hearing in open court is one which any citizen of our country—not to mention relations and friends—has the right to attend. And deliberate restriction of this right is intolerable.25 Indignation about such restrictions on glasnost reverberated in the series of petitions against the impending ‘Trial of the Four,’ (Ginzburg, Galanskov, Dobrovolskii, and Lashkova). In November 1967, 115 Soviet intellectuals, including Volpin, Bogoraz, and Litvinov, signed an appeal stating their desire to attend the trial and criticising the practice of admitting people according to special lists and passes: ‘In this way, formally open trials have been turned into closed ones, and the principle of publicity of legal proceedings, guaranteed by the Constitution, has in fact been violated.’26 One week later, many of the same signatures appeared beneath a declaration that demanded glasnost for the trial and explained its paramount importance: The crucial significance of the publicity of judicial proceedings lies in the fact that publicity is the basis of all other judicial guarantees, and for that reason we cannot tolerate even isolated violations of the principle of publicity If exceptional circumstances justifying a closed examination of certain matters should crop up in the impending trial, respect for the principle of publicity requires that all the other matters be examined in open sessions and that the entire trial be organised in such a way that the public should be able to attend it.27

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The authorities ignored these appeals and a protest signed by General Petr Grigorenko and eleven others denouncing ‘the illegal transformation of a judicially open trial into one that is closed.’28 Undeterred by official hostility, the dissidents addressed others about the lack of glasnost at the trial. After the verdict had been handed down, Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz released their famous appeal to international public opinion to protest against the trial in which ‘the courtroom is filled with specially selected people, officials of the KGB and volunteer militia, who give the appearance of an open public trial,’ and warned that the trial was ‘no better than the celebrated trials of the 1930s.’29 This theme was taken up by General Petr Grigorenko, who warned in an Open Letter to the Budapest Conference of Communist Parties that ‘the possibility of a renewal of Stalinism exists as long as there is no ‘glasnost of the judicial process, which was not present in Stalinist times.’30 Another appeal to the same conference from twelve dissidents, including Bogoraz, Litvinov, and Grigorenko, denounced the fact that political ‘trials occurred with gross violations of legality, the most important of which is the absence of glasnost.’31 The trial later that year of the dissidents who protested in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia was marked by Ilya Gabai’s famous samizdat article ‘Before the Closed Doors of the Open Court’: a phrase that captured the hypocrisy of the Soviet judicial process, and that would become a leitmotif in accounts of subsequent dissident vigils outside political trials.32 Whilst these early protests had focused upon closed trials, glasnost had far wider implications for the Soviet regime. On the eve of the December 1966 Constitution Day demonstration, Volpin had advised Yurii Dobrovolskii to carry a banner with the slogan, ‘Glasnost is needed not only in courts,’ implying that it was also needed to address cases of extra-judicial repression, such as psychiatric abuse.33 Volpin elaborated this thesis in a lengthy essay titled ‘Glasnost of Court Proceedings,’ which was published in the autumn 1970 issue of Valerii Chalidze’s samizdat journal Social Problems. Here he reiterated his conviction that glasnost in the judicial process was ‘a guarantee of legality,’ and that a defendant who insisted upon his innocence had ‘in glasnost the first guarantee of the success of his struggle.’34 But Volpin also emphasised the importance of glasnost during the preliminary investigation, in defamation cases, and in addressing the problem of bureaucracy.35 A government could not diminish its authority more effectively, he argued, than by unfounded limitations upon glasnost.36 For a small circle of rightsdefenders, Volpin’s theories played an important role in the crystallisation of legal consciousness, but his wider impact was limited by his scholarly tone. Far more resonant was Solzhenitsyn’s emotive call for glasnost in his 1969 open letter to the Secretariat of the RSFSR Writers’ Union, which had just expelled him in absentia and was preparing to punish his supporters. Recalling the unfulfilled promises of the Bolshevik revolution, Solzhenitsyn scorned the claims of official secrecy: Were we not promised flfty years ago that never again would there be any secret diplomacy, secret negotiations, secret and incomprehensible appointments and transfers, that the masses would be informed of all matters and discuss them openly? ‘Enemies will overhear’—that is your excuse…. As if there were no enemies when immediate glasnost was promised….

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Glasnost, honest and total glasnost—this is the first condition of the health of any society, including our own. And he who does not want glasnost for our society, he is indifferent to the nation, he thinks only of his own profit. He who does not wish this glasnost for his nation does not want to purify it of its diseases, but only to drive them inward, there to fester.37 The demand for ‘honest and total glasnost,’ rather than selective disclosure, was the enduring distinction between dissident glasnost and the official glasnost that Lenin formulated and Gorbachev reiterated during 1984–7. The other giant of the dissident movement, Andrei Sakharov, made glasnost a recurrent theme in his public statements. In his early works, he argued that glasnost was a precondition for technological progress. This idea was implicit in his Reflections, which aimed to encourage ‘open, frank discussion under conditions of glasnost.’38 It was elaborated in his 1970 Memorandum to the Soviet leadership, co-authored with Valentin Turchin and Roy Medvedev, which called for ‘democratisation at the initiative of, and under the control of, the highest authorities.’ It argued that there was a close link between ‘the problems of technical-economic progress and scientific methods of management, on the one hand, and questions of information, glasnost and competition on the other.’39 Restrictions on freedom of information made it difficult to control the leadership, and also meant that ‘our leaders receive incomplete and edited information and are prevented from using their power effectively.’40 Sakharov repeated this demand in his March 1971 Memorandum to Brezhnev, where he argued that ‘glasnost facilitates the social controls safeguarding legality, justice, and the rightness of all decisions taken, contributes to the effectiveness of the entire system, makes for a scientific and democratic system of government, and promotes progress, prosperity and national security.’41 After a year without a response, Sakharov released the Memorandum with a postscript in which he reaffirmed that ‘as before, I consider the democratisation of society, the development of openness in public affairs, the rule of law, and the safeguarding of basic human rights to be of decisive importance.’42 Sakharov’s evolution from socialist to liberal reformist was echoed by Yurii Orlov’s 13-point letter to Brezhnev, written in September 1973 as a response to the slander campaign against Sakharov. Pointing to the crisis of Soviet science and society, Orlov suggested that a first step for reform would be ‘the abolition of censorship of the press, free exchange of information [and] glasnost.’43 This proposal was extended in the reform programme set out in Sakharov’s 1975 essay, ‘My Country and the World.’ Article Six of that programme was ‘legislative guarantee of glasnost and public control over the taking of important decisions.’44 The unofficial Committee on Human Rights, established in November 1970 by Sakharov, Valerii Chalidze, and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, made glasnost a central tenet of its theoretical and practical work. In his first major report to the Committee, Chalidze emphasised the connection between human rights and glasnost: 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

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this becomes customary can we hope for increasingly effective protection of human rights.45 In the absence of legally enforceable glasnost, Chalidze saw dissident activism as ‘an important element in the system for the protection of human rights in individual cases.’ According to Chalidze, ‘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.’ As a result, ‘society has found out about the most important court proceedings and about extralegal violations of human rights.’46 The extension of glasnost to new spheres of public life was a central theme in Sakharov’s outspoken statements during 1973, which ignited a massive vilification campaign in the Soviet press. In a July 1973 interview with a Swedish journalist, Sakharov contended that emigration restrictions were a tragedy not merely for refuseniks, but also for those who wished to remain, because ‘a country from which it is not possible to leave freely, to which it is not possible to return freely, is a country that is defective, a closed volume where all processes develop differently from those of an open system.’47 He proceeded to emphasise that ‘we need first of all greater openness in the work of the administrative apparatus.’48 The interview provoked not only a denunciatory article in Literaturnaya Gazeta, but a summons to the office of Deputy General Prosecutor, Malyarov, who threatened Sakharov with criminal sanctions because foreign anti-Soviet organisations like NTS had published his statements. Sakharov responded that he would have been glad for the interview to have been published in Literaturnaya Gazeta, because ‘I consider openness of publication of great importance.’49 When the fate of the prisoner of conscience Andrei Amalrik was raised, Malyarov reproached Sakharov, ‘Who gave you the right to doubt our system of justice?’ Sakharov responded with a defence of glasnost: ‘When proceedings are not public, when political trials are consistently held under conditions allowing for violations, there are grounds for doubting the fairness of the court.’50 Defying Malyarov’s warning, Sakharov called a press conference where he made the case for glasnost on the international stage, because closed societies were a threat to their neighbours. Détente on Soviet terms was dangerous, he argued, because ‘it would mean cultivation and encouragement of a closed country, where everything that happens may be shielded from outside eyes, a country wearing a mask that hides its true face.’ He added that the CSCE negotiations ‘seemed to suggest an awareness that rapprochement must be associated with simultaneous liquidation of [Soviet] isolation.’51 Three weeks later, he reiterated this argument in his open letter to the US Congress in support of the Jackson Amendment: For decades the Soviet Union has been developing under conditions of intolerable isolation, bringing with it the ugliest consequences. Even a partial preservation of those conditions would be highly perilous for all mankind, for international confidence and détente.52 The importance of glasnost in international affairs was emphasised in Sakharov’s 1975 Nobel Lecture, where he argued that:

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détente can only be assured if from the very outset it goes hand in hand with continuous openness on the part of all countries, an aroused sense of public opinion, free exchange of information, and absolute respect in all countries for civil and political rights.53 The same idea was taken up in a letter to the Washington Post in 1978 by two exiles, Andrei Amalrik and Valentin Turchin, who had both played a formative role in the establishment of the Moscow Helsinki Group: The best guarantee for American security would be the evolution of the Soviet Union from a closed society in which the question of a nuclear strike is decided by 5 or 10 individuals, into an open society in which government is controlled by the people.54 Ironically, the intervention of dissidents onto the international stage during the 1970s diminished the clamour for glasnost. The Helsinki groups formulated their documents and demands in terms of the international human rights agreements that were enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act, not in terms of the provisions of the Soviet Constitution or Criminal Code. But Sakharov continued to agitate for glasnost, and his resentment of the closed society was probably exacerbated by his exile to the closed city of Gorky. Shortly after his banishment, Sakharov insisted that ‘my position remains unchanged. I am for a pluralistic, open society, both democratic and just.’55 In his 1983 essay on the dangers of thermonuclear war, he concluded with a list of preconditions for genuine international security that included ‘openness and pluralisation in the socialist countries.’56 In November 1984, less than a month before Gorbachev’s first landmark speech on glasnost, Sakharov protested the refusal of the authorities to permit him to attend his wife’s trial as ‘a violation of the principle of glasnost.’57

The weapon of glasnost Dissidents did not only petition for glasnost from the authorities. They also used glasnost as a weapon against repression. References to its potency abound in the history of the dissident movement. General Grigorenko wrote of a 1974 trial that the ‘investigative organs didn’t count on the light of glasnost and didn’t give enough time to purify the case of dangerous witnesses.’58 Two years later, a Radio Liberty interviewer asked Andrei Amalrik, just arrived in the West, about the suspected murder of the writer Konstantin Bogatyrev: ‘And hasn’t that powerful sword that has been used before in the struggle— the sword of glasnost—turned out to be dull in this case?’59 The most consistent advocate of the sword of glasnost was Andrei Sakharov. In the beginning, it was a means of defending himself against intimidation. ‘The world will save me,’ he told a Western journalist at the height of the September 1973 vilification campaign, adding that ‘the whole world is watching me.’60 When a prominent academician tried to persuade Western scholars that public statements in defence of dissidents were counterproductive, Sakharov released an open letter in which he avowed that ‘I am convinced that my position, my rights and the safety of members of my

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family…can be effectively protected only by open and decisive interventions.’61 In a commentary to the letter, the Chronicle noted that ‘Sakharov again emphasises the necessity of publicity in all matters that are of social importance.’62 As he became the most prominent spokesman for the human rights movement, Sakharov theorised its use of glasnost as an aspect of its repudiation of the heritage of revolutionary violence. Setting out the movement’s priorities in his message to the 1979 Sakharov Hearings, he emphasised that ‘only non-violent means should be used as a matter of principle, with publicity being the main weapon in the defence of human rights.63 In 1980, during his first year of exile, Sakharov bolstered his claim that the human rights movement did not pursue ‘political objectives’ by declaring: ‘Glasnost is our only weapon.’64 The potential of that weapon was massively enhanced by the spread of communications technology, which undermined the Soviet dictatorship’s total monopoly over the mass media. During Stalin’s terror, this control enabled it to mobilise its subjects and to manipulate their perceptions far more effectively than ever before. During the ensuing decades, the balance shifted in favour of society. The ownership of shortwave radios in the Soviet Union soared from 3.5 million in 1950 to more than 60 million in the 1970s, creating what Solzhenitsyn called ‘the mighty non-military force which resides in the airwaves and whose kindling power in the midst of communist darkness cannot even be grasped by the Western imagination.’65 Certainly it was grasped by the Kremlin, which devoted immense resources to jamming Western broadcasts, and to diplomatic campaigns against the West’s ‘information imperialism.’ That ‘kindling power’ existed in a vacuum until the dissident movement supplied it with the oxygen of information. Without abundant testimony from people living in the society to which Western radio stations were addressed, the airwaves would remain a source of distrusted foreign propaganda: an assault from outside rather than a debate within society. The gathering of this testimony began with the appearance of a series of exposes of major political trials in samizdat during the 1960s. The prototype was Frida Vigdorova’s record of the Brodskii case, in early 1964.66 It was followed by Aleksandr Ginzburg’s White Book on the Daniel and Sinyavskii trial (1966), Pavel Litvinov’s The Demonstration in Pushkin Square (1967) and The Trial of the Four (1968), and Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s Noon (1968). Perhaps the most explosive work of this early samizdat was Anatolii Marchenko’s My Testimony, a record of camp life that demolished Khrushchev’s claim that there were no more political prisoners in the Soviet Union. In his preface, Marchenko made it clear that glasnost was a fundamental motive behind his work: The main aim of these notes is to tell the truth about today’s camps and prisons for political prisoners to those who wish to hear it. I am convinced that publicity is the sole effective means of combatting the evil and lawlessness that is rampant in my country today.67 These early records of repression represented glasnost in its purest form: no editorialising, no political opinions, only information and documents, which spoke for themselves. This style became the hallmark of the permanent journal of the human rights movement, The Chronicle of Current Events, created in April 1968. For fifteen years, the

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Chronicle’s expanding network of correspondents would provide information about repression from the Ukraine to the Baltic and the Caucasus. The spectrum of its sources ranged from Jewish activists and Marxists to Russian nationalists and Pentecostalist Christians, all united by the common experience of repression. As this information network proliferated, the ‘kindling power’ of the airwaves became a tangible factor in the gulag. No sooner had a prisoner’s rights been violated, than the details were being passed to Western journalists in Moscow and then broadcast back to the USSR. Camp administrators, omnipotent tyrants of barbed-wire fiefdoms under Stalin, now had to worry that details of violence or torture would leak out within weeks, and that their own names would be broadcast across the world. Such exposure might mean official disfavour in Moscow, and the dispatch of an investigative commission. Vladimir Bukovskii, involved in a series of hunger strikes in camps and prisons during 1972–6, described the calculations that confined his gaolers: If you overdid it a fraction, or put a bit too much pressure on, you had a hunger strike on your hands. And you had London, Munich, Washington [i.e. the BBC, Radio Liberty, and the Voice of America] kicking up a stink again, which meant a Moscow commission on your backs within a few weeks. For that reason, the prison guards and officers also listened to the Western radio stations, twiddling the knobs of their receivers at night, asking one another the next morning: did you hear anything? And if they had, a commission was bound to come.68 Even psychiatric prisons were pervious to Western radio broadcasts. General Grigorenko recalled that the chief of his ward at the Chernyakovsk special psychiatric hospital responded to all his protests against beatings and mistreatment of patients: Evidently he feared glasnost. He was afraid that I would tell my wife stories she would in turn pass on. All the patients remarked that the atmosphere in the ward had changed since my arrival.69 Glasnost remained Grigorenko’s only weapon after he was transferred to an Ordinary Psychiatric Hospital. When the deputy head of the forced-treatment section, A.Kozhemyakina, warned him of her power to determine his fate—‘If by your conduct you manage to get sent back to a Special Hospital, you’ll never get out again’—he passed the news to his wife Zinaida. Soon Kozhemyakina’s name and threats were broadcast on the BBC, Deutsche Welle, and the Voice of America. Enraged, she physically attacked Zinaida at the time of her next visit. But the affair concluded in a reprimand for Kozhemyakina, after which, noted Grigorenko, ‘she left my family in peace.’70 The regime waged a continuous struggle against the flow of information from the camps and prisons. The censorship of letters was tightened, meetings with relatives and lawyers were postponed, and prominent activists were resentenced before the expiry of their terms. After fifteen years of publication, the Chronicle of Current Events was suppressed in 1983, although its function was partly assumed by Vesti iz SSSR, a fortnightly human rights bulletin based in Munich. But the crackdown was too late: dissident glasnost had already done its work. The repressive apparatus and its abuses

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were common knowledge. Many had believed Khrushchev’s claim that there were no political prisoners, but few would have taken Gorbachev seriously when he made the same claim in his interview with L’Humanité in early 1986. Not only the Gulag’s camps and prisons, but also the fates of individual political prisoners had been publicised by two decades of glasnost. Even as he denied the existence of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was forced to respond to a question about the health of Andrei Sakharov.71 That journalist’s impudence was in itself a tribute to the reach of dissident glasnost. Such means of informing and addressing the Soviet leadership had long been contemplated by dissidents. At his 1978 trial, Yurii Orlov traced the work of the Moscow Helsinki Group to the realisation ‘that approaching our own government through the governments of other nations was more effective than a direct approach.’72 In a 1981 article, Sakharov had urged ‘the use of all possibilities of glasnost and diplomacy’ to defend the victims of repression. He observed that for those addressing Soviet leaders, ‘it is important to take into account that they do not know about—and probably do not want to know about—most letters and appeals directed to them,’ and thus ‘personal interventions by Western officials who meet with their Soviet counterparts have particular significance.’73 Such interventions reached a level of intensity during the early 1980s that paralysed Soviet diplomacy: this was the ‘psychological war’ that Gorbachev promised to defeat, when he made his early clarion calls for glasnost as a weapon against ‘the ingenuity and unscrupulousness of bourgeois propagandists.’ The coming transformation would also be shaped by the legacy of dissident glasnost, by the decades of samizdat and radio broadcasts that illuminated and discredited the repressive apparatus. At least for that section of the liberal intelligentsia that was destined to radicalise perestroika, dictatorship had lost its lustre. For them, genuine reform meant the release of political prisoners and democratisation, rather than new experiments in coercion.

The practice of glasnost Glasnost was not only a weapon against repression, but also a basic principle of the rights-defence movement’s own operation. Dissidents acted openly, advertising their addresses on samizdat documents, sending their protests to Soviet institutions. Of course many activities, such as the production of the Chronicle or the collection of donations to support the families of political prisoners, continued without publicity, but such covert enterprises were inextricably connected with the existence of a dissident public sphere. For Soviet citizens outside the original core of Moscow dissidents, public figures like Sakharov and public associations like the Moscow Helsinki Group were vital contact points, conduits between society and the information network of the Chronicle. But the practice of glasnost represented more than a tactical innovation. It was also an ethical rupture with the Bolshevik heritage. It meant the abandonment of the underground as the principal arena of political activity. This fundamental change in the methods of resistance occurred in the mid-1960s. It was symbolised by General Grigorenko’s famous slogan, ‘In the underground you meet only rats.’ In his memoirs, written in American exile, he added that ‘those who have power now in the USSR are rats who emerged from

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the underground.’74 Grigorenko spoke from experience, as the founder of an underground ‘Union of True Leninists,’ which had been easily crushed by the authorities. His conversion to glasnost began with his first meeting with Vladimir Bukovskii, a 22-yearold Volpin protégé, in the spring of 1966. Asked whether he favoured open or underground struggle, Bukovskii replied: Open struggle! Why should we hide? The law is on our side. People will hear public statements and the honest and the brave among them will join us. What methods could one use for underground conspiracy? Given the corruption of our morality, I am convinced that from the very first one would encounter a provocateur.75 If Volpin was the original theorist of dissident glasnost, Bukovskii was its pioneering practitioner. A few months earlier, he had organised the first glasnost demonstration in Pushkin Square, though the KGB had detained him before it took place. In January 1967 he organised another demonstration in the square, this time in protest against the arrest of four youths and the tightening of the Criminal Code. Bukovskii’s ‘open struggle’ continued at his trial, where he defied the prosecutor and judge at every juncture, and vowed that ‘when I am free again, I shall organise other demonstrations.’76 At the same time, a more modest form of protest, the annual dissident demonstration in Pushkin Square, had become part of the dissident calendar: for the first decade on Constitution Day, and from 1977 on International Human Rights Day. According to the ritual, dissidents would gather around the statue of Pushkin, remove their hats, and share a few minutes of silence in honour of the victims of repression. The same desire to demonstrate open solidarity produced the traditional vigils outside the trials of dissident defendants, who would be showered with flowers whilst being led away to captivity. Despite their symbolic importance, it was less in public demonstrations than in samizdat that the practice of open struggle was institutionalised. When Aleksandr Ginzburg compiled the White Book, his collection of documents on the trial of Daniel and Sinyavskii, he sent copies with his address to the KGB and the Chief Prosecutor’s Office. This decision marked a fundamental transition, for the White Book recounted the trial of writers incriminated for publishing under pseudonyms. Ginzburg’s precedent was followed by Pavel Litvinov’s subsequent trial records, The Demonstration in Pushkin Square, and The Trial of the Four. As a result of the publication of his address by foreign radio stations, Litvinov received an avalanche of letters and visitors from across the Soviet Union. Litvinov’s sudden celebrity status coincided with the wave of the podpisanty, public (as distinct from confidential) petitions against political trials, which receded under the impact of dismissals from work and expulsions from university during the spring of 1968. The culmination of this public ferment came in 1969, when fourteen prominent activists founded the Initiative Group on Human Rights, the first dissident public association. It was followed a year later by the Committee on Human Rights. Despite their short-lived activity, these experiments in public collective activity set a precedent for the far more successful Moscow Helsinki Group, its counterparts in Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia, and associated initiatives such as the Working Group to Investigate the Use

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of Psychiatry for Political Purposes and the Christian Committee for the Defence of the Rights of Believers. The next quantum leap in dissident glasnost came in 1974, at the height of the KGB’s sustained attempt to crush the Chronicle of Current Events. Exploiting the anonymity of its editors, the KGB had threatened that every new issue would be punished with new arrests. On 7 May 1974, Sergei Kovalyov, Tatyana Velikanova, and Tatyana Khodorovich assumed public responsibility for the Chronicle at a press conference, where they released three new issues and a statement that ‘we regard it as our duty to facilitate as wide a circulation for [the Chronicle] as possible.77 It was, as Sakharov noted in a statement on Kovalyov’s arrest seven months later, not only ‘a courageous and historic step, but at the same time it was a challenge to those who had called the Chronicle libellous and anti-Soviet, those who fear truth and openness.’78 Sakharov reiterated this point in a statement submitted to the judge at the trial of Kovalyov, whom he praised for his ‘reverence for law, justice, the defense of human rights and glasnost.’79 Not every dissident was an advocate of glasnost as a basic principle of activism. After the crushing of the podpisanty in 1968, there was a brief efflorescence of pseudonymous samizdat, in which the notion that emancipatory change could be achieved by secret dialogue was a persistent theme. This thesis evoked derision from Solzhenitsyn in From under the Rubble: For a brief period, a profusion of journals and more journals sprang up in samizdat…all of them strictly clandestine, of course, and all of them offering the same advice: just don’t reveal your face, just don’t break the rule of secrecy, but slowly spread a correct understanding among the people…. It seemed so easy: philosophise in one’s burrow, hand the results over to samizdat, and the rest will happen automatically! But it won’t.80 Another manifestation of this phenomenon was the so-called ‘Democratic Movement of the Soviet Union,’ comprising a small group of intellectuals in Estonia, who released a serious of grandiose programmatic documents that were treated with extreme scepticism by the Chronicle. The debate was renewed in September 1978, when Roy Medvedev accused Aleksandr Ginzburg, the recently sentenced manager of the Prisoner’s Aid Fund, of having exposed himself to ‘what in revolutionary groups is called “having one’s cover blown”’ and insisted that instead of joining the Moscow Helsinki Group, Ginzburg should have shunned ‘publicity’ and gone as far as possible ‘underground.’81 One of the recipients of Medvedev’s Open Letter, the novelist Georgii Vladimov, responded with a polemical defence of glasnost, arguing that the Fund had won a significant moral victory over the authorities by acting openly: By refusing to go underground, it has left this to the persecutors and oppressors, and a miraculous transformation has taken place before our own eyes: the people working below ground are those who once banged on the table with their revolvers, who towered over us so dramatically in their heroic tight black leather jerkins.

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Listing the varieties of blackmail and oppression practised by the KGB, Vladimov concluded that the overall impression was ‘incontrovertible and unambiguous: an underground terrorist organisation is busily at work, the only difference being that is not hounded by the government—it is the government.’82 The dissident public sphere was slowly destroyed by the wave of systematic arrests that began in late 1979, which targeted dissidents who acted openly. The implications for glasnost were analysed in a 1981 interview by Ivan Kovalyov, a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and the son of Sergei Kovalyov: Overt protest—publicity—is one of the basic traits, perhaps the principal trait, of the human rights movement as it now exists. Overt actions by individual human rights advocates led eventually to the creation of overt human rights groups and associations. Now the authorities are destroying them. I do not believe that even if all such groups are eliminated, overt human rights actions will cease. But in such circumstances it is clear that new human rights associations will be quickly suppressed in their early stages before they gain strength.83 Yet like Vladimov, Kovalyov found hope in the reversal of roles, in the struggle between public dissidents and the clandestine state: At almost every political trial the ‘illegal activity’ of the defendant is discussed. And this is done with respect to people who have publicly spoken out against tyranny! But really, the concept of ‘illegal, underground activity’ is more applicable to the actions of the authorities themselves and their organs. How else can you describe the existence of secret decrees, instructions and directives? Or political trials which consistently violate the principle of public disclosure?84 Certainly that principle was violated at Ivan Kovalyov’s own trial in April 1982, when he was sentenced to five years in the camps and five years exile for his commitment to glasnost.85 Repression also intensified against dissidents who acted openly in the cultural sphere. Their most visible achievement was the samizdat journal Poiski, edited by an eclectic combination of elderly reform communists and young non-communist intellectuals, who for almost two years had provided a remarkable forum for tolerant and pluralistic dialogue. The demise of this experiment was heralded by the arrest of one of the editors, Valerii Abramkin. In a final statement, the editorial board denounced the arrest as a reprisal for Poiski’s attempt ‘to break through the blockade against dialogue, for being open about our names and actions.’86 An even more explicit affirmation of the practice of glasnost came in April 1982, when Mikhail Gefter, one of the journal’s guiding spirits, responded to a summons with an open letter to the General Prosecutor: My involvement in Poiski is no secret. And not because something earlier hidden has been uncovered. No, there was nothing hidden from the very beginning. Moreover, secrets were repudiated as such from the

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beginning—by everyone, who decided to found Poiski, [and] made open thought and the dialogue of convictions (limited neither in the composition of questions, or the composition of participants) the basis of their principles. My voluntary and pre-meditated decision to participate in Poiski was conditional on active agreement with the indicated principles. They are documented in the text of the ‘Invitation,’ written by me and published in the first issue of the journal. I reiterated this position (in addition to an article, in which it was reflected) in a letter to the editors of Poiski, given glasnost on the pages of the final issue in 1979. Today it is necessary again to underline, that precisely adherence to the principle of openness and systematic dialogue can unite people of different generations and viewpoints, who participated in Poiski.87 It was a significant statement from an intellectual who would play a prominent role during perestroika and the early post-Soviet period. An eminent historian, Gefter, had headed the Sector of Methodology of the Institute of History during the late 1960s, and drifted into dissidence after his enforced retirement in 1976.88 His connections as an institutional intellectual and his moral authority as an outspoken dissident would facilitate his rapid return to public debate in the autumn of 1987, when Vek XX i Mir published his interview with Gleb Pavlovskii, a former Poiski colleague.89 For the revival of civil society during perestroika, the legacy of the dissident public sphere cannot be underestimated. Dissidents demonstrated that it was possible to act openly even under conditions of extreme persecution, and their courage was a reproach to those who conformed. The pressure experienced by institutional intellectuals was exemplified by Sakharov’s March 1981 essay on ‘the responsibility of scientists,’ which concluded with an exhortation to his colleagues to join the struggle for glasnost by expressing their dissent openly: Velikanova, Orlov, Kovalyov and many others have resolved the question of responsibility for themselves, setting out on the path of active and selfless struggle for human rights, for glasnost. Their sacrifice is enormous, but it is not pointless. It is precisely these people who are changing the moral face of our world for the better. Others amongst their colleagues have not found the strength for such a struggle. Is it not time for these scientists, who to a small circle frequently show much understanding and non-conformism, to show their feeling of responsibility by more socially significant means, more openly, at least in such questions as the open defence of repressed colleagues, the open control over the real observance of the laws of the country and its international obligations.90 This circle of institutional intellectuals, who practised ‘kitchen glasnost’ and public hypocrisy, would find the courage of their convictions only during perestroika, with the rise of figures like Lev Ponomaryov, a mathematician who had visited Yurii Orlov in exile and then became a member of the initiative group that created Memorial. From the same milieu came ‘the group of activists, employees of an array of Institutes of the

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Academy of Sciences’ whom KGB chairman Kryuchkov blamed for Sakharov’s radical role in Soviet politics during 1989.91 For them, and many others, the dissidents’ repudiation of the underground and their practice of glasnost was an example and an incitement.

Official glasnost versus dissident glasnost It was inevitable that Gorbachev’s campaign for glasnost should provoke a reaction from the dissidents. After two decades, a key word in the dissident lexicon had become government policy. But the dialogue of official reformers and the dissidents was slow in maturing. It was inhibited by entrenched patterns of repression and resistance, by the official stereotypes of dissidents as ‘cut off from the Soviet people,’ and by the dissident tradition of non-collaboration with the regime. Bitterness was exacerbated by the continuing persecution and press vilification of dissidents after Sakharov’s return from Gorky and the release of political prisoners. The most enduring blank-spot of official glasnost was the history of dissent during the years of stagnation. As spokesmen for the regime expounded the imperative of glasnost, they fastidiously avoided mentioning those who had endured persecution for proselytising the cause of glasnost during the past two decades. The first open clash between official and dissident glasnost erupted when a group of ten prominent émigrés released a manifesto titled ‘Let Gorbachev Give Us Proof!’ The signatories included such pioneers of dissident glasnost as Vladimir Bukovskii and Yurii Orlov, as well as eminent cultural figures like Yurii Lyubimov and Vasilii Aksyonov. The manifesto was widely published in the Western media, but it became a sensation when it appeared in Moscow News, a flagship of perestroika.92 Never before had dissidents had such an opportunity to challenge the regime and its ideology in an official forum. The gulf between the ‘official campaign’ and dissident glasnost was a major item of their critique: Glasnost essentially implies some public discussion where everybody can take part without fearing reprisals irrespective of the views expressed. Glasnost should include both the right to receive information and the right to spread information because both are inseparably linked in the single process of society’s control over the government. Rather than the official campaign of criticism of Soviet reality there should be free access to copying equipment to promote greater glasnost as we understand it. If the Soviet leaders wish to enjoy trust among the public, it is necessary for them to recognise at least several independent publishers not subject to Party control. In this connection the publication of this letter in the Soviet press would be the most convincing proof of the sincerity of pronouncements about glasnost.93 But the appearance of the letter was far from a ‘convincing proof.’ Whilst Moscow News achieved a milestone in official glasnost, it also demonstrated its limits and pitfalls by unleashing a vitriolic propaganda campaign against the signatories. The very act of

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publication was used as a refutation of dissident arguments, not an attempt to enter into dialogue. The manifesto demonstrated that the dissidents were beyond the pale. Echoing the vilification of dissidents during the Brezhnev era, Moscow News provided tendentious biographical notes about the signatories, who were exposed as terrorists and spies. In the customary manner of affirming the unanimity of the Soviet people, the paper reported that letters and telephone calls from readers had denounced the manifesto as ‘irrefutable proof of [the signatories’] moral degeneration.’ But what was most surprising about this eruption was the eagerness of eminent ‘foremen of perestroika’ to join the chorus of vituperation. In an acerbic and malicious dialogue, the theatre director Oleg Efremov, the playwright Mikhail Shatrov, the actor Mikhail Ulyanov, and the journalist Len Karpinskii speculated about the treacherous motives, the hypocrisy, the moral degradation, the delusions of grandeur, and the political blindness of the ten émigrés. Their underlying theme was that the ten were renegades severed from Soviet history and enemies of perestroika. Pondering as to how they had stooped so low, Efremov warned them that ‘you’re siding with those who are slowing perestroika down, who detest this reconstruction of ours.’94 But the spirit of the moment was best captured by Egor Yakovlev, the editor of Moscow News, who accused the ten of suffering from ‘personality-cult’ thinking and reproached them for referring to ‘our’ history, since ‘with your position regarding our latest history, you have nothing to do with it.’ Deploying a metaphor that would become a leitmotif in attempts to define the limits of the permissible, Yakovlev concluded that ‘they have chosen the opposite side of the barricades.’95 The wording of Yakovlev’s anathema was not accidental. Only weeks earlier, Gorbachev had affirmed the need for dialogue and consultation, explaining that ‘in our country, all of society is on the same side of the barricade.’96 On the other side, alongside the imperialist ‘special services,’ were the dissidents, supposedly ‘cut off from society,’ and administratively excluded from the expanding arena of public debate. For most of 1987, the official press ignored Sakharov’s public statements, including his complaints about ‘the continuing detention of those who had spoken out too soon for glasnost,’ although KGB transcripts of his telephone conversations were read and annotated by Gorbachev.97 But no one questioned the right of conservative ideologues like Yurii Bondarev to lash out at the proponents of glasnost from the tribune of the RSFSR Writers’ Union Congress: The false-democrats in literature have lit the lantern of openness, stolen from justice and truth, at the edge of the abyss. This stolen openness has been presented by our mass media and press in only one aspect—as aggressive, destructive, and opening the gates wide for mediocrity, ambitious people, false Jacobins and untalented, newly made geniuses.98 As campaigners for glasnost during the past two decades, the dissidents were less vulnerable to reproaches about having ‘stolen openness,’ but they were on the wrong side of the barricades. The result was a debate that favoured the enemies of freedom of expression. The continuing vilification of dissidents was both a demarcation of the limits of the possible, and a salutary warning about the potential consequences of violating those limits.

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Despite the humiliating pardoning procedure and continuing harassment, dissidents used glasnost as a rallying point, much as they had exploited the Kremlin’s short-lived enthusiasm for the Helsinki Accords a decade earlier. The first major dissident initiative after the releases of political prisoners was the launching of the journal Glasnost, under the editorship of Sergei Grigoryants. A literary historian, Grigoryants had become a dissident because of his refusal to betray his friend, Andrei Sinyavskii. Entrapped by the KGB, Grigoryants was sentenced to his first term at a closed trial, in violation of the glasnost provision of the Code of Criminal Procedure, as the Chronicle pointed out at the time.99 Radicalised by five years in the camps, he replaced the arrested Ivan Kovalyov as editor of Bulletin V, an internal publication of the human rights movement, which gradually filled some of the space created by the suppression of the Chronicle. For this recidivism, Grigoryants was sentenced in 1983 to a decade of incarceration, which may have shaped his scepticism toward Gorbachev’s rhetoric about glasnost, which he experienced amid the increasing violence in the closed world of the gulag. Until Grigoryants’s release in 1987, he was not allowed a single meeting with his wife. After his hand was broken by a warder, he was held in a maximum-isolation prison. Another warder promised that Grigoryants would not leave prison alive.100 Grigoryants’s Glasnost quickly established itself as the most important manifestation of the ‘new samizdat.’ It benefited from the existence of dissident information networks, and in particular from the participation of former contributors to Bulletin V. By April 1988, the socialist informal activist Boris Kagarlitskii was complaining about the widespread impression that ‘Glasnost is the only serious bulletin, samizdat today is Glasnost.’101 Although the title of Grigoryants’s new journal was frequently described in the Western media as a homage to Gorbachev’s glasnost, many articles contested the official version of glasnost and derided the reformists’ silence about dissidents. Typical was an article by Sasha Bogdanov, who questioned the lineage of ‘the girl named glasnost’: Why do our journalists with indomitable speed expose everything, except the fact that it is not their all-world service and honour, that the girl by some miracle remained alive, but thanks to some zeks, who are slandered and ignored by the newspapers, journals, radio and television? Why are we instead given judicial-medical expert opinions, that the girl named ‘glasnost’ was born two years ago, that she’s in excellent health, has outstanding food, and has caring parents, well-disposed and dignified, namely these same ideologically-mature comrades?102 Grigoryants also practised glasnost in the operation of the journal: he sent copies to the CPSU Central Committee, and requested permission to open a business bank account, rent office space, and hire press time at a printing plant.103 After an initial period of restraint, during which local officials even visited Grigoryants’s apartment to enquire about his plans and offer advice about how to apply for authorisation, the authorities ran out of patience in August 1987.104 The newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva invited Grigoryants for an interview, but only in order to provoke him with questions about the criminal case that the KGB had fabricated against him in the 1970s. Publishing these details without Grigoryants’s response or any mention of his 1983 conviction for human

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rights activism, the newspaper noted that ‘Sergei Ivanovich shouldn’t complain about our publicising these pages from his biography, pages that he has been hiding so carefully,’ because ‘openness is openness.’ But openness did not include discussion of the Soviet human rights record: With maniacal malice, the authors of Glasnost drag out the same old irritating fabrications about human rights violations, about ‘political prisoners’ in the USSR, and about ‘activists in the movement for free emigration’ who are supposedly being kept in psychiatric hospitals. Such preoccupations marked Grigoryants’s venture as a relic of the past: the typescript pages ‘give off a musty odor…as if one had picked up a calendar from 10 or 15 years ago.’105 The same might have been said about the Vechernaya Moskva article, whose real author, Anatolii Rusanovskii, was a veteran propagandist. What was new was his readiness to invite Western journalists to an interview, where he denounced Grigoryants’s venture as ‘immoral and unnecessary,’ and scorned the notion that unofficial publications might be legalised: If the process continues and goes on in depth, what need is there for an unofficial press? There will be no need for any other glasnost. There will be just one—one honest, one broad and one single glasnost…. There is no need for competition.106 Rusanovskii’s prognosis about the fate of the unofficial press was prescient, though his conviction about the triumph of one single glasnost was wishful thinking. The struggle between the meanings of glasnost, between the Leninist blacklist and the idea of freedom of expression, would outlive the Soviet regime. Even within dissident ranks there was competition over glasnost. In July 1987, Lev Timofeev, Larisa Bogoraz, and Sergei Kovalyov established a discussion forum called the ‘Press-Club Glasnost.’ Its opening declaration made an explicit connection between glasnost and freedom of expression: The goal of our publicistic press club is to offer the opportunity for the open expression of public opinion about the real problems of any group, any citizen of our country—a possibility which until now has been denied to a significant strata of our population, all those whose views on the events of our time are more or less different from the officially accepted viewpoint.107 This group organised the International Human Rights Seminar held in Moscow in December 1987, which Timofeev presented as an attempt to create a favourable atmosphere for the holding in Moscow of the international human rights conference that had been proposed by the Soviet authorities. Although the organisers were received at the Foreign Ministry, their overture was spurned. A Central Committee report described the seminar as a ‘provocational action’ undertaken by ‘anti-social elements supported by imperialist special services and foreign subversive centers.’108 Even institutional

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intellectuals gave the ‘provocation’ a wide berth. Fifty prominent figures had been invited to attend the seminar, but none even acknowledged the invitations. In exasperation, Timofeev used his new samizdat journal Referendum to conjure up a nightmare scenario of one of the Perm corrective camps filled not only with foremen of perestroika like Yurii Afanasev and Gavril Popov, but also the Soviet leader: ‘Come here, Gorbachev!’ the lieutenant commandant would say, explaining that there could not be a crisis situation in our society, that such a claim is anti-Soviet and that unless [Gorbachev] repudiated it, he would not be released at the expiry of his term. The moral of the story was that the continuing persecution and ostracism of dissidents was a threat to reform: ‘Remember, our esteemed, bold intelligenty, you repeat alien words, whilst continuing to hold under lock and key those who pronounced those words, those who pronounced them at the righttime.’109 Two months later, Timofeev’s warning was given credence by the publication of Nina Andreeva’s anti-reform polemic, ‘I cannot give up my principles,’ which seemed to demonstrate the fragility and reversibility of the liberalisation process. Rejecting Gorbachev’s contention that glasnost was a potent weapon in the ‘psychological war,’ Andreeva argued that it had become a Trojan horse for the ideological enemy: Openness, candour and the disappearance of zones closed to criticism, as well as emotional fervour in the mass consciousness, especially among young people, are frequently manifested in the posing of problems that, to one extent or another, have been ‘prompted’ by Western radio voices, or by those of our compatriots who are not firm in their notions about the essence of socialism.110 As evidence for the exploitation of glasnost by anti-socialist forces, Andreeva pointed to the rise of ‘extremist elements capable of provocations’ to the leadership of informal groups, and the resulting ‘politicisation of these grass-roots organisations on the basis of a pluralism that is far from socialist.’ The propagation of this ‘extra-socialist pluralism,’ she argued, ‘objectively impedes restructuring in social consciousness.’111 Ten days later, the attack on ‘pluralism that is far from socialist’ was intensified by Iona Andronov, the New York correspondent of Literaturnaya Gazeta, who was linked to the KGB.112 Andronov published an ‘expose’ claiming that Grigoryants’s Glasnost was a tool of the CIA and that it was fomenting ethnic unrest.113 These allegations were based upon an article in The Nation by Kevin Coogan and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who argued that the Center for Democracy (CFD), the New York publisher of Glasnost, had conducted activities that ‘recklessly endanger and potentially discredit dissidents and independent political activity in the Soviet Union.’114 They publicised a series of CFD documents elaborating programmes that were open to misrepresentation as espionage activities, although the most provocative had in fact been abandoned after the release of political prisoners in 1987. Despite the authors’ perfunctory expression of concern that ‘it would be tragic if Glasnost were silenced,’ and their accusation that the CFD had given ‘ammunition’ to Soviet conservatives, their own incautious claims were potent

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ammunition indeed. It was actually an interview with Coogan that comprised the most damaging part of Andronov’s indictment. Coogan admitted that he had provided Andronov with an advance copy of the article, but claimed that ‘I was flat-out suckerpunched in that the guy made up an interview with me that never occurred.’ For the CFD, the incident was a case study in Soviet manipulation of Western journalists, but Vanden Heuvel was unapologetic. ‘Anybody who says that it takes an article in the American press for the Soviets to victimise people,’ she declared, ‘doesn’t understand the Soviet system, which is capable of harassing anybody it wants without any help from outside.’115 What she did not understand was the importance for dissidents of Western public opinion, of the weapon of glasnost, which Bukovskii had termed ‘a means of defence like the safety belt of a mountain climber.’ For those seeking to silence Grigoryants, The Nation’s avowed motives were far less important than the fact that a leading left-wing publication was alleging links between dissidents and the intelligence community. Nor would Grigoryants have been reassured by the belated reformist response to Nina Andreeva. A counter-manifesto in Pravda did emphasise that democracy ‘is impossible without freedom of thought and speech, without an open and broad clash of opinions, without examining our life with a critical eye.’ But it also identified the opponents of perestroika with the hostile view of socialism propagated by ‘foreign antagonists.’116 In May 1988, the limits of ‘socialist pluralism’ were tested by a group of former dissidents and informal activists, who established the Democratic Union at the dacha where Grigoryants produced Glasnost. The KGB retaliated by raiding the dacha, arresting Grigoryants for a week, and confiscating his equipment. Whilst Gorbachev was silent about Nina Andreeva’s polemic, he lashed out at Grigoryants in an interview with Western journalists. When asked how to reconcile his fine words about glasnost and tolerance with the persecution of Grigoryants, Gorbachev boasted that: the most interesting thing that perestroika has demonstrated is that our people, while being firmly in favour of the renewal of society, and of change, have firmly expressed the view that changes should happen only within the boundaries of socialism, and on the basis of socialist values. Grigoryants’s failure to grasp this simple truth put him outside ‘our people,’ as Gorbachev explained with words of anathema carefully chosen from the Leninist lexicon of vituperation: People here know that the Grigoryants’ ‘organisation’ in quotation marks is tied not only organisationally but also financially to the West, that his constant visitors and guests are Western correspondents. This happens—it happens in nature too. There are such parasites living off healthy organisms and attempting to harm them. The importance of Gorbachev’s insight about parasites was underlined by the reprinting of this part of the interview in the Soviet press. A beleaguered Grigoryants lamented that ‘Gorbachev is declaring his solidarity with the worst forces in our society.’117 Reformist intellectuals, who were less enthusiastic about declaring their solidarity with Nina Andreeva, now turned to the dissidents. The barricades were being realigned. In

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March 1988, Sakharov was approached about contributing to the reformist anthology Inogo ne dano, which was to be released during the impending Party Conference.118 Amid mounting fears about the fate of perestroika, Sakharov signed a petition in April with Afanasev, Klimov, Shatrov, and six other prominent reformist intellectuals. They warned against attempts by the party machine to stack the conference, and called for more democratic procedures to ensure that ‘all the bright and active minds from across the country’ were brought into the debate. Whilst the leadership sought to enforce a ‘socialist pluralism’ that included Nina Andreeva but excluded Grigoryants, the petition emphasised the magnitude of the gulf within the regime: ‘We are facing the reality of differences of view in the party and in the Central Committee, different views about the nature of Soviet history are being expressed, and we do not all expect the same from the future.’119 In Memorial, Moscow Tribune, and the Interregional Group, these differences would radicalise the reformist intellectuals, who would abandon Gorbachev for Sakharov, the rhetoric of perestroika for that of democracy, glasnost as a weapon of psychological warfare for glasnost as freedom of expression. A parallel convergence of reformers and the dissident heritage marked the struggle to create institutional safeguards for glasnost. The most prominent figure in the preparation of the proposed law on glasnost was Yurii Baturin, who published an anthology on glasnost that opened with extensive quotations from Marx and Lenin.120 When Baturin spoke on Soviet television about the draft, he even discussed the origins of glasnost in the 1860s, but carefully avoided mentioning dissidents.121 This reticence was prudent, for one of Baturin’s principal colleagues was Mikhail Fedotov, an eminent academic jurist, and deputy chairman of the Professional Ethics Committee of the Journalists’ Union. But in his student days, Fedotov had participated in the genesis of the dissident movement. At a commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1965 glasnost demonstration, he would share a table at Moscow Memorial with prominent dissidents and recall his participation in the Pushkin Square protest on 22 January 1967. ‘I was never a leader or even close,’ he acknowledged, ‘I was always a person from the dissident mass.’122 For his involvement in the ‘dissident mass,’ Fedotov had been expelled from Moscow State University in 1968, and he was only able to finish his degree by studying at night school. Whilst working as a journalist in the 1970s, he also completed a postgraduate degree at the All-Union Law Correspondence Institute, where he became a member of the academic staff.123 Fedotov’s three careers, in dissidence, the media, and the law, would shape the central preoccupation of his research: the problem of ensuring press freedom. In June 1988, two decades after his experience of persecution for exercising his right to freedom of expression, Fedotov was offering his ‘specialist opinion’ to Moscow News about the creation of institutional safeguards for an independent press.124 Several months later, the Estonian press published the first drafts of the ‘Law on the Press and Other Mass Media,’ which had been drafted by Baturin, Fedotov, and V.Entin.125 This draft, which outlawed censorship and established a registration procedure that freed the press from party tutelage, was ultimately the basis for the Soviet law on the press, passed in June 1990. The same principles were enshrined in the corresponding Russian Federation legislation, which Fedotov played a vital role in enacting and enforcing, as deputy minister for the press.126 The institutionalisation of ‘total and honest glasnost’ evoked little enthusiasm from Mikhail Gorbachev. At the first Congress of People’s Deputies, the hysterical collective

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denunciation of Sakharov, in scenes worthy of the Stalinist purges, had demonstrated the unpopularity of pluralism amongst the party’s ‘aggressively obedient majority.’ The rising tide of party discontent was symbolised by the postponement in September 1989 of the publication of the Law on the Press, because of resistance to the formal abolition of preliminary censorship. Instead of supporting glasnost, Gorbachev chose this moment to attack the liberal press. At a meeting with media bosses on 13 October 1989, he denounced a variety of eminent reformers ‘who, in their chase after popularity, are ready to speak out against their own mother.’127 The main offender was Vladislav Starkov, the editor of Argumenty i Fakty, whose transgression was to have published a readers’ survey that showed Sakharov as the most popular politician at the Congress.128 Gorbachev’s tirade was enthusiastically applauded by the editors of Molodaya Gvardiya and Moskva, standard-bearers of the National Bolshevik tendency that was fomenting a campaign against ‘Russophobia’ in the media. One month later, its orators would use the RSFSR Writers’ Union Plenum to demand the resignation of Anatolii Ananev, the editor of Oktyabr, for publishing works by Vasilii Grossman and Andrei Sinyavskii. Whilst Starkov and Ananev managed to stave off dismissal until the passage of the press law, the circumstances of Gorbachev’s outburst were significant. Both at the Congress and its aftermath, Sakharov had extended the limits of official glasnost, and threatened to overshadow its architects. Only a year earlier, Grigoryants had provoked Gorbachev’s fury by appearing to challenge ‘the view that changes should happen only within the boundaries of socialism, and on the basis of socialist values.’ During 1989 Sakharov challenged those boundaries, not in a samizdat journal, but as the most outspoken deputy in Soviet parliament, as the nucleus of an emerging political opposition. It was no coincidence that KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, in his revolution day address, warned against the ‘excesses of glasnost.’129 The timely adoption of the press law in June 1990 was the crowning triumph of the struggle to institutionalise glasnost. Under the provisions of the new law, Ananev and Starkov registered their publications as independent entities, and were thus shielded from the vengeance of the party apparatus, as it mobilised its forces in the parliament and the security apparatus.130 But Goskomizdat officials refused to register Grigoryants’s Glasnost, claiming that it was a ‘local’ Moscow journal that should seek registration from the municipal authorities.131 At the same time, the Central Committee reasserted the claims of Leninist glasnost by launching a new weekly titled Glasnost, which came to epitomise the glasnost that Gorbachev had unveiled in 1984: glasnost that was combined with ‘political vigilance and implacability toward views that are alien to us’ and ‘ideological work that is creative and aggressive.’ Deriding the new venture, Grigoryants revealed that a Polish politician had complained to him, ‘I paid big money for a subscription, and I was sent some rubbish instead of your journal.’132 But it was venomous ‘rubbish’: on the eve of the August 1991 coup, it published the recollections of Andropov’s secretary, who claimed that the KGB chief had warned Brezhnev against recalling Aleksandr Yakovlev, the architect of perestroika, from his exile as ambassador to Canada because he had been ‘reborn’ during his time abroad and his views were now ‘alien to our ideology.’133 As perestroika entered its terminal crisis during the winter of 1990–1, glasnost was under attack on many fronts. In Moscow, the liberal current-affairs programme Vzglyad was taken off the air, whilst the evening news resumed the pattern of the Leninist

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glasnost of the mid-1980s, once again reporting ‘on things like a railway situation in Murmansk failing to unload freight cars, due to some official’s fault, or some conscientious workers in the Kurgan region who have done a good job of bringing in the potato harvest.’134 In Vilnius, there was bloodshed when the television centre was stormed by OMON troops. The democrats’ outrage at these events offended Gorbachev, who in turn vented his anger upon glasnost.135 On 14 January 1991, Gorbachev proposed to lawmakers that ‘a decision could be taken right now to suspend the Law on the Press’ and suggested that ‘the Supreme Soviet will ensure complete objectivity’ in the media. This capitulation was reformulated by parliamentary speaker Anatolii Lukyanov as a proposal that the Commission on Glasnost be authorised ‘to work out concrete measures for the coverage of events in the country.’136 According to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, that session marked, ‘the end of the era of glasnost.’137 Certainly it marked the end of Gorbachev’s reputation in democratic circles. In a joint appeal, Yelena Bonner and Sergei Kovalyov castigated Gorbachev’s striving ‘to retain power at any price,’ and lamented that ‘the events in Vilnius, the pressure on glasnost, the recent declaration of the resignation of minister Shevardnadze…show the sharp reactionary turn of the head of the state and the parliament.’138 The theorist of that ‘reactionary turn’ was Gennadii Zyuganov, ideology secretary of the new RSFSR Communist Party. Within months of the passage of the press law, he had lashed out at official glasnost as ‘a psychological war against the [Soviet] people,’ and added that ‘this spreading pseudo-glasnost…with its refined masochism and servility, is part of the realisation of plans worked out by overseas [American secret] services decades ago.’139 He would elaborate this thesis in a notorious open letter to Aleksandr Yakovlev, whom he blamed for the fact that ‘glasnost has already broken down into hysterical cries and has become a weapon in the psycho-logical war against the people.’140 This was the ultimate negation of Gorbachev’s programme: glasnost, launched as a rebuff to the West’s ‘psychological warfare,’ was exposed as an instrument of that warfare. Zyuganov’s conspiracy theory would be pressed with increasing vehemence by the leaders of the emerging red-brown coalition, both in the Russian Federation parliament and on the streets of Moscow, after the collapse of the Soviet Union confirmed their suspicions and freed them from any residual loyalty to Gorbachev the apostate. In early 1993, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the recently released coup-plotter and former KGB chairman, announced that ‘personally for me no doubts remain’ that Aleksandr Yakovlev was a CIA agent, and that KGB information about his treachery ‘was above all confirmed by his subsequent actions.’141 A few weeks later, communist deputies participated in a ‘people’s tribunal’ that ruled that Gorbachev should be charged with treason and faced with the ‘supreme penalty.’142 In post-Soviet Russia, the onslaught against glasnost was joined by parliamentary speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov. Although he habitually denied that he had been a party functionary, Khasbulatov’s own attitudes towards freedom of expression were evident as early as the Daniel and Sinyavskii trial, when as a Komsomol official he had interrogated student participants in the first glasnost demonstration with exemplary severity.143 In this exercise of youthful zealotry, Khasbulatov was the antithesis of Mikhail Fedotov, the student expelled from the same university for dissident activities, who was promoted from deputy minister to minister for the press in November 1992. By then, the media had become a major battleground between executive and legislature. During the summer of

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1992, demonstrators from the parliamentary opposition had staged a long ‘siege’ of the television centre at Ostankino, which was headed by Egor Yakovlev, the former editor of Moscow News. Five years after denouncing dissident émigrés for standing on the wrong side of the barricades, Yakovlev was himself on the wrong side, and was dismissed by Yeltsin in a concession to parliamentary sentiment. Also under siege was the newspaper Izvestiya, which had offended Khasbulatov and endured a year of his wrath. In September its offices were invaded by parliamentary guards. Then its property was claimed by the parliament, which announced the creation of a rival Izvestiya. Khasbulatov’s vendetta against this newspaper was not merely a manifestation of the struggle between executive and legislature. At the heart of his political agenda was an attack on glasnost and on the press law. Unable to understand that the liberal media’s hostility was no less a product of his own aggression than of Yeltsin’s manipulation, Khasbulatov singled out the media for increasingly vitriolic criticism. He would denounce the media’s support for Yeltsin at the time of the April 1993 referendum as ‘information terror, right up to the utilisation of means of waging psychological war which are banned by the Geneva convention.’144 The culmination of Khasbulatov’s war was the passage of a resolution by the 9th Congress of People’s Deputies ‘On Measures to Secure Freedom of Speech on State Television and in the Information Services,’ which provided for the establishment of parliamentary ‘oversight councils’ to monitor the activities of the electronic media. Castigating this attempt to replace the ‘semi-monopoly’ with a ‘giant monopoly,’ press minister Fedotov lamented that ‘the clock of glasnost and freedom is being wound ten years back.’145 But the pressure on glasnost did not only come from authoritarian elements in the parliament. Despite Yeltsin’s efforts to pose as the defender of press freedom, powerful figures in his own entourage were profoundly hostile towards journalists who exercised their freedom in the wrong way. In particular, Mikhail Poltoranin, first as press minister and then as head of the Federal Information Centre, provoked journalistic protests about the ‘unprecedented’ pressure he exerted on their activities.146 At one notorious meeting with media representatives, Poltoranin lambasted the ‘egotism’ of those journalists in state television who were unable to understand that the authorities had a right to expect that they would carry out government policy.147 The pressure on the media reached a new level of intensity during the failed parliamentary rebellion of October 1993. First, an armed parliamentary mob attacked the Ostankino television complex. Then, the victorious Yeltsin regime instituted a regime of censorship under the state of emergency. This crackdown was encouraged in an open letter from forty-two prominent reformist writers.148 A solitary voice of protest was raised by the former dissident Andrei Sinyavskii, who condemned the closure of opposition newspapers, and declared that ‘today I am prepared to intercede for my enemy, for my most beloved woman is in danger—free speech.’149 One week later, his intercession was joined by his inveterate rivals Vladimov Maksimov and Petr Egides, who co-signed a statement in Nezavisimaya Gazeta that lambasted the forty-two for their readiness to shut the mouths of their opponents.150 The media was to remain a political battleground throughout the 1990s, but the dissident notion of glasnost had prevailed over the propagandistic glasnost of the foremen of perestroika. There was no more potent symbol of the demise of the original project of perestroika than Gorbachev’s decision, in early 1993, to join the dissidents Andrei Sinyavskii and Sergei Kovalyov in the ‘Free Press’ Foundation, headed by

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Nezavisimaya Gazeta editor Vitalii Tretyakov.151 But the most influential free-speech initiative of the post-Soviet decade was the ‘Glasnost Defence Foundation,’ created in June 1991 on the initiative of the Film Makers’ Union.152 Throughout the 1990s, it tenaciously defended Russian journalists from the attacks of the authorities, using the weapon of glasnost to repulse attacks on glasnost. Three decades after the original Pushkin Square demonstration, a new generation of human rights activists was invoking glasnost as its rallying cry in defence of freedom of expression.

3 The rights-defenders The matter is not only that the law reigns in the state. The question is: which law, what principles of law? (Sergei Kovalyov, addressing the 1991 Sakharov Congress)1

Dissidents were at the vanguard of the struggle for human rights and a law-abiding state in Russia. From their first public protests in the mid-1960s until well into the Yeltsin era, dissidents demanded that the Kremlin obey its own imperfect laws, its constitution, and its international legal obligations. They reinforced these demands in their own activity, behaving as free citizens in an unfree society. In the face of repression and illegality, the dissidents insisted upon their rights and upon the legal process with a persistence that verged upon pedantry and the surreal. Consider this exchange, recorded by the Chronicle, between the dissident Oleg Popov and KGB investigator Kudryavtsev, who attempted to cut short an interrogation after refusing a demand to explain a legal term: POPOV: You are an investigator, and, as laid down in the Code of Criminal Procedure, you are obliged to explain the contents of articles 181 and 182 to witnesses. KUDRYAVTSEV: No, I will not do it. And we will not argue about it. You, Popov, are refusing to be interrogated. You are free to go. Leave! POPOV: No, I have come here for interrogation, and intend to be interrogated. I will write your refusal to explain article 182 to the witness into the interrogation record (Popov starts to write down the investigator’s words). KUDRYAVTSEV: What are you writing? POPOV: It’s not for you; I just don’t want to forget what to put in the record later. KUDRYAVTSEV: You’re not writing it for me, but you’re using my Criminal Code. POPOV: Do have it back, good heavens. I have my own copy (Popov gets out a criminal code). KUDRYAVTSEV: You say that you do not know the laws and yet you carry a Criminal Code with you. POPOV: I carry it because I don’t remember it, i.e., I don’t know it. By the way, I’ve also brought a copy of the Code of Criminal Procedure.2 The exasperation of the authorities at this kind of behaviour was exemplified by a psychiatrist examining Vladimir Bukovskii, the organiser of the first Constitution Day demonstration:

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You keep talking about the Constitution and the laws, but what normal person takes Soviet law seriously? You are living in an unreal world of your own invention; you react inadequately to the world around you.3 During the perestroika era, dissidents played a conspicuous role in the struggle to transform this ‘unreal world of their own invention’ into the institutions of a liberal democratic state. They spearheaded the attack on the constitutionally guaranteed supremacy of the Communist Party. They shaped the human rights provisions of the Russian Constitution. They campaigned for the creation of such institutional safeguards as the Constitutional Court and the office of Ombudsman. At the same time, they were the most vociferous and effective opponents of attempts to curtail and violate basic human rights. The connection between the dissident struggle for legality and the establishment of democratic institutions in Russia has attracted little scholarly interest. During the 1970s, Sovietologists like Walter Connor dismissed dissident concerns as irrelevant to ‘the masses [who] do not demand legality, representative institutions, freedom; these are unfamiliar and exotic concepts…the interest in freedom and the rule of law is not broad enough, is not sufficiently a “mass” interest to make its accommodation critical.’4 Such generalisations were frequently theorised in terms of cultural stereotypes. Richard Pipes traced the failure of the democratic opposition to its alienation from Russian culture: The notions of law and universal human rights lack deep roots in the consciousness of the Russian people. A Westerner is prone to regard these concepts as innate to man and their absence as intolerable deprivation. In reality, they are the product of a unique cultural tradition that originated in Stoic philosophy and was transmitted to the West through Roman jurisprudence…. In the course of its historical evolution, Russia has failed to come within the orbit of classical influence…. The average Russian may have an instinctive sense of justice; he reacts strongly, even violently, when he feels he has been wronged. But he lacks a consciousness of legality.5 Not even the collapse of the Soviet Union provoked a serious re-examination of the accepted wisdom. Samuel Huntington even warned about a widening gulf with the West, ‘as the Russians stopped behaving like Marxists and began behaving like Russians’: The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism was between ideologies that, despite their major differences, were both modern and secular, and ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality, and material well-being. A Western democrat could carry on an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be impossible for him to do that with a Russian Orthodox nationalist.6 Such generalisations not only exonerate Marxism from its responsibility for Soviet legal nihilism and contempt for human rights. By setting up an opposition between liberal democracy and Russian nationalism, they also accord closely with Soviet propaganda

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attacks on dissidents as bearers of foreign values, and with the stab-in-the-back rhetoric of anti-democratic forces in post-Soviet Russian politics. Despite the hackneyed stereotypes dispensed by cultural determinists, dissident legalists did not emerge from a vacuum. The legalist tradition in nineteenth-century Russian liberalism, which culminated in the Constitutional Democratic Party, may have been devastated by Bolshevik repression, but its legacy was invaluable for future legalists: a usable past, a place to stand on the ground of their own culture and history. The persistence of this tradition was exemplified by Revolt Pimenov, a member of the RSFSR constitutional commission, who had first been arrested in 1957 for activities that foreshadowed the dissident legalists of the 1970s: The goal of our activity was formulated most precisely in the proposal to form a constitutional-communist party. The idea is clear to those who know the history of the Constitutional Democratic Party in Russia. Recognising Tsarism as autocracy, the Constitutional Democrats nevertheless sought to restrict it by law and build a law-governed state. We were also prepared to recognise the Communist party as an autocratic ruler if only its power was restricted constitutionally.7 The definitive statement of pre-revolutionary legalism was Kistyakovskii’s essay ‘In Defence of Law’ in the Vekhi anthology, a polemic against the intelligentsia’s legal nihilism. It is usually cited as evidence of Russia’s innate lawlessness, not as evidence of an emerging legalist tradition, yet it became a vital document for dissident legalists and for perestroika-era reformers. According to Boris Shragin, the essay was ‘perhaps especially important to the formulation of principles of democratic protest in the postStalin era.’8 The lineage of pre-revolutionary legalism can also be traced to dissident legalists on a personal level. Andrei Sakharov’s grandfather was an eminent liberal barrister, who had edited a famous collection of essays against capital punishment.9 Dina Kaminskaya, one of the most tenacious dissident lawyers, was the daughter of a Kadet Party candidate in the elections to the Constituent Assembly.10 The cultural determinists also ignore the magnitude and the pervasiveness of the repressive apparatus that had been nurtured by seven decades of totalitarianism: the interior ministry, the procurator’s office, a subservient judiciary, and above all the KGB. It was these security interests, not any inherited notions of tsarist autocracy, that instigated attacks on human rights during Russia’s transition, which subverted institutional reform, and which fomented the catastrophic war in Chechnya. Acquiring the lexicon of reform, the ‘power ministries’ promoted a conception of the law that was based upon the interests of the state. Only in the context of this project, supported by a vast conglomeration of institutional interests, can the achievement of the dissident rightsdefenders be understood. Russia’s post-Soviet constitutional predicament is not to be blamed on the fact that Russians are ‘again behaving like Russians,’ devoid of legal consciousness. It is rather the result of a struggle over the nature of legality, over whether a law-abiding state would be founded upon the claims of state security or the rights of the individual. What has been accomplished is above all the work of a group of Russians with a profound sense of legality and of the interconnection of law and human rights. Their views were crystallised in the dissident movement.

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The pravozashchitniki The late 1960s saw the emergence of a kind of dissident known as a pravozashchitnik, usually mistranslated as ‘human rights activist.’ But the term suggests a defender both of rights and of the law. To this end, the pravozashchitniki acquired an extraordinary level of erudition about the principles of human rights and the letter of the law of Soviet legislation. They also engaged in an apparently hopeless struggle to defend victims of repression, by publicising their plight and by helping their families. These preoccupations produced cross-currents of tension in dissident ranks during the 1970s: between those who saw legalism as a means of struggle against the regime, and those who treated legality as an end in itself; between those who emphasised inalienable human rights, and those who emphasised the letter of the law; between those who saw themselves as engaged in an essentially humanitarian activity, and those who advocated the overthrow of the Soviet dictatorship. But this tension was also constructive: it shaped the characteristic dissident notion of legality, which was founded upon the citizen and his rights, not upon the prerogatives of the state. The pravozashchitniki began as defenders of the Soviet constitution. It was a surprising development, for the constitution was infamous as an instrument of Stalinist propaganda, promulgated on the eve of the terror of 1937–8. Although celebrated by the Soviet regime as the ‘world’s most democratic constitution,’ Justice Minister Nikolai Krylenko noted at the time that it also ‘provided for the extermination of the enemies of the people.’11 Those enemies included not only the author of the constitu-tion’s civil rights chapter, Nikolai Bukharin, but also Krylenko himself. It took the cold logic of Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin, an eminent mathematician and a political prisoner during the Stalin period, to intuit the possibilities of this notorious document. As early as 1961, Volpin was arguing in private conversation that the Stalin constitution was ‘a good document, as was the Soviet legal code,’ but that ‘Soviet citizens had been conditioned to act as if they had no rights’ and that ‘the state had come to encroach on individual rights because individuals had yet to band together to defend those rights.’12 Vladimir Bukovskii, who came under Volpin’s influence during this period, later recalled of their late-night arguments: Volpin’s idea…came down to this. We reject this regime not because it calls itself socialist—there is no law defining socialism and therefore citizens are not obliged to know what it is—but because it is based on coercion and lawlessness, tries to impose its ideology on people by force and obliges everyone to lie and be hypocrites. We wish to live in a state ruled by law, where law is unshakeable and the rights of all citizens are protected, where it would be possible not to lie without risking the loss of our freedom. So let us live in such a state. We, the people, are the State. Whatever we are will mould the character of the State. A close examination of the laws we have been given fully supports such an interpretation. Let us, therefore, like good citizens of our country, observe the laws as we understand them, that is as they are written. We are obliged to submit to nothing but the law. So let us defend our laws from being

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encroached upon by the authorities. We are on the side of the law. They are against it.13 Incited by Volpin to put this theory into practice, Bukovskii organised the first glasnost demonstration on Constitution Day, 5 December 1965, in protest against the impending trial of Daniel and Sinyavskii. One of the banners, held by Volpin, proclaimed, ‘Respect the Soviet constitution.’ The loyalist tone of this slogan perturbed one of the other demonstrators, the student Oleg Vorobev, who felt like leaving the square. Three decades later, he recalled that ‘I was already an anti-communist, and honestly, in no way could I respect [the Soviet constitution].’14 A different kind of indignation was expressed by an interrogator who asked the arrested Volpin, ‘And here you write, “Respect the constitution.” What are you saying? That someone is not respecting the constitution?’ Volpin retorted that ‘if a person, standing on Constitution Day with such an inscription is dragged from the square, then, it would seem, these people do not particularly respect the constitution.’15 It was a classic illustration not only of the logic that earned Volpin several terms in psychiatric prisons, but also of the predicament of the authorities, who were faced with a challenge that did not fit the traditional criteria of subversion or anti-Soviet activity. During the ensuing years, defence of the law provided a common cause around which diverse social groups began to form the Moscow dissident milieu. In early 1967, there was still a vast social gulf between eminent intellectuals with established careers like Academician Sakharov and rebellious activists in the youth subculture like Vladimir Bukovskii. Their impending convergence was heralded and facilitated by their common concern for legality and civil liberties. The passage of two repressive amendments to the RSFSR Criminal Code, articles 190/1 (against the dissemination of ‘deliberately false statements derogatory to the Soviet state and social system’) and 190/3 (against ‘grave breaches of public order’), provoked protests from both groups. Twenty prominent Soviet intellectuals, including Sakharov and eight other academicians, addressed an appeal to the RSFSR Supreme Soviet. They warned that the articles opened the way to ‘subjective and arbitrary interpretation of any statement as deliberately false and derogatory to the Soviet state and social system.’ In a loyalist tone, they concluded that the amendments were contrary to ‘the Leninist principles of socialist democracy’ and represented ‘a potential obstacle to the exercise of liberties guaranteed by the Constitution of the USSR.’16 The same idea was brought into Pushkin Square on 22 January 1967 by a group of young demonstrators protesting against recent arrests. Their banners called for the release of the prisoners and the revision of the ‘anti-constitutional decree’ by which the Supreme Soviet had amended the Criminal Code.17 The organiser of that demonstration, Vladimir Bukovskii, transformed his trial into a milestone in the struggle for a law and human rights-abiding state. His defiant final speech was not only a passionate defence of the constitution, but also a lesson in the uses of the law, as he rebutted the interjections of prosecutor and judge. ‘We demonstrated for legality,’ he declared, and proceeded to offer a detailed legal explanation of why both articles 70 and 190/1 contradicted article 125 of the constitution, which guaranteed freedom of speech and assembly. When the judge interrupted him to offer the condescending suggestion that he might one day study law at university ‘and discuss these questions on a more sophisticated level,’ Bukovskii retorted that ‘I do know the

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laws’ and that if ‘what I am saying is so well known, then I am still more at a loss to understand how the Prosecutor can think that to criticise the laws is a crime.’18 Following Volpin’s exhortation to demand the implementation of the law as it is written, Bukovskii concluded: ‘If these articles about freedom of speech and of the press have been put into the Constitution, then the Government must have the patience to listen to criticism.’19 Not only defendants, but also even lawyers were beginning to demand adherence to the law. For three prominent Moscow barristers—Dina Kaminskaya, Sofia Kalistratova, and Boris Zolotukhin—the next major political trial, the Ginzburg-Galanskov case of early 1968, became an initiation into dissidence. Soviet judicial tradition required that defence lawyers go through a ritual of dissociating themselves from politically suspect clients, but instead Zolotukhin opened his defence with the historic words, ‘I have the honour to defend Aleksandr Ginzburg.’20 He demolished the prosecution case, declared that ‘I need not dwell on Ginzburg’s moral virtues, as, whether he is a good or an evil man, I can confidently state that he is not a guilty one,’ and called for the complete acquittal of his client.21 This violation of legal convention provoked prompt reprisals. In rapid succession, Zolotukhin was expelled from the Communist Party for the ‘non-party, non-Soviet line of his defence,’ then from the Collegium of Lawyers, and finally removed from his post as head of a legal consultation office.22 His persecutors could not have imagined that two decades later Zolotukhin would play a central role in the reform of the Russian judiciary, the creation of the constitutional court, and the drafting of a new constitution. Similar disgrace and ultimate vindication awaited Kaminskaya and Kalistratova, who were both barred from political cases a few years later. Kaminskaya was pressured into emigrating, after the KGB confiscated a manuscript about corruption by her husband, the jurist Konstantin Simis.23 The investigation of her case also led to Boris Zolotukhin’s second expulsion from the Communist Party.24 But exile in the West enabled Kaminskaya to become a powerful voice for legality, as a regular broadcaster on Radio Liberty’s ‘Law and Society’ programme.25 More gradual, but ultimately far more radical, was Kalistratova’s trajectory from eminent defence lawyer to dissident defendant. After her forced retirement, Kalistratova offered legal consultations to Sakharov’s petitioners, advised the Group to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, joined the Moscow Helsinki Group, and was finally charged in 1982, in a case that was only dropped in 1988.26 The trials of the late 1960s also served as a catalyst for the formation of the rightsdefence movement. During the spring of 1968, the podpisanty, signatories of a series of collective letters in defence of Ginzburg and Galanskov, were subjected to systematic persecution. The result was a parting of the ways between the irresolute and the intransigent. Those who recanted saved their careers but disappeared from the annals of the movement. Those who remained defiant were radicalised by the experience of persecution—demotions and dismissals from work, expulsions from the party—and went on to play crucial roles in the rights-defence movement of the 1970s. Emboldened by their defiance and worried by the erosion of their milieu, these activists began to discuss ways of giving institutional form to their amorphous movement. At a meeting at Aleksei Kosterin’s dacha in 1968, Andrei Amalrik proposed the creation of a ‘Committee to Defend the Constitution.’27 What finally emerged a year later was the ‘Initiative Group on Human Rights,’ a title assumed by fifteen signatories to a petition to the UN Human Rights Commission. Except for their future prominence as dissidents, the fifteen had little

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in common: they ranged from paradigmatic rights-defenders like Sergei Kovalyov, Tatyana Velikanova, and Aleksandr Lavut to the Marxist Leonid Plyushch and the Crimean Tatar activist Mustafa Dzhemilev. Explaining their decision to appeal to the UN, the signatories recalled that the Soviet authorities had ignored previous protests, and ‘the hope that our voices might be heard, that the authorities would put an end to the lawless acts to which we have repeatedly drawn attention—this hope has proved to be in vain.’28 But in its content and its choice of addressee, the appeal was clearly a legalist initiative. It enumerated political trials of the late 1960s, where defendants were prosecuted merely for exercising the right to impart information, a right enshrined in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At a time when reform-communist dissidents were seeking to influence the Soviet authorities by appeals to the World Conference of Communist Parties, to petition a minor and corrupted institution in the UN bureaucracy was an apparently modest step, unless one treated UN human rights documents as literally as the pravozashchitniki treated the Soviet constitution. In effect, the Initiative Group was exhorting the UN: ‘Observe your own declarations.’ An explicit avowal of the Initiative Group’s legalist premises came one year later, in its ‘statement of purposes’: The Initiative Group is not engaged in politics and does not propose any sort of constructive solutions in this area. But it is unwilling to accept the policy of penalising and persecuting dissenters. The Initiative Group’s cause is opposition to illegality.29 The Initiative Group’s renunciation of politics and opposition to illegality offered no protection from repression—half of its membership was already incarcerated—but it did define the essence of the legalist cause for decades to come. As the first dissident public association, the Initiative Group’s greatest achievement may have been as a precedent for the emergence of an embryonic civil society in the rights-defence milieu. Its example was certainly taken into account by Valerii Chalidze, when he founded an unofficial Committee on Human Rights in November 1970. Unlike the amorphous Initiative Group, Chalidze’s Committee functioned within a framework defined by its founding statutes, which defined it as ‘a creative association acting in accordance with the laws of the land.’ It offered ‘consultative assistance to the organs of government in the establishment and application of guarantees of human rights, carried out on the initiative of the Committee or of interested organs of government.’ Portraying itself as an scholarly body, it also offered its services to ‘persons engaged in constructive research into the theoretical aspects of the human rights question and in study of the specific nature of this question in a socialist society’ and affirmed its goal of ‘legal enlightenment, in particular the propaganda of international and Soviet legal documents on human rights.’30 When the KGB warned him that the Committee existed in violation of the 1932 ‘Regulations relating to voluntary societies and unions,’ Chalidze defended himself with the ‘laws of the land,’ arguing that the regulations did not apply to the Committee, which as a creative association like a collective of authors ‘does not require registration of any sort but permits agreement to be reached between the authors,’ under the terms of article 482 of the Civil Code. With provocative bravado, he added that ‘the prospect of criminal proceedings being taken is distinctly alluring, as this would make it

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possible to examine, in open judicial debate, the state of the law and of current practice regarding the right of association.’31 The activities of the Initiative Group and Chalidze’s Committee were linked to different aspects of samizdat. The Initiative Group included many key figures in the underground Chronicle of Current Events, which exemplified pravozashchitnik values by defending victims of repression, by documenting official illegalities, and by demonstrating how citizens could use the law to protect their rights. By contrast, the Committee emerged from the more specialised literature of samizdat legal studies, which was centred upon Chalidze’s journal Social Problems. Two of its regular contributors were Boris Tsukerman and Volpin, who would both become ‘experts’ of the Committee. Tsukerman was famous for his ‘judicial symphonies’: collections of his correspondence with Soviet governmental institutions over particular violations of the law. When an institution failed to respond or demonstrated its ignorance of the law, Tsukerman would report the lapse to the next-higher institution, gradually proceeding through the bureaucratic hierarchy until he reached the Prosecutor’s Office.32 A samizdat volume of these exchanges, titled Debates about the Law, covered issues ranging from freedom of the press to discrimination against students for their convictions, from the length of detention without trial to the presumption of innocence.33 Probably of more practical use was an article by Volpin on how to behave during interrogations, which provided information that the Chronicle described as ‘indispensable to anyone under interrogation who wishes to avoid either a possible violation of legality or becoming an unknowing accomplice to such a violation.’34 The most contentious debate in the pravozashchitnik milieu during the early 1970s revolved around the question of political opposition. Pure legalists were defined by a rejection of politics. They denied that they were anti-Soviet, that they aspired to the role of a political opposition, and even that their collective activity constituted a movement. The incarnation of this position was Chalidze, who repeatedly expressed frustration at misconceptions about his true motives: some people thought that the Committee was aspiring to leadership of what they called the democratic movement; others hoped the Committee would become its leader; some believed that the formation of the Committee marked the birth of a political opposition in the USSR; while others marvelled at how intelligent people could embark on such a futile exercise.35 A similar aversion towards political aspirations is reflected in the Chronicle’s criticism of the samizdat journal Demokrat, produced by a small underground organisation in Estonia, which spoke under the pretentious name of the ‘Democratic Movement of the Soviet Union.’ It was, according to the Chronicle, ‘indulging in wishful thinking and thereby confusing the reader.’36 But the focus of legalist resentment was the People’s Labour Union (NTS), the secretive Russian émigré organisation that sponsored the Frankfurt-based journals Grani and Posev. Through a system of couriers, NTS kept both journals well supplied with samizdat, and became the most important publisher of dissident materials in the late 1960s. At the same time, the struggle against NTS played an increasingly central role in

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Soviet repression and propaganda. Links to NTS were the basic accusations in the indictments against Bukovskii, Ginzburg, and Galanskov. Publication of samizdat works in NTS journals was used to discredit established intellectuals like Solzhenitsyn and Tvardovskii. To avoid a similar fate, the statutes of Chalidze’s Committee specifically ruled out any co-operation with organisations that sought the overthrow of the Soviet state.37 The more amorphous Initiative Group was divided by intense argument about the clandestine links that two members, Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov and Viktor Krasin, maintained with NTS. Anatolii Yakobson resigned from the group after an NTS courier arrived at his apartment in the mistaken belief that he was a fellow conspirator.38 No less hostile to NTS were Tatyana Velikanova and Aleksandr Lavut, and particularly Sergei Kovalyov, whom LevitinKrasnov described as ‘my constant, untiring opponent.’39 Instead of political subversion, the legalists hoped to facilitate reform by changing public attitudes towards the law. In his first report to the Human Rights Committee, Chalidze declared that its chief task was ‘to promote the growth of legal consciousness in society,’ since ‘we can hope for serious progress in the defence of human rights only after an advance in the legal consciousness of the people, including those in power.’40 The kind of legal consciousness that Chalidze sought to instil was inextricably linked to the idea of inalienable individual rights, which he theorised for the first time in samizdat. Contesting the claim in the RSFSR’s former civil code that rights were granted by the state to citizens, Chalidze contended that ‘these rights inhere in man as the subject of these rights and the State can defend these rights, restrict or violate these rights, but cannot grant them.’41 The corollary was Chalidze’s second tenet, the notion that for the citizen, ‘anything not prohibited is permitted.’ Such ideas, which became prevalent in rights-defence circles, were important as an antidote to a central thesis of the Kremlin’s project for a law-abiding totalitarian state: that rights were granted by the state in return for the citizens’ performance of duties. Two decades later, rights-defenders would incorporate the idea that ‘basic human rights and freedoms are inalienable and belong to everyone from birth’ in the opening of the second chapter of the Russian Federation constitution.42 Despite his predilection for theory, Chalidze’s efforts to foster a law-abiding state and society had a practical, humanitarian dimension. He regarded knowledge about the law and court practices to be a way of keeping people out of jail, and later boasted that ‘I believe I was successful in preventing several demonstrations, the organisation of tens of committees, the publication of quite a few sharp protests, and even one self-immolation.’ The Committee attracted a large volume of correspondence from victims of various injustices at the hands of the authorities, and Chalidze used his legal expertise to defend a series of these petitioners, including refuseniks, prisoners wrongly sentenced, and a religious community denied registration.43 After the Committee’s demise, this role was continued by Sakharov, whose prestigious status as academician had always attracted the preponderance of the Committee’s mail. After her forced retirement, the lawyer Sofia Kalistratova would draft replies for him, ‘explaining legal points and offering wise counsel,’ and Sakharov ‘would discuss the letters with her and then sign them.’44 These earnest efforts to help citizens against the omnipotent bureaucracy can be regarded as the genesis of a major dissident-inspired legislative initiative of the 1990s: the creation of the office of Ombudsman.

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Chalidze’s attempt to establish dialogue between state and society earned little gratitude from either camp. Irritated by his presumptuous offers of assistance, by his role in fomenting the international attack on Soviet psychiatric abuse, and by his meetings with US congressmen, the authorities subjected Chalidze to growing pressure during 1972. Meanwhile, anti-communist dissidents were offended by Chalidze’s dismissive attitude towards heroic gestures and were suspicious of his eagerness to assist the authorities. Their resentment on both counts was aggravated in 1972 by Chalidze’s resignation from the Committee and his departure on a lecture tour to the USA, which seemed to confirm Chalidze’s cowardice, and to suggest a tacit agreement with the KGB. Solzhenitsyn, who had been surprised to learn of his appointment as one of the Committee’s ‘corresponding members,’ wrote scathingly in his memoirs about Chalidze’s desire to advise ‘the cannibals (when requested) on the rights of those they were eating alive,’ and complained that ‘Sakharov allowed this Committee to absorb much of his time and energy, spreading them thinly over pedantic debates, fruitless inquiries, and Chalidze’s prevarications, when what was needed was action.’45 Although he contested this judgement, Sakharov himself publicly chastised Chalidze for his departure, and his inevitable forfeiture of Soviet citizenship. The loss of patience amongst Chalidze’s peers was also evident when a new member of the Committee, Grigorii Podyapolskii, suggested that Chalidze’s departure would bring a reorientation of the Committee’s work from ‘legal studies’ to case studies, and in particular the misuse of psychiatry.46 Emigration may have undermined the legalists, but it also opened new horizons. After their departure in the early 1970s, Volpin and Tsukerman played little further role in the rights-defence movement. But in 1973, Chalidze became editor of Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, a tamizdat counterpart to the beleaguered Chronicle of Current Events. It was published under the aegis of Khronika Press, a subsidiary of the Chekhov Press established in 1968 by Ed Kline and Max Hayward. Chalidze was joined at Khronika Press by Pavel Litvinov, who published a legalist manifesto in the anthology Samosoznanie.47 The third wave of emigration also brought prominent rights-defenders into contact with previous, anti-Soviet waves. Debates that had once resounded in Moscow kitchens were now replayed in the West. The first Sakharov Congress produced a particularly acrimonious clash, after five recent émigrés issued a statement arguing that since the proceedings were devoted to the subject of human rights in the USSR, they should not ‘become transformed into a political struggle.’48 One of the signatories, Boris Shragin, also evoked indignation when he recommended that the journal Vestnik R.Kh.D. ‘must guarantee itself against accusations of anti-Sovietism.’49 Far more significant for the radicalisation of the rights-defenders was the adoption of the new Soviet constitution in October 1977, which provoked a barrage of samizdat criticism. This constitutional debate was virtually ignored in the West: one prominent Moscow correspondent even claimed that ‘the dissidents issued no detailed analysis of the Soviet constitution…or any appraisal of the political and judicial rights contained and limited in the document.’50 In fact their criticism was detailed, prescient, subversive, and constructive. One of the most impressive responses was the open letter to Brezhnev from Sofia Kalistratova, who lamented that the new document ‘does not broaden democracy, but narrows it even by comparison with the existing constitution.’51 The source of dissident indignation was two-fold: the Brezhnev constitution both eroded the rights of

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citizens, and entrenched the supremacy of the ruling party. In an obvious move to undermine the constitutional basis for dissent, article 39 stipulated that in the exercise of their rights, ‘citizens may not injure the interests of society and the state or the rights of other citizens.’52 At the same time, article 6 affirmed the ‘leading role’ of the Communist Party. An open letter to the Politburo from twelve prominent dissidents pointed to the contradiction between this article and the constitution’s affirmation of popular sovereignty. Reversing the traditional legalist argument, they provocatively suggested that the constitution should reflect the reality of the one-party state: If supreme power in this country has been legally given to the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, let that be stated in the Constitution, without any attempt to hide the ‘Partyocratic’ nature of that power by referring to ‘the power of the people’. There are in this world monarchies, one-man dictatorships and theocratic states; why should there not be a state where supreme authority is held by a group of party leaders? However, in that case, it should not be called a democracy.53 What is remarkable about the samizdat reaction to the Brezhnev constitution is the extent to which it foreshadowed the democratic agenda for constitutional reform in late perestroika years, when Andrei Sakharov spearheaded the attack on article 6 in the Congress of People’s Deputies. Even such institutional measures as the creation of a Constitutional Court to determine how far laws were in accordance with the constitution were discussed by the Letter of the Twelve, by Kalistratova, and by Kronid Lyubarskii (who would become a delegate to the Constitutional Assembly in 1993). They also argued for the introduction of the jury system, for guarantees of judicial independence, and for the right of citizens to stand for public office as representatives of groups of citizens.54 This last proposal was acted upon in 1979, when a group styled ‘Vybor-79’ attempted to nominate the dissident historian Roy Medvedev as a candidate in the elections to the Supreme Soviet, a post to which he would be elected only a decade later at the height of perestroika. The new constitution also strengthened a tendency amongst rights-defenders to prefer international human rights documents over Soviet law. Interest in such documents had been stimulated by Soviet propaganda about 1968 as ‘International Human Rights Year.’ From its first issue in April 1968, the covers of the Chronicle had quoted not the Soviet constitution, but article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on freedom of expression. A year later, the Initiative Group demanded the observance of this article in its open letter to the United Nations. This appeal elicited little response beyond official irritation, but a genuine dialogue was established between Chalidze’s Committee and the International League for Human Rights and Amnesty International. Links with the latter were developed by a former member of the Committee, Andrei Tverdokhlebov, who established ‘Group 73,’ the basis for the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International. Although relations between these dissidents and Amnesty’s head office were often strained, the initiative did reflect the rights-defenders’ basic affinity with Amnesty’s minimalist goals and strictly non-political stance.55 But the turning point for the proponents of international human rights came in August 1975, when the Soviet regime celebrated the conclusion of the Helsinki Final Act as a momentous historical occasion:

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Izvestiya hailed it as the greatest event in Europe since the defeat of Hitler, and termed the Final Act ‘a law of international life.’56 In what almost amounted to an incitement to dissident legalists, another Soviet commentator declared that ‘the signatures affixed to the Final Act have also a legal significance—they make it a binding international document.’57 What aroused such enthusiasm from the Kremlin was the West’s apparent recognition of East European borders, but the Final Act also contained minimal but significant human rights provisions, which the Soviet authorities clearly had no intention of implementing. This gulf between propaganda and practice was exploited by Yurii Orlov, a member of the Amnesty chapter, who in May 1976 announced the creation of the Moscow Helsinki Group. In its documents, the group based its activities upon the human rights provisions of the Final Act, and made few references to Soviet legislation. The break with traditional practice was emphasized by Orlov in a 1989 interview, in which he denied that the movement’s basic principle was ‘observe your own laws’: I did not have such an approach. For me, laws were international agreements about human rights. It seems that the rights-defenders movement did not have such a common slogan.58 The new emphasis was symbolised by a change in the date of the rights-defenders’ annual silent demonstration in Pushkin Square. In 1977, it was shifted five days forward, from Constitution Day to International Human Rights Day.59 Yet the Helsinki Group represented an evolution, rather than an abandonment, of the pravozashchitnik ethos. Like Chalidze’s Committee, the Helsinki Group offered to assist the authorities to implement reform: its official title was the ‘Moscow Group to Assist the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords in the Soviet Union.’ Like earlier defenders of the constitution, the Helsinki Group called upon the authorities to fulfil obligations that they had voluntarily assumed. But by appealing to international law, the Helsinki Group did introduce a new standard by which to judge Soviet law. The comparison would become a leitmotif in the programmatic documents of the democratic movement of the 1990s, as it attempted to create a constitutional and judicial order that met international standards. Growing contempt for the abuses of Soviet law in the late 1970s also provoked a samizdat controversy over the merits of going through the motions of defending oneself in trials where the outcome was preordained. A new form of passive resistance was pioneered by Aleksandr Podrabinek, who refused to participate in his 1978 trial, announcing that ‘I have no artistic talent and therefore shall not take part in this show, even as an extra.’ When the court ignored this request, Podrabinek secured his removal by smoking and singing Bizet’s ‘Torreador Song.’60 This approach was praised in a samizdat interview with Valerii Abramkin, an editor of the beleaguered samizdat journal Poiski, who offered a detailed account of ‘the pros and cons of participating in the pathetic juridical farce.’ But at his own trial, Abramkin chose to participate in the farce, claiming that his responses to judge, prosecutor, and witnesses were an attempt to enter into a dialogue with the regime.61 No such illusions were harboured by Tatyana Velikanova, who justified her silence at her August 1980 trial by reference to the law: ‘By participating in this trial, I would be collaborating in an unlawful act. I respect the law, and therefore, I refuse to take part in this trial.’ When the verdict was handed down, she responded: ‘The farce is over.’62 This contempt for the judicial process was endorsed

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by four prominent dissidents on the ‘Committee to Defend Tatyana Velikanova,’ who noted that ‘it is pointless to talk about violations of the law in Velikanova’s case,’ because ‘there was never a whiff of the law.’63 The dissident preoccupation with legality had immense repercussions. Despite Sovietological verities about the average Russian’s lack of legal consciousness, the dissidents exhibited a highly developed legal consciousness under conditions of persecution and lawlessness. Their commitment to legality was not to be measured by slogans about the ‘law-abiding state,’ but by terms in prisons and labour camps. This experience reinforced their evolving notion of legality as inextricably bound up with human rights. When they returned from captivity, they were naturally sceptical about the rhetoric of legality that issued from the lips of their former persecutors. The result was one of the defining struggles in the history not only of perestroika, but also of post-Soviet Russia.

Constitutional illiberalism Like the dissidents, the architects of perestroika could see the benefits of legality and the idea of a ‘law-abiding state.’ Already under Brezhnev, the claims of legality had been a standard riposte to criticism of the Soviet human rights record: dissidents had violated the law, and were being punished in accordance with the law. As the crisis of the system deepened, first Andropov and then Gorbachev employed the discourse of legality to bolster the existing order and to justify repression aimed at preserving it. The initial ideological impetus of perestroika may have been a return to Leninist purity, but this growing preoccupation with the ‘law-abiding state’ was a profound repudiation of Bolshevik legal nihilism and of Lenin’s description of the dictatorship of the proletariat as ‘rule unlimited by any law.’ Soviet legal scholars of the 1920s like Stuchka had even proposed that ‘communism means not only the victory of socialist law, but the victory of socialism over any law, since with the abolition of classes with their antagonistic interests, law will die out altogether.’64 If the 1936 Stalin constitution marked the formal abandonment of this aspiration, its essentially propagandist function also represented a kind of apotheosis of Soviet legal nihilism: it provided not a law-abiding state, but a lawabiding façade. Despite their converging preoccupation with legality, the official reformists and the dissidents differed profoundly on the nature and the function of a law-abiding state. For the pravozashchitniki, law was inextricably bound up with the defence of rights. For the official legalists, law meant the defence of the state and the denial of rights to its critics. As perestroika entered its terminal crisis, the defence of the Soviet constitution became a final justification for the regime’s existence, helping to fill the vacuum left by the discrediting of the official ideology and the fragmentation of the Communist Party. Democrats and national separatists, reformers and radicals, were all exposed in the documents of the security apparatus as perpetrators of ‘anti-constitutional activity.’ It was no coincidence that much of the impetus of the official campaign for a lawabiding state came from the KGB, the Committee for State Security. For two decades the KGB had been the target of incessant dissident criticism for the illegalities and violations of the constitution that were recorded in the Chronicle. Dissidents openly mocked the

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KGB’s disdain for legality. In a 1972 open letter to Andropov, Valerii Chalidze noted patronisingly that when the KGB confiscated his works on jurisprudence, ‘I am surprised, but I am consoled by the hope that a reading of these works will help to raise the level of legal consciousness at your institution.’65 By the end of the decade, attitudes had hardened. For the novelist Georgii Vladimov, the KGB’s practice was akin not to a lawenforcement, but to a terrorist, organisation: They are engaged in various forms of oppression and blackmail: anonymous letters, anonymous phone calls, the appearance of fraudulent documents in Moscow and abroad signed in your name, the opening of letters, the tapping of phone conversations. Each of us could add to this— in fact you would need a separate study to list all their dirty tricks…but one already has an overall impression, and it is incontrovertible and unambiguous: an underground terrorist organisation is busily at work, the only difference being that it is not hounded by the government—it is the government.66 The impact of this indictment of lawlessness was magnified by Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which drew an explicit connection between contemporary lawlessness and the crimes of the Cheka during the Bolshevik Revolution. When Yurii Andropov delivered his Dzerzhinskii centenary speech in 1977, he felt compelled not only to affirm his commitment to socialist legality, but also to defend the Chekists: Enemies claimed that the dictatorship of the proletariat was incompatible with legality and with law and order. This was a lie. In reality, from its first days the new system began to create its own laws, continuing and developing all the proletariat’s democratic gains…. Socialist legality, like Soviet power in general, was established in harsh clashes with class enemies.67 The attempt to salvage the reputation of State Security reached absurd heights during the perestroika years, when a massive propaganda campaign celebrated the past and present exploits of the Chekists. KGB chairman Chebrikov boasted that 235 books had been published on ‘state security subjects’ in 1987 alone.68 This futile endeavour collapsed in 1989, when The Gulag Archipelago was published in Novyi Mir, and Memorial activists marked the Day of Political Prisoners by surrounding the KGB building on Dzerzhinskii Square with a living chain of candle-bearers. The growing insecurity of State Security about its criminal past was hinted at during a discussion in early 1990 between newly elected RSFSR people’s deputy Sergei Kovalyov and KGB chairman Kryuchkov, who expressed the hope that the proposed Law on State Security ‘would take the KGB out of the underground in a certain sense.’69 This carefully qualified proposal was not to dismantle the monolith of state security, with its extensive networks of agents and informers, but to bring legislation into complete accord with repressive practice. The first landmark in the project for a law-abiding totalitarian state was the Brezhnev constitution of 1977, which shed the democratic pretensions of the Stalin constitution by proclaiming the ‘leading role’ of the communist party and by adding new provisos to

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limit its human rights provisions. This charter of totalitarianism made it easier for the security apparatus to pose as defenders of the constitution. Its human rights chapter deployed the idea of duties to forestall those who might be tempted to demand their constitutional rights. Article 59 declared that ‘the exercise of rights and freedoms is inseparable from the performance by the citizen of his duties,’ which were enumerated in the ensuing ten articles. These duties ranged from ‘socially useful work’ and military service, to clearly ideological demands such as ‘intolerance’ of anti-social behaviour, raising children as ‘worthy members of a socialist society,’ and safeguarding the interests of the Soviet state and promoting the growth of its power and authority. Unlike the Stalin constitution, with its decorative human rights provisions, this was not a document that would provoke dissidents to demand that the authorities observe the Soviet constitution. But it did evoke enthusiasm from the security apparatus. According to KGB chairman Yurii Andropov, the constitution was ‘the logical expression of the Soviet state’s entire development.’70 In his Dzerzhinskii centenary speech, Andropov explained the ‘organic link’ between rights and duties: For Soviet people, there is no contradiction in this relationship. We proceed from the premise that the individual acquires true freedom if his activity proceeds in the channel of the general direction of social progress. In freeing man from all forms of social and national oppression, socialism creates completely new relations between the state and the individual and inseparably links personal interests and social interests. This is disclosed even more deeply and fully at the stage of mature socialism…. The nature of socialist society is such that the expansion of rights and freedoms is organically bound up with an increase in the accountability of each individual to society and with the performance of civic duties.71 There was nothing new about the attempt to counterpose duties to rights, which had a long history in nineteenth-century illiberal and nationalist thought. Even Solzhenitsyn argued in his controversial Harvard address that ‘it is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.’72 But whilst Solzhenitsyn was affirming the imperatives of Christian morality over legal theorising, Andropov was asserting the claims of the state against its citizens, with the clear implication that duties were to be codified by law and enforced by the state security organs. During Andropov’s brief tenure as General Secretary, this blueprint was partially implemented. To increase the ‘accountability of each individual to society,’ the security organs unleashed a crackdown against corruption, and set in motion an unprecedented campaign to impose discipline upon society. These initiatives were reinforced not only by a burst of legislation, but also by effusions of rhetoric about legality. At the landmark June 1983 plenum, Andropov proclaimed that ‘the normal course of our social development is inconceivable without the strictest possible observance of the laws that protect the interests of society and the rights of citizens.’ This affirmation provided a point of departure for V.Fedorchuk, the interior minister and former KGB chairman, who published an article titled ‘On Guard for Law and Order,’ in which he boasted about the ‘measures that have been taken to intensify the struggle against violations of labour, state

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and public discipline, strengthen order and organisation and increase the responsibility of every toiler for his assigned task.’73 Whilst punishing the toilers for failing to perform their duties, Andropov passed a series of laws to facilitate the suppression of those guilty of ideological malingering. The restoration of discipline in society was enforced most brutally in the camps. In September 1983, violations of labour camp regulations by inmates became a criminal offence: this enabled the KGB to dispense with the practice of fabricating criminal cases against prisoners of conscience to prevent their release at the expiry of their term. In January 1984, Andropov amended the law on crimes against the state, which broadened the definition of treason to include acts threatening state security. As the US State Department noted, the amendment allowed virtually any political offender to be charged with treason, ‘given the all-encompassing meaning of ‘state security’ in Soviet usage.’74 The campaign for ‘civic duties’ also produced a new kind of state-sponsored public initiative, the ‘Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public.’ Soon after his accession, on International Human Rights Day, 10 December 1982, Andropov had proposed a discussion of ‘using Soviet citizens of Jewish nationality for active participation in counter-Zionist propaganda.’ A note accompanying the proposal explained that ‘people of Jewish nationality, with rare exceptions, hold back from making public judgment of Zionism.’75 In other words, they had failed to perform their civic duties. Whereas previous Soviet front organisations, such as peace and women’s organisations, had been created to project an image of Soviet society, this initiative was intended to contest the refusenik case about the position of Jews in Soviet society. It became the prototype for a series of sham manifestations of civil society. The next would be the ‘Public Commission on International Co-operation on Humanitarian Questions and Human Rights,’ which was unveiled in 1987 as a pseudo-Helsinki Group. The culmination of this process was the creation in 1990 of a sham political opposition, the self-styled Centrist Bloc, which included a KGB-sponsored ‘Andrei Sakharov Union of Democratic Forces’ and Vladimir Zhirinovskii’s Liberal Democratic Party. Andropov’s agenda for the legislative entrenchment of totalitarianism was pursued by the KGB throughout the perestroika years. The keynote speech at the 1985 Revolution Day ceremony, delivered by KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov, heralded the extension of the law-enforcement crackdown to more and more spheres of society and the economy: Now is a time of heightened responsibility for the moral health of our society. Socialist democracy is incompatible with all-permissiveness, with disregard for civic duties. It is impermissible that in some places there is still a lenient attitude toward those who do economic and moral damage to society and flout our laws. We emphasise once again that the Party and the state will tirelessly wage a very resolute and uncompromising struggle against embezzlement, stealing and hooliganism, against turning out poorquality output and against all actions that run counter to Soviet laws! [stormy, prolonged applause]76 A few months earlier, Chebrikov had reported that the struggle against dissidents was also ‘being waged steadfastly, in full accordance with the law.’ Emphasising his commitment to legality, he explained that it was not a matter of class repression, ‘as was

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the case during the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, but of the protection of our state and social system from the criminal actions of certain persons.’77 Persecution was no longer a political act, but merely the routine functioning of the law-enforcement machinery. This struggle was not abandoned with the release of political prisoners in the months that followed Sakharov’s return from exile. In September 1987, Chebrikov marked the 110th anniversary of Dzerzhinskii’s birth with a commemorative speech in which he explained that ‘considerations of humanism’ had resulted in the pardoning of some dissidents, who were ‘given the opportunity to engage in socially useful labour.’78 They were pardoned by individual decrees of the Supreme Soviet, not amnestied as a group. Far from admitting its own guilt, the state sought to extract admissions of guilt from every prisoner on the verge of freedom. Cases were reviewed individually, and each prisoner was pressured to write an appeal for clemency and to sign a statement promising not to commit ‘illegal’ behaviour in the future, implying guilt for past crimes.79 Those who refused were excluded from the first round of releases. Some, like Anatolii Koryagin and Iosif Begun, were released several months later, on condition of emigration.80 Others, like Mikhail Kukobaka and Mikhail Alekseev, remained in the camps until late 1988. Tatyana Velikanova refused her pardon, and served her full term of exile. Even crueller was the legalistic process for the release of prisoners from psychiatric prisons, which required a medical commission to certify that an inmate was cured: such prominent dissidents as Vladimir Gershuni, Vladimir Klebanov, and Lev Ubozhko endured ‘punitive medicine’ for most of 1987.81 Released prisoners were in a legal limbo. Upon his February 1987 release, Aleksandr Oguridnikov was warned: Have no illusions! For such activities as those for which you were imprisoned, you may be imprisoned again! Nothing has changed: this is simply an act of mercy in relation to you, but if in the future you start up a ‘seminar’ or attempt to publish a journal, then you will again face a prison term.82 At liberty they were subject to petty persecution. Many were unable to regain possession of their apartments, or even to receive residency permits (propiski), which meant they were unable to obtain work and vulnerable to bureaucratic harassment. Prisoners released before 1987, such as Sergei Kovalyov, Valerii Abramkin, and Vyacheslav Bakhmin, were still subject to surveillance, limitations in correspondence, and were barred from returning to Moscow under the terms of an unpublished 1985 decree.83 The continuing criminalisation of dissidents was crucial to the delicate equilibrium of perestroika. It helped to reinforce the position of the KGB, which did not have to admit wrongdoing. Even in late 1989, Kryuchkov would insist that ‘the security organs did not combat “dissent,” only specific unlawful activities’ and that therefore ‘the terms “dissidents” and “political prisoners” were never acceptable to us.’84 Bolshevik martyrs like Bukharin and Zinoviev, who had contributed to the lawlessness and bloodshed of the post-revolutionary period, were rehabilitated with much fanfare; dissidents who had defended human rights and legality retained their criminal records and were liable to prosecution as recidivists. During 1987–8, their precarious position served as a salutary warning to others who dared to challenge the limits of the possible. The threat was

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emphasised by official statements in 1987 about the importance of legislation against ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.’85 Asked by Moscow News about possible changes to the criminal law concerning dissidents, a ‘reformist’ academic acknowledged the flaws of article 190–1, but defended the necessity of article 70: If what you have in mind is Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR on agitation and propaganda aimed at subverting or undermining the Soviet power, then I think it must be kept the way it is. A state has a right to self-defence.86 The state’s rights, not the rights of the individual, were the guiding preoccupation of the architects of the ‘socialist law-abiding state.’ In September 1988, whilst the released prisoners of conscience languished in a state of legal limbo, Chebrikov boasted about measures ‘to strengthen the legal foundation’ of the work of the KGB. He explained that a Law on State Security was being drafted with the aim of ‘shaping a socialist state based on the rule of law as a form of organisation and functioning of political power that fully accords with socialism and socialist democracy.’87 For the security apparatus, legality performed not only a repressive, but also a creative function: it became a basic character trait for the last blueprints of New Socialist Man. In his 1987 Dzerzhinskii anniversary speech, Chebrikov had reiterated Andropov’s doctrine about ‘the organic combination of socialist democracy and discipline, of independence and responsibility, and of the rights and duties of citizens.’ Rights were a matter of disdain for Chebrikov, but he saw the possibilities of duties. To restore discipline and nip dissent in the bud, one need only inculcate an awareness of the law, of the pervasive legally enforceable duties that bound every citizen in the much-vaunted ‘ideological unity of Soviet society.’ In this connection, he lamented the fact that ‘work aimed at ensuring and strengthening law and order and instilling a spirit of lofty respect for the law in Soviet people is still not being conducted effectively enough.’88 Law, with its unequivocal injunctions and prohibitions, was to displace Leninism, a sphere of contention during perestroika, in the making of the Soviet public mind. The last engineer of human souls, Chebrikov continued to develop this idea even after his removal as KGB chairman. In a move that symbolised the ambiguity of the official campaign for a lawabiding state, he was appointed chairman of a Central Committee commission on legal reform. It was, as one US observer noted, ‘as if we had named the late J.Edgar Hoover to revise our Bill of Rights.’89 Chebrikov relished the role. In a 1989 ‘election’ speech, he spoke as a Politburo member to an audience in Moldova, and made a clarion call for ‘legal education’ as a new remedy for an old problem: It is urgently necessary to create in the country a uniform state system of universal legal education, and to improve fundamentally legal upbringing…. The goal of this upbringing should be a person of high political sophistication and lofty spiritual interests.90 Thus law surreptitiously supplanted Leninism as a medium of indoctrination, although the intended result of this social engineering sounded remarkably similar to traditional Stalinist designs. Dissidents might proselytise the cause of legal enlightenment, but

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Chebrikov envisioned law as an antidote to dissent: it would produce not autonomous citizens conscious of their rights, but cogs in the wheel of state security, obediently performing their constitutional duties. Behind a façade of democratic rhetoric, the KGB’s agenda for the renovation of totalitarianism was clearly endorsed by Mikhail Gorbachev, who emphasised in his report to the 27th Party Congress in February 1986 that ‘the essence of socialism is such that citizens’ rights do not exist and cannot exist without their duties, just as there are no duties without rights.’91 On a reformist note, he conceded the possibility of an expansion of ‘international cooperation in the implementation of the political, social and personal rights of human beings.’ To this end, a sham human rights committee, the ‘Public Commission on International Co-operation on Humanitarian Questions and Human Rights’ was created shortly before the Washington summit meeting between Gorbachev and Reagan. Echoing the statutes of dissident Helsinki groups, the Commission’s declared aim was ‘to achieve conformity of Soviet legislation with the obligations assumed by the Soviet Union in the Helsinki Final Act and in UN human rights documents.’92 It was chaired by Fedor Burlatskii, an Andropov protégé, who now portrayed himself as a daring crusader for human rights. In a famous volume of interviews, Burlatskii dismissed dissidents as obstacles to reform and then exalted the role of his commission in the most grandiloquent terms: This is an independent human rights commission composed of wellknown Soviet writers, artists, journalists, and scholars—representatives of the progressive intelligentsia. Its purpose is to develop legal protection for individual freedoms…. My personal hope is to use the commission as a lever for radical democratisation and to see the commission become a legal opposition to the bureaucracy.93 Burlatskii’s credentials as an apostle of ‘radical democratisation’ were open to question. In the 1970s, Burlatskii had been an outspoken defender of the Soviet human rights record.94 Even in 1987, a few months before the Commission’s creation, in the best traditions of the Anti-Zionist Committee, Burlatskii had denounced those who demanded ‘unlimited freedom to demonstrate’ as ‘local nationalists, extremists from Pamyat and certain other groups of similar orientation, people pursuing selfish interests, so-called refuseniks who want to emigrate.’95 In fact, the commission was less a ‘legal opposition’ to the bureaucracy, than to the dissidents, who derided Burlatskii’s inept attempt to appropriate their agenda, and his apparent terror of contact with informal groups. As Valerii Senderov noted, ‘sometimes [the Burlatskii Commission] made half a step forward, heroically struggling for a concession, which, as was obvious to everyone, it had already been decided to grant.’96 Measures to consolidate the dictatorship became more urgent during 1989, when the dissident and official conceptions of legality clashed spectacularly in the speeches of Sakharov and the ‘aggressively obedient majority’ in the Congress of People’s Deputies. In parallel with that pseudo-democratic experiment, a series of institutional reforms offered a new rationale for a pervasive security apparatus. In April 1989, one month before the convocation of the congress, a Supreme Soviet decree amended article 70 of the Criminal Code, replacing ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’ with ‘public appeals

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for the overthrow of the Soviet state and social system or for a change in it by means at variance with the USSR Constitution.’97 This ‘reform’ preserved much of the scope of the original article, and its vague wording meant that calls for non-violent protests could still be prosecuted, yet it was acclaimed by official legal scholars as a milestone on the path to constitutionalism.98 It was really a milestone on the path to a constitutional dictatorship. Another milestone came in late 1989, when the KGB’s notorious Fifth Directorate, responsible for the struggle against ideological subversion (which had including scores of dissidents whose crime was to call for the observance of the Soviet constitution), was renamed ‘Department Z,’ with responsibility for the ‘Defence of the Constitution.’99 In his 1989 speech for the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, KGB chairman Kryuchkov boasted about the emerging ‘atmosphere of the supremacy of the law and of unswerving observance of socialist legality by state agencies and public organisations, officials, and every Soviet citizen.’ Echoing Andropov’s doctrine about reciprocal rights and duties, Kryuchkov explained that ‘socialist legality’ meant not only respect for the constitutional rights of the citizen, but also ‘respect for the bodies of state power and administration.’100 The assignment of Department Z was facilitated by the Communist Party’s loss of its constitutional ‘leading role’ in February 1990, and the creation of a powerful executive presidency. Not only was Gorbachev granted prerogatives to declare ‘presidential rule’ in separatist republics, but also he was protected by a law against insulting the president, which provided the basis for a series of political prosecutions during the twilight of the Soviet regime. The most famous was the case against former dissident Valeriya Novodvorskaya, the indefatigable rabble-rouser from the Democratic Union.101 But the KGB presented the changes as a fundamental shift in its mission from the ‘sword of the party’ to the guardian of the constitution. When Sergei Kovalyov, as part of a delegation of deputies of the RSFSR parliament, visited the Lubyanka in the spring of 1990, he was reassured by Kryuchkov that ‘the KGB began as a party organ, the Party’s decisions were laws to it, but now, after the abolition of article 6 of the Constitution, this is no longer so,’ and that the fifth department had been replaced by a ‘new department busy protecting constitutional principles.’ Kryuchkov’s conversion to the cause of constitutionalism evoked scepticism from Kovalyov, who acknowledged that ‘the constitution does need observance and, consequently, protection,’ but asked, ‘Why should this be done by secret services rather than by the judiciary?’102 The reason was that it provided the KGB with a new designation of the enemy, a substitute for the obsolete term ‘anti-Soviet.’ Thus a June 1990 KGB report on the First All-Union Congress of Independent Workers’ Movements pointed to the subversive presence of NTS ‘as well as other organisations of an anti-Constitutional orientation, such as Sajudis, Rukh and others.’ Congratulating themselves on their counter-measures, the authors boasted that they had ‘prevented [the delegates’] submission to radically minded political opportunists and organisations of an anti-Constitutional orientation.’103 The KGB’s struggle for constitutionalism was never a struggle for constitutional democracy. A 1989 KGB document signed by Kryuchkov had identified its chief task as the prevention of the formation of a political opposition in the USSR.104 In pursuit of this aim, the KGB followed trusted stratagems. In the tradition of the Anti-Zionist Committee and the Burlatskii Commission, it created an ersatz opposition named the Centrist Bloc. Two of its founding components, the ‘Andrei Sakharov Union of Democratic Forces,’

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and the ‘Renaissance’ movement of Valerii Skurlatov would fade into obscurity after achieving momentary notoriety. More rewarding was the security apparatus’s investment in the ‘Liberal Democratic Party’ of Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the most talented demagogue in post-Soviet politics, who would make a compelling case for a law-abiding dictatorship during the election campaign for Yeltsin’s first State Duma. No less insidious was the influence of the security apparatus on the March 1990 elections to the RSFSR parliament. Despite the success of Democratic Russia and the election of a pleiade of prominent dissidents, the legislature was a deeply conservative body. Reassuring the Politburo in the aftermath of the elections, KGB chairman Kryuchkov pointed out that 86 per cent of the RSFSR deputies were CPSU members, and that the representation of the KGB was greater than in the Union parliament. ‘As they say,’ he concluded, ‘Don’t panic.’ Another member of the Politburo, V.Vorotnikov, added that ‘law-enforcement organs have very many representatives, and there are not a few employees of the Committee of State Security, agents of the Interior Ministry and leaders of [its] regional directorates, district departments, prosecutors’105 These employees were prominent even within Democratic Russia. At the movement’s founding congress in October 1990, Yelena Bonner assailed the influence of representatives of the repressive apparatus like disgraced prosecutors Gdlyan and Ivanov, and the KGB colonel Oleg Kalugin, ‘a man who worked for the KGB for thirty years and has now become our democratic hero.’106 Another dubious ‘democrat’ was former KGB Lieutenant Saushkin, an investigator of dissidents during the late 1970s, who was elected to Mossoviet on the Democratic Russia ticket.107 In an interview with Literaturnaya Gazeta, Aleksandr Ginzburg expressed astonishment that his former interrogator was ‘teaching us to create a law-abiding state.’ He drew a distinction between a KGB colonel who had admitted in Ogonek that his participation in repression was a source of shame (‘I would willingly shake his hand’) and Saushkin, whose ‘democratic activity has begun with lies.’108 Undeterred, Saushkin stood for the chairmanship of the Mossoviet Commission on Legality. When Kovalyov confronted him at public hearings, Saushkin retaliated by casting aspersions on Ginzburg’s integrity.109 As perestroika entered its terminal crisis in early 1991, the rhetoric of constitutionalism became the standard justification for the drift towards dictatorship and the crackdown in the Baltic states. After the storming of the Vilnius television station by OMON troops, Gorbachev blamed the bloodshed on the Lithuanian authorities, and in particular on their ‘flagrant violations of and deviations from the USSR Constitution and the Lithuanian SSR Constitution, [their] flouting of citizen’s political and social rights and [their] desire, under democratic slogans, to implement a policy aimed at the restoration of a bourgeois system.’110 The importance of constitutionalism amongst those preparing for a coup was underlined by KGB chairman Kryuchkov, who levelled identical accusations in an interview with Literaturnaya Gazeta.111 At about the same time, Kryuchkov presented Gorbachev with a KGB analytical report, which argued that ‘the interests of protecting the Soviet Constitutional order’ urgently required government control over the mass media to prevent their becoming ‘the mouthpiece of anti-socialist forces.’112 Gorbachev did not pursue his half-hearted proposal to suspend the Law on the Press, but the security apparatus did benefit from a series of presidential decrees, which expanded the KGB’s power to conduct searches,113 and provided for the introduction of joint army and police street patrols.114 Both measures were publicly justified as part of a

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war on crime, but they helped to create a climate conducive to the declaration of a state of emergency. The culmination of this process was the declaration of the State Committee for the State of Emergency (GKChP) that seized power in Moscow in August 1991. Echoing decades of Soviet human rights propaganda, the GKChP mocked the democrats’ ‘incantations about commitment to the interests of the individual’ at a time when the people’s ‘real rights and possibilities have been infringed.’ Ignoring civil and political rights, it lambasted the ‘offensive against the rights of working people,’ and claimed that ‘the rights to work, education, health care, housing and recreation have been called in question.’ Skirting the delicate question of the legality of its own actions, the GKChP attacked ‘those who, blatantly flouting the USSR Basic Law, are staging an unconstitutional coup…and longing for an unbridled personal dictatorship.’ It promised ‘to restore law and order immediately, to put an end to bloodshed, to declare a merciless war on the criminal world, and to eradicate shameful phenomena that discredit our society and discredit Soviet citizens.115 This restoration of law and order was to begin with the arrest of seventy-five prominent democrats, including such eminent dissidents as the NTS representative Valerii Senderov; journalists Sergei Grigoryants and Lev Timofeev, both editors of samizdat journals; and parliamentarians Sergei Kovalyov and Gleb Yakunin.116 The arrest list also included Valerii Skurlatov, author of the provocational ‘Action Programme 90,’ whose function was probably to testify against democrats at a future show trial.117 The targeting of dissidents was explained by Aleksandr Kichikhin, an officer of the KGB’s Directorate Z, who pointed out that the KGB generals responsible for the crackdown ‘were guided by personal, as well as political reasons’ since ‘most officers currently working for the KGB started their careers in Directorate Five, suppressing dissent.’118 But it was also testimony to the dissident role in instigating the creation of a different kind of constitutional order in Russia.

Deputy Sakharov The first spectacular clash between the dissident and official notions of legality took place at the inaugural Congress of People’s Deputies in May and June 1989. Andrei Sakharov dominated the proceedings, both by his demands for democratic reform and by the hysterical denunciation that he provoked. What might have been a rubber-stamp legislature was transformed by his presence into an arena for unregimented debate, for the exposition of democratic values, and for the exposure of totalitarian habits. In his speeches and interventions, Sakharov campaigned for parliamentary supremacy, for the creation of an opposition, and for a new constitutional framework. In the process, he set the agenda for Democratic Russia and became a model for other democratic deputies. According to Gavriil Popov, Sakharov became ‘the symbol of our nascent parliamentarianism’: We shall always remember how this man, prematurely aged by Soviet exile, his health wrecked by protest hunger strikes and forced nourishment, how this hunched and exceptionally proud man, paying no attention to anything or anyone, rose to his feet to start the unofficial

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queue at the rostrum of the Congress. He fought to prevent the Congress of People’s Deputies being turned into something spearheaded against the people, into an apparat spectacle with concessions to the spirit of the times. He fought for the right of any deputy to come to the rostrum, without a text already examined, even without agreement on who was to speak.119 This unique role was the culmination of Sakharov’s dissident experience, which had not only taught him to defy choruses of vilification, but had also provided him with the outlines of a programme based on legality, constitutionalism and human rights. Sakharov may not have been the most radical deputy at the Congress—others showed more initiative in offending the sensitivities of the party faithful by calling for Lenin’s burial— but he was the only true pravozashchitnik. The dissident legacy also gave Sakharov a constituency in civil society. Unlike institutional reformers, Sakharov experienced both support and pressure from a network of rights-defenders, who judged his activity by the standards of human rights and constitutionalism, not by the shifting slogans of perestroika. Support came from the activists of Memorial, where Sakharov served as honorary chairman. At its founding conference, Memorial’s broadsheet had printed Sakharov’s election programme, and the organisation had attracted such prominent dissident rights-defenders as Boris Zolotukhin, Sergei Kovalyov, and Aleksandr Daniel. Sakharov’s dissident associates had also created a niche in the International Foundation for the Survival of Humanity, a perestroika initiative established after Gorbachev’s Forum for a Nuclear-Free World. As titular chairman of the Foundation’s Human Rights Committee, Sakharov instigated the creation of a Project Group on Human Rights in 1988, with the involvement of the former dissidents Sergei Kovalyov and Boris Chernobylskii.120 Although Sakharov was frustrated by the failure of attempts to influence the legislative process through the Institute of State and Law, the Project Group did draft legislation on States of Emergency, a major preoccupation of Sakharov’s year in the eye of the political storm.121 At the same time, Sakharov’s efforts to establish a dialogue with the Soviet authorities and his readiness to participate in quasi-official initiatives provoked repeated censure in dissident circles. When Sakharov encouraged political prisoners to request pardons in 1987, he was accused by Boris Altshuler and Larisa Bogoraz ‘of having advocated shameful concessions, of having urged capitulations that could scar the prisoners for the rest of their lives.’122 Similar outrage greeted Sakharov’s contribution to the 1988 reformist anthology Inogo ne dano, in which he suggested that ‘a large part’ of those subject to punitive psychiatry actually needed treatment.123 In an incisive rebuttal, Aleksandr Podrabinek, editor of the samizdat journal Express-Chronicle, argued that ‘in his convergence with the Soviet leadership, Academician Sakharov has passed over the border of “private opinion,” in supporting a speculative and cruel thesis of Soviet propaganda.’124 It was authoritative criticism, for Podrabinek had earned two camp terms for his authorship of the expose Punitive Psychiatry and his role in the Working Group to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes.125 But his scepticism about Sakharov’s ‘convergence’ also reflected deep convictions about radical noncollaboration, which Podrabinek had pioneered at his first trial. When Sakharov decided to become a deputy from a public organisation, the Academy of Sciences, rather than

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seeking a popular mandate, Podrabinek again castigated his readiness to compromise his principles: ‘What can be expected of deputies who unanimously scorn the primary element of a democratic system: free elections?’126 If Sakharov defied expectations as a deputy, it was partly because he entered the Congress with a need to justify his presence. Throwing tact and political calculation to the winds, he exploited the platform to educate not only his fellow deputies, but also the nationwide television audience, about the priority of legality and human rights over the prerogatives of the state. A recurrent theme in his speeches was that the Congress should assume the responsibility of a legislature. In his first address on 25 May, Sakharov called for the adoption of a ‘Decree on Power’ proclaiming that ‘the Congress of People’s Deputies has the exclusive right to adopt laws for the USSR, and to appoint people to the highest posts in the USSR.’127 He also pleaded for the Congress to behave like a legislature. Amid expectations that the proceedings would begin with elections, he pointed to the need for a preliminary debate about the candidates, even about Gorbachev’s candidature as chairman. Before being drowned out by heckling, he exhorted the Congress to be ‘worthy of the great task that stands before it’ and to ‘approach its work in a democratic spirit.’ When the Congress prepared to vote for Gorbachev after a few perfunctory questions, Sakharov registered his protest by walking out of the hall. Sakharov exploited the nomination process to criticise legislative encroachments upon civil liberties. During the discussion of the candidacy of Anatolii Lukyanov for the deputy chairmanship of the Supreme Soviet, Sakharov raised the 1988 laws on demonstrations and the April decree, and complained that that ‘we don’t really know who drafts these laws or how the legislative process works in general.’ In relation to the April decree, he made a plea for freedom of conscience: Acts of conscience that do not involve violence ought not to become the subject of criminal prosecution. This principle is the cornerstone of a democratic political system. But the element of ‘Violence’ has been omitted from the April 8 decree’s definition of criminal subversion.128 Evidently stung by Sakharov’s inquiries about his role in this legislation, Lukyanov himself announced amendments to the decrees at the end of the congress. A similar dialogue between rights-defender and official legalist took place during the nomination hearings of Aleksandr Sukharev as Procurator General. Thirteen years earlier, Sukharev’s lies about the trial of Sergei Kovalyov had provoked a section in the Chronicle titled ‘polemics with Sukharev.’129 Now posing as a true convert to the cause of reform, Sukharev hastily agreed with Sakharov’s criticism of the Procuracy’s powers.130 At about the same time as his confrontation with Sakharov, Moscow News published an interview with Sukharev in which he boasted, with evident relief, that ‘the very word dissident has almost been expunged from today’s vocabulary.’ He then insisted that ‘I am unambiguous about the cases of past years: if a person is not guilty, he must be rehabilitated, and apologies must be made for the wrong done to him.’131 But Sukharev showed no readiness to begin that process by apologising for his own role in the repression of the innocent. For Sakharov, rights-defence rhetoric was an expression of the dissident past; for Sukharev, it was an attempt to obscure that past.

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Sakharov’s focus on rights-defence themes and his constant exhortations about legislative responsibility tested the patience of the party apparatchiks, the overwhelming majority of the Congress, who were accustomed to carefully scripted and stage-managed party functions. Their real sympathies were first demonstrated when they hailed General Igor Rodionov, responsible for the recent massacre of peaceful demonstrators in Tbilisi, with a prolonged ovation worthy of a returning hero. When the former Georgian party boss, Pastiashvili, appeared on the verge of making a revelation implicating Rodionov, the ‘noise in the hall increased to a roar,’ and he fled in terror from the rostrum.132 On 2 June, they visited this same collective fury upon Sakharov. An obviously orchestrated series of denunciations produced scenes of mass hysteria that became one of the decisive moments of perestroika. The pretext was a recent interview in which Sakharov had reported claims that Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan had fired upon surrounded Soviet soldiers to prevent their capture. To counterbalance Sakharov’s moral authority, a crippled Afghan veteran, Sergei Chervonopiskii was chosen to express the indignation of the armed forces at this slander. ‘We believe,’ he declared, ‘that Sakharov wants to discredit the Soviet army.’ He proceeded to read a statement from fellow veterans, expressing their disgust at ‘this irresponsible, provocational prank,’ which was ‘an insult to the honour, dignity and memory of those sons of the Motherland who fulfilled their duty to the end.’ Shifting to the ground of ideology, he concluded with a memorable exhortation to patriotism: ‘There are three things that we all must fight to protect: state power, our motherland, and Communism.’133 When Sakharov went to the podium to defend himself and his opposition to the Afghan war, he faced a scene of pandemonium: the official transcript recorded ‘noise in the hall,’ but as Sakharov recalled in his memoirs, ‘what actually happened was five minutes of hysteria in front of millions of viewers.’134 Those deputies not caught up in the collective frenzy watched in stunned silence this grotesque spectacle of the ‘unity of Soviet society’: a moment of alienation that may have been a milestone on their road to opposition. Reflecting upon this ‘memorable and painful experience,’ Yurii Vlasov admitted that when the audience rose to its feet, shouting and applauding those who were vilifying Sakharov, ‘it was difficult even to remain seated.’135 According to Sobchak, ‘during those minutes the entire audience breathed the air of 1937.’136 Sergei Stankevich called it ‘a moral lynching of a great man.’137 Once order had been restored, a succession of speakers denounced Sakharov, each expression of outrage greeted by eruptions of applause. The accusers ranged from such pillars of the military establishment as future coup plotter Marshal Akhromeev, who declared that Sakharov’s allegation was ‘an outright lie, a deliberate falsehood,’ to T.D.Kazakova, a schoolteacher from Tashkent province, who accused him of insulting ‘the entire Army, the entire people and all our fallen soldiers who gave their lives,’ and who concluded with the anathema: ‘I bring down universal scorn on you.’138 If this Orwellian hate session was intended to discredit Sakharov, it was a spectacular failure. Sakharov may have been driven from the podium, but his authority had been magnified by his solitary confrontation with the ‘aggressively obedient majority’ Invective that could terrorise a provincial party satrap evoked only calm defiance from Sakharov, and in his defiance, he set a precedent for future rebels in post-Soviet legislatures. For democratic publicists, the confrontation became the central event of the Congress. Leonid Batkin, a specialist on Renaissance history and a member of Moscow Tribune, saw the Congress as a ‘meeting of two worlds,’ ‘the world of the undemocratic

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conscience,’ and ‘the world of the democratic conscience,’ which was incarnated by Sakharov. In his ordeal before the Congress, Sakharov was no longer a solitary dissident cut off from society, but a heroic tribune of the people: One shouldn’t feel sorry for Sakharov. He has chosen his destiny himself. He has gone through much worse things in complete isolation and obscurity. Only yesterday he stood before the cameras. The country and the world watched with bated breath as Sakharov was slowly choosing plain words, but he spoke with his usual candour and firmness, and with an uncharacteristic passion prompted by the situation. He was not trying to defend himself and his reputation (the latter does not need this). He was out to uphold the truth and, what us glued to the screens, to uphold OUR reputation. The poignancy of the situation, Batkin noted, was heightened by the history of Sakharov’s opposition to the invasion of Afghanistan, by the fact that ‘the only person among the audience and at the podium, perhaps the only person in the whole land who is absolutely innocent of guilt before the Afghan victims was precisely the one reviled by the people’s (sic) deputies.’139 Undaunted by the fury of the ‘aggressively obedient majority,’ Sakharov continued to campaign for All power to the Soviets’ as the congress approached its tumultuous conclusion. An opposition of one, Sakharov was the sole deputy to vote against the Congress’s final resolution. When Gorbachev announced the cessation of television transmission of the closing proceedings, Sakharov rushed to the podium to protest. Broadcasting resumed for Lukyanov to announce a decision to rescind the April 8 decree, provoking yet another intervention from Sakharov.140 The resumption was a significant concession, because it ensured a national audience for Sakharov’s most important speech to the Congress, delivered in its last moments. By allowing Sakharov to make this eleventh-hour address, Gorbachev had evidently hoped that Russia’s most famous dissident would pay tribute to the Congress’s historic significance, but Sakharov used the opportunity to justify his rejection of the final resolution, and to present what amounted to a constitutional manifesto. ‘The construction of the state has started with the roof,’ he lamented, coining a memorable phrase that would become a leitmotif in debates about Russia’s post-Soviet constitutional predicament. In particular, Sakharov warned against the concentration of power in Gorbachev’s hands as parliamentary chairman, which was ‘dangerous, even if he is the author of perestroika.’ Sakharov also assailed the Congress for surrendering its responsibilities to the Supreme Soviet, which ‘will simply be a screen for the real power of its Chairman and the Party-state apparatus.’ Sakharov’s remedy was his ‘Decree on Power,’ which he now read out as a seven-point draft. It began with the abolition of the communist party’s leading role, and then set out ways to assert the supremacy of the Congress: by the creation of parliamentary commissions, by control over appointments, and by the limitation of the KGB’s functions to international security.141 He proceeded to call for the Congress to adopt a ‘resolution embodying the principles of the Rule of Law,’ which he defined in rights-defence terms:

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These principles include: freedom of speech and conscience; the possibility for private citizens and public organisations to contest before an independent tribunal the acts and decisions of all officials and government agencies; due process in trial and investigatory procedure (access to defense counsel from the very beginning of criminal investigation; trial by jury; transfer of jurisdiction over criminal investigations from the Procurator’s office, which should be solely concerned with faithful execution of laws).142 Here, in embryonic form, was the judicial reform agenda that Democratic Russia would bring to the RSFSR parliament. No other deputy was so preoccupied by the cause of building a state that was not only law-abiding, but respected human rights. The impact of this speech was amplified by the accompanying drama. As Sakharov exceeded his allotted five minutes, the habitual heckling in the hall reached a crescendo, and Gorbachev called upon him to ‘respect the Congress.’ Defiant, Sakharov retorted that ‘I respect humanity,’ and that ‘I have a mandate that goes beyond the limits of this congress.’143 Unimpressed by this claim, Gorbachev switched off the microphone, and ‘Sakharov raised his hands to heaven like a victim of tyranny.’ To Gorbachev, the gesture was merely ‘a well played act that was intended to show to the nation how impudently the powers that be treated a man of honour.’144 In his final remarks, Gorbachev decried ‘the attempts of Deputy Sakharov to disparage the role of the congress and its milestone significance in the history of our country.’ On this discordant note, the Congress stood for the closing national anthem.145 What Gorbachev failed to grasp in 1989 was Sakharov’s contribution to making the Congress a milestone in Soviet history, though he admitted in his 1995 memoirs that Sakharov was ‘unquestionably the most outstanding personality at the Congress.’146 By his tenacity and defiance, Sakharov had incarnated the idea of a legislative opposition. Now he participated in the first steps to create such an opposition. At the Interregional Group’s conference on 29–30 July 1989, he was elected one of its five co-chairmen, although with the lowest number of votes.147 This poor showing testified to the caution of the deputies, not to the level of Sakharov’s influence. No deputy rivalled Sakharov’s programmatic or symbolic contribution to the emerging opposition. Testimony to his role came from KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, who warned Gorbachev in a secret memorandum on the eve of the second Congress that Sakharov’s election had been perceived by his supporters as ‘a change in status from “lone rights-defender” to the position of one of the leaders of the legal opposition,’ and had given him ‘the possibility not only of propagandising his ideological scheme, but also of trying to put it into practice through other members of the Interregional Group.’ Without Sakharov, the Interregional Group was an amorphous assortment of reform-communist intellectuals and party apparatchiks, all zealous proponents of perestroika, but devoid of a programme that differed significantly from party slogans. Kryuchkov had no doubt about Sakharov’s role as instigator: Thus, he was one of the first to raise the thesis of the necessity of the abolition of article 6 of the Constitution of the USSR, which subsequently became a crucial demand of the radicals. His ‘Decree on Power’ played

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the role of a political platform for the Interregional Group of Deputies, and for many elector’s clubs.148 It was Sakharov’s rights-defence agenda, based on his dissident past, that transformed the ‘radical-left’ Moscow deputies into an embryonic democratic opposition. And his personal authority as a dissident enabled him to become the moral axis of that opposition. Foremen of perestroika like Yurii Afanasev and Gavriil Popov were open to derision for having opened their eyes only when it was advantageous to do so, but Sakharov had been making the case for human rights and democratic reform during two decades of persecution and ostracism. Sakharov’s record was a guarantee that the Interregional Group was more than just another nomenklatura exercise, at a time when the political scene was being confused by the creation of KGB-sponsored democratic organisations. Kryuchkov’s alarm about Sakharov’s role as the spearhead of the democratic opposition was shared by the emerging alliance of neo-Bolshevik and radical nationalist forces. After Sakharov’s visit to Sverdlovsk in September 1989, he was denounced in Literaturnaya Rossiya by Anatolii Salutskii, who claimed that Sakharov’s intention had been to distract attention from the inaugural congress of the United Front of Workers of Russia.149 Another Russophile ideologue, Aleksandr Kazintsev, assailed Sakharov and the foremen of perestroika as a minority of specialists seeking power.150 At the opposite, neo-Bolshevik extreme, Nina Andreeva warned that the Congress’s ‘strong democratic minority…headed by Academician Sakharov’ was seeking to change the existing system ‘by the handing of power from the Politburo to the Supreme Soviet,’ and that ‘after the defeat of the party and its Leninist cadres, they will advance Sakharov for president.’151 But the most vicious attack appeared in Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal, where veteran propagandist Vladimir Bushin published a two-part article justifying the vilification of Sakharov at the Congress.152 The first part linked Sakharov’s ‘shameless’ refusal to apologise to the armed forces to his failure to serve at the front during the Second World War, and was littered with citations from Brezhnev-era propaganda texts.153 The second part was a polemic against Batkin’s celebrated article, ‘Two Worlds Meet at the Congress,’ in which Bushin claimed to have discovered plagiarism of fascist leaflets. Bushin seized upon Batkin’s derision of Chervonopiskii’s boasts about saving ‘Afghan women and children’ as evidence that Batkin himself ‘would never save any foreign women or children.’ Citing an interview in which Chervonopiskii claimed to have acted without instructions, Bushin scorned the idea that the denunciation of Sakharov had been orchestrated, and accused Batkin of being ‘simply incapable of imagining that someone might be completely disgusted by Sakharov’s declaration, compose a speech alone, and rise to the tribune with it.’154 The hostility to Sakharov’s vision extended far beyond the traditional enemies of liberalisation. Prominent foremen of perestroika were also captives of the authoritarian temptation. Soon after the congress, Andranik Migranian and Igor Klyamkin, both scholars from the Institute of Economics and the World Socialist System, made the case for an authoritarian transition to democracy. Elaborating what amounted to a blueprint for a coup d’état, Migranian argued that the Congress should have given Gorbachev emergency powers, set up a Committee to Save the People, and ‘temporarily’ suspended the activities of all other institutions of power.155 The attractiveness of this project, as the

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lesser evil, was increased by the mobilisation of National Bolshevik tendencies. For Klyamkin, the demmciation of Sakharov at the Congress was particularly ominous: It is not accidental, perhaps, that in the course of the polemics with Sakharov a new and yet not so new slogan was hurled at the audience: ‘State, Motherland, Communism!’ …How can one be sure that it was not the beginning of a search for ideological symbols capable of influencing our still sensitive ‘defensive instincts,’ to bring the army into politics.156 Anxiety about militant patriotism was exacerbated, soon after Sakharov’s death, by the disruption of a meeting of the pro-perestroika writer’s group ‘April’ by paramilitary activists from a Pamyat splinter group. The incident inspired an appeal to the Central Committee from a group of eminent literary figures, all still communist party members, who demanded the enforcement of article 74 of the Criminal Code (prohibiting incitements to ethnic hostility) and proposing the formation of an ‘anti-fascist front.’157 The same tone would be revived by the events of October 1993, when a similar assortment of writers called for the suppression of ‘all kinds of communist and fascist newspapers and organisations.’158 What united these foremen of perestroika was the assumption that the leader in the Kremlin could be trusted with emergency powers. It was a conviction that clearly found favour with Gorbachev, who took a first tentative step back from democratisation during the Supreme Soviet’s debate on the Armenian-Azerbaijani crisis. The debate exemplified both the uncertainty of perestroika, and Sakharov’s rights-defence activity as deputy. On 2 October 1989, Gorbachev had almost persuaded deputies to vote for fifteen months of ‘emergency measures,’ including a ban on strikes and the use of the military to halt Azerbaijan’s railroad blockade of Armenia.159 Although he was not a member of this standing legislature, Sakharov was given leave to intervene in the debate. He denounced the proposed duration of the measures as ‘a reaction out of all proportion to the events at hand,’ and pointed out that the discussion had been provoked by the crisis in the Caucasus, yet ‘an attempt has been made to extend the need for emergency measures to the whole country.’ The solution, he contended, was to ‘extinguish the fire where it originated, instead of pouring water everywhere, thereby destroying everything.’160 Apparently swayed by this appeal for caution, the deputies amended the proposal to include additional safeguards. It was a perilous moment, because there was no existing legislation to govern a state of emergency. This legal vacuum, which exacerbated the risk of a constitutional coup d’état, was repeatedly criticised by dissidents. As early as July 1989, the first document of the revived Moscow Helsinki Group had appealed to people’s deputies about the urgent need for the creation of appropriate safeguards, and set out the principles that should govern a law on states of emergency.161 Anticipating Sakharov’s intervention in the Supreme Soviet debate, the Group argued for spatial and temporal limitations on a state of emergency, which should not override fundamental human rights, and which should be proportional to a crisis situation.162 These principles were enshrined in a draft law that was prepared by the Russian-American Project Group on Human Rights for a 1 November 1989 deadline set by the Supreme Soviet. It was circulated amongst deputies, and according to Kovalyov, ‘seemed to receive a high assessment.’163 Although no

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official alternative was produced until the following year, the draft was never examined in the Union parliament, and instead became the basis for the RSFSR Law on States of Emergency. Gorbachev, seeking to control the mounting turmoil, was clearly resentful of Sakharov’s oppositional activities and the anti-reform backlash they seemed to have provoked. At a closed meeting with media officials on 13 October, he vented his pent-up anger against publications that had once been flagships of perestroika, but had become ‘irresponsible’ and ‘inflammatory.’164 The ostensible target of his wrath was Vladislav Starkov, the fervently pro-perestroika editor of Argumenty i Fakty, but it was Sakharov’s profile that Gorbachev wanted to diminish. Starkov’s transgression was to have published the results of a reader survey that had voted Sakharov the most popular deputy in the Congress.165 A few days earlier, police had intervened to prevent Sakharov participating in a live discussion of Afghanistan on the popular and outspoken television programme Vzglyad.166 Alarmed by these government-sanctioned attempts to curb his access to the media, Sakharov appealed for journalists around the world to rally in defence of press freedom.167 In his attempts to preserve the unity of pro-perestroika forces, Gorbachev failed to grasp that Sakharov was helping to generate a democratic alternative and a counterweight to the burgeoning authoritarian tendencies. To be legally viable, that alternative required the abolition of article 6 of the constitution, and it was this cause that dominated the final weeks of Sakharov’s life. In mid-November, Sakharov had praised striking miners in Vorkuta, describing their action as ‘part of our common struggle.’168 This new constituency probably inspired Sakharov to join four other Interregional Group deputies in calling for a two-hour national strike on 11 December, the eve of the second Congress, in support of the abolition of article 6.169 In the shadow of the East European revolutions, this call provoked official alarm: at a closed Central Committee plenum, Gorbachev denounced the ‘emotional’ rush to alter the constitution, whilst other speakers denounced Sakharov’s call as a breach of parliamentary ethics.170 The strike failed to materialise, and on the first day of the Congress, the attempt of radical deputies to schedule a debate on the removal of article 6 was rejected. When Sakharov cited telegrams from the public in support of his proposal, he was rudely rebuffed by Gorbachev, who declared derisively: ‘I can show you three folders of them with thousands. Let’s not manipulate public opinion,’ and then waved him from the microphone: ‘That’s all.’171 But the majority was slim: 1,138 votes to 839, with 56 abstentions. Gorbachev had merely postponed what Sakharov had helped to make inevitable. Rebuffed at the Congress, Sakharov took the cause of a multiparty system to his colleagues in the Interregional Group. In a historic speech, he exhorted them to assume the responsibilities of an opposition. Castigating the leadership for retarding the pace of reforms, he argued that ‘we simply cannot share responsibility for the actions of a government that is leading the nation to disaster and postponing the realisation of perestroika for years to come.’ But he emphasised that ‘when we declare that we are going into opposition, we assume responsibility for the measures we propose.’172 The impact of this exhortation was magnified by Sakharov’s death that evening, which evoked a reaction that was wide enough and deep enough to transform Russia’s political landscape. A wave of eulogies transformed Sakharov into the icon of the democratic movement. A first, tentative step in this direction was to identify him as a central figure

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of perestroika, which was facilitated by Gorbachev’s reticent admission that ‘even when I disagreed with him, I always remembered his sincerity, which is why people respected him.’173 Developing this theme in a commemorative issue of Moscow News, Yurii Karyakin recalled Gorbachev’s telephone call to Sakharov as ‘the beginning of the sharp and profound Gorbachev-Sakharov dialogue, a dialogue which became one of the engines of our progress.’174 According to Ales Adamovich, the Belarusan writer who had served on the Burlatskii commission, ‘Sakharov mapped perestroika’s routes and formulated the fundamentals of the new thinking and the new attitudes, pushing politicians towards moral decisions at home and abroad. Intellectually and morally, perestroika ripened under the strong influence of his personality.’175 Whilst integrating Sakharov into the pantheon of perestroika, the reformers also used him to transgress the limits of perestroika. Sakharov became a symbol of the idea of opposition. As Leonid Batkin reflected in an obituary that was both eulogy and incitement: The fact is that in our country there have not been and currently are not any democratic institutions. But we had Sakharov. We did not have and we still do not have people who have declared themselves openly in opposition, without which normal political life is impossible. But we did have an opposition, because we had Sakharov!176 The demand for a multiparty system was a recurrent theme at Sakharov’s funeral, where demonstrators held placards with a crossed-out ‘6’. Arkadii Murashov, a member of the Interregional Group, announced that it was ready to go into opposition. Yurii Afanasev called for all democrats to unite in ‘one Andrei Sakharov democratic bloc.’177 Later Afanasev reflected that it was ‘impossible to overestimate Sakharov’s role’ not only in the formation of Memorial and the Interregional Group, but in ‘the very idea of opposition’: We diverged from the official course of the Communist Party on questions of power, of property, and of the national and state organisation of the USSR…. I think that without Andrei Dmitrievich we would have wavered for a long time over those questions. His clear-cut statements, literally on the eve of the Second Congress, de facto led to the formation of a political opposition.178 Less ecstatic was the assessment of KGB chairman Kryuchkov, who warned Gorbachev that speakers at Sakharov’s funeral ‘tried in essence to canonise the late academician, transforming him into a distinctive symbol of the struggle for the realisation of the conditions of groups opposed to theCPSU.’179 To combat the Sakharov myth, Kryuchkov sponsored the formation of the ‘Andrei Sakharov Union of Democratic Forces,’ the title Afanasev had proposed for a coalition uniting all those who had mourned Sakharov’s death.180 In April 1990, the proposal was taken up by a shady figure, Vladimir Voronin, and advertised in Moscow News as an attempt ‘to bring together all those who share the famous human rights activist’s ideas.’181 Voronin’s links to the security apparatus were suggested by his biography: he

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had graduated from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism with a thesis on The Psychological War of the USA,’ and was subsequently jailed for the embezzlement of state funds.182 This appropriation of Sakharov’s name was denounced by Elena Bonner and Sergei Kovalyov, who pointed out that the allegedly democratic union was in fact founded ‘behind closed doors, guarded by uniformed or plainclothes policemen.’183 Voronin subsequently emerged as the chairman of the Centrist Bloc, an alliance of phantom parties that repeatedly called for the declaration of a state of emergency and the suppression of all political parties. The Sakharov Union’s primary activity was the publication of a newspaper edited by Voronin, Tsentr, which combined Voronin’s selfaggrandizing memoirs with diatribes against Bonner, insinuating that she was the instigator of Sakharov’s hunger strikes and responsible for his premature death. The Sakharov Union outlived the Soviet regime by several years, a grotesque relic of totalitarian ineptitude. Voronin’s one triumph was the serialisation in Tsentr during 1992 of excerpts from the memoirs of Sakharov’s daughter Tatyana: as cynical an exploitation of private anguish as the KGB’s involvement with Solzhenitsyn’s divorced wife, Natalya Reshetovskaya. Only in May 1994 did Voronin finally renounce Sakharov’s name in favour of one that reflected his fascist sympathies.184 A different testimony to the power and pervasiveness of the Sakharov legend was the increasingly vitriolic slander from the bastions of National Bolshevism. Writing in Molodaya Gvardiya, Vladimir Zaburin denounced the ‘grovellers’ who had used Sakharov for their own ends: ‘Why, one asks, was a powerless old man on the verge of death subjected to such ruthless exploitation in the political arena? Sakharov here, Sakharov there, Sakharov everywhere.’185 Recalling references to Sakharov as ‘the conscience of the nation,’ Zaburin argued that those who saw Sakharov in such terms lacked a conscience of their own.186 The attack on the Sakharov cult was developed in the next issue by Samoilov’s article, ‘The Outburst of Sakharovshchina,’ drawing an implicit parallel with the 1937 Ezhovshchina Terror. This inflammatory polemic was read out at a closed ideological conference in early 1991, and provoked a response from the newspaper of Democratic Russia.187 Samoilov complained that ‘after Sakharov’s death, the more brazen of his accomplices…spoke out with demands to confer his name on squares, streets, universities and so on.’ Having noted that Sakharov had ‘acquired scandalous fame during the 1970s as an antisoviet and a fierce enemy of détente,’ he proceeded to excel the imaginations of the most vituperative propagandists of the Brezhnev era by exposing the Nobel Peace Laureate as ‘a supporter of the application to his own nation of medical means of manipulating behaviour and violently limiting the very lives of individuals.’ The paradox that demonstrations of many thousands should gather under the name of such a criminal was easily explained by juxtaposed statistics: Sakharov might have been proposed by 182 institutes of the Academy of Sciences, but ‘it is also known that 44% of all doctors and candidates of science in the USSR are Jews, though Jews comprise only 0.69% of the population.’188 Some dissidents were also uneasy about the canonisation of Sakharov. At the founding Congress of Democratic Russia, Elena Bonner spurned the ovation that greeted her appearance on stage, and demanded: Why are you inclined to create cults…. Out of Sakharov…and out of myself? …Either you are really democrats, or you are simply distracting

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yourself with the movement, in which case you’re a crowd. If you want to remain a crowd, then roll from cult to cult, like a ball. If you want to become a movement, try to be more responsible.189 On the eve of the 1991 Sakharov Congress, she complained that ‘everybody seems to be using [Sakharov’s] name for their own ideological ends,’ and pointed to the proliferation of public associations and organisations named after Sakharov, and the opening of Sakharov museums ‘where no one knows what will be said about Sakharov.’190 She also rebuffed self-appointed guardians of Sakharov’s memory, like Roy Medvedev, now a Gorbachev loyalist, who assailed Yeltsin’s identification with Sakharov as ‘an assault on another’s glory.’191 Bonner responded with an article titled, ‘Does Roy Medvedev Have the Right to Defend Sakharov from the Democrats?’ in which she set out the facts of Sakharov’s long-standing distrust of Medvedev.192 Even more sceptical about the Sakharov cult was Gleb Pavlovskii, who argued after the collapse of the Soviet Union that: the torrent of words in hymns to Sakharov and the invocations of his name are yet to be analyzed as ersatz speech, as a way of not speaking about the rights-defence movement, as a way of not remembering that period and not rehabilitating political prisoners.193 He assailed the 1960s generation for its inability ‘to hold power without castrating the memory of its time of infamy, the Seventies.’ Instead of repenting, it had ‘squeezed out political rivals amongst the ranks of the former political prisoners, substituting one name for the epoch and programme of the Movement.’194 The ersatz speech of the Sakharov cult persisted into the Yeltsin regime’s own ‘time of infamy.’ In December 1994, as Russian tanks were rolling into Chechnya, prominent representatives of the Presidential Administration marked the anniversary of Sakharov’s death by laying a wreath at his grave in Vostriyanskii cemetery.195 In a book published shortly after the destruction of Grozny, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev avowed that Sakharov’s notion: of the inseparable link between the preservation of peace and an open society and the observance of human rights, a notion which until recently was considered in our country an impermissible challenge to the Soviet regime and its ideology, has today become one of the foundations of Russian foreign policy.196 Yet even ersatz speech has a meaning. The paeans to Sakharov may have marginalised the rights-defence movement, but they were also a way of assimilating its agenda. The morning after Sakharov’s death, Boris Yeltsin had declared: ‘We must come to the end of the path that Sakharov began. Our duty is to Sakharov’s name, to the persecution he suffered.’197 It was a time when Yeltsin had exhausted the possibilities of antibureaucratic populism, and was facing ridicule for dubious claims about an assassination attempt. For him, ‘the path that Sakharov began’ became a path away from Leninism, and towards a multiparty democracy and a human rights-respecting state. It was a path that led him away from the party, and towards the rights-defenders, a convergence that was

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symbolised by Yeltsin’s standing vigil as an honour guard beside Sakharov’s coffin, alongside the dissidents Lev Timofeev and Sergei Kovalyov.198 The ‘path that Sakharov began’ was clearly signposted. No amount of adulation would sound plausible without a commitment to the defence of human rights and constitutionalism that was the lodestar of his public life. Those who claimed to be Sakharov disciples were also constantly confronted by his posthumous voice. Anthologies of Sakharov’s long-suppressed, dissident works finally appeared in Soviet editions. With reverential prefaces, the liberal press published his last statements, in which rights-defence concerns were paramount. Apart from his celebrated address on opposition, there was the draft of the speech that he had been writing on the night of his death, which was published in late December 1989 by Literaturnaya Gazeta. This classic rights-defence text assailed recent legislation extending the lawful period of pre-trial detentions from nine months to eighteen months. Offering reasons to rescind the law, Sakharov pointed to the fact that it had been promulgated despite its failure to pass the House of Nationalities. It was the old dissident refrain: ‘Observe your own constitution.’ But the focus of Sakharov’s indignation was the role of the General-Prosecutor, Aleksandr Sukharev, who had presented the legislation to the Supreme Soviet. During his nomination hearings at the Congress, Sukharev had adroitly deflected Sakharov’s questions with reformist rhetoric. Now Sakharov accused him of spearheading the power ministries’ project for a law-abiding dictatorship: instead of monitoring the implementation of the laws, the procuracy in the figure of its highest official is striving to free its hands entirely and return the country to the stormy times of illegality, of the cult of personality, stagnation, and other rather gloomy periods.199 Sakharov’s political testament was his draft ‘Constitution of the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia.’ Published in two versions (an original draft released soon after his death in Novoe Vremya, and the final text published in Zvezda in March 1990), it was less a legal document than a personal manifesto, an eclectic summation of his life’s work. Still faithful to the central theme of his 1968 Reflections, Sakharov included the convergence of socialist and capitalist systems and world government amongst the goals of the new union (article 4). His disarmament concerns were evident in article 14, which renounced a nuclear first strike. But the draft’s most important contribution to the democratic movement was to focus attention upon the creation of constitutional safeguards for human rights. In an ironic counterpoint to the affirmation of Communist Party supremacy in the Brezhnev constitution’s article 6, Sakharov’s article 6 affirmed the supremacy of civil and political rights, and enumerated those that had been most flouted by the Soviet regime: The Constitution of the Union guarantees the civil rights of the human being—freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and exchange of information, freedom of religion, freedom of association, meetings and demonstrations, freedom of emigration and return to one’s country, freedom to travel abroad, freedom of movement, freedom of choice of place of residence, work and education, the inviolability of the home,

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freedom from arbitrary arrest and from psychiatric hospitalisation without a medical basis. No one can be subjected to criminal prosecution for actions linked to convictions, if they contain no violence, appeals for violence, other infringement of the rights of people, or treason.200 This protection of non-violent civic activity, echoing Sakharov’s criticism of the April decrees at the Congress, was clearly intended to provide a constitutional barrier to repressive legislation and ordinances. The Sakharov constitution may have been unworkable, but it was the antithesis of the security organ’s project for a law-abiding dictatorship. It became the point of departure for discussion about the creation of a rightsrespecting state. One of the first responses came from Leonid Batkin, who pointed to some major absences in the text (the status and powers of the Constitutional Court, the independence of the judiciary, and local government), but expressed gratitude for ‘the fact that it exists.’201 A.A.Mishin, writing in the latest instalment of a series of reformist anthologies, criticised the clauses providing for the supremacy of republican over union legislation, but praised Sakharov’s endeavour ‘to construct a dignified life now, for the people of the present, and not for our distant descendants.’202

Democratic Russia The first serious steps to implement Sakharov’s project for a law-abiding state that respected human rights were taken not in the Union parliament, but in the RSFSR parliament. In January 1990, one month after Sakharov’s death, leading deputies of the Interregional Group announced the creation of the ‘Democratic Russia’ bloc, an electoral alliance of parties and informal groups to contest the RSFSR elections. Its founding document declared that: the general political orientation of this wide association will be defined by the documents of the Interregional Group, the humanist ideas of our great contemporary ANDREI DMITRIEVICH SAKHAROV, his proposed decree on power and his draft constitution.203 The bloc’s programme included the enactment of a new RSFSR constitution ‘in which human rights are paramount’; the revocation of article 6 of the republican constitution; the elimination of the two-tiered Congress/Supreme Soviet structure to remove the intervening link between the electorate and the highest body of power; the placing of the KGB under parliamentary control; and a declaration of Russia’s sovereignty.204 The mobilisation that had begun at Sakharov’s funeral reached its climax on 4 February 1990, when over 100,000 demonstrators converged on Moscow’s Manezh Square to demand the abolition of article 6. To emphasise the democrats’ divergence from the Kremlin reformers, the meeting began with a minute of silence ‘in memory of the victims of five years of perestroika.’205 One prominent placard quoted Sakharov’s words: ‘The only gift we can make to the forces of the right is our own passivity.’ The end to passivity, in the largest non-government demonstration in Moscow since the revolution, was extolled by Yurii Afanasev from the podium as ‘the peaceful revolution

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of February 1990.’206 It was held on the eve of a Central Committee Plenum, which voted almost unanimously to abolish article 6.207 The end of the Communist Party’s legal ascendancy became law at the 3rd Congress of People’s Deputies, where the abolition of article 6 was repeatedly referred to as ‘Deputy Sakharov’s amendment.’208 A pleiade of rights-defenders became legislators in the March 1990 elections. The most renowned was Sergei Kovalyov, an editor of the Chronicle and a veteran legalist. As the sole dissident, Sakharov had been a lonely figure in the Union parliament, but Kovalyov was joined by a team of former dissidents: Boris Zolotukhin, Father Gleb Yakunin, Revolt Pimenov, and Mikhail Molostvov. Close to the rights-defence movement were Lev Ponomarev and Anatolii Shabad, whom Elena Bonner publicly endorsed on the eve of the poll, emphasising their closeness to Sakharov.209 Ponomarev, a founder of Memorial, had visited his friend Yurii Orlov in internal exile. Shabad had been a colleague of Sakharov at FIAN, and had become his ‘authoritative aide’ in the Congress.210 Even before his election, Kovalyov’s attitude towards a parliamentary career was ambivalent, and he had to be dissuaded by Sakharov from withdrawing his candidacy.211 After his overwhelming first-round victory in a Moscow electorate, Kovalyov expressed distaste at the composition of the parliament, and was already calling for its dissolution: I think that it is essential to transform the Congress of People’s Deputies into a Constituent Assembly, which must ratify the basic provisions of the constitution, define the federal status of Russia, establish the appropriate commissions, adopt a new democratic law on elections, announce elections to a legislature assembly…and dissolve itself. Acknowledging that the ‘apparat’ majority would not permit such an outcome, Kovalyov added that Sakharov would be the model for his parliamentary career.212 He believed that he would be a ‘voice in the wilderness.’213 What transformed Kovalyov’s position was Boris Yeltsin’s reinvention of himself as a Sakharov disciple. Soon after his election as speaker of the parliament, Yeltsin invited Kovalyov into his office and proposed that he become head of the Committee on Human Rights, emphasising ‘the importance of the question of the rights of the individual for the new state which we are trying to construct.’214 Kovalyov hesitated before accepting, torn between a sense of responsibility and an unwillingness to become involved with Yeltsin. As chairman of a committee, he automatically became a member of the Supreme Soviet presidium, the parliament’s ruling body. Like Sakharov, Kovalyov’s entry into the corridors of power was greeted with scepticism by radical rights-defenders. Arriving in Moscow in April 1991, on an invitation signed by Kovalyov, Vladimir Bukovskii revealed that he had warned Sakharov that ‘there is no need to enter these Soviet parliaments and serve as Gorbachev’s screen,’ since ‘you will have the responsibility and they will have the power.’215 One month later, the failure of the Sakharov Congress in Moscow to confront the arrests of Vladimir Danilov and Valeriya Novodvorskaya provoked fierce criticism from Aleksandr Podrabinek, who lamented that democratic movement was ‘growing, becoming official, and degenerating’:

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I have long ceased to nurture illusions towards people who are playing with the regime, but here, it seemed to me, zek solidarity (the organizing committee of the congress includes Ye.Bonner and S.Kovalyov) would defeat conjunctural considerations. I was wrong.216 In a vain attempt to analyse the widening gulf between legalists and politicals, Kovalyov published an article on ‘Why there is no rights-defence movement in the USSR.’217 The very title could only infuriate Podrabinek, editor of the rights-defence weekly ExpressChronicle, which was one of the greatest achievements of that movement. In a bitter response, Podrabinek lamented that ‘On reading Kovalyov’s words, any Western politician should understand that human rights matters can now be discussed only with some research center of the Potemkin-village type.’218 Kovalyov justified his engagement with the authorities in terms of his belief in evolutionary reform, and his contention that ‘even in this Russian parliament, where almost 60% of the deputies remain members of the Communist Party [in 1993], it is possible to get something done.’219 The Human Rights Committee did become a platform for rights-defence activism. Its earliest acts included a demand that Chistopol prison provide it with all documents related to Anatolii Marchenko’s last hunger strike.220 But the ‘war of laws’ between the RSFSR and Union legislatures diminished the Committee’s influence with institutions beholden to the Union. The Committee’s perilous status was exemplified by its mission to investigate ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh in January 1991, when Kovalyov and his delegation were arrested at gunpoint at Stepanakert airport by Azerbaijani OMON troops, who mocked his parliamentary credentials.221 The impact of the Committee was also limited by its small staff. Like earlier dissident public initiatives, the Committee was overwhelmed by a stream of citizen complaints about bureaucratic injustices. ‘Convicts write from jails, reformatories and isolation wards, law-abiding citizens complain of unlawful dismissals and housing problems,’ acknowledged Kovalyov.222 Yurii Shikhanovich, a former editor of the Chronicle of Current Events, was engaged in the unequal task of responding to what became an avalanche of mail.223 The Committee also gave Kovalyov the opportunity to advance a legislative agenda for the institutionalisation of human rights concerns. In co-operation with NGOs like Memorial, the Moscow Helsinki Group, and the Russian-American Project Group on Human Rights, it prepared draft legislation on States of Emergency, Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression, and Penitentiary Reform. The Committee’s first success was the passage of the Law on States of Emergency, which had originally been drafted for the Union parliament by the Project Group on Human Rights, and was then adapted for the RSFSR. In the face of the obvious threat of a military coup, the legislation was designed ‘to preserve democracy in even the most inhospitable conditions,’ since ‘a State of Emergency is a very convenient beginning for a coup: a State of Emergency is introduced, then prolonged, then prolonged again and again.’224 In fact the law provided the basis for the parliament to veto Yeltsin’s declaration of a State of Emergency in the Chechen-Ingushetian Republic in November 1991.225 But the communist-dominated RSFSR parliament invariably favoured the legislative initiatives of the security apparatus, which was feared by the RSFSR leadership as a critical factor in the struggle against Gorbachev, and which enjoyed its own powerful

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representation in the corpus of deputies. Kovalyov’s first major clash with these institutional interests was provoked by the RSFSR law on the militia, which had been drafted by the Committee for Legality and Law and Order, a notorious bastion of the security apparatus. Appealing to the deputies’ ‘sense of history,’ Supreme Soviet chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov exhorted them to vote for the law, and prevented Kovalyov from explaining his objections. According to Kovalyov’s committee, the legislation impinged upon ‘important human rights, such as the right to inviolability of the person, the right to confidentiality of private life, [and] the inviolability of the home,’ and failed to establish even ‘the minimum level of guarantees which are contained in the existing union and republican legislation.’226 A similar confrontation took place one month later, when Kovalyov urged the Supreme Soviet to pass a resolution against the involvement of Soviet forces in ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and to limit the use of Soviet forces to the separation of the opposing sides. Khasbulatov prevented him from reading the draft, which never even reached the agenda.227 Nor did the parliament heed Kovalyov’s objections to the RSFSR Law on Repressed Peoples, which announced the instant rehabilitation of all repressed ethnic groups. Kovalyov’s proposal that commissions be created to mediate competing claims was derided as a ‘bureaucratic approach.’ One prominent politician castigated Kovalyov: ‘Look at him: he defends the rights of every prisoner, but he does not want to defend the rights of entire peoples!’228 The traditions of the dissident rights-defenders were also upheld by Boris Zolotukhin, who was elected chairman of the Judicial Reform Subcommittee of the Legislation Committee. Like Kovalyov, Zolotukhin was engaged in a running battle against the draconian legislative initiatives of the security apparatus. ‘The weight of extra powers and privileges granted to law-enforcement agencies,’ complained Zolotukhin laconically in the autumn of 1991, ‘should by no means be in direct proportion to the force of the pressure they bring to bear on people’s deputies.’229 Against this pressure, Zolotukhin campaigned for the creation of an independent judiciary, for judicial control over the activity of law-enforcement organs, and for the introduction of the jury system. Zolotukhin supervised the drafting of the ‘Conception of Judicial Reform,’ which set out guidelines for the restoration of an independent judiciary. Submitted by Yeltsin to the Supreme Soviet in October 1991, it became ‘the legal foundation for the adoption of laws aimed at transforming the Russian justice system.’230 The parliamentary rights-defenders’ most enduring achievement was in the field of constitutional reform, where Yeltsin sought to demonstrate his adherence to ‘the path that Sakharov began.’ In July 1990, the essence of Sakharov’s Decree on Power was enshrined in an RSFSR Decree on Power, which opened with the declaration that ‘power in the RSFSR belongs exclusively to the people’ and warned that ‘any illegal intervention by political parties, party-political organs and other public organisations in the activities of the organs of state power and administration…must cease immediately.’231 The Sakharov constitution became the first document to be circulated amongst members of the Russian parliament’s new constitutional commission, which had been established at the first session of the RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies in June 1990.232 Its ‘great influence’ on the resulting draft was even acknowledged by Ruslan Khasbulatov, who also claimed that it had influenced the alternative draft proposed by the Communists of Russia faction, and thus ‘forced the conservatives to make a major shift to the left.’233 But

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it was in the work of the constitutional commission that the dissident legacy was most felt. As Viktor Sheinis noted in 1991: [The constitution] was prepared by a small group of democratic deputies and legal experts. No one in a position of authority supervised this work…. The draft is predicated on the indisputable priority of indi-vidual rights and liberties over the corporate interests of any communities, on society’s priority over the state.234 Those deputies included both Kovalyov and Zolotukhin, who had responsibility for the human rights and judicial reform aspects of the constitution. The completion of the draft constitution was overshadowed by the debate around Solzhenitsyn’s manifesto, ‘How are we to Rebuild Russia’ But the draft’s importance was grasped by the correspondent of the London Times, who described it ‘a direct challenge to the KGB’ and emphasised the break with Soviet tradition: The drafters, who include the respected dissident and former prisoner Sergei Kovalyov, have drawn on Anglo-Saxon legal and political traditions in an attempt to ensure watertight protection for human rights.235 In fact the heritage of the rights-defence movement and the lessons of the Soviet past were far more important influences than ‘Anglo-Saxon’ law, which was fortified by centuries of evolution and countless volumes of case law. The constitution set out an extensive catalogue of human rights. It also provided for an institutional machinery to enforce those rights, including the office of ombudsman, and a constitutional court. Defying the prerogatives of the military-security apparatus, it outlawed telephone eavesdropping without a court order, and guaranteed the right of conscientious objectors to perform alternative civilian service. The first draft was essentially completed in November 1990, but was rejected in early 1991 by the parliament.236 The most vociferous opposition came from the Communists of Russia group, which claimed that the draft ‘reflects an open desire to constitutionalise a coup d’état capable of changing the existing social structure and creating a totalitarian state with a mock democratic façade.’237 In the shadow of Gorbachev’s crackdown in the Baltics, this allegation was supplemented with conspiracy theories. ‘Foreign specialists,’ claimed communist hardliner Viktor Ilyukhin, ‘had a direct relation to the preparation of a new draft constitution of the Russian Federation’—an obvious allusion to the Russian-American Project Group on Human Rights.238 New impetus came after the failure of the August 1991 coup. Yeltsin’s first presidential message to the legislature singled out the human rights chapter of the draft constitution for special praise: Not the CPSU, not the nation, not any party, but precisely the human being is the highest value. His rights are unshakeable and inalienable. They belong to him from birth and possess the highest priority. The observance of human rights is the main obligation of state power, all its

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institutions and officials. The corresponding section of the draft constitution is set out in maximum accordance with the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, international pacts and treaties.239 Despite the post-coup wave of democratic enthusiasm, it still proved impossible to muster the necessary two-thirds majority to incorporate even the draft human rights chapter into the existing constitution. Instead, it was passed in November 1991 as a ‘Declaration of Rights of the Individual and the Citizen’, which lacked the binding force of constitutional law. A further attempt at a constitutional amendment was rejected in March 1992 by the communist-dominated Federal Council, the upper house of the Supreme Soviet.240 The stalemate in constitutional reform contrasted with the progress of judicial reform. In July 1991, Boris Zolotukhin submitted legislation on the Constitutional Court to the RSFSR Congress of People’s Deputies. ‘State wisdom,’ he declared, ‘demands the creation of a reliable legal mechanism that would restrain each of the branches of power from the natural temptation to elevate itself over the other two.’241 But the law exemplified Sakharov’s complaint that the building of the constitutional house had begun with the roof. The new court was to adjudicate compliance with a Brezhnevera constitution that vested supreme power in the Congress of People’s Deputies, which could rewrite the rules of the game at the whim of two-thirds of the deputies. Hence, Zolotukhin’s bill was supported not only by reformers, but also by defenders of the Leninist heritage. The inevitable politicisation of the new institution was also exacerbated by the poverty of Soviet legal culture. During hearings before the Human Rights Committee, a candidate for judge of a regional court stated that in settling a difficult case he would seek advice from ‘superior comrades.’ Another candidate, in an unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Constitutional Court, declared that he was standing for the post ‘in order to defend the interests of the peasantry.’242 Despite the deadlock over the constitution, the position of the parliamentary rightsdefenders was transformed by the failure of the August 1991 coup. In the euphoria of victory, long-postponed initiatives such as the Declaration on the Rights of the Individual and the Citizen, the Law on the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression, and the Conception on Judicial Reform were passed by the RSFSR Congress. But even in this apparent moment of triumph, even when addressing the crowd demanding the demolition of the Dzerzhinskii statue in Lubyanka Square, Kovalyov reaffirmed the primacy of legal process over revolutionary enthusiasm, insisting that ‘an independent court must deal with the CPSU, and a parliamentary commission and then the same court must deal with the KGB.’243 It was the pinnacle of Kovalyov’s public life. In September, he headed the Russian Federation delegation to the CSCE human dimension conference in Moscow, where he denounced his own country’s laws on the militia and the KGB, which ‘not only fail to guarantee personal freedom sanctity of the home, private correspondence and telephone communication, and even the right to life, [but] even provide for the possibility of the infringement of these rights.’244 He was also appointed the head of the Russian delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission, and as preparation for the next session, the parliament held hearings on the human rights situation in Cuba.245 As at the CSCE conference, Kovalyov welcomed foreign criticism at the UN, and emphasised that ‘our

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assessment of the human rights situation in any country would be determined only by the essence of the case,’ a position certain to infuriate the power ministries.246 The cynical history of Soviet human rights diplomacy was the central item of Kovalyov’s expert testimony in July 1992 before the Constitutional Court in the case on Yeltsin’s decree banning the Communist Party.247 The collapse of the USSR also elevated the authority of the parliamentary Human Rights Committee. No longer could its appeals and requests for information be ignored by bureaucrats subordinate to the Union authorities. After agitation in the camps, the Committee took charge of the drafting of legislation on the reform of the penitentiary system.248 It also played a central role in the framing of an amnesty for prisoners, although its scope was reduced during the political bargaining process necessary to secure its passage.249 As Kovalyov acknowledged, ‘the Supreme Soviet is conservative and it regards the defence of the rights of prisoners in a very one-sided way.’250 A similar compromise weakened the Committee’s long-postponed Law on the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repression, which was finally passed by the Supreme Soviet on 10 October 1991.251 The law provided for the automatic rehabilitation of those found guilty under the anti-dissident articles of the Criminal Code (70 and 190–1) and its antireligious articles (142 and 227). The legislation was unprecedented in its scope, yet marred by serious flaws. Victims of non-judicial repression were not liable to automatic rehabilitation, and families of victims were denied compensation. Resentment flared at a conference of former political prisoners in St Petersburg in December 1991, where Kovalyov confessed that ‘I feel that I have been invited here not so much as a speaker, but as a defendant.’252 The demoralised and discredited security establishment began to recover from the failed putsch only in early 1992, whilst the democrats were preoccupied with the launching of market reforms. In January 1992, the Supreme Soviet passed a Law on the Procuracy as drafted by the Committee for Legality and Law and Order, which was dominated by security officials. Speaking on behalf of the Committee on Legislation, Zolotukhin lamented that the law ‘preserves unchanged the monster which was created in the 1930s on the scheme of the unforgettable Andrei Vyshinskii.’253 At the same time, Khasbulatov shut down the most aggressive investigation into the coup, led by Lev Ponomarev, who had sought to end the ‘practice of changing doorplates at the Lubyanka office.’254 One of the members of the commission, former dissident and Orthodox priest Gleb Yakunin, had revealed information that led to the exposure of two members of the Holy Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate as KGB agents.255 By July, Security Minister Viktor Barannikov felt secure enough to accuse both Ponomarev and Yakunin of ‘treason’ in a closed session of the Supreme Soviet, and it was announced that the Procurator was prosecuting them for having disclosed the materials.256 It was an empty threat, and the case was soon dropped, but it testified to a new confidence in the Security Ministry that the post-putsch crisis had passed, and it was back to business as usual. The first victims were Lev Fedorov and Vil Mirzayanov, two scientists who were arrested in October 1992 for revealing the military-industrial complex’s continuing development of chemical weapons in violation of government policy.257 That month Barannikov appointed Viktor Cherkesov, a KGB officer notorious for his zealous prosecution of political cases as late as 1988, as head of the St Petersburg branch of the Security Ministry. This provocative step was criticised in a letter to Yeltsin from

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Kovalyov’s Committee, which expressed ‘extreme concern’ about the promotion to such a vital position of a man who ‘directly [and] actively participated in the persecution of otherwise-thinkers, [and] in the preparation of political cases at the end of the 1970s and during the 1980s in Leningrad.’ It pointed to evidence about Cherkesov’s ‘violations of procedural norms during the conduct of searches and interrogations,’ and cited statements by the dissidents Rostislav Evdokimov and Vyacheslav Dolinin that Cherkesov had told them that KGB officers can and must violate the written law for the sake of fulfilling ‘higher laws.’ The consolidation of democracy, concluded the Committee, ‘greatly depends upon the cadres policy conducted at the present time,’ and especially in the Security Ministry, which had failed to understand ‘the impermissibility of appointing to leading positions persons who were directly involved in political repressions conducted by the communist regime.258 It was a prescient, but unheeded, warning: in 1995, Cherkesov would mastermind one of the great political cases of the Yeltsin era: the prosecution of the environmental activist Aleksei Nikitin. The reassertion of the old KGB cadres proceeded in tandem with the growth of authoritarian tendencies within the parliament, which produced increasing friction between Ruslan Khasbulatov and Sergei Kovalyov. Their initial clashes revolved around procedural issues: Kovalyov criticised the fact that ‘esteemed Ruslan Imranovich can freely permit himself to say that “I will insist on this decision with all my strength,”’ a position that would be untenable for the speaker of a Western parliament.259 Amicable relations became impossible after March 1992, when the Human Rights Committee exposed an order signed by Khasbulatov ordering the expulsion of Chechens from Moscow hotels.260 In a statement, the Committee accused Khasbulatov of exceeding the powers ‘laid down for the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet by article 115 of the RSFSR Constitution,’ of appropriating the functions of the executive, and thus of violating ‘the basic principle of a law-abiding democratic state—the principle of separation of powers.’ It warned that ‘the arbitrariness committed by the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet discredits the Russian parliament and the corpus of deputies in the eyes of the electorate and the world community.’261 The same contempt for legality was demonstrated several months later by Khasbulatov’s use of parliamentary guards to seize the premises of the newspaper Izvestiya, and his reprisals against his deputy, Sergei Filatov, who criticised the move.262 In an open letter to Filatov, Kovalyov declared that it was time for Khasbulatov ‘to think about resignation.’263 The position of the rights-defenders was complicated by the transformation of the political struggle into a constitutional struggle. When Yeltsin banned the National Salvation Front in the autumn of 1992, Kovalyov had denied that there was a legal foundation for the ban, since the Front had made no appeal for unconstitutional action.264 But the constitutional field had become a quagmire. Exploiting Sakharov’s incautious use of the Leninist slogan ‘All power to the Soviets!’, Khasbulatov waged a war of constitutional attrition against the presidency. In November 1992 the Supreme Soviet passed a law declaring the Council of Ministers ‘the highest organ of state administration,’ despite the president’s status as head of state.265 After the December 1992 Congress, Kovalyov claimed that deputies were rapidly being transformed into state officials, ‘and the speaker is not at all a speaker, but a superior of a very high rank.’ He assailed the ‘completely monstrous amendments to the constitution’ that had been taking place under the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets!’ For Kovalyov, the apotheosis of

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parliamentary sovereignty was symbolised by the passage of a constitutional provision empowering the legislature to determine any question—‘not any question on legislation, but any question in general.’266 Arrogating to itself new powers, the Congress passed a resolution in March 1993 declaring itself the ‘supreme power on all questions relating to the Russian Federation,’ and reduced the president to merely the ‘highest official.’ Kovalyov announced that he and fifty-eight other deputies would challenge the resolution in the Constitutional Court, and lamented: ‘Unhappy is the country in which deputies are complimented for deciding to live under the constitution.’267 Kovalyov’s appeal was pre-empted by Yeltsin, who announced the introduction of ‘special rule’ on 20 March 1993. This first attempt to resolve the constitutional crisis was declared illegal by Chief Justice Zorkin of the Constitutional Court even before Yeltsin’s decree had been published, and before the court had convened. Clearly siding against its own parliament, Kovalyov’s Committee praised Yeltsin’s adherence to the ‘principles laid down in the constitution, the supremacy of democracy and the priority of human rights,’ whilst assailing the Constitutional Court for siding ‘with one of the parties to the conflict.’268 In an open letter to Zorkin, Kovalyov explored the implications of the crisis and posed a question about the very nature of law: Should the Constitutional Court be governed by the spirit and sense of the constitution, the fundamental principles of law or proceed from the letter of our ragged constitution? A constitution containing irreconcilable contradictions…. On the one hand, it proclaims the principle of the separation of powers. On the other, it affirms the supremacy of the Congress as an organ of state power. In support of this invocation of ‘fundamental principles,’ Kovalyov identified two points in the law on the constitutional court that ‘appeal to the spirit and sense of the constitution and legal consciousness of judges as a source of law.’269 Kovalyov’s discovery of the ‘spirit and sense of the constitution’ was a new attempt to reconcile the two tenets of the pravozashchitnik: the defence of rights and the defence of law. If the letter of the constitution entrenched the power of the nomenklatura and authorised legislative infringements of human rights, the ‘spirit and sense of the constitution’ established the people as the ultimate arbiter. By submitting the fate of his reforms to a referendum on 25 April, Yeltsin stood on the ground of this theoretical constitutionalism. A fortnight before the poll, Kovalyov justified his position in an interview with Moscow News, where he denied that he had become a revolutionary, and expressed pride in his legalist past: I always adhered to a strict legal position. Understand, that in the 60s–70s, this seemed to be extreme radicalism, but it was not so. I never called for a break, though I showed a zeks’ solidarity with people whose calls for revolt I did not share. I said this: the existing law in this state is bad. I am prepared to do everything to change it, but my strict condition is this: adhere at least to the bad law.

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Now the problem was that the ‘bad law’ was being exploited by the opponents of democracy and legality. Kovalyov lashed out at the recrudescence of authoritarian values in the militant parliamentary opposition, which was symbolised by the return to democratic centralism in the revived CPRF. The quest for absolute power was taking place behind a façade of ‘cultured parliamentarianism’ and the ‘legal field of the existing constitution.’ Here was the crux of the problem, for it was ‘precisely the existing constitution that creates an illegal field: it is saturated with mutually-exclusive contradictions.’ For Kovalyov, this legal quagmire was a result of the unlimited prerogatives of the legislature: The separation of powers does not entail such divine institutions as a Congress which on its own can write the constitution and amend it. 2/3 of the votes of the Congress are enough to change the law—that is to say, in Russia, to go around it. Without exploring the implications of the impending constitutional rupture, Kovalyov argued that ‘compromise is impossible: either elections, the dissolution of the congress and the adoption of a new constitution, or all-power to the Congress-monarch, [and] change the written law according to the Bolshevik basis of democratic centralism.’270 Yeltsin’s victory in the April referendum gave new impetus to the democrats’ campaign for early elections and a new constitution. Kovalyov called upon the deputies ‘to display human decency and resign,’ and in June he participated in the establishment of the pro-presidential electoral bloc, ‘Russia’s Choice’.271 A new ‘presidential’ draft of the constitution had been unveiled on the eve of the referendum by Yeltsin, who claimed that it incorporated the best proposals of the Constitutional Commission, and Sakharov’s draft.272 It was no coincidence that Yeltsin chose Sakharov’s birthday, 21 May, to announce the convocation of a constitutional assembly.273 The link with Sakharov was emphasised by Foreign Minister Kozyrev, who claimed that Sakharov’s solitary creation of a draft constitution was ‘the right of a man, who had awoken the people, to appeal to the people directly,’ and that such a right now belonged to Yeltsin, as the winner of the April referendum.274 The presidential synthesis was debated at a constitutional assembly, which met during the summer of 1993.275 An array of former dissidents—Kronid Lyubarskii, Aleksandr Oguridnikov, and Lev Ubozhko—were appointed to legitimise this extra-constitutional body, but the most prominent was Boris Zolotukhin, vicechairman of the Supreme Soviet’s Legislation Committee, and already a determined foe of Khasbulatov.276 At the March 1993 Congress, Zolotukhin had led the campaign for the abolition of the post of parliamentary speaker.277 Now he was entrusted with the delicate task of chairing the assembly’s section on local government.278 After the defeat of the Supreme Soviet, Zolotukhin would also serve as co-chairman (alongside A.N.Yakovlev) of the ‘public chamber of the constitutional conference,’ which made final adjustments to the draft before its submission to a national referendum. Whilst the democrats were engaged in constitution-making, the Supreme Soviet was purging its ranks. The reformist Legislation Committee was split into two separate committees on ordinary legislation and constitutional legislation. The latter was headed by the militant communist lawmaker Vladimir Isakov, author of the notorious statute ‘On the protection of the constitutional bodies of power.’279 Kovalyov’s Committee escaped

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dissolution, but it was under continuous pressure. At a joint sitting of the two houses in July 1993, Kovalyov was held to account by deputies for failing to defend the rights of ‘ordinary people,’ whom his critics conceived as social and national categories, not as the numerous individuals for whom his committee had interceded. Deputy Utkin accused him of defending ‘the rights of criminals, victims of repression, and people somewhere beyond the borders of our country!’ Ramazan Abdulatipov, chairman of the Council of Nationalities, declared that ‘at the present stage the protection of human rights ought to consist in socio-economic support of the population.’ Nikolai Pavlov expressed outrage that the Committee should be seeking to organise hearings on anti-Semitism, ‘in a country where 85% of the population is Russian.’ Nor did Kovalyov’s dissident past protect him. When one deputy tried to remind the parliament that ‘Kovalyov was imprisoned for seven years so that all of us could talk freely here,’ deputy Tikhonov retorted angrily: ‘You’re trying to tell us that he suffered? Well, we suffered for a whole 70 years!’280

Sergei Kovalyov and ‘the true principles of constitutionalism’ The deadlock was broken by Yeltsin on 21 September, when he issued Decree 1400, misleadingly titled ‘On Gradual Constitutional Reform in the Russian Federation.’ It provided for the dissolution of the Congress and Supreme Soviet, elections for a new State Duma, and a referendum on the new constitution. This clear violation of the existing constitution provoked little criticism from the rights-defenders. Boris Zolotukhin conceded that the constitution had been violated, but argued that the calling of early elections was legitimated by the results of the April referendum.281 Elena Bonner denied that there was a constitution to be violated, and thanked the president for ‘returning to the people the right to elect a parliament and president,’ a right of which it had been deprived by the Supreme Soviet when it ‘scorned’ the will of the people expressed in the April referendum.282 Lyudmila Alekseyeva noted ‘with pleasure’ the fact that unlike August 1991 there were no tanks to be seen in the streets.283 None seemed perturbed by the abandonment of the old dissident slogan, ‘respect the constitution!’ Kronid Lyubarskii, Memorial’s delegate to the Constitutional Convention, even argued that the pravozashchitnik movement had been from the beginning ‘a movement in defence of human rights’ and that ‘the [dissident] slogan “respect your constitution” signified only one thing: respect those human rights that you were forced to write into your good-fornothing constitution.’284 During the interregnum between Decree 1400 and the crushing of the parliamentary rebellion, the most prominent Soviet human rights bureaucrat saw an opportunity for a comeback. In a bizarre open letter to the parliament, Fyodor Burlatskii appeared to call for the deputies ‘to depart with dignity,’ but then singled out Kovalyov’s Committee as their greatest failure: The Committee on Human Rights created by you—what has it done, whom has it helped? Refugees from other republics? Deprived pensioners? Our compatriots in the neighboring republics? The unemployed? Children?

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It was an adroit sleight-of-hand from a supreme opportunist, who was positioning himself to resume his career as human rights bureaucrat, regardless of the outcome of the political struggle. In February 1993, Burlatskii had reappeared as president of a ‘Foundation for Euro-Asian Co-operation and Human Rights,’ which claimed to offer ‘consultative services on legislative entrenchment of the rights of the individual,’ and which was apparently funded by the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.285 Now Burlatskii accused Kovalyov’s Committee of trying ‘to crush and slander the rest of the rightsdefence movement, which was outside the framework of its control,’ which referred in particular to Burlatskii himself and his Humanitarian Commission, about which he rhapsodised that it ‘achieved the liberation of four hundred people imprisoned for socalled religious crimes, struggled for the restoration of citizenship to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn…and assisted tens of thousands of citizens in the defence of their rights.’286 On the same day that this rewriting of history was published, Burlatskii’s bid for power was thwarted by a Yeltsin decree that appointed Kovalyov chairman of a newly created presidential human rights commission.287 By choosing the dissident over the Soviet apparatchik, Yeltsin was reaffirming his democratic credentials. Kovalyov’s attitude towards Yeltsin’s dissolution of the parliament was ambivalent. When he had learned of Yeltsin’s impending decree, he had tried to contact the president, but only gained access to Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev. ‘I literally begged Kozyrev to get the president to put off any final decision on attacking the parliament, to postpone his address on television and to reconsider this tragic step,’ Kovalyov revealed three years later, after his break with Yeltsin.288 But once the die was cast, Kovalyov sided with the president. In Moscow News, he praised Yeltsin for adhering to ‘the fundamental principles of constitutionalism’ rather than ‘the bad letter of a bad law,’ the, constitutional field that was ‘a complex conglomerate of the remnants of Brezhnev’s Basic Law and numerous amendments,’ and offered no possibility of a constitutional resolution. The political conflict, contended Kovalyov, was not a struggle between executive and legislature, but between reformist forces and ‘the party of revanche, [which] had an overwhelming majority in the corpus of deputies and did not wish to part with its constitutionally founded absolute power.’ In this deadlock, the only solution was ‘to appeal to the opinion of the voters,’ which Yeltsin had done in the April referendum and was about to do in the promised parliamentary elections.289 In the shadow of the burned-out parliament, such speculation about theories of ‘true principles of constitutionalism’ inflamed a conflict that had been simmering in dissident ranks since the first Constitution Day demonstration against the arrest of Daniel and Sinyavskii. Now it was Sinyavskii himself who proposed a contrary version of those ‘true principles.’ In an open letter in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Sinyavskii defended the parliament because of the presence of former dissidents: ‘just as in our fatherland there are many remarkable people, so in the Supreme Soviet there was the rights-defender and camp inmate Sergei Kovalyov, for example, or the legendary lawyer Boris Zolotukhin.’ It was a curious inversion of Burlatskii’s case, which indicted the parliament because of Kovalyov’s transgressions. Admonishing the intelligentsia in tones reminiscent of Kistyakovskii, Sinyavskii inquired: ‘Really, don’t you know that the president of the country does not have the right to violate the law?’290 This argument was echoed in Izvestiya by another émigré, the veteran legalist Pavel Litvinov, who from New York accused Yeltsin of undermining ‘the last respect for the law, replacing it with the law of

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force, which is of course understood by and familiar to people.’ He dismissed Kovalyov as a dispensable façade for the regime, before concluding with pessimistic modesty that: life has shown that the experience of the rights-defenders movement has left almost no trace on contemporary Russia, and therefore many will probably dismiss me, as a man bound by old thinking and old problems, who long ago lost contact with Russian reality.291 The ‘old thinking’ was nevertheless prevalent amongst young pravozashchitniki like Yan Rachinskii, an activist of Memorial’s Human Rights Centre, who lamented that the dissident response to the dissolution of the parliament had ‘posthumously vindicated Soviet propaganda in its claim that for dissidents the slogans of defending the constitution was nothing more than a hypocritical cloak, and that in power they would not be concerned by it.’ In particular, Rachinskii mourned the loss of moral authority caused by the adoption of double-standards: And when communists (and not only communists) come to Moscow and demand that the former rights-defenders, sitting in the Kremlin and Old Square, observe the Constitution, the situation does not evoke laughter, despite its obvious parodic character. And it will not be laughable, it seems to me, for the participants in the rights-defence demonstration, when a week before the elections, on the traditional day of 5 December, the communists come out onto Pushkin Square with the old (but not their) slogan (perhaps preserved in the KGB archives since 1965)—‘Respect the Constitution.’292 This scenario began to unfold after the foundation of a ‘Movement for Democracy and Human Rights in Russia,’ which united dissidents of a social democratic orientation like Gleb Pavlovskii and Vyacheslav Igrunov, the Memorial activist Dmitrii Leonov, liberal publicist Dmitrii Furman, and left-wing figures like Aleksandr Buzgalin and Boris Kagarlitskii.293 As Rachinskii had predicted, the 1993 Human Rights Day demonstration attracted an unusual crowd: Moscow News reported that fascist literature was on sale.294 No less ominous was an opposition ‘Constitutional Assembly,’ which was addressed by former Constitutional Court chief justice Valerii Zorkin, former constitutional commission chairman Oleg Rumyantsev, and by the radical nationalist dissident Vladimir Osipov, who lashed out at the ‘dictatorship of the Russophobic mafia’ and the antiOrthodox machinations of Masonic conspirators.295 The repercussions of the constitutional rupture were incalculable. The bloodshed tarnished the democrats, and certainly contributed to their failure in the December 1993 elections to the State Duma. It also cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the new constitution. Soon after the elections, Communist Party leader Gennadii Zyuganov made it clear that rejection of the constitution was a precondition for any potential political ally.296 In October 1993, the institutional vacuum created by the absence of a parliament and the suspension of the Constitutional Court enabled local authorities to perpetrate serious viola-tions of civil liberties. Moscow Mayor Yurii Luzhkov exploited the State of Emergency to purge the capital of refugees from the Caucasus. In this atmosphere of

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lawlessness and bureaucratic tyranny, Sergei Alekseev, one of the authors of the presidential variant of the constitution, lamented that ‘all the efforts to develop and realise civilized legal norms were in vain’: To speak after this about any law-abiding state is simply immoral. It was our illusion, one needs to repent, farewell it, and begin from zero, or rather from minus.297 But Kovalyov continued to nurture the illusion. In his address to the first session of the Presidential Human Rights Commission, he acknowledged that ‘a potentially dangerous situation’ had been created by the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet and the paralysis of the Constitutional Court. The problem, he insisted, was not Yeltsin’s intentions, about which he had ‘no particular doubts,’ but the tendency of ‘any government, if nothing restricts or restrains it,’ to gravitate toward authoritarianism: Under these conditions, there is only one guarantee that Russia will develop along a democratic path and evolve toward a law-governed state, toward what is called ‘the rule of law.’ That is the primacy and the real observance and the protection of human rights.298 A contrary notion of the rule of law was being propounded by the power ministries, but Kovalyov expressed satisfaction that ‘not one of the arch-reactionary decrees prepared by the municipal administration and by various government departments has been signed in the form that it was submitted.’ He also saw the creation of the Commission as ‘evidence that the President’s words about respecting human rights are not merely a propaganda phrase, but his political will and intention.’ That ‘will and intention’ had not yet provided normal working conditions for the Commission, which was to employ four people on a permanent basis.299 What Kovalyov did not consider were the long-term implications of Yeltsin’s resort to force as a solution to a political crisis. Several years later, Kovalyov would argue that the October events and the Chechen war were ‘genetically very closely related,’ since the suppression of the parliament ‘had convinced Yeltsin that he was a genius at resolving crises and that knots should be cut rather than untied.’300 The authoritarian temptation was aggravated by the electoral triumph of Vladimir Zhirinovskii, who had promised a crackdown on crime and the protection of Russians abroad. Within a year, the efforts of the presidential administration to appropriate this agenda, by the notorious Decree on Banditism and the bloody invasion of Chechnya, would precipitate a final break between Yeltsin, the constitutional ‘guarantor of human rights,’ and the rights-defenders who had bolstered his democratic credentials during 1993. In the desperate winter of 1993–4, the consolation for democrats was the adoption of a constitution that entrenched human rights. Only a few weeks after Alekseev had described talk of a law-abiding state as ‘immoral,’ Sergei Sirotkin, a jurist on Kovalyov’s Commission, extolled the superiority of the human rights provisions of the proposed constitution to its predecessor. In an interview with Literaturnaya Gazeta, Sirotkin drew the attention of readers to the place occupied by human rights in the text. Not only was the primacy of rights affirmed by their position in the second chapter of the constitution,

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immediately after the ‘bases of the constitutional system,’ but article 18 declared that human rights ‘determines the sense, contents and application of legislation, the activity of the legislature and executive, local government, and are guaranteed by the judiciary’ For Sirotkin, this article marked a fundamental transition: In my view this is a philosophical formulation—the rights and freedoms of the citizen as the sense of the activity of the state apparatus. In other words—the state is for the individual and not vice-versa. By contrast, ‘almost every article’ of the previous constitution offered ‘the possibility of restricting human rights by federal law.’ These loopholes, recalled Sirotkin, had been exploited by the Supreme Soviet in its efforts to control the media, and in its legislation on religious evangelism, the militia, and operative-investigation activity.301 When antidemocratic forces triumphed in the Duma elections, democrats found solace in the hope that a constitutional barrier had been erected against parliamentary tyranny. After lambasting the democratic intelligentsia for its failure to unite, Elena Bonner admitted that ‘the only thing that is slightly reassuring is the news that the people supported the constitution.’302 The first half of 1994 was marked by an illusory stabilisation. The Duma may have been, as Rachinskii predicted, ‘a parody of a parliament, even more wretched than the present one,’ but Kovalyov was elected Ombudsman under the post-election division of parliamentary posts between factions, despite the fact that the requisite federal constitutional law had not yet been passed.303 At the same time, policymakers in the Yeltsin regime, concerned about its authoritarian image, sought to identify publicly with the rights-defenders. In May 1994, they hosted a one-day conference at the Presidential Administration complex in Moscow’s Old Square to mark the 73rd anniversary of Sakharov’s birth. Addressing an audience of illustrious rights-defenders and representatives of ‘the party of power,’ Kovalyov affirmed the progress that had been made since Sakharov’s death: We live in a country, where a constitution has been adopted that proclaims human rights as the basic principle of the legal system in general, where the legislative foundations of political freedoms and the supremacy of law have been laid, in a country where the democratic conquests of the people have withstood an attempted armed revanche, where freedom of speech has become a norm and where finally a tendency toward social agreement and reconciliation has become noticeable.304 This vindication of the new constitution, five years after the vilification of Sakharov at the first Congress of People’s Deputies, marked the point of maximum rapprochement between the dissident rights-defenders and the Kremlin. In his turn, Sergei Stepashin, director of the FSK, the latest incarnation of the KGB, spoke about the ‘moral shock’ he experienced during the vilification of Sakharov at the Congress. Boasting fulsomely that ‘a lot is changing’ in the FSK, Stepashin presented Bonner with two files, containing sixty-two documents, as the FSK’s ‘repentance’ for its past.305

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It was a short-lived repentance. Less than one month later, the power ministries exploited their new influence in the weakened Yeltsin regime to challenge the human rights provisions of the constitution. The notorious presidential decree, ‘On Urgent Measures to Protect the Population from Gangsterism and Other Manifestations of Organised Crime,’ authorised the security forces to detain suspects for up to thirty days, in flagrant violation of article 22 of the constitution, which barred detention without a court ruling beyond forty-eight hours. The assault on the constitution evoked euphoria in the FSK, which began to exhibit a pride in its Chekist heritage not seen since Andropov’s days. An FSK spokesman, Aleksandr Mikhailov, used an interview on the current affairs programme Itogi to read out a Cheka memorandum about the crime situation in Russia in 1918. Drawing an obvious parallel with post-Soviet Russia, Mikhailov concluded triumphantly that, after one year, the Cheka was able to report that ‘all the criminals have been caught and shot.’306 As usual, the most vociferous criticism of this regression came from the rights-defenders. Boris Zolotukhin, now the deputy leader of Russia’s Choice, warned that the reach of the ‘emergency measures’ extended far beyond gangsters to onethird of all those suspected of committing crimes, which called into question the presumption of innocence.307 In an open letter to Yeltsin, Kovalyov called for the suspension of the decree, and warned that ‘Russia’s tragic experience indicates that citizens’ safety cannot be protected by violating the basic rights and liberties codified in Chapter 2 of Russia’s constitution.’308 Instead of heeding this warning, Yeltsin made a characteristic compromise, providing Kovalyov’s Presidential Human Rights Commission with extra staff and ordering it to monitor the decree’s implementation.309 After attending an expanded collegium of the Procurator General’s Office, Kovalyov again attacked the decree as an ‘enormous social danger.’ In particular, he warned against the prerogatives granted to local administrators to declare a de facto state of emergency, and thus to circumvent the legislative restrictions and parliamentary monitoring that governed presidential rule.310 In an apparent reprisal for this outspokenness, the presentation of the first annual report of the Presidential Human Rights Commission was postponed, and an attempt was made to suppress it by classifying it as an internal government document.311 Ironically, this apparent breach between Kovalyov and the Presidential Administration probably helped him to gain the necessary two-thirds majority for the constitutional law on the human rights commissioner to pass its first reading in the State Duma.312

Rights-defenders in Chechnya The magnitude of the danger to the constitution became clear on the eve of its first anniversary, 11 December 1994, when Russian troops were dispatched to ‘restore constitutional order’ in the secessionist republic of Chechnya. The official press depicted the war as an extension of the struggle against organized crime, as a crackdown on ‘bandits’ and ‘illegal armed formations.’ The rights-defenders, spearheaded by Sergei Kovalyov’s mission in Grozny, challenged this line. As Russian forces prepared for the first general assault on Grozny, Kovalyov declared on Russian television that ‘there are no armed band-formations,’ and that ‘we see a nation at arms.’313 By exposing the destruction and suffering inflicted by the Kremlin, the rights-defenders also raised the

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possibility that the war was a crime in itself. By their heroism under the bombardment of their own army, they became central figures in the war-reporting of the liberal media, which paid increasing attention to the human rights, rather than the law-enforcement, aspects of the conflict. The authorities responded by accusing rights-defenders of having contributed to the Chechen problem by ignoring human rights violations under the Dudaev regime. At a session of the Russian Security Council on 26 December, Yeltsin made a transparent jibe at Kovalyov: For three years, nobody ever noticed the violations of human rights in Chechnya, while today some human rights champions are blaming the troops instead of thanking them, for they are restoring legality in the republic. The troops are defending unity in line with the Constitution.314 The accusation was amplified by the government broadsheet Rossiiskaya Gazeta that for several months published a column titled ‘for the information of rights-defenders’: a list of violent crimes committed in Chechnya before the ‘restoration of constitutional order.’ This propaganda did not impress Kovalyov: These are complaints about theft, robbery, murder, rape. They should be addressed to the police or the prosecutor’s office, not at all to rightsdefenders. When you are struck by a hooligan on the street, he has not violated human rights. He has violated the criminal code, and rightsdefenders have nothing to do there. Human rights are violated by the state or by state officials.315 This definition reflected the experience of the rights-defence movement, but it could not be popular in a society increasingly traumatised by violent crime. The rights-defenders did not take up crime-fighting, but they did lead the resistance to the war. Veteran dissidents were especially prominent. When Memorial called an antiwar ‘vigil’ in Old Square outside the presidential administration buildings, those detained by the police included such well-known ex-prisoners of conscience as Aleksandr Lavut, Arsenii Roginskii, and Aleksandr Podrabinek.316 When Foreign Minister Kozyrev mockingly contrasted these protests with the heroic Red Square demonstration of August 1968, the four surviving demonstrators released an open letter castigating Kozyrev for exploiting their act ‘for speculation, for petty, personal, career goals,’ and then asserted the continuity of the dissident tradition: We were and remain supporters of peaceful, non-violent resolution of the most complex external and internal state problems. We demand the withdrawal of the army from Chechnya. Today we repeat: ‘Shame on the aggressors, shame on the “occupiers” of their own or a foreign people.’ For your freedom and ours.317 But it was Sergei Kovalyov’s mission to Chechnya, undertaken in co-operation with activists from Memorial, that exemplified the continuing vitality of the rights-defence tradition. At an evening in memory of Sakharov on 11 December 1994, Kovalyov

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declared that ‘today, Sakharov would be there, where blood is flowing, in Grozny, in Chechnya. I am certain of this.’318 Two days later, Kovalyov flew to the Caucasus at the head of a parliamentary delegation, which included two deputies from the rights-defence milieu—St Petersburg dissident Mikhail Molostvov and the Christian Democrat Valerii Borshchev—as well as the Memorial activist Oleg Orlov and the communist deputy Leonid Petrovskii. If Sakharov had experienced the rhetorical wrath of the power ministries, Kovalyov was now to endure the destructive potential of their arsenal. Never during his years as a dissident had he been exposed to such horror. ‘Every day,’ began one appeal from Grozny, ‘we see the corpses of peaceful civilians—some cut to pieces, others without a head or without legs.’319 But the essential continuity of Kovalyov’s activity was obvious to his fellow rights-defenders. At a press conference on 29 December, Aleksandr Lavut, one of Kovalyov’s successors as editor of the Chronicle, recalled that it was ‘a very strange anniversary’—the twentieth anniversary of Kovalyov’s arrest for his rights-defence activities. Recalling the panegyrics to Kovalyov’s heroism in Grozny, Lavut argued that the point was that ‘what Kovalyov was engaged in then, and now, are in some sense one and the same thing.’320 Like the Chronicle, the reports of Kovalyov’s monitoring mission documented illegalities and human rights abuses in methodical, dispassionate, and exhaustive detail. There was the same frenetic collection and verification of testimony, the same struggle against official propaganda, the same intercession on behalf of the victims of repression. What the rights-defenders revealed was not only the horrors of war, but also the callousness of the military leadership, the lawlessness of the security apparatus, and the magnitude of the threat to Russian democracy. During the siege of Grozny, they remorselessly exposed the lies and distortions of the government propaganda apparatus, about Afghan mujahadeen, about Dudaev blowing up buildings to simulate bombardment, and about the alleged Chechen refusal to negotiate.321 The revelation in Izvestiya of the use of torture at the ‘filtra-tion points’ established for the detention of Chechen suspects was based on the testimony of a survivor recorded by Kovalyov’s group.322 The events in Samashki, which government spokesmen celebrated as ‘the first independent operation carried out by forces of the Interior Ministry,’ was exposed by Kovalyov’s group as a punitive massacre of civilians. But if the rights-defenders’ work with information was meticulous and objective, their condemnation of the war was strident and emotive. Like earlier rights-defenders, they appealed not only to their own government, but also to Russian and international public opinion. The most resonant was Kovalyov’s appeal from Grozny on 24 December, which opened with the observation that ‘every day we see with our eyes aircraft bombing residential areas with impunity’, and then called for protest: I, the Human Rights Commissioner of the Russian Federation, as long as I am in this post, appeal to all political forces in Russia, to the entire world community to stop the annihilation of the civilian population. Noting that he had never called for a demonstration, he urged his fellow citizens: ‘Now, I call: go!’ and then reiterated his appeal for the exertion of influence on the Russian leadership ‘by any open or diplomatic channels.’323

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This call marked the culmination of the deterioration of relations between Yeltsin and the prominent rights-defenders who had supported him in October 1993. During the drift to war, dissidents had cautioned Yeltsin about the perils of using force. On 18 December, Elena Bonner had denounced the government’s recent course as ‘impermissible in any law-based state,’ and warned Yeltsin that if he gave the order to bombard Chechnya, ‘you can no longer be president of Russia.’324 After Kovalyov’s appeal to international public opinion, Yeltsin abandoned all niceties. At a closed meeting of the Russian Security Council on 26 December, Yeltsin scorned Kovalyov’s ‘sobbing,’ and castigated his failure to report on the prewar human rights situation in Chechnya. In turn, Boris Zolotukhin resigned from the Presidential Human Rights Commission and the Presidential Council on Judicial Reform. ‘My departure,’ he declared, is the only way in which I can express my protest to the President against this insulting of my longtime friend, a man of rare decency, and against his having said, ‘one must not give way to sobbing’ to a person who, at that very moment, was under the fire of bombs and rockets sent by his President.325 Zolotukhin’s departure from the Commission was followed one day later by Elena Bonner, one of Yeltsin’s most strident defenders in 1993. Now in an open letter to the president, Bonner denounced the war as a prelude to the reconstitution of totalitarianism founded upon the military-industrial complex and the FSK, which ‘has already demonstrated that it has retained its old habits.’ Recalling August 1991, when ‘Russia, together with you, did not let these people come to power,’ Bonner lamented Yeltsin’s capitulation to the power ministries, and concluded: ‘you have met your Foros.’326 Another veteran rights-defender, Kronid Lyubarskii, resigned on 4 February as Memorial’s representative in the presidential public chamber, the advisory body created on the basis of the Constitutional Assembly.327 To contain the mounting criticism unleashed by the rights-defenders, the Kremlin created an ersatz commission, the ‘Provisional Monitoring Commission on Constitutional Rights and Freedoms for the duration of the process of restoring Constitutional Legality in the Chechen Republic.’328 Appropriately, this Soviet-style body was headed by Valentin Kovalyov, a prominent Communist parliamentarian and deputy speaker of the State Duma, who had played a leading role in the ‘people’s tribunal’ against Gorbachev in 1993.329 In a bizarre move, Yeltsin also nominated Sergei Kovalyov and Ramazan Abdulatipov as deputy chairmen of the sham commission. Abdulatipov, now chairman of the Federation Council, had been one of Sergei Kovalyov’s most vociferous critics in the old Congress. Like the Burlatskii Commission, the Provisional Monitoring Commission provoked scorn from rights-defenders like Elena Bonner, who expressed her exasperation in an open letter to Yeltsin: Wake up! We have already had something like this in our history. At the end of the 1970s, almost all the members of the independent Moscow Helsinki Group (I had the honour to be a member) and the members of analogous groups in the Soviet Union’s republics were sent to the gulag or exile. Later another group was hastily formed under a similar name. The

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infamous Fyodor Burlatskii was chosen to head this creature of the KGB and the Politburo. (However this commission fooled very few people in the world.)330 Despite his surname, Valentin Kovalyov’s commission fooled even fewer. Izvestiya described the new body as a ‘pocket commission,’ and noted that Yeltsin may have ‘exchanged Kovalyov for Kovalyov,’ but the two were hardly of equal worth: Sergei Kovalyov, under bombs and bullets every day transmits from Grozny terrible reports, crying with details of what happened. Valentin Kovalyov, sitting in a Moscow office, has so far not raised his voice. Sergei Kovalyov, defending human rights in Chechnya, risks his life. His namesake, defending nothing except the rights of the Russian authorities to operate in Chechnya as they are operating, is risking absolutely nothing.331 In fact Valentin Kovalyov was risking his political career: within a few days, his eagerness to defend Yeltsin’s war had earned him appointment as Justice Minister and expulsion from the Communist Party. Sergei Kovalyov may have forfeited the favours of the president, but his courage under fire earned him plaudits in the democratic press. Izvestiya named him its first ‘Man of the Year,’ and praised him as ‘a statesman and public figure for whom real human rights (first of all, the right to life) are more important than the rights of the state with all its doctrines.’ In paying tribute to the resonance of Kovalyov’s opposition to the war, Izvestiya drew an implicit parallel with Sakharov’s ordeal before the Congress: In the days and weeks during which the roar of explosions in Chechnya could, it seemed, drown out even the strongest voice of protest, the entire world suddenly heard the quiet, Sakharov-like voice of this man, coming to it from beleaguered Grozny, from the very epicentre of events.332 The same award came from Ogonek, which described Kovalyov’s demeanour as that of ‘a typical intellectual in glasses from the conformist generation of the sixties,’ before adding that ‘his appearance is deceptive’ since ‘this is the most courageous man in the country.’333 A group of democratic deputies nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.334 The proposal was endorsed by a statement from prominent intellectuals, including Academicians Arbatov and Likhachev, who claimed that Kovalyov’s ‘moral feat’ had raised him ‘to the level of the conscience of the nation.’335 Whilst the Nobel Committee chose to honour the less heroic work of the Pugwash movement, Kovalyov did receive a succession of international human rights prizes during 1995. There was even speculation about Kovalyov standing for the presidency. In April, Galina Staravoitova of Democratic Russia revealed that she had held talks with Russia’s Choice leader Egor Gaidar about the possible nomination of Kovalyov, whom she saw as ‘a unifying figure as Andrei Sakharov had been in his time,’ as the presidential candidate of the democratic parties.336 It was a role that Kovalyov did not rule out, and he made a clarion call for democratic unity at a speech before the annual Sakharov concert in the Great Hall of the Moscow

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Conservatorium on 21 May 1995. But hopes were dashed by the ambitions of Yabloko leader Grigorii Yavlinskii, who remained resolutely opposed to an electoral alliance of democratic parties.337 Like Sakharov’s accusations against the Soviet army, Kovalyov’s outspokenness evoked fierce criticism from the military-security complex, from the ‘aggressively obedient majority’ in the parliament, and from the Kremlin. Defence Minister Pavel Grachev scorned Kovalyov as ‘a toad and a traitor.’ More subtle was Col.-General Anatolii Kulikov’s repeated announcement that even Chechen resistance fighters derided Kovalyov as ‘a political prostitute.’338 In the State Duma, the attack on Kovalyov was initiated by the faction most closely linked to the security apparatus, Zhirinovskii’s LDPR, which was clearly seeking to supplant Russia’s Choice as the ‘presidential party.’ But the LDPR proposal to ‘discuss the activity of human rights commissioner Kovalyov’ was overwhelmingly supported by Zyuganov’s Communists, and by significant portions of ‘Women of Russia’ and the ‘New Regional Policy’ group.339 The resulting ‘debate’ on 25 January was one of the most acrimonious since the hate session against Sakharov in Gorbachev’s Congress. Yurii Kuznetsov, the LDPR leader in St Petersburg, who had initiated the hearings, declared that he did not know whether Kovalyov’s post of human rights commissioner was under Yeltsin or under Clinton. Another radical nationalist deputy, Nikolai Lysenko, called for Kovalyov’s removal because he did not grasp ‘the priority of national interests.’ But the incendiary role of Chervonopiskii was played by M.Burlakov, who read a list of crimes committed before the outbreak of hostilities, and demanded: ‘Where were you when human rights were being violated on a mass scale and you said nothing?’ Then he proceeded to blame Kovalyov for the death of his relatives in Chechnya: BURLAKOV: Why did you not bring one civilian out…. I have the right to ask you this, because my relatives died there because of you. Pharisee! [noise in the hall]…. KOVALYOV: I deeply sympathise with you over the death of your relatives in Grozny. BURLAKOV: Don’t sympathise with me, answer the question! Don’t sympathise, Pharisee! KOVALYOV: Stop shouting! [noise in the hall] Well, I don’t sympathise then. I sympathise with others, whose relatives died, [there are] so many.340 Although a vote on Kovalyov’s dismissal was deferred, the position of the Duma majority was clear. His inevitable ouster came on 10 March 1995, on a motion sponsored by Sergei Baburin’s ‘Russian Way’ party, which was obviously settling scores for Kovalyov’s stance in 1993.341 The overwhelming 240 to 75 vote against him did not deter Kovalyov, who declared, in an echo of Sakharov, that ‘I have a higher mandate.’342 But dismissal did not end the hounding in parliament, which was led by Stanislav Govorukhin, head of the Duma commission on Chechnya. When Kovalyov’s group exposed the Samashki massacre in April 1995, Govorukhin demanded that Kovalyov, along with Shabad and Ponomaryov, be prosecuted for disseminating ‘pro-Chechen propaganda.’ Kovalyov responded by requesting the Duma to strip him of his parliamentary immunity, so that he could defend his position in a court of law.343 After the destruction of Grozny, the rights-defenders resumed their traditional vocation, the defence of legality and of the constitution. The legal implications of the

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Chechen crisis were debated at a Memorial conference in March 1995, which was attended by members of Kovalyov’s mission, leading rights-defenders, and by eminent jurists. The proceedings demonstrated that the devastation of Chechnya had been made possible by the subversion of legality in Russia and by myriad violations of Russian legislation, of the Russian constitution, and of international law. The enumeration of these transgressions provided the basis for the submission of an appeal from twelve rights-defence groups to the Acting-Procurator-General, A.N. Ilyushenko, calling for the prosecution of those who had exceeded their authority by deciding to use force in the Chechnya, and by implementing this decision. The case was set out in Izvestiya by Natalya Kravchenko and Aleksandr Lavut, both veterans of the Chronicle.344 Preoccupied with demonstrating his loyalty to the party of power, Ilyushenko ignored the proposal, and proceeded to launch a series of inept political prosecutions, including the cases against former dissident Valeriya Novodvorskaya and the producers of Kukly, a satirical puppet show broadcast on NTV.345 A more promising arena for the legalist rights-defenders was offered by the decision of the reactivated Constitutional Court to hear the State Duma’s challenge to the legality of the presidential decrees that unleashed the war in Chechnya. Given the Duma majority’s barely disguised support for the war and its scorn for the constitution, its case was clearly motivated by political opportunism. Sergei Shakhrai, the government’s lawyer, relished pointing out that members of the Duma legal team, such as former coup plotter Anatolii Lukyanov, had called Kovalyov as an expert witness, despite having voted for his removal as Ombudsman because of his stance on the war.346 It was not so easy to impugn the credibility of Kovalyov himself, who had suffered a heart attack whilst saving the lives of the Budennovsk hostages, and who came from hospital to deliver one of the most passionate and controversial speeches of his public life, a philippic in defence of the constitution, and of the ‘true principles of constitutionalism.’ He argued that the presidential decrees were ‘hypocritical documents,’ and should be considered not in isolation, but in the context of their consequences, ‘massive and gross violations of human rights,’ including those that article 14 of the constitution protected even under a state of emergency. It was an argument that reflected decades of pravozashchitnik activism, of defending victims of repression, and of dealing with the human consequences of the legal process. This concern underlay Kovalyov’s indictment of the president: In starting this war, a civil war, the president should have looked at the constitution, and weighed up all considerations about the state’s unity, security and legality against the main article of the Constitution, the second, which proclaims: ‘The human being, his rights and freedoms are the highest value. The recognition, observance and defence of rights and freedoms are the duty of the state.’ The result of the decisions taken by the president has crossed out this article. Also violated has been the obligation of the president to be a guarantor of the rights and freedoms of the individual, stipulated by article 80 of the constitution, and by his oath in article 82. Forgive the metaphor, but this is already a constitutional crime.347

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The poignancy of this indictment was magnified by Kovalyov’s status as a rightsdefender, and as a founding father of the constitution. Court chairman Tumanov, who had rebuked the demagoguery of other Duma representatives, listened in deferential silence. One legal commentator claimed that Kovalyov’s speech might ‘noticeably change the balance of forces’ that developed after his inept colleagues had been excelled by Shakhrai.348 To reduce Kovalyov’s impact, the government press seized upon his statement about Yeltsin’s ‘constitutional crime,’ ripped it out of its legal context, and ignored his arguments about the priority of human rights in the constitution. Even Izvestiya criticised Kovalyov’s rhetorical excesses, arguing that his reference to the ‘Goebbels recipe’ of the government propaganda apparatus was inappropriate: ‘The point is that this is a court, not a demonstration in Pushkin Square.’349 But in an interview after the hearings, Kovalyov reaffirmed his vocation as a pravozashchitnik: I consider myself an independent expert and stand on the side of law. It is a blunder and even mendacious [to say that] Kovalyov defends the Chechens. I have done nothing of the sort. I have defended neither Chechens nor Russians, but I have tried and am trying to defend the law, as I understand it, of course.350 The court majority had a different understanding of the law, and endorsed the constitutionality of Yeltsin’s decrees. Rejecting Kovalyov’s central argument, it claimed that there was no causal connection between their wording and the carnage in Chechnya. The verdict was hailed by Justice Minister Valentin Kovalyov as a ‘great achievement.’ Rights-defenders like Kronid Lyubarskii lamented that ‘the court morally approved acts in which sovereignty, territorial integrity, state security and such “state values” stand higher than human rights,’ in violation of article 2 of the Constitution.351 In their struggle against the Chechen war, the rights-defenders helped to contain a mortal threat to Russian democracy, but they paid a heavy price. Their agenda for legislative reforms was halted in the Duma, as presidential support vanished, and as the Communists and radical nationalists exacted vengeance for the rights-defenders’ unpatriotic stance on the war. Soon after Kovalyov’s removal as parliamentary Ombudsman, the draft legislation on the post was overwhelmingly rejected at its third reading in the Duma. Even the democratic parties, fearing the appointment of a hardliner like Stanislav Govorukhin, voted against the bill.352 The Duma also rejected a reformist law on the Procuracy, ‘Vyshinskii’s monster.’ Boris Zolotukhin, one of the most vocal supporters of the draft, lamented that the Procuracy was destined to remain the only state organ that was responsible to no branch of power.353 At the same time, the security apparatus exploited its new ascendancy amongst the lawmakers. Yulii Rybakov, a Duma deputy and veteran rights-defender, warned that ‘we have a burst of draft legislation emanating from the Duma Committee on Security, headed by Viktor Ilyukhin.’354 The most alarming was the loosely worded Law on State Security, which granted extraordinary prerogatives to the new Federal Security Service (FSB), the most powerful reincarnation of the post-Soviet KGB. The law empowered the FSB to initiate investigations to ensure ‘its own security,’ a formula that Rybakov characterised as ‘an open gate, through which may pass any interest, which will be packed into the cause of ensuring its own security.’355

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No less damaging for the reform process was the collapse of Kovalyov’s relations with the Presidential Administration, in which he had served as a counterweight to authoritarian tendencies. After Kovalyov’s testimony in the Constitutional Court, the Kremlin leaked details of a decree abolishing the Presidential Human Rights Commission.356 Ignoring the Commission’s independent status, Sergei Filatov declared that it was unacceptable to call the president a constitutional criminal ‘if you are at the same time in the employ of the president.’357 In fact Kovalyov remained at his post for another six months, long enough to draft the Commission’s damning annual human rights report. His final break with Yeltsin was precipitated by the Pervomaiskaya hostage crisis in early 1996, when federal forces launched a barrage intended to annihilate the Chechen terrorists, without regard for the fate of the hostages. In a resignation letter, Kovalyov accused Yeltsin of compromising the very word ‘democracy,’ and of taking ‘decisions that—instead of strengthening the rule of law in a democratic society—have revived the blunt and inhumane might of a state machine that stands above justice, law and the individual.’358 The cause of that state machine was taken up by a new wave of human rights bureaucrats, who owed their positions not to their reputations as activists in civil society, but to their connections with the ‘party of power.’ For them, human rights was not a matter of protecting citizens from the state, but of strengthening the state. The obvious regression was symbolised by the appointment of Professor Vladimir Kartashkin, a Brezhnev-era defender of the Soviet human rights position in UN forums, as Kovalyov’s successor as chairman of the Presidential Human Rights Commission. At the revamped Commission’s first meeting in November 1996, Kartashkin ingratiated himself with the presidential authorities by promising that it would ‘not confine itself to offering criticism, as it did under Mr. Kovalyov, but will also suggest “positive solutions.”’ He flattered the prejudices of Duma nationalists by devoting the first meeting to ‘Measures to protect the rights of Russian citizens abroad.’ His obsequiousness even extended to the power ministries, which stood to benefit from an agenda item ‘On Creating a Special-Reaction Force to Protect the Lives of Russian Citizens.’ One commentator expressed amazement that a human rights commission should ‘take steps toward setting up armed formations,’ but then reflected that ‘it seems logical, given the new ideology of human rights advocacy.’359 The theorist of this ‘new ideology’ was Aleksei Kiva, a historian and publicist whose antipathy towards dissidents had been evident even in the early 1990s, when he had denounced ‘yesterday’s “human rights defenders”’ in separatist republics for creating intolerable conditions for officers’ families.360 Now in a massive programmatic article, spread over two issues of the official broadsheet Rossiiskaya Gazeta, Kiva lambasted dissident rights-defenders for their anti-state stance, which he likened to ‘Japanese samurai who stayed in the jungles of the Philippines for decades after the end of World War II, thinking that the war with the Americans was still going on.’ The leading anachronism was Kovalyov, in whose behaviour Kiva discovered a radicalism ‘akin to religious fanaticism’ that was ‘incompatible with human rights activism’—although for the previous decade Kovalyov had been criticised precisely for his compromises and quest for dialogue with the authorities. Kiva even reproached Kovalyov and his supporters for their outspoken campaign against the war in Chechnya. Ignoring their role in ending the bloodshed, Kiva claimed that they had done ‘more to worsen the situation

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than to help resolve it,’ and had ‘sent the Russian human rights movement down the wrong path.’361 The right path, according to Kiva, was to strengthen, not to discredit, the state: the Russian state is weak at the moment, and that is why many laws are not working and measures undertaken by the government in the interests of Russia’s citizens are not being fully implemented…. In every country that has a strong social policy and guarantees basic civil rights and liberties on a practical level, the state is strong too. Such a strong state would defend the poor against the new Russians, and Russians in the ‘near-abroad’ against discrimination: the two issues in which Kiva sensed the vulnerability of the previous commission. Alluding to Kovalyov’s prominent role in Russia’s Choice, Kiva declared that: those who had a hand in the emergence of ‘buccaneer capitalism’ in its truly unbridled forms, and in the creation of an entire class of the superrich through the impoverishment of millions of people, have no moral right to consider themselves defenders of human rights. Critics of the Commission’s policy were dismissed as ‘people who had backed the Dudaevites to the hilt.’362 Kiva developed these insinuations in a second polemic, published in April 1997 after the Commission’s abject subservience to the state had earned it derision in rights-defence circles. The Moscow Helsinki Group had even called for its disbandment.363 In the best traditions of Soviet propaganda, Kiva impugned the group’s patriotism by pointing to its receipt of grants from Western foundations: ‘fear of losing the grants…is a powerful motive to pay close attention to the sentiments of the grant providers.’ To contest the monopoly over human rights activism enjoyed by such ‘Westernist radical democrats,’ Kiva attempted to reclaim a usable past for the Commission by invoking the legacy of Russophile dissent, which had allegedly been suppressed by the liberal media. ‘Why is it,’ demanded Kiva, ‘that Sergei Kovalyov, who believes that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, is a hero, while Leonid Borodin, who considers himself a Russian patriot and says so aloud, is not quite a hero?’ Yet at the same time, Kiva made it clear that ‘the dissident stage of the struggle, like the stage of fighting for democracy during the period of Gorbachev’s perestroikta’ was over, and that the dissidents had ‘failed to find a place for themselves under the new conditions’ and were ‘swimming against life’s current.’ In particular, the dissidents had failed to grasp the necessity of a shift from ‘methods of primitive human rights activism’ to civilised forms as in ‘all developed countries,’ though Kiva chose not to ponder whether ‘developed countries’ in the 1990s bombarded their own cities and killed thousands of their own peaceful citizens in the interests of ‘restoring constitutional order.’364 Any hope that a new parliamentary Ombudsman would fill the vacuum left by the degradation of the Presidential Commission was confounded by the Communist dominance of the State Duma after the December 1995 elections. For the Communists, the post was a political prize; for other factions, it was a useful bargaining counter. The

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Law on the Ombudsman was finally passed in April 1996, but only as a result of a backroom deal between the Communists and Zhirinovskii’s LDPR. In return for communist support of Zhirinovskii’s call for easing economic sanctions against Libya, the LDPR dropped its opposition to the law.365 But a few months later, the law was again stalled by the Federation Council, which added an amendment authorising subjects of the Federation to create their own human rights commissions: an obvious attempt to prevent the federal Ombudsman from meddling in provincial affairs.366 Only in December 1996 was the law finally passed after a compromise stipulated that the investigations by federal and regional commissioners could proceed in parallel. ‘No other law has ever been subject to such thorough and detailed discussion in the Duma,’ observed Elena Mizulina, vice-chairman of the Committee on Legislation.367 But the marathon was not yet over: during 1997, no candidate succeeded in garnering the required two-thirds vote to be elected to the post. Finally a political deal between the Communists and the Our Home is Russia (NDR) faction secured the election of Russia’s second Ombudsman in May 1998. NDR sought the removal of an estranged member, General Lev Rokhlin, as chairman of the parliamentary Defence Committee. In return for Communist support against Rokhlin, NDR supported the candidacy of Oleg Mironov, a member of the CPRF Central Committee, to succeed Kovalyov, who denounced the deal as ‘monstrous.’368 Mironov, a former police detective and defence lawyer for the Communist Party in 1992, announced that his first investigation would be corruption in the Procurator’s Office.369 Evidently he regarded his position not as an instrument for defending citizens’ rights, but as another law-enforcement agency, a mini-power ministry. Mironov’s election marked the complete political eclipse of the rights-defenders, yet their institutional legacy remained intact. Largely through their efforts, the attempt of the security forces to reconstitute the dictatorship on the basis of legality had been frustrated. Dissidents transformed the campaign for a law-abiding state into a campaign for a human rights-respecting state. Without their involvement in the reform process, Russia’s postSoviet constitutional infrastructure would be far less hospitable to individual rights. Kovalyov may have given credence to Yeltsin’s democratic rhetoric, but he was also a restraining influence on the executive throughout the dangerous transition. Perhaps the dissident achievement is to be measured less by concrete reforms, than by what did not happen. By 1998, five years after the adoption of the new constitution, Russia’s burgeoning civil society could defend itself against the state by appealing to its human rights provisions and to a judiciary that was beginning to enforce them. The ultimate fate of this constitutional edifice remained doubtful, but its creation and its precarious survival was itself a miracle, in the cataclysmic political conditions unleashed by economic crisis and imperial collapse. The importance of this precedent for the future cannot be underestimated: it is the stuff of which democratic traditions are made. It is also the lasting monument of the dissident rights-defenders.

4 The invention of Russophobia Shafarevich was from birth inseparably tied to Russia, the land and its history: they are one flesh, with a common bloodstream, a single heartbeat. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)1

Dissidents did not only foster democratic alternatives to Soviet totalitarianism. The pluralism of samizdat engendered a plethora of authoritarian, imperialist, anti-Semitic, and quasi-fascist currents, all claiming the banner of Russian ‘patriotism.’ As perestroika entered its terminal crisis, the ideas formulated in this milieu helped to fill the vacuum left by the demise of Marxism-Leninism. They provided a common vocabulary and a common enemy for the red-brown spectre that haunted Russia’s transition to democracy. The principal ideologist of this alliance was the famous mathematician and dissident Igor Shafarevich. Once a close collaborator of both Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, Shafarevich rose to become a co-chairman of the National Salvation Front, the main anti-Yeltsin bloc in the Supreme Soviet during the intensifying political crisis that culminated in the bloodshed of October 1993. That position at the pinnacle of the political opposition was in recognition of Shafarevich’s inflammatory opus magnum, the treatise Rusofobiya, which became a virtual manifesto of the self-styled patriotic movement. After circulating clandestinely in samizdat since 1982, it was published in Nash Sovremennik in 1989, earning its author accolades from patriotic publicists, and vehement denunciation in the reformist press. This controversy helped to give the term ‘Russophobia’ wide circulation in anti-reform circles, which used it to forge stab-in-the-back myths about the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the ensuing years, it gradually penetrated public discourse, until even leading members of the Yeltsin administration incorporated it into their political vocabularies. Of course Shafarevich did not coin the term ‘Russophobia,’ though his identification with the concept became so total that one of his critics found it necessary to remind her readers that the nineteenth-century poet Fedor Tyuchev had used the term before him. Shafarevich’s contribution was to transform a slogan and a matrix of resentments into an elaborate and provocative theory of history, set forth in a scholarly tone, and bolstered by an arcane theoretical framework and extensive bibliographical notes. Its central contention was that Jewish nationalism provided the motive force behind derogatory statements about the Russian character, history, and culture in a whole current of dissident and émigré literature. In this way, Shafarevich fused anti-Semitism and antiintellectualism. Rusofobiya became for Russian national chauvinists of the 1990s what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been a century earlier: an indictment and a ritual exorcism of democratic reformism, an incitement to action and a vindication of bigotry,

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and a rallying point for xenophobes and the defenders of autocracy. Indeed Shafarevich told an interviewer that he found little ‘that was in principle new’ in the Protocols: The development of a child in the womb of its mother is also a natural process, and no one calls it a conspiracy. In history, large groups of people, without coming to agreement among themselves, often work in a certain direction. It seems to me that the mechanism of such processes is still little studied.2 What we are supposed to conclude is that the ‘little studied mechanism,’ which was merely mythologised in the Protocols, found its pioneering researcher in Shafarevich. Despite the prevalence of the notion of Russophobia in patriotic discourse, Western academia paid little attention to the concept or to its original theorist. In his major study of the rise of Russian ultra-nationalism, Walter Laqueur admitted that Russophobia ‘has been of late the great watchword of the Russian right,’ but diminished its significance by claiming that ‘the concept did exist before 1987, under other names such as ‘antiSovietism.”3 In the process, he ignored the special vehemence brought to the discourse of Russophobia by its anti-Sovietism, by its indictment of the Jewish role in the October Revolution, and the ensuing cataclysms of civil war, collectivisation, and terror. This omission enabled Laqueur to draw an even more inappropriate analogy: Russophobia…can be compared, broadly speaking, with antiAmericanism: and Russian arrivals to America—for example, Solzhenitsyn and Aksyonov—have expressed astonishment and shock at facing so much ill will and even hatred vis-a-vis the United States. But in America, unlike among the self-conscious Russian right, such sentiments have been ignored or even been treated with ridicule.4 Laqueur also minimised the role of Shafarevich’s ideas, arguing that the book attracted attention only because of his stature as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences: if it had been written by a Pamyat leader, ‘it would have been considered a relatively measured statement of certain nationalist complaints against the intelligentsia.’5 A similar line was taken by John Dunlop, who contended that the primary significance of Rusofobiya for the Russian right was to demonstrate that ‘Shafarevich, the great mathematician, is with us’: While the work is certainly read in rightist circles, and while it is sold in kiosks which cater to nationalists and to anti-semites, it is probably too ‘scholarly’ in its style and manner of presentation to answer the primitive needs of many extremists. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion appears to be more popular among such elements because its message is more lurid and its unmasking of a vast ‘conspiracy’ more crudely compelling.6 These conclusions were made possible by the fact that both scholars avoided detailed analysis of the text, or the polemics it generated. Laqueur’s description of this inflammatory diatribe as ‘a measured statement’ is extraordinary As Shafarevich made

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clear, his main target was not the intelligentsia, but a group of Jewish intellectuals, and he traced their hostility towards Russia to their Jewishness. The result was an indictment, no less virulent in many ways than the Protocols, of the very essence of Jewish culture. Dunlop’s claim about the ‘primitive needs’ of extremists missed the point: it was precisely Shafarevich’s ‘scholarly’ style that made his ideas attractive not merely to the marginal rabble, but to pillars of the Soviet establishment during the totalitarian twilight of 1989–91. While poorly-printed editions of the Protocols competed with the gutter press, Shafarevich’s anti-Semitic reflections appeared in prestigious thick journals, and his vocabulary was taken up by representatives of the Communist Party, the security apparatus, the military leadership, hardline parliamentary factions, and conservative cultural figures. If contemporary scholarship has paid little attention to Shafarevich’s ideas, it has virtually ignored their sources, which are to be found in the samizdat debate that took place during the 1970s about the relationship between Russian history and the Russian Revolution. What was originally at stake in this debate was whether a democratic future required the renunciation of the pre-revolutionary past. Some prominent advocates of ‘socialism with a human face’ blamed Russian backwardness for the failures of Soviet socialism, and their arguments were given substance by the Brezhnev regime’s discovery of the uses of national chauvinism against ideological renegades. A parallel discussion of the pre-revolutionary heritage was taking place in unofficial Orthodox circles, who were split over whether the Orthodox revival should occur under the sign of universalist Christianity or Russian patriotism. The two debates intersected in a collection of anonymous samizdat articles, calling for repentance and the renunciation of national messianism, which were produced in 1969 by members of a seminar hosted by Father Aleksandr Men. Nationalist responses, in samizdat jour-nals like Vladimir Osipov’s Veche and the anthology From under the Rubble, evoked in turn objections from liberals like Sakharov, Sinyavskii, Chalidze, Lev Kopelev, Boris Shragin, and Aleksandr Yanov. For over a decade, refutations, rebuttals, and recriminations flowed between samizdat and tamizdat, culminating in Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya. This protracted debate exemplifies the way that samizdat’s freedom from censorship made possible the generation and development of ideas that could never have been contemplated in the official press. This provenance was a source of durability in the new conditions of the reform period, created by the collapse of censorship and the disappearance of the official ideology as the axis of permissible public debate.

Shafarevich the rights-defender What outraged many liberals at the time of the publication of Rusofobia was the author’s status as a famous scholar and a respected dissident, which conferred an aura of academic rigour and moral authority upon a profoundly anti-Semitic text.7 It was a rare combination of qualities in the milieu of patriotic politics. On the one hand, many prominent patriotic intellectuals were morally tarnished during the Brezhnev era by their collaboration with the regime, by their readiness to sign collective letters denouncing Solzhenitsyn, by their lapses into the jargon of communist internationalism. On the other, most of the dissident luminaries of Russian nationalism, such as Vladimir Osipov, Yurii

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Dobrovolskii, and Yurii Skuratov-Ivanov, were marginal figures, underground men whose educations were interrupted by expulsions from schools and by terms in prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Shafarevich was unimpeachable on both counts. Shafarevich’s achievements as a mathematician earned him international acclaim. A founder of his own theoretical school in number theory and algebraic geometry, he made fundamental contributions to twentieth-century mathematics, including his work on the inverse Galois problem, on the generalized law of reciprocity, on the problem of towers in class field theory, and on moduli of K3 surfaces.8 His published works, which include the famous textbooks Number Theory (with Z.I.Borevich) and Foundations of Algebraic Geometry, have been widely translated. His meteoric career began in 1943, when at the age of 20 he was appointed a lecturer at Moscow State University, and during two decades of teaching he supervised thirty-three candidates’ theses and ten doctorates. His career suffered a brief reversal during the late Stalin period, but in 1958 he was elevated to corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. One year later he won the Lenin Prize, and was permitted to travel abroad to attend a major mathematics conference. It was the beginning of his international reputation. Shafarevich was made a foreign affiliate of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the London Royal Society, and the German Academy Leopoldina. He received the Heinemann Prize from the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and an honorary doctorate from the University of Paris.9 This stature as a scholar gave credibility to Shafarevich’s no less striking formulations about Russian history. It also endowed him with habits of argumentation and exposition that made his works models of clarity beside the fulminations of many of his patriotic allies, and even those of some of his democratic opponents. Yet the leap from algebra to history was problematic, as Solzhenitsyn observed in a panegyric to Shafarevich in his 1975 memoirs: ‘When such conversions are superficial, we get dilettantism; when they are more serious, we see the strong and vigorous grip of an independent mind uncluttered with stereotyped preconceptions, capable of sifting the wheat from the chaff.’10 In their leaps of logic, unfounded generalisations, biased selection of evidence, and eclectic bibliographies, Shafarevich’s works do bear the mark of the dilettante, but no less than the works of many of his samizdat adversaries. Shafarevich’s dissident career began in the spring of 1971, when he approached Sakharov during the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences, and offered to participate in the work of the Committee on Human Rights, the unofficial discussion forum that he had created the previous year with Valerii Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov. By the time Shafarevich joined the committee, it was under mounting pressure from the KGB, which had just searched Chalidze’s flat. According to Solzhenitsyn, Shafarevich had little faith in the committee’s effectiveness, but became a member ‘because he thought it shameful that people were no longer joining, felt it would be unforgiveable if he did not lend his own strength to it.’11 Sakharov shared those doubts, and was losing patience with the other members, who seemed more interested in the nuances of the criminal code than in defending real people. According to him, ‘Shafarevich and I tried our best to give attention to more important issues.’ In particular, Shafarevich was then especially ‘disturbed by the misuse of psychiatry, by religious persecution, and by other actions which violate a victim’s spiritual integrity.’12 Shafarevich delivered a report to the committee on legislative discrimination against

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believers, a persistent theme of his public activity.13 In the 1980s Sakharov claimed that ‘I have never lost my respect for [Shafarevich].’ But he admitted that their collaboration had been limited by the fact that Shafarevich’s views were ‘close to those of Solzhenitsyn.’14 The extent of this closeness became clear with the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s autobiography, in which he distanced himself from Tvardovskii and Sakharov, whilst extolling Shafarevich as his real ally: Igor Shafarevich and I really had been comrades, marching shoulder to shoulder, for three years now, while we had been working on From under the Rubble. We were tied together not by memories of the past (we shared none), nor even by our present stand against the Dragon, but by a firmer bond: our common views on Russia’s future.15 They had met in the winter of 1967–8, shortly after Shafarevich had returned from an academic trip to Yugoslavia. Concluding that Shafarevich was ‘one of the pampered few who are always going abroad,’ Solzhenitsyn taunted him before leaving that all the academicians he knew ‘seem to enjoy an interesting and even a daring conversation, but that when the time came to act, to take a stand, they were always missing.’16 It was a time when rumours, launched by Solzhenitsyn himself, were circulating that he was working on a scathing novel about the Soviet intelligentsia, and Shafarevich feared that that he had been cast in the role of anti-hero.17 Their relations improved after Solzhenitsyn saw Shafarevich’s signature under a human rights appeal, evidently the mathematicians’ protest in March 1968 against the forced hospitalisation of Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin.18 But they were in regular contact only after Solzhenitsyn proposed to Shafarevich that they create a samizdat periodical, an initiative that was not realised because of the difficulty of convincing authors to make contributions.19 Instead they produced the anthology From under the rubble, to which Shafarevich contributed three essays, on ethics, on the national problem, and on socialism. The essay on socialism, which was a condensed version of a monograph published in 1975 as The Socialist Phenomenon, was certainly Shafarevich’s most daring contribution.20 He argued that socialism existed both as a doctrine and a social system, which he illustrated with a wide range of historical examples. He began his survey of socialist dogma with Plato, then the ‘socialism of the heresies’ such as the Cathars and Taborites, before continuing to the ‘socialism of the philosophers’ like More, Campanella, and Meslier. Then he examined historical cases of socialism in the Inca state, the Jesuit realm in Paraguay, ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. On the basis of this ‘dotted outline,’ Shafarevich defined socialism in terms of four basic principles: (1) the abolition of private property; (2) the abolition of the family; (3) the abolition of religion; and (4) equality and the abolition of hierarchies in society.21 He proceeded to refute a series of explanations for the socialist phenomenon, before concluding that it was a product of the human species’ innate striving for self-destruction, which Freud termed Thanatos or the death instinct. A decade earlier, such a proposition might have been testimony to the author’s own death instinct, but in the mid-1970s, in the aftermath of The Gulag Archipelago, Shafarevich was simply echoing the general repudiation of socialism in dissident circles. The book has been dismissed by Western scholars, but it

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clearly established Shafarevich’s reputation as a radical opponent of the regime.22 It was cited approvingly by Sakharov, and the Georgian dissident Merab Kostava was incriminated with translating it into Georgian.23 Roy Medvedev, dissident standard-bearer of ‘socialism with a human face,’ was obviously outraged by Shafarevich’s claims. As editor of the journal Vek XX, he rejected a review of the work because it was ‘not malicious enough.’24 The review, by Viktor Sokirko, was subsequently published in Poiski.25 With the advent of perestroika, the surreptitious influence of Shafarevich’s conception of socialism upon village-prose circles became increasingly apparent. Vasilii Belov extolled the condensed essay version for showing that ‘socialism was not a social formation, but only an ideology’ and thereby striking a blow against ‘communist romantics, who believed in the change of formations and dreamt of the radiant future of all humanity.’26 Its special place in the patriotic mythology of resistance was emphasised by Aleksandr Kazintsev, who in 1991 recalled a conversation about the essay during the 1970s in an unofficial seminar that was apparently under KGB surveillance: when someone declared that ‘Shafarevich is right,’ the doorbell rang, and a man in an elegant foreign costume asked: ‘Has anyone called a handyman?’27 The preparations for From under the Rubble were interrupted by Solzhenitsyn’s arrest, which occurred whilst Shafarevich was visiting Solzhenitsyn, to give him a copy of the latest draft of The Socialist Phenomenon: as he was being led off by KGB, Solzhenitsyn glimpsed Shafarevich ‘black as a cloud, still as a statue, a satchel replete with socialism and algebra in his hand.’28 During the year that followed Solzhenitsyn’s deportation, Shafarevich was drawn closer to the Russian nationalist movement by the KGB’s crackdown on Vladimir Osipov’s Russophile samizdat journal Veche. In August, Shafarevich’s name headed a petition in defence of the mathematician Yurii Gastev, who was persecuted for his links to Osipov.29 After being ousted as editor of Veche, Osipov launched a new ‘Christian-patriotic’ journal titled Zemlya, which included Shafarevich’s statement ‘On the essay collection From under the Rubble.’30 Osipov was finally arrested in late November 1974, and Shafarevich’s name headed an appeal, which pointed out that Osipov was ‘a victim of unjust, unconstitutional persecution’ who ‘had maintained the position of a loyal citizen…although he criticised the ruling ideology in various ways for its lack of attention to the cultural heritage of the Russian people and for the destruction of the country’s ancient buildings.’ Signatories included From under the Rubble authors like Vadim Borisov and Mikhail Agurskii, as well as prominent rights-defenders like Yurii Orlov, Sergei Kovalyov, and Valentin Turchin.31 Shafarevich’s involvement with Osipov coincided with an obvious breach with Sakharov on the question of emigration. In September 1973, Sakharov appealed to the US Congress in support of the Jackson-Vanik amendment. He justified this by arguing that the right to emigration was ‘first among equals.’ Shafarevich clearly held strong opinions on the matter. One of the most poignant moments in Solzhenitsyn’s memoir is his recollection of a conversation with Shafarevich in August 1973, as they walked through the ruins of the village of Serednikovo, which had been destroyed during collectivisation. When Solzhenitsyn, under increasing pressure from the authorities, reflected on how they might remember the scene if they were forced into exile, Shafarevich declared that ‘life would be impossible anywhere but in Russia.’32 In November 1974, after Solzhenitsyn’s fears about his banishment had come true, Shafarevich made his opinions public at the press-conference in his apartment for the

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launching of From under the Rubble, at which he denounced recent comments by Sinyavskii, now in Paris, and asserted that leading figures of Russian culture who voluntarily emigrate ‘cannot contribute anything to that culture,’ as they ‘have turned out not to possess enough spiritual values to withstand the threat of suffering.’ Sinyavskii’s co-defendant Yulii Daniel, who had remained in Moscow after his release from camp, responded with an ‘Open Letter to Shafarevich,’ in which he contended that ‘a true artist, even when physically separated from his native land, is always linked to her by an unbreakable, spiritual umbilical cord.’33 Sinyavskii joined Maksimov, Nekrasov and Galich in a brief statement castigating Shafarevich’s ‘impermissibly insulting tone’ and arguing that ‘in taking it upon himself to separate Russian writers from Russian culture, he has adopted the tone and methods of Soviet justice.’34 Although he never had to face the test of arrest and trial that Sinyavskii had withstood, Shafarevich was finally banned from delivering lectures in October 1975.35 He admitted later that he did not understand why he had lasted so long in official academia, since ‘by the existing norms, my crime deserved much more than being fired from the university.’36 The Committee on Human Rights faded out of existence in 1975, but despite their ideological rift, Shafarevich and Sakharov continued to make joint appeals for persecuted colleagues. In July 1974, they issued a statement on the predicament of Yurii Orlov, then a corresponding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences, who was suffering employment discrimination because of his essay on whether nontotalitarian socialism was possible.37 Three years later, after Orlov’s arrest for his activities as chairman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, they joined two Russian Jews— Naum Meiman and Yurii Goldfarb—in an appeal exhorting participants at an International Conference on Nuclear Accelerators in Protvino to demand Orlov’s release.38 After some hesitation,’ Shafarevich also signed an appeal with Sakharov ‘to all those who agree that the defense of human rights is essential for the preservation of peace on earth,’ in which they denounced the arrest of Helsinki Monitor and Solzhenitsyn Fund manager Aleksandr Ginzburg as ‘a link in the chain of repressions in preparation for the Belgrade [CSCE] meeting.’39 The main direction of Shafarevich’s public activity, however, was increasingly focused upon the defence of fellow nationalists and Orthodox activists. In early 1976 he signed a statement protesting against the dismissal of the Russophile priest Dmitrii Dudko from his parish. The other signatories included Vadim Borisov, Feliks Svetov, and Zoya Krakhmalnikova—subsequently one of Shafarevich’s most outspoken Christian critics.40 A few months later, in a BBC television interview, he argued that overflowing churches were evidence not of Soviet religious toleration, but of church closures. If services were not disrupted, it was because the authorities were attempting to transform religion into a ‘cult performance’ that did not go beyond the walls of the church.41 At a press-conference at Dudko’s home in April 1977, Shafarevich released a statement denouncing recent anti-religious articles in Literaturnaya Gazeta.42 He did not join the Christian Committee for the Defence of the Rights of Believers, which was established by Gleb Yakunin in December 1976, but spoke at length in a second BBC interview about religious persecution in September 1977.43 The political implications of Shafarevich’s drift towards nationalism became clear in a June 1978 interview in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Excerpts appeared in the Chronicle of Current Events, and the interview marked the end of his involvement with

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the rights-defenders. Shafarevich openly identified himself with the pochvenniki, and criticised Westernizers with plans for institutional reforms: What we need are maximum spiritual changes with a minimum of outward changes…. A return to God is needed and a return to our people, a sense of the overall national purpose and a feeling of responsibility before history and the future of our country.44 At about this time, Shafarevich’s portrait was painted by prominent Russophile artist Ilya Glazunov, who held his controversial Manezh exhibition in 1978.45 That year Shafarevich also participated in a second collective initiative with several Rubble contributors, an anthology of articles in Vestnik RKhD 125 that appeared alongside Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Commencement Address, with its fierce denunciation of Western decadence. Shafarevich’s contributions included a BBC interview, an early article on Shostakovich, and a scathing attack on Roy Medvedev’s ‘rearguard battle’ for Marxism.46 Yet Shafarevich’s readiness to accept ‘a minimum of outward changes’ meant that he shared Medvedev’s political quiescence during the ensuing decade of repression and tumultuous change. When the authorities launched a crackdown on the dissident movement in late 1979, Shafarevich’s public statements ceased. Not even the recantation of Father Dudko, and the trials of Russophile dissidents like Leonid Borodin and Ivan Skuratov evoked a public response from him. Surveying the apparent destruction of the dissident movement, the left-wing samizdat journal Varianty observed that Shafarevich and Roy Medvedev, both regarded in the West as ‘well-known dissidents, [though] they do not apply that label to themselves,’ were now ‘manifesting a judicious and necessary caution.’47 When Shafarevich lent his authority to radical nationalism during perestroika, ‘this judicious and necessary caution’ of the early 1980s would evoke scathing criticism from the Orthodox writer Zoya Krakhmalnikova, who was sentenced to internal exile in 1982 for her role in the journal Mariya. But Shafarevich’s silence was not the product of cowardice: during these years he was engaged in the dangerous task of writing Rusofobiya, a work that may have been anti-Semitic, but which was also profoundly subversive. In 1982, ‘after long hesitation,’ Shafarevich and his friends released Rusofobiya into samizdat, without contemplating the possibility that it might be published in his lifetime, hoping only that ‘of the tens of copies at least a few would reach their target and bring this testimony of our time to future generations.’48 He expressed satisfaction with its rapid proliferation, but it had no discernible public resonance at the time.49 Unlike other major samizdat texts, its moment of maximum impact would come with publication at the height of perestroika.

Cosmopolitanism, Metanoia, Russophobia Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya was the culmination of a debate about the alienation of the intelligentsia from the Russian nation. This controversy had a long history in prerevolutionary literature, where it was a dominant theme in the polemics between Westernisers and Slavophiles, but it received its definitive treatment under the shadow of

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revolution in the Vekhi anthology (1909). At once an indictment of the radical intelligentsia and a warning against the imminent threat of a revolutionary cataclysm, Vekhi was not heeded by contemporaries, but its legacy surfaced half a century later, when it influenced a wide range of Soviet intellectuals: both those whom Shafarevich celebrated as ‘Russophiles,’ and those he denounced as ‘Russophobes.’ Shafarevich’s pseudonymous foe Altaev paid homage to Vekhi as ‘a power secretly affecting the whole spiritual development of Russian society,’ whilst Shafarevich’s friend Solzhenitsyn claimed that ‘even after sixty years its testimony has not lost its brightness’ and that it ‘still seems to us a vision of the future.’50 Vekhi’s status as prophecy, its vision of the coming revolutionary cataclysm, made it especially useful as an authoritative starting point for samizdat writers attempting to come to terms with that cataclysm after the event. However, readiness to take the side of the innocent nation against the alienated intelligentsia was inhibited by the memory of the anti-cosmopolitan campaign of Stalin’s last years. This campaign, which combined Marxist-Leninist ideology, Russian chauvinism, and anti-Semitism, accompanied the wave of repression that began with the crackdown on the Anti-Fascist Committee and culminated in the Doctors’ Plot. Despite the post-Stalin thaw, militant patriotism and anti-cosmopolitanism remained central currents of Soviet intellectual life, particularly for the Stalinist tendency gathered around the journal Oktyabr, which kept alive the possibility of regression to full-blown Stalinism. The risk was dramatized by the 1958 campaign against the ‘internal émigré’ Pasternak, which Shafarevich would frequently recall as a warning against the dangers of desecrating cultural icons.51 It took literary form in Ivan Shevtsov’s 1964 novel The Louse, a wide-ranging denunciation of the proWestern liberal intelligentsia. Flattering Khrushchev’s prejudices, Shevtsov tried to link modern art to the intrigues of the CIA. The thaw did, however, create opportunities for liberals to combat the excesses of ‘Soviet patriotism.’ After Khrushchev’s removal, Shevtsov was the target of a mocking review in Novyi Mir by Andrei Sinyavskii, who suggested that the best response to the author was not rational argument, but pity.52 It was the beginning of Sinyavskii’s long confrontation with militant nationalism, whose spokesmen would vilify him as the archetypal ‘Russophobe.’ For almost a decade Sinyavskii himself had been publishing works abroad under a Jewish pseudonym, Abram Tertz, and would soon be facing neither rational argument nor pity, but arrest, trial, and seven years in the Mordovan camps. After Sinyavskii’s arrest, one official reviewer would denounce his pseudonym as a ‘squalid provocation’ aimed at creating ‘the impression that anti-semitism exists in our country and that a writer with a name such as Abram Tertz has to seek publishers in the West if he wants to write ‘frankly’ about Soviet life.’53 Another would express outrage at the ‘persistent odour of anti-Semitism’ in his works: a striking accusation to make against someone who had chosen a Jewish pseudonym, and who would become the most strident critic of Russian anti-Semitism.54 Whilst Sinyavskii was serving his sentence, Russophile ideologues exploited official discomfort over the emergence of democratic dissent, with its apparent Western orientation, in order to reassert National Bolshevism against the party’s internationalist rhetoric. In April 1968, under pressure from the petition campaign at home and the effects of the Prague Spring abroad, the Central Committee passed a resolution calling for a sustained and vigorous drive against the influence of bourgeois ideology in all fields.55

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This warning coincided with the publication of an anti-Semitic diatribe in Molodaya Gvardiya by Mikhail Lobanov, a future ally of Shafarevich in the patriotic movement of the 1990s. Lobanov vilified pro-Western ‘cosmopolitan’ intellectuals and denounced Jewish theatre directors Meyerhold and Efros as destroyers of traditional values.56 One month later Pravda offered implicit endorsement of Lobanov’s xenophobic line, castigating intellectuals of some socialist countries who advocated Western theories against socialism, and Soviet intellectuals who were manifesting ‘individualism and apoliticism’, and succumbing to ‘foreign ideological influence.’57 After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Molodaya Gvardiya renewed its ideological offensive. In a rambling article replete with references to Russian saints and ecstatic praise of the Russian character, Viktor Chalmaev celebrated the revolution as ‘a joyous sacramental act’ that was the culmination of Russia’s unique path of historical development, and expressed pride that ‘fortunately the history of our homeland is filled with great volcanic eruptions.’58 This was a direct challenge to official dogma about the revolution as an event of world-historical, rather than purely national significance. It also contested Lenin’s conception of the two cultures, progressive and reactionary, of pre-revolutionary Russia.59 A response came from A.Dementev in the liberal Novyi Mir, criticising Chalmaev and Lobanov in purely Marxist terms, but also disparaging their fear of ‘bourgeois prosperity’ and ‘Americanism,’ since ‘Soviet society, by its very…ture, is not predisposed to bourgeois influences.’60 This apparent loss of ideological vigilance provided the pretext for the notorious ‘Letter of the Eleven’ conservative writers, who warned that ‘the penetration of bourgeois ideology among us was, has been, and remains a very serious danger,’ pointed to ‘the cosmopolitan ideas so dear to the hearts of certain critics and writers grouped around the journal Novyi Mir,’ and observed that it was not without significance that Sinyavskii had written for Novyi Mir.61 At the same time, literary critic Aleksandr Yanov ignited a parallel debate in Voprosy Literatury, by asserting that there was a direct continuity between Slavophilism and the Black Hundreds, a claim that provoked a scornful response from village-prose critic Vadim Kozhinov.62 Although the debate was effectively stifled after the ‘Letter of the Eleven,’ the ensuing purge of the editorial board of Novyi Mir, and the dismissal of the editor of Molodaya Gvardiya, these articles had a major resonance in the intelligentsia. In spite of Chalmaev’s ‘ludicrous pretension’ and ‘barely literate style,’ even Solzhenitsyn, who had just finished The Gulag Archipelago, was moved to sympathy by his praise for Russian saints, his evocation of the village, and his hostility towards revolutionary democrats, all of which Solzhenitsyn regarded as ‘a bellow of longing for a dimly remembered national idea.’63 But the scope and possibilities of the argument were confined by the official arena in which the articles were published. It was a debate between loyalists, an argument about the sources of the greatness of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Yanov and Dementev argued in terms of Marxist-Leninist internationalism, Chalmaev in terms of patriotic loyalty to the state against its foreign enemies. The more evasive Kozhinov played an elaborate charade, pointing out contradictions in his opponents’ reasoning, but nevertheless assuming the mantle of a defender of ideological orthodoxy. The positive tone meant that none of the polemicists addressed the ‘painful question’ of blame for the Bolshevik Revolution, nor could they contemplate the post-Soviet future. During the ensuing decades, the battle-lines that had been drawn in 1969 were the scenes of periodic

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skirmishes in official arenas, including the acrimonious debate ‘We and the Classics’ at the Central House of the Writer in 1977, where Efros was advised to found his own [Jewish] national theatre. While official intellectuals exchanged recriminations, a far more profound debate began in samizdat, which was not confined by this stultifying framework of loyalty. Whilst the ideologues of the Brezhnev regime were consecrating the advent of ‘developed socialism’ in verbose theoretical works that were soon to be discarded with other monuments of the ‘era of stagnation,’ samizdat was renouncing the Great October Socialist Revolution. As they abandoned Marxism-Leninism as a source of emancipatory possibilities, samizdat writers rediscovered the proscribed classics of pre-revolutionary philosophy, and above all the Vekhi anthology. The resulting literature was essentially an inquiry into the sources of a catastrophe. The first serious attempt to pose the crucial question was a collection of three pseudonymous articles released into samizdat in 1969 under the title ‘Metanoia,’ and subsequently published in issue 97 of Vestnik RSKhD (Herald of the Russian Student Christian Movement), the Paris-based émigré journal that would become the central forum for the Russophile renaissance.64 These articles were the work of young writers belonging to an unofficial religious seminar hosted by Father Aleksandr Men, a prominent Orthodox priest, whose Jewish origins and passionate ecumenism would earn him the hostility not only of Russian nationalists, but also of some Zionists.65 The four pseudonymous authors—N.N., Gorskii, Altaev, and M. Chelnov—were united by a Christian standpoint, which enabled them to criticise both liberal socialist reformers like the Sakharov of the Reflections, and the heritage of Slavophile nationalism. Unlike the official opponents of Molodaya Gvardiya, they were radically anti-Communist. Gorskii derided Marxism’s scientific pretensions, excoriated Lenin and the ‘underground men’ who were attracted to him, and pointed to the October Revolution as proof that ‘Evil does not give birth to Good, and inhumanity cannot lead to the path of normal socioeconomic life.’66 Similarly, Altaev attributed the intelligentsia’s paralysis to its sense of responsibility for the regime’s crimes and a fear that the party would be judged as Hitler’s party had been judged.67 Where Chalmaev celebrated the ‘joyous sacramental act’ of the Bolshevik revolution as the triumphal culmination of Russia’s glorious history, the ‘Metanoia’ authors argued that the Communist regime was ‘an organic result of Russian life, the concentration of all that is bad in the Russian soul, all of the sinful growth within Russian history which cannot be mechanically cut off and cast aside.’68 This sinful growth was Russian messianism. It was the subject of an elaborate analysis in Gorskii’s article, which held that ‘the supposed exclusivity of Russia’s mission has now been intoxicating Russian consciousness for four centuries.’69 Gorskii treated this intoxication as a product not of ‘the usual hypertrophy of national feeling,’ but of ‘religious messianism which is clearly analogous to ancient Hebrew messianism,’ and whose core idea was that ‘among nations only the chosen nation is capable of realising the Messiah’s kingdom and showing the final meaning in history.’70 Gorskii traced the development of Russian messianism to medieval Russia’s calling as the sole Orthodox kingdom in the world, bound to maintain the purity of Christ’s teaching until the Apocalypse. In post-Petrine Russia, this eschatological conception ‘was secularised and transformed into a rationalistic theory of progress according to which history must

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inevitably end in the triumph of universal Happiness, Good, and Justice.’ Russian Communism merged the two paradigms, transforming the Final Judgement into the World Revolution, and the advent of communism into ‘the infinite triumph of universal happiness and prosperity.’71 In his critique of national messianism, Gorskii reserved special opprobrium for the Slavophile contention that ‘Christianity is the primary characteristic of the Russian people,’ arguing that it reduced Christianity to an instrument of national chauvinism. Discussing Konstantin Aksakov’s claim that Russian history ‘has the meaning of Universal Confession,’ Gorskii claimed that ‘here Slavophile messianism loses religious depth,’ and reveals itself as ‘unruly nationalism and imperialism and the God-chosen status appears in the form of external, crudely materialistic power.’72 Such faith in a ‘Russian Christ, like faith in the Russian-people as a God-chosen one,’ argued Gorskii, marked a ‘return to Old Testament consciousness and has no justification in the universal consciousness of the New Testament.’73 For Christianity was ‘addressed to all people, and the messianic pretensions of individual nations…are completely foreign to the evangelical spirit.’74 Whilst dismissing Slavophilism’s ideas for their ‘scientific-historical insolvency,’ Gorskii identified them with Communism: despite all the differences in the religious, political and social ideas of the Slavophiles, populists or bolsheviks, they have a common root—the universal future of Russia which will become the culmination of Universal history and be its end and execution.75 The implications of this common source were explored in Altaev’s indictment of the Russian intelligentsia. Altaev took as his starting point S.N. Bulgakov’s diagnosis of the Russian intelligentsia’s radical ethos as a product of ‘a peculiar distortion of spiritual sources imparted by Orthodox culture and the Church.’76 He proceeded to trace the Russian intelligentsia’s continuing degradation, as it abandoned revolutionary asceticism for material well-being, and its ranks were swelled by people who might otherwise have been salesmen or gambling-den owners.77 The result was the ‘dual consciousness’ of the intelligentsia, which ‘does not accept the regime, but at the same time is afraid to admit it.’78 To do so would require recognition of its guilt for the crimes of the regime. Instead it propagated the ‘myth of enlightenment,’ the delusory belief that Aesopian language and small evasions of censorship would become a source of emancipatory reform.79 As the intelligentsia embraced these illusions, noted Altaev sardonically, it failed to see ‘that evil does not necessarily come dressed in the dirty rags of anarchy, it can also appear in the glittering suit of a well-organised Reich.’ He concluded with a series of pessimistic questions: What will the Russian intelligentsia think of next? With what else will it wish to amuse the devil? Will it be a new Russian messianism of the German national-socialist type, or will technocracy come to power? Or will we see a return to Orthodox Stalinist communism?80 The impact of Vestnik 97 has been likened to Chaadaev’s ‘Philosophical Letter,’ whose publication in 1836 ignited the Slavophile-Westerniser controversy.81 According to

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Yanov, it was Gorskii who touched the ‘tenderest sore point’ of the Russian right, and ‘for a brief historical instant, all the factions of the dissident Right—isolationist and messianic—were united in a fit of indignation.’82 It is not hard to find the causes of their outrage. By consciously modelling themselves upon Vekhi, the Vestnik 97 authors were encroaching upon the Russophile heritage. By opposing Christianity to Russian nationalism, they were calling into question the central tenet of the Russophile revival. Reformist documents like Sakharov’s Reflections could easily be dismissed as Westernising idolatry, because of their invocation of socialism and technocratic progress. But the Vestnik 97 articles, with their moral exhortations and their call for repentance, appropriated the language of the Russophile renaissance to make anthropological generalisations about ‘Russian man,’ to assault national myths, and to articulate a provocative version of Russian history as a continuum of tyranny and messianic delusion. The initial backlash against the pretenders appeared in Vladimir Osipov’s samizdat journal Veche, which had been launched as a platform for loyal Russophile sentiment in 1971 after the silencing of Molodaya Gvardiya, and survived until its suppression in 1974. In issue 8, Leonid Borodin, a recently released political prisoner and a former member of the Leningrad underground group VSKhON, derided Gorskii’s claim about the continuity between Russian messianism and Bolshevism. He pointed out that ‘all the basic components of revolutionary psychology were already clearly expressed in The Communist Manifesto,’ and that Lenin’s plans for the revolution were based on theoretical considerations that were ‘in no way connected with any past variant in Russian history’83 Then, like the Vestnik 97 authors, Borodin used the freedom of his samizdat platform to transgress the limits of the permissible. Defying their warnings against anti-Semitism, Borodin insisted that to understand the spiritual processes that led to the acceptance of the revolution, ‘it is impossible to disregard the role played by the Jews in the denationalisation of a particular part of the Russian intelligentsia’ and that ‘denationalised Jewry became a sustaining medium for the Russian engaged in tearing his ties with the nation, with traditions, and with indigenous estates in his search for “truth and justice.”’84 In a few succinct sentences, Borodin had posed the thesis that Shafarevich would elaborate a decade later into a theory of history. The magnitude of Vestnik 97’s impact became clear only with the release of Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich’s anthology From under the Rubble, which marked the opening of a major fissure between dissident democrats and dissident Russophiles. Solzhenitsyn singled out N.N.’s ‘Metanoia’ and Gorskii’s ‘Russian Messianism’ for fierce condemnation, declaring that ‘these articles solemnly bury Russia, with a bayonet thrust just in case—just as prisoners in the camps are buried.’ He also deplored the fact that: there is not the slightest hint that the authors share any complicity with their countrymen, with the rest of us; there is nothing but denunciation for the irredeemably vicious Russian people and a tone of contempt for those who have been led astray.85 He was echoed by Shafarevich, who claimed that the authors’ aim was to change the nation’s consciousness so ‘that it dare not imagine that its life has some aim,’ and then asked: ‘What other nation has ever been subjected to such sermons?’86

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The sermons offered in From under the Rubble sought to resurrect a national idea based upon repentance, self-limitation, and sacrifice. Against Vestnik 97’s call for repentance for the sinful legacy of the national past, Solzhenitsyn’s article ‘Repentance and Self-Limitation’ argued that repentance itself was a central component of Russian traditional culture, though it had been undermined by the ‘soulless reforms’ of Nikon and Peter the Great.87 Instead of national messianism, he called for self-limitation: moral renewal, an end to foreign aggression, and ‘inward development’ of the northwest. Shafarevich took a different approach in his closing essay, which proposed sacrifice as a way ‘to overcome the many obstacles in Russia’s path,’ which was ‘to enable man to find a way out of his blind alley, to find salvation from the senseless race of industrial society, the cult of power and the darkness of unbelief.’88 Whilst proposing his conciliatory national idea, Solzhenitsyn denounced Gorskii, Chelnov, and N.N. for arbitrarily distorting Russian history ‘with the obsessive thoroughness of hate.’89 Having derided the National Bolsheviks who celebrated the Great October Revolution as the crowning achievement of Russian history, Solzhenitsyn now assailed those who damned Russia for producing the Bolshevik catastrophe. The success of this misconception, according to Solzhenitsyn, was due to ‘the obscurity of our recent history, the destruction of archives, the disappearance of evidence.’90 After a running refutation of citations from Vestnik, he reached Chelnov’s assertion that ‘Proletarian messianism is taking on a blatantly Russophile character,’ and asked: ‘Have we memory and courage enough to recall the first fifteen years after the revolution when ‘proletarian messianism took on a blatantly’ Russophobic character?’91 The italics were Solzhenitsyn’s, and for additional emphasis he repeated the sentence at the end of the paragraph. It was not the first samizdat use of the term ‘Russophobia,’ which had appeared occasionally in Osipov’s Veche. The best-known example was a celebrated polemic against Aleksandr Yakovlev, the future architect of perestroika, which ended with a warning that ‘forces of international cosmopolitanism, together with Chinese chauvinists and other enemies of Russia, will correctly evaluate the position of the newlyemerged Russophobes.’92 In an interview, Osipov himself denounced that ‘furious Russophobe and slanderer,’ the historian Pokrovskii, as the personification of ‘the white heat’ of pre-revolutionary nihilism.93 But here, ‘Russophobia’ was merely a clichéd term of abuse in Russophile diatribes. The term acquired an entirely new resonance when it entered the lexicon of a Nobel Prize winner in Literature (Solzhenitsyn had actually declined to contribute to Veche because he was dissatisfied with its quality). For all the vehemence of their criticism, the Rubble contributors were profoundly indebted to the arguments of Vestnik 97. This was particularly evident in Solzhenitsyn’s ‘The Smatterers,’ which developed Altaev’s critique of the intelligentsia. Solzhenitsyn acknowledged Altaev as ‘the stubborn exposer of the smatterers,’ and complimented his ‘brilliantly polished’ analysis of the ‘six temptations’ of the Russian intelligentsia.94 But in opposition to Altaev’s analysis of the moral degradation of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia under the Soviet regime, Solzhenitsyn contended that the intelligentsia had ceased to exist, a claim that mirrored Pomerants’s provocative claim that ‘the people’ had ceased to exist. What remained were the ‘Smatterers,’ who were distinguished by their alienation from the people. Tracing a series of statements hostile to the people and peasantry in tamizdat and samizdat, Solzhenitsyn noted that ‘it is unlikely that [the authors] know each other, but what unity! …Which means that it is not just the invention

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of individuals, but a trend.95 This trend, revealed by Solzhenitsyn, would eventually be designated the ‘Small People’ in Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya. Although its defence of Russian history and its indictment of the intelligentsia prefigured Rusofobiya, the overall tenor of From under the Rubble was moderate and conciliatory. There was no hint of the anti-Semitism of Rusofobiya. Indeed Solzhenitsyn extolled ‘the miraculous birth and consolidation of Israel after two thousand years of dispersal’ as a striking example of the resilience of the national idea.96 Ironically, it was Shafarevich who made the best case against ethnic recriminations, in his insistence that ‘since the blame for the present situation cannot be laid at one people’s door, it follows that to a certain extent all peoples are to blame.’97 This position was symbolised by the inclusion in the anthology of a contribution from Mikhail Agurskii, a prominent Zionist activist and convert to Christianity, whom Yanov would later disparage as ‘a fellow traveller of Russian nationalists.’98 In a widely reprinted article, Agurskii had argued that Christianity in the Russian national movement was a ‘powerful obstacle for neo-Nazism,’ and therefore its leading representatives, such as ‘the editors of Veche, and people of national-Christian orientation such as Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich’ had been vilified by ‘neo-Nazi’ institutional and underground anti-Semites.99 It was an extraordinary moment: a Zionist extolling the future theorist of post-Soviet anti-Semitism as a bulwark against anti-Semitism. The attacks to which Agurskii alluded, both in samizdat and from official platforms, may have had an impact on Shafarevich’s intellectual development, by encouraging him to disprove the accusation that he was betraying his compatriots in the interests of Jews. The prototype of these attacks appeared in late 1971, when an ultra-nationalist author insinuated that Solzhenitsyn might have Jewish ancestry, whilst deploring his sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish engineer Ilya Isaakovich in the recently published August 1914.100 The author also denounced Jewish dominance of the Cheka, Radio Liberty, and the Nixon administration, whilst praising Lenin and Stalin for opposing Zionism.101 A few years later, Shafarevich himself came under similar attack in an ‘antiZionist’ samizdat diatribe, which denounced Osipov’s Veche for reprinting ‘the declarations of A.Sakharov, Shafarevich and the rest of the Zionist pack of scholars and pseudo-scholars, who howl about freedom of the press.’102 The authorities clearly welcomed this tendency, and exploited it to exacerbate the tensions within the dissident community during the debate unleashed by Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Letter to the Soviet Leaders.’ In late 1974, Sakharov received an anonymous letter from the ‘Central Committee of the Russian Christian Party,’ warning him to cease his ‘antipopular activity’ and ‘to change his attitude towards the Russian people,’ whilst threatening reprisals against his Jewish son-in-law, Efrem Yankelevich.103 Variations on this theme were constantly played in closed propaganda lectures by officials like Vladimir Emelyanov, an institutional antiSemite who argued that Christianity was itself a form of Zionist encroachment upon Russian paganism. In a document submitted to the Central Committee in January 1977, as Helsinki Groups proliferated across the Soviet Union, Emelyanov called for ‘a relentless struggle against all forms of ORGANIZED Freemason-Zionist activity,’ as manifested by the leading dissident public groups, including the defunct ‘Sakharov Committee,’ to which Shafarevich officially belonged.104 Emelyanov attained international notoriety with the appearance of his radical anti-Semitic manifesto,

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Dezionisation, which was published by an Arab publishing house in Paris in 1979, the year that Shafarevich began work on Rusofobiya.105 The plausibility of the image of Shafarevich the Jewish sympathizer began to crumble as early as 1976, when Vestnik RKhD published his ferocious polemic against Father Aleksandr Men. A prominent theologian of Jewish ancestry, Men had published articles, pseudonymous and under his own name, in the émigré press, and had helped to smuggle Solzhenitsyn’s manuscripts to the West. He had also hosted the discussion circle of young intellectuals who had produced ‘Metanoia,’ and become one of the most ardent exponents of liberal and ecumenical views within the church. In a 1976 interview, Father Men had obviously offended Shafarevich’s traditionalist sensibilities by his ‘light and resolute attitude towards Christian relics’ in mooting the possibility of liturgical reform.106 But what provoked Shafarevich’s fury was Men’s implicit criticism of Osipov and his references to anti-Semitism. Asked about his attitude towards the rebirth of Russian chauvinism in unofficial Orthodox circles, as manifested by the samizdat journals Veche, Moskovskii Sbornik, and Zemlya, Men drew the same opposition between Christianity and Russian chauvinism that had been the central thesis of ‘Metanoia’: I am always nauseated by any chauvinism, whether it be Russian, Jewish or Chinese. And for a Christian it is as a whole shameful. As for the antiSemitism of those Orthodox persons who call themselves pochvenniki, this is an old song. In any epoch people do not like to speak of their own guilt, and willingly seek various ‘scapegoats.’107 In an astonishingly vitriolic response, Shafarevich declared that he could not reconcile this passage with Christian attitudes, or ‘even with the moral criteria of the average contemporary pagan.’ Observing that Men himself, not the interviewer, had raised the issue of anti-Semitism, Shafarevich castigated Men for failing to provide evidence from the relevant journals, since ‘elementary decency would demand the formulation of the accusation in a way that it might be checked.’108 Then he reduced Men’s statements to a critique of Osipov, whose Veche was the only journal of the three to have survived for multiple issues, and who was now serving an 8-year prison term in the Mordovan camps. Citing reports in the Chronicle that Osipov was being dragged to interrogations after work, and thus ‘could not even know of the accusations, let alone answer them,’ Shafarevich demanded to know whether Father Men really thought that a discussion was possible ‘under such unequal conditions.’109 Men’s rejoinder, which appeared in Vestnik RKhD in late 1977, could only have fuelled Shafarevich’s anger. The priest claimed that his remarks had been directed not against Osipov, but against a tendency that included successful members of various artistic, writers’, and scientific organisations. Refusing to surrender the mantle of patriotism, Men avowed that ‘I do not only value and love the Church, the culture and the country, in which I grew up and was formed, but I also think that the word motherland is not only a figurative expression.’ In an oblique jibe at Shafarevich’s position on emigration, Men added that this sentiment ‘is always strongly felt by émigrés.’ But Men distinguished patriotism from chauvinism. Recalling the Old Testament injunction against graven images, he declared that ‘nothing must be transformed into a cult, even the national inheritance,’ and that ‘the struggle against the chauvinist instinct is the duty of

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the Christian.’ Challenging Shafarevich’s version of Russian history in which foreigners were the source of every misfortune, Men argued that ‘true patriotism is strong in its wideness and openness,’ and that ‘openness to other cultures was one of the features of Russia: we find it in Dmitrii Rostovskii and Tikhon Zadonskii, in Chaadaev and V.Solovev, in Turgenev and Tolstoi.’ He concluded with a reminder that ‘prophets, being passionate patriots, do not flatter their contemporaries, are not silent about the sins of the people…and they act in this way precisely because they are not indifferent to its fate.’110 It was not a lesson taken seriously by ultra-nationalist Gennadii Shimanov, whose 1980 samizdat anthology Mnogaya Leta included an open letter accusing Men of being an agent of Zionism working to corrupt Russian Orthodoxy.111 Surprisingly, Shafarevich did not include Father Men amongst his chosen adversaries in Rusofobiya, perhaps because Men was under increasing KGB pressure during the early 1980s, and a debate with him would have been no less ‘unequal’ than with Osipov.112 But this bitter clash with a prominent Jewish priest about the nature of Russian chauvinism would appear to mark a crucial moment for the genesis of Shafarevich’s theory about the link between Russophobia and the heritage of Jewish culture: never before had he attacked an opponent with such ferocity. Meanwhile the shockwaves produced by From under the Rubble reverberated in liberal polemics, just as Russophile circles had earlier been radicalised by the appearance of Vestnik 97. The initial response was to be found in the Medvedev brothers’ short-lived journal XX Vek.113 After it was shut down under KGB pressure, Raisa Lert upheld the same position in the ‘pluralist’ samizdat journal Poiski. Two émigré attempts to produce programmatic responses to From under the Rubble appeared in 1976. Democratic Alternatives, edited by Vadim Belotserkovskii, offered a social-democratic perspective, and included two articles that would feature prominently in Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya: Yanov’s reflections on the gulag as a constant satellite of Russian history, and Leonid Plyushch’s criticism of the immorality of Solzhenitsyn’s speculations about which nations committed most injustices towards Russia.114 More substantial and avowedly pluralist was Samosoznanie (‘Self-consciousness’), a liberal-democratic anthology edited by Mikhail Meerson-Aksenov, Pavel Litvinov, and Boris Shragin. It included Yurii Orlov’s essay on non-totalitarian socialism, and a philosophical article by Yurii Barabanov, one of the authors of From under the Rubble. But what most incensed Russophiles was the inclusion of the final chapter of Richard Pipes’s Russia under the Old Regime, which traced modern totalitarianism to the autocracy of Nicholas I.115 Russophiles derided the fact that an anthology devoted to ‘self-consciousness’ should require a US historian to interpret the Russian past, but Pipes’s excerpt was significant for the argument of Rusofobiya: it earned him a prominent place as the sole Sovietologist in Shafarevich’s rogues’ gallery of Russophobes.116 Here he would be joined by Boris Shragin, whose contribution to Samosoznanie would be expanded in his treatise The Challenge of the Spirit. As this controversy raged, Andrei Sinyavskii, now lecturing at the Sorbonne, reappeared in the guise of Abram Terts to publish Strolling with Pushkin, a light-hearted and irreverent portrayal of the great poet, which would soon be excoriated as the archetypal Russophobic text. This ‘lampoon’ provoked a furious response in emigration, including an article by Roman Gul that would appear in the Soviet press at the height of the anti-Russophobia campaign of 1989.117 Undeterred, Sinyavskii wrote a elegiac article

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in memory of the émigré writer Arkadii Belinkov, one of the pioneers of the Third Wave and compiler of the Novyi Kolokol anthology, who had been denounced by émigrés for his ‘russophobic attitude’ and for exhibiting ‘a kind of organic dislike (not to say hatred) for all Russia as such.’118 Sinyavskii countered that Belinkov’s ‘hatred of Russia’ was ‘if you read him carefully and without prejudice, the reverse side of his love for Russia, which, when it causes pain, tells us so much more than starry-eyed illusions.’119 This conviction led Sinyavskii to launch his own journal, Sintaksis, as a forum for pluralistic dialogue. In particular Sinyavskii wanted the journal to address the problem of antiSemitism in Russia ‘because I am Russian, and a Russian writer.’120 Defending his article on Russian anti-Semitism in the second issue of Sintaksis, Sinyavskii declared that ‘when I hear that some subject is taboo, not to be mentioned, I realise at once that this is the one subject that must be mentioned.’121 The other great violator of patriotic taboos was Aleksandr Yanov, the ideological apparatchik who had provoked Kozhinov in 1969 with his assertions about the continuity between Slavophiles and Black Hundreds. After falling into disfavour with the authorities over an article about Herzen, which caused the removal from circulation of the February 1974 issue of Molodoi Kommunist, Yanov emigrated to the USA.122 In exile he rapidly became an outspoken voice in academic Sovietology. Although he abandoned the jargon of Marxism-Leninism, he continued his polemic against the Russophiles, arguing that the legacy of Ivan the Terrible held the key to the atrocities of the Soviet regime. After some initial skirmishes in the émigré press, he published a series of monographs warning the West about the dangers of the burgeoning nationalist movement.123 In The Russian New Right (1978), he claimed that Russian history was characterised by the alternation of ‘Stalinist’ and ‘Brezhnevite’ phases, and that a new eruption of Stalinism could result from the convergence of the official nationalism of Molodaya Gvardiya and dissident Russophiles.124 The central figure in this scenario was Solzhenitsyn, whose evolution since his banishment to the West had distressed Yanov and many other liberals. Analysing the chapters from Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel published in 1975 under the title Lenin in Zurich, Yanov claimed that the demonic portrayal of the Jewish revolutionary Izrail Lazarevich Parvus marked Solzhenitsyn’s reconciliation with the militant nationalism of Antonov and Shimanov.125 That year Shafarevich and other authors of From under the Rubble rejoined the controversy, with a new collection of articles published in Vestnik 125 alongside Solzhenitsyn’s controversial Harvard Commencement address of June 1978. In an introduction to the anthology, Vestnik editor Nikita Struve traced the course of the debate from the ‘young and zealous authors’ of ‘Metanoia’ who ‘had subjected the general historical development of Russia to a hurried and self-confident criticism,’ to From under the Rubble, and the latest wave of polemics by recent émigrés, who had ‘subjected Russian history to unfriendly and dishonest criticism’ and tried to blame Russia for the failure of the socialist experiment.126 According to Struve, the Vestnik 125 collection was intended as a rebuttal to this tendency, since ‘the argument must be “about Russia” and not against it,’ and ulti-mately ‘must become an argument “for Russia.”’127 This exhortation was taken up by I.Dubrovskii and Vadim Borisov, who defended Russian history against the sweeping and ‘unfriendly’ generalisations dispensed by Shragin and Meerson-Aksenov.128

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Shafarevich was the major contributor to the anthology, which included his interview with the BBC and two essays, reflections upon the life and work of Dmitrii Shostakovich and Roy Medvedev.129 The contrast between the early meditation on Shostakovich and the recent polemic against Medvedev revealed the growing militancy that would culminate in Rusofobiya. Nevertheless the essay on Shostakovich was not without relevance for the current debate. It demonstrated how the composer withstood the pressures of the Stalinist regime and remained part of Russian culture, unlike the émigrés whom Shafarevich had severed from Russian culture at his 1974 press-conference. More aggressive was the essay on ‘Marxism’s rearguard battle’ in the works of Roy Medvedev. Here Shafarevich retaliated for the historian’s attacks on From under the Rubble. Yet even Shafarevich’s polemical aggression was overshadowed by the fervour of Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Commencement Address, a sweeping diatribe against Western decadence and the individualist heritage of Renaissance humanism.130 The result was an indictment of centuries of European history, and a mirror image of the charges made by the ‘Metanoia’ authors, Shragin and Yanov against centuries of Russian history. What liberals found most disconcerting in the speech was Solzhenitsyn’s apparent repudiation of democratic institutions. He attacked the West’s excessive legalism for providing equal freedom for good and evil, and declared that it was time for the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.131 He attacked the irresponsible media for misleading public opinion, for stuffing people’s ‘divine souls with gossip, nonsense, vain talk,’ for exerting undue influence. ‘Who,’ he demanded, ‘has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?’132 Not only did he equate the ‘party mob in the East’ and ‘the commercial one in the West’ as destroyers of spiritual life, but he asserted that the human personality in the West had become weaker, whilst in the East it had become firmer and stronger through suffering.133 He extolled Shafarevich’s treatise on socialism as ‘a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit,’ but did not attempt to reconcile this conclusion with the spiritual growth that he claimed to have detected.134 The furious reaction to the Harvard Address might be explained by the obvious disarray of the Western world in the late 1970s, beset by economic woes, and apparently retreating on the world stage. If the Iranian Revolution of 1979 seemed to confirm some of Solzhenitsyn’s warnings, it also supplied his critics with their most insulting analogy. In the autumn of 1979, an article by Valerii Chalidze, criticising the anti-Western tenor of Solzhenitsyn’s recent statements, was published in the New York newspaper Novoe Russkoe Slovo under the title ‘Khomeinism or National Communism?’135 Widely reprinted, it produced a major scandal in the émigré milieu, evoking a series of polemics and even an endorsement from Sakharov, just exiled to Gorkii.136 Sinyavskii joined the chorus, telling the New York Review of Books that Solzhenitsyn’s political statements ‘form a progression, [and] they are becoming more and more narrow minded as years go by.’137 The idea that Solzhenitsyn was a potential Russian Ayatollah had already been raised by Efim Etkind, the Leningrad literary scholar who had once been sacked from his institute because of his friendship with Solzhenitsyn.138 Solzhenitsyn responded with a succinct rebuttal of this ‘Persian trick…in which the horrors of Moslem fanaticism in Iran are somehow connected with the revival of Orthodox religion in Russia, as if to throw Persian sand into the eyes of those who elsewhere have the courage to kneel.’139 It was a

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valid disclaimer, but within a decade, his ally Shafarevich, a passionate advocate of the revival of the Orthodox religion in Russia, would extol the Islamic world’s campaign to silence Salman Rushdie. A more extensive response appeared in 1982, when Solzhenitsyn published ‘Our Pluralists,’ an intemperate diatribe against his detractors. Its publication coincided with Rusofobiya’s release into samizdat, and the two works do share a central preoccupation: how to respond to and classify their adversaries in the debate about Russian history. There are obvious similarities between Solzhenitsyn’s and Shafarevich’s defence of Russian history and the Russophile renaissance against the speculations of Shragin, Yanov, Sinyavskii, and Pomerants.140 But while Shafarevich identified his adversaries on the basis of ethnic criteria, Solzhenitsyn focused upon their ideological standpoint, their espousal of pluralism as ‘somehow the supreme attainment of history.’141 While Shafarevich traced the sources of ‘Russophobia’ to Jewish culture, Solzhenitsyn singled out Jewish émigrés for praise: Once again, I fear, I must point out a contrast: some of the writers in Jewish émigré papers and journals do not hide the fact that they are steeped in Russian culture, in Russian literature, and out and out attacks on Russia are noticeably rarer in their writings. They have discovered in themselves a profound affinity with Russia such as they had never previously suspected. Not so the ‘pluralists.’ Having ‘chosen freedom’ they must make a splash in the ocean of self-indulgent verbiage with their discovery that Russians, for all their culture, are slaves, and slaves they will remain.142 If there is any point that marks the parting of ways between Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich, it is here, in this gesture of respect for Jewish Russophiles. But as invective, ‘Our Pluralists’ was far more virulent than Rusofobiya. Solzhenitsyn’s tone was scornful and derisive, whilst Shafarevich maintained a veneer of scholarly restraint. Solzhenitsyn ostentatiously announced that he would not indicate sources for quotations, whilst Shafarevich supplied detailed bibliographical endnotes for each chapter. Paradoxically, Solzhenitsyn’s vehemence limited the repercussions of his outburst: ‘Our Pluralists’ was no more than a bitter polemic, a forgivable cry of rage from an unjustly insulted writer; Rusofobiya was a manifesto for ultra-nationalism, a cold and premeditated indictment of an entire national culture. If the émigré debate had dissolved into bitter acrimony, Solzhenitsyn’s attempt at dialogue with Sovietology fared little better. In 1980 he published an article in Foreign Affairs on ‘Why misconceptions about Russia are a threat to America.’143 It was an attack upon the assumption of ‘an indissoluble link between the universal disease of communism and the country where it first seized control—Russia.’144 Inevitably Richard Pipes was a principal adversary. Solzhenitsyn claimed that the Harvard historian had wilfully ignored ‘those events, persons, or aspects of Russian life which would not prove conducive to his thesis, which is that the entire history of Russia has but a single purpose—the creation of a police state.’145 Virtually accusing Pipes of ‘Russophobia,’ Solzhenitsyn declared that Russia under the Old Regime:

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allows only one conclusion to be drawn: that the Russian nation is antihuman in its essence, that it has been good for nothing throughout its thousand years of history, and that as far as the future is concerned, it is obviously a hopeless case.146 These were no obstacles to a career in the Reagan administration, which appointed Pipes to the National Security Council. His presence was certainly a major factor in Solzhenitsyn’s rejection of an invitation to lunch with Reagan and a group of dissidents at the White House in 1982. In an open letter to the president, Solzhenitsyn scorned attempts to brand him as a ‘nationalist,’ describing himself instead as a ‘patriot,’ which ‘means that I love my country and therefore will understand other people’s love for theirs.’ He pointed out that if his supporters came to power, they would end Soviet expansionism and the arms race, yet ‘all this does not suit some of your close advisors,’ who ‘define such a programme as “extreme Russian nationalism.”147 In 1984, back in academia, Pipes showed no regrets about his treatment of the great Russian novelist, diagnosing Solzhenitsyn’s outlook as ‘profoundly illiberal and in its fundamentals indistinguishable from that of the most reactionary Russian thinkers of the later nineteenth century.’148 The 1985 World Congress of Slavicists in Washington held a widely publicised debate on the question ‘Is Solzhenitsyn an anti-Semite?’ with Richard Pipes in the role of prosecutor, and Adam Ulam as the advocate for the defence.149 Two years later, Solzhenitsyn reflected that ‘they lie about me, as one lies only about the dead.’150 The accusations against Solzhenitsyn were unfounded and tendentious, and it was no surprise that some of his most ardent defenders were themselves Jewish. Solzhenitsyn’s cause was not the indictment of Jews for all of Russia’s ills, but the dissociation of Russian patriotism from Soviet totalitarianism. No one had done so much to forestall the possibility of a revival of Stalinist National Bolshevism, with its inherent militant antiSemitism. He was fostering the Slavophile heritage of moderate conservative nationalism, without which a democratic Russia would be inconceivable. But it is undeniable that Solzhenitsyn helped to formulate legitimate grievances that Shafarevich would redirect towards illegitimate ends. The connection was seized upon by Solzhenitsyn’s adversaries. Sinyavskii would trace the term ‘Russophobia’ to Solzhenitsyn’s words at a 1983 press-conference, though Solzhenitsyn never blamed other cultures for the ‘arguments against Russia.’151 At the same time, the magnitude of the vituperation directed at Solzhenitsyn for his defence of Russian history, and the allegations of anti-Semitism based on the most circumstantial evidence, provided Shafarevich with another potent illustration of ‘Russophobia.’152 Whilst they slandered Solzhenitsyn, émigrés and Sovietologists ignored the rise in the dissident milieu of an anti-Semitic ideologue whose intolerance was not to be measured by passing references to Lenin’s ancestry and dramatisations of Parvus’s demonic role in the Russian Revolution. Virtually unknown to the outside world, Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya was silently proliferating in samizdat beneath the frozen political landscape of Andropov’s Moscow. It was at once the summation, and the moral nadir, of the debate that had begun with Vestnik 97. It was a release of pent-up polemical rage against Altaev and Gorskii, against Shragin and Sinyavskii, against Yanov and Pipes. It appropriated Solzhenitsyn’s defence of Russian culture, but only in order to attack Jewish culture. It

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was the most original contribution to the literature of prejudice since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The construction of Rusofobiya At first glance, Rusofobiya appeared to be a methodically structured and carefully researched treatise. Instead of polemical assertions, it opened with a series of questions posed in a tone of dispassionate inquiry. ‘How is the spiritual life of people flowing?’ asked Shafarevich. ‘What views, outlooks, sympathies and antipathies, and which of its strata—were forming the attitudes of people towards life?’ Surveying the diversity of samizdat and tamizdat, whose authors ranged from monarchists to Marxists, from believers in theocracy to advocates of free enterprise, Shafarevich reflected that it was as if ‘fate had opened the lid of the saucepan in which our future was being cooked, and enabled one to look into it.’ Yet amidst this primordial chaos of diverging and irreconcilable views, Shafarevich claimed to have discovered a surprising unanimity ‘on one clear conception,’ a view of Russian history and the current condition of the country that was propagated by many writers and supported by the majority of Russian émigré journals, and endorsed by Western sociologists, historians, and journalists.153 Shafarevich traced this tendency, still to be designated as ‘Russophobia,’ to the appearance of publicist works by Grigorii Pomerants and Andrei Amalrik, but attributed a pivotal role to the ‘Metanoia’ collection in Vestnik 97, which ‘developed more fully the basic positions that were then repeated in almost all the other works.’154 Amongst these works, Shafarevich identified the monographs of émigrés Shragin and Yanov, as well as Richard Pipes’s Russia under the Old Regime. The early chapters were the most plausible part of Rusofobiya. Here Shafarevich was contesting, rather than laying, charges against a national culture and a national character. The opening chapter sets out ‘the one clear conception’ that united the Russophobes: the idea that: the history of Russia, beginning in the early Middle Ages, is determined by several ‘archetypal’ Russian features: a slave psychology, the absence of a sense of one’s own dignity, intolerance for other opinions, a lackey’s combination of malice, hatred and submission before alien authority.155 According to Shafarevich’s summary, the combination of Russians’ love for strong, cruel regimes, and their messianic belief in a special role for Russia to save the world, produced despotism and bloody cataclysms, exemplified by Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Stalin. Yet the innately xenophobic Russians were unable to comprehend the sources of these misfortunes, which they blamed on everyone but themselves. Thus the 1917 Revolution ‘flowed naturally out of all Russian history,’ and the cruelties of the revolutionary epoch were to be explained by peculiarities of the Russian national character.156 This determinist account of Russian history was subject to a cursory rebuttal in the second chapter. Shafarevich’s main weapons were contextualisation and counterexamples. Defending the heritage of Muscovite Rus against those who regarded it as a

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precursor of Stalinism, Shafarevich argued that the tsarist title ‘samoderzhets’ was not a licence for tyranny, but merely signified that the Tsar was subordinate to no other ruler.157 Against attempts to trace the sources of Russian messianism and the Third International to the conception of Moscow as the Third Rome, Shafarevich pointed out that this conception had been formulated by the Pskov monk Filov merely to remind the Tsar of his responsibility as the ruler of the last Orthodox state after the fall of Constantinople.158 Shafarevich cast doubt upon the uniqueness of other alleged Russian antecedents of Soviet totalitarianism by reminding his readers of the darker side of European history. If there was religious intolerance in seventeenthcentury Russia, it was hardly different from that of contemporary Europe, scene of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the Thirty Years War.159 He used the same approach to deal with those who traced totalitarian ideocracy to the subordination of the Orthodox Church to the Russian state. Perhaps the secularisation of Russian church land had occurred, in Pipes’s disparaging words, ‘as smoothly as an accounting operation,’ but the idea that the faith of citizens should be determined by that of their worldly rulers, as laid down for central Europeans in 1555 at the Treaty of Augsburg, would have been ‘unthinkable in the Russia of that time.’160 Shafarevich dealt particularly scornfully with Pipes’s ‘typically anecdotal’ claim that the Criminal Code of Nicholas II constituted the Magna Carta of modern totalitarianism. Taking up a theme of The Socialist Phenomenon, Shafarevich argued that ‘the entire conception of the totalitarian state…was worked out fully in the West,’ in Spinoza’s dictum that moral categories were not applicable to the state; in Rousseau’s notion of the people as a ‘collective being’; and above all in Hobbes’ Leviathan, that paean to the sovereign state ruling over debased humanity, which was subsequently adapted for Peter the Great in Prokopovich’s The Justice of the Monarch’s Will.161 Shafarevich, however, was less concerned with tracing the course of totalitarian tendencies in European civilisation, than with demonstrating that his opponents’ arguments could not be taken seriously. When the opportunity presented itself, he abandoned all pretence of academic courtesy: he poured scorn on Yanov for referring to Belinskii as a Slavophile, and on Pipes for failing to grasp the irony of a Russian proverb.162 Reflecting upon his effortless demolition of the Russophobic edifice, Shafarevich concluded that he was dealing not with ‘historical reflections’ but with ‘journalistic opinion, propaganda trying to inculcate in the reader certain previously posed thoughts and emotions,’ and hence ‘it must be studied as propaganda.’163 According to Shafarevich, the goal of this ‘propaganda’ was to discredit the Russophile case for a post-Soviet future based on Russian traditions, and instead to impose foreign solutions ‘uncontaminated by the poisons with which all our past is fed.’164 These ‘plans for Russia,’ which focused upon the establishment of a ‘Western-style’ democracy, were subjected to a strident but highly flawed critique in the third chapter of Rusofobia. A compendium of illiberal clichés, the chapter offered two basic arguments: democracy is unimportant, and democracy is dangerous. The first claim was based upon the simplistic reduction of liberal democracy to ‘the [electoral] mechanism for forming state power,’ which Shafarevich proclaimed to be less important than other criteria of national health, such ‘the rise or fall in economic activity, the growth or fall in the birthrate, the ascent of culture or the proliferation of alcoholism and drug addiction, firmness and readiness to make sacrifices in war or easy capitulation.’165 Shafarevich did

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not consider the possibility that liberal democracy was also a mechanism for protecting society from state power, or that a regime subject to regular elections and based on the consent of the governed might be more sensitive to native traditions than a selfperpetuating Leninist nomenklatura. Ironically, he contrasted the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and prosperous contemporary Yugoslavia as proof of the vast differences between non-democratic one-party states (the killing fields of Bosnia were still a decade away).166 Shafarevich’s second argument, about the perils of democracy, entailed a series of assertions that were both deterministic and apocalyptic. He claimed that because democracy is ‘not quite natural,’ its creation requires ‘some kind of violence to natural historical processes,’ usually ‘a tormented and bloody cataclysm’ like the English Civil War or the French Revolutionary Terror, an ordeal that Russia could ill afford.167 Then, echoing Pipes’s arguments about Russia’s backwardness and historical unsuitability for democracy, Shafarevich claimed that limited government required specific cultural traditions and unwritten rules of conduct, whose absence ‘automatically engenders a totalitarian-type regime,’ as with the French Constituent Assembly or Weimar Germany.168 Thus Sovietological ‘Russophobes’ and dissident Russophiles found common ground in the vindication of Russian authoritarianism. In a Spenglerian mood, Shafarevich added that ‘according to every indication, Western democracy was a social system on the way out,’ and that the idea of imposing it on all humanity was ‘just as hopeless as dreaming of a return to an Orthodox monarchy or to Kievan Rus.’169 The Russophobic apostles of this ‘hopeless dream’ were divided upon many issues, and Shafarevich pointed to their diversity as evidence of the incoherence of their plans. Whilst liberals like Shragin and Yanov advocated a classical multi-party democracy, Anatolii Levitin-Krasnov demanded ‘complete equality of property,’ the Marxist Leonid Plyushch was an apologist for left-wing terrorism, and Belotserkovskii’s Democratic Alternatives anthology ended with a document signed by ‘Russian democratic socialists abroad.’170 Shafarevich contended that these radical left-wing positions revealed the same quest for alternatives to democracy, for a ‘third way,’ that Yanov had denounced as the Russophile path to catastrophe.171 But it was Yanov’s own ‘plans for Russia’ that provided Shafarevich with his most potent ammunition. Lamenting the divisive maximalism of the Russian intelligentsia, Yanov had called upon ‘Western intellectual society’ to act as an arbiter between rival tendencies to facilitate the formulation of a compromise programme, a role which he described as analogous to that played by General MacArthur’s ‘brains trust’ in occupied Japan. Shafarevich seized upon the comparison, announcing that Yanov ‘is proposing as a model—OCCUPATION.’172 After this critique of Russophobic projections of past and future, Shafarevich began to elaborate his own historical theory in chapter four, which sought to interpret Russophobia as a social phenomenon. Shafarevich’s central contention was that the Russophobes were united by a mechanistic approach to life. They treated society as a machine, which should be reconstructed on the basis of rational principles without regard for national customs or traditions. By contrast, their patriotic opponents understood society as a living being, which evolved organically on the basis of the accumulated experience of past generations.173 This dichotomy was hardly new: organicism was a major theme of Slavophile and of European romantic nationalist thought in general, with a lineage that can be traced back via Dostoevskii and Danilevskii to Herder; whilst the reproach of

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manipulating society like a machine was regularly levelled against liberals by conservative propagandists during the nineteenth century. Shafarevich’s innovation was to introduce a theoretical framework—the struggle between the ‘Small People’ and the ‘Great People’—which had been formulated by the French historian Augustin Cochin to explain the philosophical origins of the French Revolution. A conservative Catholic, Cochin produced a series of studies of the French Revolution before his premature death during the First World War. Although he lacked Shafarevich’s overt anti-Semitism, Cochin was influential in French nationalist circles, and his articles were republished during the interwar years in publications linked to the extreme right-wing Action Française.174 His philosophy of history proposed that a decisive role was played in the French Revolution by a circle of intellectuals, the ‘Small People,’ who were utterly alienated from and hostile towards traditional French society, the ‘Great People.’ The basic characteristic of the ‘Small People’ was that it inhabited its own intellectual and spiritual world of philosophical societies, academies, and Masonic lodges, where perceptions and values were shaped not by experience but by ideological fashion, and where ‘doctrine becomes the cause, and not a consequence of life.’175 According to Shafarevich’s synopsis, this milieu fostered the emergence of personalities who despised the central tenets of France’s spiritual life, such as the Catholic faith, aristocratic honour, loyalty to the king, pride in the national history, and an attachment to the traditional privileges of one’s native province, estate, or guild.176 The threat posed by the ‘Small People’ was demonstrated by the revolutionary upheaval of 1789–94. This cataclysmic period constituted ‘the reign of the Small People,’ which identified itself with ‘the People’ and affirmed only its own rights in its Declarations. As a result the ‘victorious people’ was a minority, and the ‘enemies of the people’ were the majority.177 As in his earlier work on socialism, Shafarevich argued that the ‘Small People’ was a global phenomenon that emerged ‘evidently in every crisis-like, transitional period in the life of a people.’178 He generalised its basic features as: The belief that the future of the people, like a mechanism, can be freely constructed and restructured; hence, a scornful attitude towards the history of the ‘Great People,’ even to the point of claiming that it does not exist; demands to borrow the basic forms of life from elsewhere, and to break with one’s historical traditions; division of the people into an ‘elite’ and ‘inert mass’ and a stubborn faith in the right of the former to use the latter as material for historical creation; finally, an open disgust towards representatives of the ‘Great People,’ [and] its psychological make-up.179 Shafarevich presented specimens of this complex of ideas in a series of cases from modern European history, such as Calvinism and English Puritanism, the Young Germany movement and the New Hegelians, and the liberal and nihilist movements in nineteenth-century Russia. In these diverse movements, Shafarevich delineated those features that he was about to denounce in modern ‘Russophobes.’ He found parallels of their elitism in Calvin’s belief in the salvation of the select few and the damnation of the many; their cult of emigration in the Puritan ideal of the pilgrim; their contempt for the national past in Young Germany’s generalisations about traditional culture; and their dependence upon foreign ideas in Heine’s description of himself as ‘the head of the

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French party in Germany.’180 As for the Russian revolutionary ‘Small People’ of the nineteenth century, Shafarevich claimed that Dostoevskii’s anti-revolutionary polemics in his Writer’s Diary read like a response to a recent essay by Pomerants. At the end of this survey, Shafarevich concluded that the: repetition of such a clear complex of ideas over the course of 400 years and in different countries of Europe cannot be accidental—it is obvious that we are dealing with a very definite social phenomenon, which emerges always in a firm, standard form.181 In chapter five, Shafarevich argued that this ‘firm, standard form’ is ‘no less brightly reflected in our contemporary “Small People,”’ the Russophobes. To show the common identity of these liberal democrats and their alleged antithesis in the nineteenth-century revolutionary ‘Small People,’ Shafarevich enumerated examples from the literature of modern Russophobes that were ‘almost citations from Zaitsev, Chernyshevskii or Trotskii.’ But the modern ‘Small People’ was unique: none of its predecessors had produced such a symbol of the domination of the ‘Small People’ over the ‘Great People’ as the model of occupation proposed by Yanov, and none had shown such ‘conviction in its capacity and right to determine the life of the “Great People.”’182 This confidence was reflected in Amalrik’s comparison of contemporary dissident exiles to the prerevolutionary ‘Emigration of Hope.’ For Shafarevich, one tell-tale sign of the existence of a ‘Small People’ was the dissident preoccupation with the predicament of minorities, such as Jewish refuseniks and Crimean Tatars, and small religious sects such as Baptists, whilst turning a blind eye to the fate of the main body of the population and major denominations such as Orthodoxy and Islam.183 Another was the ‘Cult of Emigration,’ which Shafarevich had deplored at the From under the Rubble press-conference. Now he took the opportunity to denounce Daniel’s ‘enormous article’ in defence of Sinyavskii, and Sinyavskii’s ‘hymn to emigration’ in Kontinent, where he recalled how libraries of great Russian writers were departing with the émigrés.184 In the first half of Rusofobiya, Shafarevich’s argument was provocative, but within the accepted bounds of dissident polemics. There was still little to distinguish his indictment of ‘Russophobes’ from Solzhenitsyn’s diatribe against ‘Our Pluralists.’ But in chapter six, ‘The National Aspect,’ he irrevocably crossed the Rubicon into the realm of antiSemitism. At issue was the composition of the contemporary Russophobic ‘Small People.’ Having rejected the notion that it could be equated with the intelligentsia or with dissidents, he proposed as a ‘working hypothesis’ that the hatred for Russia shown by contemporary ‘Small People’ was ‘most likely connected to the intensification of the experience of one’s belonging to another [nation]’ and that the authors were ‘under the influence of a powerful force, rooted in their national feelings.’185 It was a revealing claim, for Shafarevich’s anti-Semitism was undoubtedly connected to the radicalisation of his own Russian nationalist convictions. The hypothesis also marked a milestone in Shafarevich’s divergence from Solzhenitsyn, for whom patriotism was not a source of ethnic enmity, but of sensitivity for the patriotic sensibilities of others. When the moment came to identify which national emotions were inciting Russophobia, Shafarevich dropped his restraint and launched a diatribe against Jewish global power:

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There is only one nation, about whose concerns we hear almost daily. Jewish national emotion today is feverish in our country, and throughout the world; it influences negotiations on disarmament, trade treaties, and international academic links, it evokes demonstrations and sit-ins, and flares up in virtually every conversation.186 To bolster his hypothesis that the Russophobic ‘Small People’ was driven by Jewish national emotions, Shafarevich contrasted its hostile attitude towards Russia with its favourable statements about Jews and Israel. As always, Yanov remained an indispensable exhibit. Shafarevich noted that Yanov expressed alarm about the Russian intelligentsia’s trips to villages and iconcollecting in the 1960s, but: it did not appear strange to him that his kinsmen at the same time were departing not for the neighboring countryside, but for a distant tropical country…and that they were drawn not by the icons that had been worshipped by their fathers and grandfathers, but by a Temple destroyed almost 2,000 years ago.187 He found the same double-standards in Yanov’s account of the VSKhON, the Russian nationalist underground group of the 1960s. Yanov saw a route to fascism in the VSKhON programme—which included democratic freedoms, a special role for Orthodoxy, and a national path of development—but ignored the fact that the state of Israel incarnated a similar synthesis o values.188 Even more tendentiously, Shafarevich claimed that ‘only the assumption of nationalist-Jewish underlying motives can explain the enigma of the publication of Yanov’s article about Slavophiles—in Tel Aviv!’189 Turning to other ‘ideologues of the Small People,’ Shafarevich cited statements by Nadezhda Mandelshtam, Boris Khazanov, and Shragin, about the special position of Jews in the Russian intelligentsia as a tacit admission of the ‘central role that is played in our contemporary ‘Small People’ by its Jewish core.’190 Shafarevich now attempted to explain why this ‘Jewish core’ should be permeated ‘by such disgust, if not hatred for Russia, Russian history and Russians in general.’ He had no doubt that the answer to the problem lay in anxiety over the Jewish role in the Russian Revolution: The response will be obvious, if one pays attention to the problem which one way or another is touched by almost every work of Russophobic literature: WHAT INFLUENCE ON THE FATE OF THIS COUNTRY WAS EXERTED BY THE UNPRECEDENTED INJECTION OF JEWISH NATIONAL FORCES INTO POLITICAL LIFE—IN THE VERY EPOCH OF THE GREATEST CRISIS IN ITS HISTORY? This question must be very painful for Jewish national consciousness.191 Certainly Shafarevich showed little concern for alleviating Jewish discomfort over this ‘painful question.’ Although he acknowledged that every nation had episodes that it would rather forget, the rest of chapter seven dwells upon quotations from ‘Russophobes’ attempting to dismiss and discredit accusations about the role of Jews in the revolutionary

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cataclysm. Shafarevich did, however, claim to have discovered one serious attempt to come to terms with the problem: the controversial anthology Russia and Jews, published by a group of Jewish émigrés in Berlin in 1923, which was ‘inspired by the hope that relations between the peoples might be defined not by egotism and mutual hatred, but by repentance and benevolence.’192 The volume provoked a storm of outrage, which according to Shafarevich set the model for more recent attempts to suppress debate by charges of anti-Semitism. Complaining that it was possible to discuss the transgressions of any ethnic groups except the Jews, Shafarevich declared that the concept of ‘antiSemitism’ had intentionally been left undefined, since it was ‘a symbol, a sign, whose function was to mobilise irrational emotions, upon a signal to evoke a flood of outrage, disgust and hatred.’193 To obstruct the mobilisation of such ‘irrational emotions’ against himself, Shafarevich offered a series of disclaimers, insisting that he was not ‘denying the individuality’ of Jews (since not all Jews contributed to the literature of Russophobia), and that he had strictly avoided ‘value judgments’ and the question of ‘who is guilty?’194 This avowal of restraint was difficult to reconcile with his readiness to extend the lessons of ‘the painful question’ beyond Russia’s borders. In the opening of the same chapter, he claimed that ‘the experience of Russia must be one of the basic arguments in any discussion of the role of Jews in any country.’ After lamenting the ‘inexplicable’ Jewish influence upon basic political questions in the USA, he declared that ‘in such a situation, naturally, a wish might emerge to become familiar with the consequences such an influence brought to the fate of another country.’195 These catastrophic consequences were elaborated in chapter eight, titled The Jewish Influence in the “Revolutionary Century.”’ Shafarevich traced this influence to the collapse of the closed life of Russia’s Jewish communities in the late nineteenth century, when Jewish youth abandoned religious schools and entered Russia’s economic, cultural, and political life. By the turn of the century, these Jews had ‘become a weighty factor in Russian history.’ In the liberal press, left-wing parties, and terrorist groups, ‘Jews occupied a position completely incommensurate with their percentage of the population.’196 Shafarevich dismissed the notion that Jews ‘made the revolution’ as an obvious absurdity conceived ‘in order that it could be easily refuted.’197 Although he pointed to the Jewish role in the SR military organisation, the Menshevik Party, and the Bolshevik regime after the 1917 coup, his rnain point was about the nature and timing of Jewish influence. It was Russophobic and calamitous: What strikes the eye is the particularly large concentration of Jewish names at the most painful moments, amongst the leaders and executors of actions which particularly sharply redrew life, facilitated a break in historical traditions, and the destruction of historical roots.198 Much of Shafarevich’s evidence is tendentiously anecdotal, such as his claim that ‘strikingly often Jewish names rise to the surface’ amongst Cheka officials mentioned in memoirs of the Civil War.199 But his standard ‘proof’ was to provide lists of Jewish names (or adopted Russian names alongside Jewish originals) in government and security organs responsible for assaults upon Russian traditions. Thus the destruction of churches ‘was headed in the 20s by Trotskii (with the closest aid from Shpitsberg), and in the 30s—by Emelyan Yaroslavskii (Minei Izrailevich Gubelman).’200 Similarly, Shafarevich

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discovered fifteen Jewish names in the upper echelons of the OGPU, ranging from ‘chairman Yagoda (Iguda)’ down to transport section head Shanin, at the time of the devastation of the Russian peasantry through collectivisation and the construction of the White Sea canal by slave labour.201 The paradigmatic case, for Shafarevich as for many other Russian radical nationalists, was the murder of the Tsar and his family, and here too names are allowed to tell the story: It would seem that representatives of an insignificant minority should remain as far as possible away from such a painful action, which leaves a trace throughout all history. And what names do we encounter? Yakov Yurovskii personally headed the execution and fired at the Tsar, the chairman of the local Soviet was Beloborodov (Vaisberg), and Shaya Goloshchekin was in charge of the general leadership in Ekaterinburg.202 Reinforcing the Jewish connection, Shafarevich added the inflammatory claim that a couplet by Heine about King Balthasar, who was killed for insulting Jehovah, was discovered written on a wall of the room where the massacre took place.203 After this enumeration of names and catastrophes, Shafarevich set out his most offensive and explicitly anti-Semitic argument: that the reasons for Jewish involvement in crimes against Russia were to be found in Jewish culture and in Jewish history. He scorned Pomerants’s contention that Trotskii could no more be regarded as a Jew than his White counterpart General Vrangel could be regarded as a German, pointing out that, unlike Vrangel, Trotskii had a Jewish deputy and was held in high esteem by Jewish writers such as Vasilii Grossman.204 Instead Shafarevich asserted an essential continuity between those Jews implicated in revolutionary cataclysms and their pre-assimilation religious convictions, marked by ‘a belief in the “Chosen People” and in its destined dominion over the world.’205 He opened his penultimate chapter with a series of quotations from the Books of Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and Ezra, all about the divine promise that the Jewish Chosen People would live off the labours of others, at which point he asked rhetorically: ‘What other people was brought up from generation to generation under such behests?’206 For Shafarevich, it was precisely this belief in the ‘Chosen People’ that was ‘the prototype of the ideology of the “Small People” in all its incarnations.’ Moving to the historical plane, Shafarevich traced the role of Jews in the ‘Small People’ to their isolation amid dispersal, to twenty centuries ‘lived amongst foreign peoples in complete isolation from all influences of the outside world, which was perceived as trefa, as a source of contagion and sin.’207 Without citing references, he pointed to the ‘well-known statements of the Talmud and commentaries to them’ that gentiles should not be regarded as human; that one should not fear desecrating a gentile grave; and that marriage with a gentile has no significance.208 He also claimed that the traditional Jewish Purim festival was held to celebrate ‘the killing by Jews of 75,000 of their enemies, including women and children, as described in the Book of Esther,’ and declared that it was as if the Catholic Church held an annual festival to mark the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestants.209 Shafarevich professed to find traces of this profound alienation from the surrounding people in a series of vengeful or Russophobic citations from works by such Jews as the socialists Lassalle and Martov,

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and the Russian-language poets Kh.Bilyak and E.Bagritskii, and the writer Isaak Babel.210 He even called for a re-examination of the NEP-era satirists Ilf and Petrov for their mocking portrayal of noblemen, priests, and intellectuals, all remnants of the traditional Russia that was ravaged by the revolutionary onslaught.211 The magnitude of this Russophobic hostility, according to Shafarevich, was a product of the coincidence of the breakdown of local Jewish communities and Russia’s revolutionary decades: if the breakdown had begun earlier, then ‘possibly links would have been established between Jews and the rest of the population, [and] the alienation produced by 2,000 years of isolation would not have been so strong.’212 This acknowledgment of the possibility of reconciliation would seem to be a cause for optimism, but in his apocalyptic final chapter, Shafarevich argued that the worst was yet to come. The latest incarnation of the ‘Small People’ was omnipresent and on the offensive, indoctrinating ‘defenceless youth’ in bards’ songs and theatres with contempt for Russia. The resulting severance of links between generations threatened ‘the final destruction of the religious and national foundations of life,’ and ‘a new and ultimate catastrophe, after which probably nothing will remain of our people.’213 To avert national annihilation, Shafarevich rejected dialogue with the ‘Small People’ and its advocates. The key to Russophobic propaganda was not ‘an appeal to life experience and logic’ but the manipulation of public opinion by ‘a colossal but brief concentration of public attention on several events or people,’ such as the Calas scandal as described by Cochin, or the anti-Semitic Dreyfus and Beilis trials. Digressing, Shafarevich claimed that such manipulation had produced the reputations of the Jews Freud, Schönberg, Kafka, and Brodskii, as well as (the non-Jewish) Picasso, and then prophesied that their influence would be incomprehensible to future generations.214 For Shafarevich, the antidote to Russophobia was a return to the national traditions, because ‘only the individual historical experience of the nation can help here to distinguish truth from lie.’215 Clarifying his 1978 call for a minimum of ‘outward change,’ Shafarevich argued that in accordance with national traditions, the Russian state should continue to play a great role in the country.216 In all matters, it was possible to find a solution that did not break with the heritage of the past, but instead ‘relied on the wisdom of centuries.’ Awareness of this heritage was the ‘force which we can counterpose to the “Small People.”217 In a coda, Shafarevich celebrated the nation (‘narod’) as ‘one of the most astonishing phenomena and enigmas on our Earth,’ and as the means by which individuals ‘become participants in history.’218 To save the nation from imminent destruction, it was necessary to create a ‘weapon of spiritual defence’ against the “Small People.” Rusofobiya would appear to be such a weapon, but Shafarevich insisted that ‘only the entire nation was capable of this task.’ Yet there was a humbler role for the individual, which was ‘TO SPEAK THE TRUTH, to utter, finally, the fearfully hushed up word.’ In a moment of dissident pathos, Shafarevich concluded that ‘I could not die peacefully, without having tried to do this.’219

5 The politics of Russophobia One can say without exaggeration that the figure of I.Shafarevich is one of the greatest [figures] today in Russian culture, constantly attracting the attention of the people. (Moskva, November 1991)1

If perestroika was amorphous and ultimately negligible in its philosophical and programmatic content, Gorbachev can nevertheless be credited with allowing his countrymen to taste the contents of the metaphorical saucepan in which Shafarevich saw Russia’s future being cooked. As censorship began to collapse in late 1988, the overflowing brew of samizdat included not only the dissident writers targeted by Shafarevich, but also his own Rusofobiya. It was a volatile mixture. The resulting struggle between radical democrats and radical nationalists rapidly overshadowed Gorbachev’s initial project for a Leninist renewal. As perestroika vindicated his prophecies, Shafarevich’s attitude towards the reforms hardened. He had warned that the ‘Russophobes’ of the Emigration of Hope would exploit any major crisis to implement their plans for Russia’s transformation into a liberal democracy. As the Soviet Union entered its terminal crisis, as the works of the ‘Small People’ broke through the barriers of censorship, Shafarevich became the prophet of the emerging ‘red-brown’ alliance of communist conservatives and ultra-nationalists. By applying the paradigms of Rusofobiya to the reformers and the cultural consequences of liberalisation, he offered them a framework for understanding the collapse of their world. Eventually, he would trace perestroika to the intrigues of the CIA.2 But the dawn of the Gorbachev era must have seemed auspicious for the struggle against the ‘Russophobia’ of the ‘Small People.’ Whilst the authorities continued to persecute rights-defenders, they turned a blind eye to the activities of the Pamyat society, which emerged from obscurity in 1985. Pamyat was ostensibly created to defend the Russian national heritage, but it provided a secure forum for anti-Semitic activism. Speaking at a Pamyat meeting in Moscow in December 1985, Dmitrii Vasiliev read aloud excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and claimed that their authenticity was demonstrated by the subsequent course of history.3 Such attitudes were not confined to marginal ‘anti-Zionist’ fanatics. When KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov informed a 1985 Politburo meeting that Sakharov’s actions were a product of pressure from his wife Elena Bonner, Gorbachev could think of no more appropriate remark than the explanation, ‘That’s what Zionism is.’4 Gorbachev’s future rival, the new Moscow party boss, Boris Yeltsin, ignored Sakharov after his return from exile in December 1986, but in May 1987 he did receive a delegation of activists from Pamyat, including Dezionisation author Valerii Emelyanov, who demanded an end to ‘rotten liberalisation.’5 A few months later

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Emelyanov published an article in Nash Sovremennik alleging that the Zionists’ proclaimed goal of gathering all Jews into Israel was a deception, since their sole aim was ‘to achieve world domination.’6 The revival of samizdat made possible by ‘rotten liberalisation’ provided other startling evidence of the intensity of anti-Semitic emotion in Russophile circles. In 1986 the Leningrad journal Chasy published an astonishing exchange of correspondence between the historian Natan Eidelman and the celebrated village-prose writer, Viktor Astafev. Eidelman criticised the ethnic bias evident in Astafev’s tales The Sad Detective and The Catching of Gudgeons in Georgia. In a response that stunned many of his admirers, Astafev derided Eidelman’s letter as ‘filled with the overboiled pus of Jewish high intellectual arrogance,’ recalled the murder of the last Tsar (a major exhibit in Rusofobiya), and concluded with a hysterical declaration that ‘we Russians have not yet lost our memory, and we are still a Great people, and there are still a few of us left to kill.’7

Russophobia and Perestroika By the time of the release of political prisoners in 1987, Shafarevich’s polemic on behalf of the ‘Great People’ against the ‘high intellectual arrogance’ of the Jewish ‘Small People’ was proliferating in samizdat.8 Two early disciples were Gleb Anishchenko and Viktor Aksyuchits, editors of the anti-communist Russian Orthodox samizdat journal Vybor, the embryo of the Christian Democratic Party that would propel Aksyuchits to the front ranks of the parliamentary opposition in the 1990s. In February 1988, Anishchenko published a frequently quoted article titled ‘Who is Guilty?’ in Sergei Grigoryants’s samizdat journal Glasnost.9 His point of departure was the ‘fact that parallel to the spiritual destruction of the Russian nation, a parallel process was underway: the formation of Russophobia.’10 He saw no need to clarify the concept, simply pointing his readers to Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Our pluralists’ and Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya.11 At the same time, the expansion of official glasnost enabled Shafarevich to make his first contribution to political debate in the Soviet press. In April 1988 Moscow News published his article ‘The Logic of History’ and an accompanying note to the editors expressing doubt that they would dare to publish it.12 Shafarevich was defending an article in Nash Sovremennik by village-prose ideologue Vadim Kozhinov on the sources of Stalinism.13 Kozhinov had been linked to Nina Andreeva and attacked as an enemy of perestroika by Vladimir Lakshin, the Novyi Mir critic who had celebrated Solzhenitsyn’s work before they clashed over his autobiographical portrait of Tvardovskii. Now Shafarevich praised Kozhinov for making a ‘very interesting attempt to examine the entire Stalinist phenomenon as a manifestation of world-historical proportions,’ a central contention of The Socialist Phenomenon. Shafarevich contended that resistance to revelations about the crimes of the Stalinist period was provoked by the imbalance between the enormity of the disaster and the triviality of the authorised explanation offered by the foremen of perestroika, who blamed all the crimes on one person. The official oversimplification was a product of reluctance to investigate the true sources of Stalinism, which Shafarevich hinted were to be found in collectivisation and War Communism, though readers of samizdat copies of Rusofobiya would also see this as an

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allusion to the ‘painful question’ of the role of the ‘Small People.’ The article was accompanied by a rebuttal from Shafarevich’s old foe, Roy Medvedev, who criticised Kozhinov’s focus on the role of the Jewish apparatchik, Yakov Epshtein-Yakovlev, in collectivisation, and complained that it was difficult to conduct a dispute with Shafarevich, whose The Socialist Phenomenon had identified socialism as ‘an absolute evil and Stalinism [as] one of the more adequate incarnations of the essence of socialism.’14 It had already become impossible not to conduct a dispute with Shafarevich. Later that year the storm broke around Rusofobiya, after it was published in Veche, the Munichbased Russian nationalist journal edited by Evgenii Vagin. Once a leading figure in the underground VSKhON group, Vagin had served a term in the camps before emigrating to the West and reviving the banner of Osipov’s defunct journal. Under his direction, Veche became a platform for militant anti-Semitism, and predictably he became one of Shafarevich’s most passionate advocates. The appearance of Rusofobiya in Veche confirmed the extent of Shafarevich’s political reorientation since the early 1970s. Even Nikita Struve, the pro-Solzhenitsyn editor of Vestnik RKhD, who normally gave Russian patriots the benefit of the doubt, described Veche as a ‘Black Hundred’ journal.15 Russian Jews were prominent in the first critical responses to Rusofobiya. Dora Shturman, the literary critic and admirer of Solzhenitsyn, pointed out that Shafarevich had been completely arbitrary in his choice of excerpts from the Old Testament and the Talmud, selecting only what accorded with his preconceptions from ‘the ocean of religious and secular Jewish thought.’16 Shrewdly taking as a yardstick Solzhenitsyn’s 1989 definition of anti-Semitism as ‘an unjust attitude towards the Jewish people as a whole, born of prejudice,’ she concluded that ‘in my opinion this definition fully corresponds to Shafarevich’s basic teaching in [Rusofobia]’17 It was a criticism echoed by Efim Etkind, who refuted Shafarevich’s example of the Jewish ‘Purim’ festival. According to Shafarevich, this commemoration of the killing by Jews of ‘75,000 of their enemies, including women and children’ was as if the Catholic Church celebrated the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots.18 Casting doubt on whether Shafarevich had even read the Book of Esther that records the incident, Etkind contended that it described not a massacre, but an act of self-defence aimed at preventing a genocidal pogrom.19 Another rebuttal appeared in Russkaya Mysl, a publication close to Solzhenitsyn, from Valerii Senderov, the Moscow mathematician who trained Jewish students to overcome discrimination in entrance exams. Senderov assailed Shafarevich’s ‘incorrect logical connections,’ his ‘construction of non-existent objects,’ and his arbitrary method of selecting quotations.20 This initial barrage of criticism in the émigré press probably boosted Shafarevich’s standing in Russophile circles, which embraced him as a representative ‘patriotic’ dissident. Paradoxically he owed his good fortune to the gradual cultural rehabilitation of the dissidents, their admission to public life, and the publication of their works, including those Shafarevich had vilified in Rusofobiya. For the nascent Russophile political movement, the rise of the dissidents was problematic in both a moral and a political sense. Morally, their heroism and sacrifices highlighted the far-from-heroic careers of institutional intellectuals, including most patriots, during the Brezhnev era. At the same time, the dissidents’ moral authority lent legitimacy to the liberal democratic agenda that Sakharov proposed during his election campaign. As a dissident who had produced a

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scathing critique of the designs of his unpatriotic comrades, Shafarevich was an antidote to both these problems: he enabled patriots to claim some of the credit for the dissident experience, and he provided them with a manifesto against liberal democracy. The enlistment of Shafarevich also served to reshape the ideological contours of the emerging Russophile political movement. Shafarevich’s role was exemplified by his first publicly reported speech at a Russophile function: an evening at the Bauman club, held to mark Solzhenitsyn’s 70th birthday in December 1988. Novyi Mir’s announcement of the impending publication of The Gulag Archipelago had just been vetoed by a telephone call to the printers from the Central Committee, and factions within the intelligentsia were campaigning for a reversal of the ban, and also to shape the conditions of Solzhenitsyn’s reception in the official media. Despite Dora Shturman’s attempt to counterpose Solzhenitsyn and the author of Rusofobiya, Shafarevich played a crucial role in the effort to claim Solzhenitsyn for the banner of militant Russian nationalism. Alone among prominent Russophiles, he was a close friend and collaborator of the writer. This circumstance was stressed by Vladimir Soloukhin, the doyen of village-prose literature, who recalled in his speech that during his secret visit to the exile’s Vermont residence in the early 1980s, Solzhenitsyn had spoken with particular fondness of Shafarevich.21 Indeed, the evening was as much an initiation ceremony for Shafarevich as it was an endorsement of Solzhenitsyn. It became a turning point for the village-prose tendency, and the publication a year later of selected speeches in Nash Sovremennik under the title ‘A Word on Solzhenitsyn’ signalled a fundamental shift of the journal’s editorial line.22 One of Shafarevich’s most vociferous pro-Soviet critics, Tatyana Glushkova, later lamented the ‘publication of this choir,’ which signified a ‘decisive new stage in the history of a Russian writers’ journal’ and a ‘complete change of flags.’ In particular, Glushkova expressed astonishment that the role of literary authority in fostering this unanimity should be played by ‘the mathematician I.R.Shafarevich, who established for writers both their value orientations and the perspective and scale of the commemorative discussion.’23 Shafarevich’s speech at the Bauman Club was a sustained attempt to dissociate Solzhenitsyn from the dissidents and émigrés, from the ‘Small People’ and the ‘Russophobes.’ He declared that the more he read, the more he understood Solzhenitsyn as a ‘writer, thinker and man who was closer to Ilarion Kievskii, Nestor or Avvakum, than to any later stylists—to Chekhov, Bunin, or God forbid, Nabokov.’24 The parallel with Avvakum was a leitmotif in Shafarevich’s speech: he pointed to their common use of humour to avoid hubris, their balancing act between the smile and tragedy, their defence of the ‘accursed past’ in their publicistic works, and their experience of ‘prison, camp, exile and eternal persecution.’25 Amongst Solzhenitsyn’s persecutors, Shafarevich passed over the KGB and the literary bureaucracy, and instead concentrated upon his émigré critics, and in particular upon their denunciation of Solzhenitsyn’s speculations about the priority of freedom of speech. Returning to his favourite theme, Shafarevich claimed that the literature of the émigrés showed that they needed this freedom ‘in order to blacken Russia, in order to prophesy its rapid demise, and as far as possible to push it towards [such a fate].’26 In the current crisis of civilisation, concluded Shafarevich, literature was a vital link to a culture’s roots, and Solzhenitsyn had a special role to play ‘because he is especially close, especially sensitive to these roots.’27

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Shafarevich was an implied presence in the struggle for Solzhenitsyn that erupted in the official press after the ban on his works was revoked in April 1989. For liberals, their friendship was a source of anxiety; for militant Russophiles it was a source of hope. In an oblique reference to Shafarevich, Benedikt Sarnov complained about those who likened Solzhenitsyn to Avvakum, and in this way created a ‘cult, which is no better than any other cult.’28 Meanwhile, militant Russophiles sought to integrate Solzhenitsyn into Shafarevich’s anti-Semitic scheme. Literaturnaya Rossiya announced that the publishing house ‘Sovetskaya Rossiya’ would issue a collection of Solzhenitsyn’s fiction in early 1990, and printed the proposed introduction by radical nationalist literary critic Vladimir Bondarenko, who praised Solzhenitsyn’s peasant roots and contrasted him with Jewish chroniclers of Stalinism like Anatolii Rybakov, Vasilii Grossman, and Lev Razgon, whose heroes ‘only rarely, and by necessity, have contact with an Ivan Denisovich or a Matrena.’29 No less transparent was Aleksandr Kazintsev’s long programmatic article assailing the ‘New Mythology’ surrounding the returning émigré dissidents. It curiously avoided mentioning Shafarevich by name, but presented selected quotes from Solzhenitsyn’s denunciation of ‘our pluralists’ that suggested his affinity with the author of Rusofobiya. Noting but not contesting Boris Kagarlitskii’s claim that Solzhenitsyn’s patriotism was related to that of Pamyat, Kazintsev complained that only one tendency of Russian émigré literature had been allowed to return—Russophobic writers like Sinyavskii and Yanov—who were to be suspected of loyalty not to Pamyat, but to B’nai B’rith.30 The capitulation of the censors before Solzhenitsyn’s advocates paved the way for the publication of Rusofobiya. Open discussion of ‘Russophobia’ as a social phenomenon had already begun in April 1989 with an article by R. Karp in the liberal Knizhnoe Obozrenie.31 Acknowledging that ‘Russophobia’ was not a phantom, but a constituent part of the ‘Russian question,’ Karp attributed its emergence to the renunciation under Stalin of the ‘cosmopolitan spirit of Russian culture.’32 According to one Russophile commentator, before Karp’s article ‘one alluded to the problem, one beat around the bush, and here was clear discussion.’33 This latest advance of glasnost was reflected one month later in Kazintsev’s critique of the ‘New Mythology’ Clearly aligning himself with Shafarevich, Kazintsev denounced the ‘inherent Russophobia’ of Sinyavskii, as well as that of Yanov, Pomerants, and even ‘Gorskii,’ all principal exhibits in Rusofobiya.34 After discussing Yanov’s treatment of patriotism and fascism as manifestations of the same phenomenon, Kazintsev concluded dismissively that ‘such [argumentation] is the “proof” of a Russophobe.’ In a footnote, he expressed astonishment at Oktyabr’s announcement that it planned to publish Yanov: ‘Can a Russian journal be considered the highway of Russophobic propaganda?’35 Although Kazintsev avoided mentioning the name of the original theorist of ‘Russophobia,’ the essay complemented rather than appropriated Shafarevich’s argument. By concentrating on recent statements by returning ‘Russophobes’ and on works like Yanov’s The Russian Idea and the Year 2000, published after Shafarevich released his treatise into samizdat, Kazintsev placed Rusofobiya in the context of perestroika, and heralded its impending publication. Most of Rusofobiya finally appeared in the June 1989 issue of Nash Sovremennik, which omitted only the final, virulently anti-Semitic chapters. The publication of this ‘theoretical foundation of fascism’ in a Soviet journal was, as Andrei Sinyavskii warned, ‘an event of extraordinary significance.’36 Yet it evoked little immediate reaction from

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liberal circles. Indeed, one month later Shafarevich’s essay Two Roads to One Abyss’ appeared alongside Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture in the respectable Novyi Mir, where Vadim Borisov, a contributor to From under the Rubble, was now the deputy head of the prose section. The essay was Shafarevich’s first major publicist work of the perestroika period. Its title alluded to Igor Klyamkin’s article ‘Which Road Leads to the Temple,’ about the choice between command socialism and liberal democracy.37 Shafarevich sought to demonstrate that the two systems were not diametrically opposed, but part of the same phenomenon, and equally destructive for traditional, peasant society. The essay was conspicuously devoid of anti-Semitism, and even referred favourably to a Jewish campaigner against the Gulag, Isaac Don Levine. Shafarevich’s main target was not the local ‘Small People,’ but Western liberal intellectuals who had been apologists for Stalinism and then outspoken critics of Soviet human rights abuses only when the situation had improved in the 1970s. He argued that the Western idea of progress was linked to tolerance of human rights abuses in non-Western societies, and that adoption of Western methods would transform Russia into a Latin American rather than a Western society. In its critique of progress, technological civilisation, human rights, and liberal democracy, the essay can be read as a polemic against Sakharov, who had emerged in June as the standard-bearer of the liberal-democratic project in the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. Although Shafarevich was one of a group of Russophile intellectuals who failed in their attempt to win election to the Congress, his position was articulated at its proceedings by the novelist Valentin Rasputin, who issued a warning to non-Russians about the dangers of ‘Russophobia’: We Russians regard with respect and understanding the national feelings and problems of all peoples of our country without exception, but we wish that they understand us also. Chauvinism and the blind pride of Russians are inventions of those who play on your national feelings, esteemed brothers. But they are played, one must say, very skilfully. Russophobia has proliferated in the Baltics, in Georgia, it is penetrating other republics, in some less, in some more, but it is noted almost everywhere.38 The Congress was dominated, however, by the clash between the Moscow democrats and the ‘aggressively obedient majority,’ which vilified Sakharov as a traitor at the hate session on 3 June for his allegations against the Soviet army. Shafarevich clearly sympathised with the militant patriotism of the ‘obedient majority,’ and he rebuked the Moscow deputies for not regarding the other deputies as equals.39 In an interview with the liberal Moscow News, he was particularly critical of Sakharov’s call for every ethnic group to be allowed to achieve the status of a Union Republic.40 In the volatile post-Congress atmosphere, Shafarevich and two fellow radical nationalists shifted their offensive from ‘Russophobic’ émigrés to the liberal journals that were publishing their works. The obvious target was Oktyabr, edited by the mercurial novelist Anatolii Ananev, who had once signed collective letters against Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, but who had nevertheless transformed his journal into a flagship of perestroika. Whilst Nash Sovremennik tested the boundaries of censorship with its assault on Russophobia, Oktyabr challenged the new patriotic dogmas by publishing an excerpt

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from Terts/Sinyavskii’s Strolling with Pushkin, and the complete text of Grossman’s Everything Flows, and by announcing the impending appearance of an unspecified work by Aleksandr Yanov.41 In an open letter to the Secretary of the Board of the RSFSR Writers’ Union, Shafarevich, A. Kyklov, and M.Antonov assailed the ‘consistent antiRussian policy of the journal.’42 They pronounced the familiar anathemas against Sinyavskii’s ‘notorious lampoon,’ against Grossman’s ‘Russophobic composition,’ and against Yanov as ‘the author of the most militant, flagrantly anti-Russian works, which have been justly criticised by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.’ They also reproached G.Vodolazov, the author of Oktyabr’s preface to Everything Flows, for defending Lenin, but not contesting Grossman’s main contention about Russia as ‘a thousand-year-old slave.’ The three Russophiles then argued that as the legal founder of Oktyabr, the Writers’ Union secretariat bore responsibility for the fact that ‘a Russian journal has taken the lead in proving the harmfulness of the Russian people and of Russian genes.’ We would not have publicly mentioned this circumstance, if other press organs related to writers’ creative unions were not complicit in the aforementioned new phenomenon, that is, Russophobia. Malicious signs of this monstrous phenomenon have appeared in many other outlets of the mass media, in the cinema, on the stage, on radio and on television.43 Clearly on the defensive, Ananev appealed to the Central Committee, which ordered Literaturnaya Rossiya to print his response. Noting that A. Sinyavskii and A.Yanov, and obviously also the editorial committee and the main editor were being accused of Russophobia,’ Ananev derisively likened Shafarevich, Klykov, and Antonov to a Stalinist ‘troika.’44 He reproached the ‘troika’ for taking a Sinyavskii quotation out of context, and Literaturnaya Rossiya for publishing a misleadingly edited version of Roman Gul’s polemic against Strolling with Pushkin. Asking whether the patriots were proposing that he publish only an expurgated version of Grossman’s novella, Ananev drew a provocative analogy with the new Russophile icon, Solzhenitsyn. Not only did Ananev regard the decision to publish Solzhenitsyn with ‘great satisfaction,’ but also he was convinced that it was essential to publish his works ‘in their entirety, without any cuts, [or] corrections.’ This was a perilous argument indeed, given that Ananev had denounced Solzhenitsyn in 1974 as a ‘literary Vlasovite.’ In its commentary to Ananev’s article, Literaturnaya Rossiya did not hesitate to cite this accusation, and also recalled his signature of a 1973 writers’ letter denouncing Sakharov.45 To shore up his support in the democratic movement, Ananev took the virtually unprecedented step of making a public apology to Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn in the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta. But he insisted that repentance was less important than atonement for one’s sins, which for him as an editor meant the publication of ‘works with a tragic, bitter and difficult fate.’ Such works included Grossman’s Life and Fate and Everything Flows, and Akhmatova’s Requiem, as well as the clearly un-Russophobic novella The Sad Detective by villageprose writer Viktor Astafev.46 In return for Ananev’s repentance, a group of thirty prominent democrats, including Sakharov, Dmitrii Likhachev, Yurii Afanasev, and Leonid Batkin, issued an open letter deploring Rusofobiya and defending Oktyabr.47 Shafarevich was evidently surprised by the presence of Sakharov’s and Likhachev’s

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signatures on the letter, which he likened to the ‘open letters’ slandering of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, but he expressed the hope that they had not actually read its contents.48 The boldness of Shafarevich’s attack on Ananev’s ‘consistent anti-Russian policy’ was astonishing, for his own Rusofobiya was far more methodical and purposeful in its racial vilification than any of the texts that had appeared in Oktyabr. Indeed, the most virulently anti-Semitic chapters of Rusofobiya would only be published in November 1989.49 Yet Shafarevich pressed home the attack in September 1989, with an article in Literaturnaya Rossiya on ‘The Phenomenon of Emigration,’ which amplified charges made in Rusofobiya, and provided a theoretical justification for his long-standing hostility towards voluntary émigrés. Its central distinction was between previous waves of emigration from the Soviet regime, which comprised refugees escaping terror, and the ‘Third Wave’ emigration of the 1970s, which was motivated by a political agenda for transforming the country. Such an ‘Emigration of Hope,’ like the revolutionary emigration preceding 1917, ‘is often a sign and instrument of radical, violent changes.’ After repeating the old litany of quotations from Sinyavskii, Yanov, and Shragin, Shafarevich added Aleksandr Zinoviev to the Russophobic black list for his satirical statement that what remained profoundly national about the Russian people was its centuries-old ‘ability to humble itself and to humble others, its ability to adapt to the opinions of others, its ability to oblige and demand the same of others.’ Shifting his focus frorn Jewish nationalism, Shafarevich attributed these specimens of ‘Russophobia’ to the anomalous position of the political émigrés, whose status in the West depended on their status as ‘heroes of the resistance.’ Their dilemma was that the ‘resistance is occurring in one country, and its heroes live in another.’ Hence the heroes justified their departure with the ‘conception of the hopeless country, which was doomed to slavery, and in which a decent man cannot breath.’ The elaboration of this notion produced ‘a whole literature that explained the slavish character of the Russian soul and the harmfulness of Russian history.’ In a bold sleight-of-hand, Shafarevich likened this slander of Russia to the denunciations of Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn (which actually bore a far clearer resemblance to Shafarevich’s own denunciations of concrete individuals than the generalisations the ‘Russophobes’ dispensed about their native land). But what most shocked readers of Shafarevich’s article was its concluding incitement to violence. He praised the reaction of the Islamic world to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, which was ‘not the Ayatollah’s fatwa, but grandiose demonstrations, in which hundreds of people gave their lives during confrontations with police—and as a result succeeded in achieving the banning of the book in many countries.’ He concluded menacingly that ‘our answer is still to come.’50

The ‘Children of Sharik’ When the RSFSR Writers’ Union plenum met in late November 1989, the subject of condemnation was not Shafarevich’s audacious call for mob censorship, but the ‘Russophobic’ transgressions of the journal Oktyabr. For Alla Latynina, a moderate nationalist literary critic, the hysterical proceedings provided an insight into the witchhunts of the 1930s, helping her to understand ‘what it was that brought people to the rostrums and prompted their denunciations, mercilessly preserved for their puzzled

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progeny in the newspapers.’51 At the plenum, she ‘not only understood but actually sensed the atmosphere of those witch-hunts’: [Voices of reason] were drowned in the highly electrified atmosphere that reigned in the audience, swept as it was by a single emotion: our national dignity has been injured, our national holy of holies desecrated, all of us Russians have been mortally offended, the grave of our national genius defiled, and the country invaded by a dangerous virus.52 Although his name was not mentioned in any of the published transcripts of the proceedings, Shafarevich was a palpable presence as speaker after speaker took the podium to denounce ‘Russophobia.’ Stanislav Kunaev declared that ‘Russophobia’ and mockery of Pushkin were ‘indisputably blasphemy.’53 A.Znamenskii claimed that earlier misgivings about positive Jewish and negative Russian characters in Grossman’s fiction had been confirmed: ‘The taint of Russophobia that was merely a gradually developing embryo in Life and Fate suddenly spread its wings and took flight, so to speak, in the weak and poorly written novella Everything Flows.’54 V. Odintsov read a statement from Leningrad ‘patriotic organisations,’ which expressed indignation against ‘the Russophobic campaign that has been launched by the media,’ but reserved special opprobrium for ‘the libellous opus by the overt Russophobe and anti-Sovieteer,’ Sinyavskii’s Strolling with Pushkin: ‘Never before in a century and a half has such an embittered and cynical attack on a Russian genius appeared in the pages of the Russian press.’ Vladimir Krupin assailed Sakharov for signing the Knizhnoe Obozrenie open letter in defence of Oktyabr. Of course, he knows more about weapons of mass destruction than I do. But I think I know more about literature than Sakharov does…. And I realise that a publication of the Russian Writers’ Union cannot be turned into a publication that attacks Russia.55 Despite his official dismissal by the Writers’ Union, Ananev defied his detractors and remained at his post, claiming that as a USSR people’s deputy, he could not be removed from his post without the approval of the Supreme Soviet.56 In August, after the passage of the USSR Law on the Press, Oktyabr’s editorial staff was able to declare its independence of the union, by assuming the role of the journal’s ‘founder.’57 The struggle against ‘Russophobia’ was already moving to the streets. The first attempt at a ‘grandiose demonstration’ took place in January 1990, when members of a Pamyat splinter-group led by Konstantin Smirnov-Ostashvili disrupted a meeting of the pro-perestroika ‘April’ writers’ group in the Central House of Writers. When the chairman of the meeting announced that he was prepared to give these ‘guests’ the opportunity to speak, Smirnov-Ostashvili drowned out the proceedings with his megaphone. Unhindered by the police, Smirnov-Ostashvili proceeded to deliver an election speech, a rambling tirade whose only coherence lay in its identification of Jews and ‘Russophobia’:

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Comrade Jews, leave the hall, you are not writers—Rasputin, Astafev and Belov are writers…. The time has ended when you alone determined the fate of the Russian people. The Russian-Jewish question must be raised to the heights…. Your time has ended, neither the police, nor the KGB, nor the party will help you, now we will be owners of the country, and you newcomers shall go off to Israel…. How long can one tolerate your Russophobia?58 The link between the riot and the patriotic campaign against ‘Russophobia’ was immediately obvious. Robert Rozhdestvenskii, the poet and April member, observed that the exhortations by ‘the theorists of our literature’s racial purity’ at the Writers’ Union plenum were being implemented by the Pamyat activists: The inspired word of the writer was being followed by action.’59 Although unnamed, the writer could only be Shafarevich. Ogonek also avoided his name, but issued an explicit demand that the intellectual instigators of the incident be held accountable: [T]he ‘ideologues,’ who aroused racist hysteria by ‘theoretical’ investigations in the sphere of ‘Russophobia’ and ‘the domination of Judaeo-Masons,’ who in a planned and calculated way set people against each other on the basis of national or some other criteria, who prepared in their mass-circulation publications for a ‘Russian Sumgait,’ must ultimately answer for the actions of those whom they nurtured. Sooner or later the legal racists and their patrons will answer for everything.60 Smirnov-Ostashvili himself was dismissively likened to a marionette and to the dog Sharik in Bulgakov’s novella Heart of a Dog, and described as ‘incapable of discussing the roots of “Russophobia” or the “National Idea.”’61 Despite Ogonek’s threats, it was the marionette Smirnov-Ostashvili who was prosecuted for inciting ethnic hatred, and sentenced in October 1990 to two years in the camps, where he committed suicide in April 1991.62 The ‘legal racists’ did not come to his defence. Shafarevich dismissed the incident as a riot ‘on the level of a restaurant brawl.’ Yet the repercussions of Smirnov-Ostashvili’s foray brought the ideological struggle within the intelligentsia to a new pitch of hysteria. What was a ‘grandiose demonstration’ to the adversaries of ‘Russophobia,’ seemed like a trial run for pogroms to panic-stricken reformers. A group of patriotic organisations responded to the sound of liberal alarmbells with a letter to Literaturnaya Rossiya, in which they denounced claims ‘made recently by some in the mass media and by certain USSR people’s deputies’ about impending violence against Soviet Jews and the creation of a Russian fascist movement. This ‘obvious lie and dangerous slander against Russia’ was in itself a manifestation of ‘pogromist sentiments’ and pre-meditated Russophobia: ‘The discrediting of the activities of Russian public organisations, open Russophobia, and criticism of everything that is aimed at renewing and revitalising the principles of Russian life are nothing but a wellplanned, calculated provocation.’ Following Shafarevich’s thesis in Rusofobiya, the letter attributed this provocation to ‘unscrupulous, power-hungry politicians’ in league with ‘Zionists and organisations financed by Zionism.’ Instead of charging the Pamyat activists with inciting national discord under article 74 of the Criminal Code, as

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demanded by Interregional Group deputies, it was time to ‘prosecute everyone who, on the one hand, plants fabrications about a growing wave of anti-Semitism and impending pogroms against Jews, and on the other, spreads Russophobia and fear of the Russian people.’63 This polemic set the tone for the first major ‘anti-Zionist’ demonstration held outside the Ostankino television tower on 18 February, where ‘deputies were constantly given the title “so-called People’s,” and every decision of theirs was attributed to the influence of the mafia, international imperialism and Zionism.’64 After decades of cultivating antiZionist sentiment, the authorities had few resources to deal with the appearance of antiSemitic crowds. Their bankruptcy was epitomised by a bizarre episode the day after the demonstration. One of Andropov’s innovations, the ‘Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public’ (AZCSP), met in plenary session to expose the activisation of both antiSemitic and Zionist groups in the USSR. The AZCSP had already criticised SmirnovOstashvili’s ‘openly anti-semitic’ manifesto, and complained that he was ‘discrediting the very idea of objective criticism of Zionism.’65 Now the AZCSP presidium denounced the attempts to legalise a Zionist movement in the country under the pretext of a campaign against ‘the anti-Semitism of Soviet society.’66 Officials of the prosecutor’s office and the Interior Ministry assured the meeting that they would be taking steps ‘to stop extremist nationalist manifestations,’ but left it unclear whether this referred to Pamyat or Jewish informal groups.67 In mid-February, the leadership of the RSFSR Writers’ Union held a press-conference to assuage the growing furore in liberal ranks. Yurii Bondarev appealed for reconciliation between the opposing literary factions, but Izvestiya’s correspondent found it difficult to take his words seriously: So now peace has been offered, but the form in which it was done is puzzling. Indeed, how can one help but get this impression when the expressions ‘Russophobia,’ ‘Russian-language writers,’ and ‘Russian writers’ fluttered easily and familiarly from mouth to mouth? When the statement of the Secretariat of the Board of the Russian Republic Writers’ Union, read by S.Bilukov, proved to be full of ferocious invective against ‘chained dogs of perestroika,’ and ‘lessees of glasnost’ against ‘Russophobes’ and ‘mud-slingers,’ against ‘democratic unions’ and ‘people’s fronts,’ against ‘Zionists,’ the ‘leftist media,’ and all ‘raving fanatics’ in general?68 The ‘chained dogs of perestroikta’ responded one week later. In an open letter to the Politburo, a group of liberal writers, all members of April and of the CPSU, demanded the enforcement of article 74 against ‘Stalinists’ who were fighting ‘democratic socialism’ with ‘a pseudo-Russian, chauvinistic, imperial ideology containing a strong admixture of brutish anti-Semitism.’69 This succinct petition provoked a reaction of astonishing verbosity and rhetorical ferocity, the so-called ‘Letter of 74 Russian Writers,’ which was published in Literaturnaya Rossiya on the eve of the March 1990 RSFSR parliamentary elections.70 Unprecedented in its paranoia and exaggeration, the Letter of 74 was at once a manifesto of Russophile candidates and a jeremiad against the imminent triumph of ‘Russophobia.’

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The quantity and diversity of its signatories testified to the growing authority of the notion of ‘Russophobia’ in anti-perestroika circles, and its capacity to unite a fractious coalition of Stalinists, National Bolsheviks, statists, village-prose ideologues, and even monarchists. Developing the central tenet of Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya, the 74 linked ‘the fabrication of a myth of Russian fascism’ to ‘the headlong rehabilitation and reckless idealisation of Zionist ideology.’ According to the 74, these intertwined falsehoods were being disseminated by large-circulation publications and Central Television, which had been taken over by ‘advocates of overt racism,’ who used the banners of ‘democratisation’ and a ‘law-abiding state’ to unleash ‘an anti-Russian, anti-Russia ideological campaign’: Concentrated hounding, vilification and persecution that are unparalleled in the entire history of mankind are being directed against the representatives of the country’s indigenous population, which has essentially been declared ‘outside the law’ from the standpoint of that mythical ‘rule of law state’ in which it appears that there will be no place for either the Russian people or other indigenous peoples of Russia. The 74 claimed that this vilification was aimed at denying ‘not only the fact, but the very possibility of Russia making a positive contribution to world history and culture,’ and was motivated by a ‘desire to place Russians outside the bounds of homo sapiens.’ The result was ‘a form of pathological, maniacal racism that is perhaps unparalleled in all previous “scriptures” of rabid misanthropy.’ Little evidence for this contention was provided, beyond the usual obligatory citations from Vasilii Grossman and sarcastic references in the press to Pamyat activists as ‘children of Sharik,’ which was falsely likened to ‘the terminology that Hitler’s propaganda used with regard to Russians, the “inferior” Slavic race.’71 What was unique about this ‘maniacal racism’ was that its proponents denied the ‘true nature’ of their activity: ‘they deny the indisputable fact of Soviet Russophobia, and they refuse to acknowledge that what they are doing constitutes a crime against Russia and the Russian people.’72 The next stage of the argument went much further than Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya, though it developed along a vector that he had formulated, reversing accusations to transform the targets of anti-Semitism into perpetrators of ‘Russophobia.’ According to the Letter of the 74, the true reason for the media focus upon Pamyat’s comical escapades and the mythical threat of Russian fascism was ‘to cover up true racism and fascism, whose forces are no laughing matter and are united in the USSR Zionists’ Union, which possesses militarised detachments of Beitar members.’ It was these ‘true contemporary brownshirts who unconstitutionally invaded the very heart of Russia—Moscow—with their international assembly (the Jewish-Zionist Congress held on 18–21 December 1989) and who have launched practical activities and ultra-racist propaganda throughout our entire country.’ The Jewish fascists were seeking to establish a ‘Pretoria-style regime,’ through the idealisation of Zionism and the development of the notion of Jewish supremacy: Today this idealisation pertains equally to both Soviet and foreign cultural and public figures of Jewish extraction, including political figures in the

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fascist aggressor state of Israel…. This kind of systematic, unhistorical idealisation is a tried and true means of developing the notion of a ‘supernation,’ an ‘uber’ nation, a superior nation. Against this imminent threat and ‘the unhindered export of Zionism into our country,’ a proposed law against anti-semitism was nothing less than ‘a law on the genocidal destruction of the Russian people.’ Testing the limits of the existing law, the 74 warned menacingly that the ‘daily trampling of [Russia’s] national dignity has reached such a degree that the provocateurs should not lightly count on Russian all-forgiveness and lack of malice.’ The 74 concluded with a call for a redistribution of the print news media in accordance with the Russian Republic’s material and economic contribution to the country’s paper supply, and in favour of ‘Russian’ (nationalist) publications, and to the detriment of ‘Russian-language’ (implicitly Jewish) publications ‘that preach Russophobia and insult the Russian people.’73 An instant scandal, the appeal was hailed as a historic milestone by the patriotic press. In the spirit of Brezhnev-era propaganda campaigns, Literaturnaya Rossiya published an endless series of endorsements from writers and public organisations.74 A group of scholars, headed by philosopher Eduard Volodin, expressed their ‘full agreement’ with the letter, declaring that ‘Russophobia is obstructing the resolution of the fundamental problems of the Russian people, of other peoples of Russia and of the entire Soviet Union, by causing serious damage to their friendship and brotherly international unity.’75 In its expression of support, the ‘United Front of Workers of Russia’ denounced ‘socalled intellectuals, closely linked to bureaucratised part of the party-state apparat, the mafia and Zionist circles of the West,’ an alliance which had transformed the mass media into ‘an instrument of militant Russophobia, which is becoming ever more aggressive, unrestrained and blatant.’76 Liberals were less impressed. Literaturnaya Gazeta ridiculed the 74 for producing ‘a manifesto about their own mania over the persecution to which the allegedly victimised, allegedly sole Russian patriotic writers are allegedly being subjected.’77 Certainly the letter’s impact upon the electorate was minimal. In March a pleiade of Russophile ideologues from the ‘Bloc of Russian Public-Patriotic Movements,’ including Vladimir Bondarenko, Stanislav Kunaev, Eduard Volodin, and Aleksandr Kazintsev, were defeated in the RSFSR parliamentary elections.78 Soon those who had been clamouring loudest against ‘Russophobia,’ were accusing the democrats of electoral fraud and demanding the annulment of the poll.79 In the wake of this debacle, the Seventh Plenum of the RSFSR Writers’ Union was a more subdued affair than its hysterical predecessor. Stanislav Kunaev, the new editor of Nash Sovremennik, used the podium to denounce claims that ‘Russophobia’ was an invention of chauvinists, listed a series of recent ‘Russophobic’ outrages in the press, and declared that Pasternak ‘could not be placed on the same bench with the Russophobe Sinyavskii and his apologists.’80 Another defeated Russophile candidate, Vladimir Bondarenko, lamented the fact that ‘we, the Russian writers, the Russian patriotic forces, lost everywhere we could,’ but proposed to the plenum that it accept ‘two leaders of the Russian literary revival—I.R.Shafarevich and L.I.Borodin’ as members and ‘by this, we shall honour not only them, but also ourselves and our Union of Writers.’81

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A few months later, perestroika ideologue Aleksandr Tsipko, midstream in his evolution from interpreter of Marxism-Leninism to admirer of Solzhenitsyn, pointed to the apparent triumph of the moderate nationalism represented by ‘Democratic Russia’ as proof that the threat of fascism was ‘overblown’: This Russophobia thing is mysticism. On the other hand, the business about Russian fascism is also mysticism, and that should be recognised in the West. Because if it were not mysticism, they would have won the elections. Testifying to perestroika’s moral and intellectual impotence in the face of nationalist discourses, Tsipko conceded Shafarevich’s claim that ‘unfortunately there is much in Jewish culture that is not conducive to internationalism,’ and argued weakly that ‘this is something that is not talked about; and maybe it shouldn’t be talked about, because the Jewish people suffered the most.’ By contrast, ‘the great or large nations should be objective.’ Instead of pointing out that there was much in most cultures that was ‘not conducive to internationalism,’ Tsipko was accepting and validating a central premise of Rusofobiya: that double-standards were applied to Jews and non-Jews. His own confusion was especially evident in his complaint that ‘all this is terribly politicised and vague,’ and in his ambivalent conclusion, declaring that ‘on the one hand, all this shouting, this Russophobia, is stupid,’ whilst ‘on the other hand, this problem with Pamyat is somehow very much being used, although it is a reality.’82 The exiles were less optimistic. One week after Tsipko dismissed ‘Russophobia’ as ‘mysticism,’ Valerii Chalidze launched a scathing attack against his former colleague in the Committee on Human Rights. Chalidze warned that: there are forces in society which, given an acute crisis or a mass psychosis, could push the country into the hands of a Stalin or Hitler—just listen to the sabre-rattling of Shafarevich and many other extreme ‘defenders of the national pride.’ In particular Chalidze cautioned against being misled by the mild terms Russophiles used ‘so as not to abuse the democratic ear too much,’ for if they were given power, ‘they will become much more outspoken.’83 The main target of Shafarevich’s sabre-rattling, Andrei Sinyavskii, was similarly alarmist. He repeatedly warned that ‘a powerful, militant Russian nationalism’ was arising to protect the Soviet Union, which he likened to a garage full of cans of petrol: ‘In that volatile atmosphere, the Russian nationalists are playing with matches, and one of the most inflammatory matches is called “Russophobia.”’84 Whilst comparing Shafarevich’s book to Nazi ideology, he claimed that the real danger was not so much in its publication as in ‘the silence surrounding the appearance of this book, the absence of any serious discussion of it.’85 In a speech at the Kennan Institute in January 1990, Sinyavskii added another factor to the equation, arguing that the problem was not in Shafarevich’s ‘stupid and frivolous ideas,’ but in the fact that ‘the great authority of Solzhenitsyn stands behind Shafarevich.’86

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The first serious attempt to expose the gulf between Shafarevich and Solzhenitsyn was undertaken by Alla Latynina, a liberal nationalist seeking a political realignment through the creation of a moderate centre and the repudiation of Leninism. Shafarevich clearly disturbed Latynina, who, like Sinyavskii, saw Rusofobiya as incendiary. Latynina had described the appearance of Shafarevich’s signature in the original open letter against Oktyabr as ‘an unpleasant surprise,’ and noted that the press campaign against Oktyabr had ‘shown me how powerful a word [i.e. ‘Russophobia’], thrown like a match into spilt petrol, might be.’ She contrasted Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 warning about the dangers of ethnic conflict with Shafarevich’s praise for the Muslim world’s reaction to Salman Rushdie.87 But in her programmatic article ‘Solzhenitsyn and Us,’ she carefully avoided mention of Shafarevich. Instead she refuted claims about Solzhenitsyn’s affinity with ‘anti-Semitism,’ ‘xenophobic nationalism,’ and the advocates of ‘de-Zionisation’: all labels readily applicable to Shafarevich. Latynina scornfully demolished left-wing critic Benedikt Sarnov’s claim that in Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914, the terrorist Bogrov had murdered Stolypin ‘not as an agent of the Okhrana, not as a psychopath, but as a Jew, gripped by Jewish feelings,’ a characterisation which would have closely accorded with the central thesis of Rusofobiya.88 She pointed to the work of ‘the conscientious’ (and Jewish) researcher, Dora Shturman, who had concluded that Bogrov was portrayed as a typical revolutionary terrorist of the period, whose actions were shaped on the ‘ideological field.’ Seizing upon Sarnov’s admission that he had found August 1914 so boring that he had read only the Stolypin assassination scene, Latynina pointed to another passage, the sympathetic portrayal of the Jewish engineer Arkhangorodskii, and observed that ‘it would not be difficult today to imagine a supporter of the “De-Zionisation” of Russia, upon reading August, exclaim: and why is this “Union of Russian Engineers” represented by the Jew Arkhangorodoskii?’89 Emelyanov’s supporters were the most obvious supporters of ‘De-Zionisation,’ but the remark was no less directed against the anti-Semitic adversaries of ‘Russophobia,’ who that month had staked their claim to Solzhenitsyn in Nash Sovremennik.90 After the ‘Letter of 74,’ Latynina was more explicit, declaring that the signatories’ demand for ‘the immediate categorical banning of all forms of Russophobia’ injured her national sentiments ‘rather more than Russophobia itself.’ She cautioned, however, that ‘I do not belong to those who regard Russophobia as a nonexistent phenomenon, a propaganda manoeuvre of ardent anti-Semites.’91 ‘Russophobia’ existed in the notion of ‘Russia as a subject of imperialistic consciousness,’ and above all in the legacy of mixing the concepts ‘Russia’ and ‘Soviet’: The conception of Russia as a subject of imperialistic consciousness, a failure to understand that Russians are also victims of a social experiment, like other peoples, that not Russian tanks entered Prague, but Soviet, that not Russian forces were in Afghanistan, but Soviet—in a word, many years of mixing the concepts ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ (against which Solzhenitsyn warned more than once) cannot be immediately overcome. But Russophobia cannot be banned.92 The resilient heritage of Russophobia was best overcome by political realignment. Recalling Chuprinin’s question about the morality of eclecticism, about whether one could rightly ‘take this “from Shafarevich,” and that “from Sakharov,”’ Latynina noted

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that ‘the name of Shafarevich is now odious,’ but if the question were rephrased as, ‘Is it possible to take something from Solzhenitsyn and something from Sakharov?’ then ‘I respond: it is possible and moral.’93 A similar line was taken by Vyacheslav Karpov, who published an extensive refutation of ‘the strange logic of Igor Shafarevich’ in the March 1990 issue of Oktyabr, the besieged bastion of ‘Russophobia.’ Like Latynina, Karpov argued from a position of moderate nationalism, and found three points of agreement with Shafarevich. He accepted the essential validity of Shafarevich’s rejection of the notion that archetypal features of the Russian soul explained the tragedies of Russian history. He sympathised with Shafarevich’s case against the technocratic society and the idea of blindly following the Western path. He even agreed that ‘Russophobia (understood as fear and simultaneous hatred towards everything Russian) was a pathological phenomenon, essentially indistinguishable from other forms of racial or national intolerance.’ But he added that ‘I think that the most fatal means of “struggle” against Russophobia is the attempt to counterpose it with another phobia,’ such as Judaeophobia.94 This was the central project of Rusofobiya, whose significance for Karpov was that it provided a central conception for ‘what earlier had been unsystematically dispersed in publicist works and literary criticism.’95 The rest of Karpov’s essay was an attempt to discredit this conception. He had no scruples about speculating about Shafarevich’s mind-set. Pointing to the sense of a hostile world that pervades Rusofobiya, Karpov reminded the reader that ‘sociopsychological research consistently links a closed consciousness with the sense of a hostile world,’ and argued that Shafarevich’s tendency to indicate ‘one and only one cause’ of a social phenomenon—such as his claim about the Jewish impetus for Russophobia—was ‘very characteristic of a closed, dogmatic consciousness.’96 But most of Karpov’s critique was directed against Shafarevich’s methodology. He described Shafarevich’s decision to limit his sources to literature of the past two decades as ‘simply unforgiveable for an analyst attempting to reveal the genesis of a particular ideology.’ A serious investigation of the sources of Russophobia would inevitably have led him back to the Slavophile-Westernizer controversy, and forced him to recognise the ‘genetic link’ between the ideologues of Russophobia and the traditions of Russian culture.97 To demonstrate the futility of Shafarevich’s method of indictment by quotation, Karpov proceeded to provide a series of ‘Russophobic’ quotes from the classics of Russian literature, before concluding that the approach was more suited to a police dossier.98 After demonstrating the extent of Shafarevich’s oversimplification of Russian history and Western liberalism, Karpov attacked Shafarevich’s Achilles’ heel: his avowed Christian faith. Karpov contended that Shafarevich’s celebration of organicism ignored the spirituality and freedom that distinguished human communities from biological populations. He added that the early Christians in the Roman Empire fitted the mould of the ‘Small People’ no less than English Puritans and French revolutionaries.99 Surveying Shafarevich’s efforts to avoid the charge of anti-Semitism, Karpov concluded that he advocated a ‘biological anti-Semitism,’ which ‘fully accords with his biological view of society (the idea of organicism).’100 The accusation was ingenious, but false. Moreover, it left Shafarevich’s most provocative assertions—about Jewish culture—unanswered. That challenge was taken up by the linguist Aleksei Shmelev, in an essay published in Znamya, but originally written in 1987 when Rusofobiya was circulating in samizdat.

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Like Karpov, Shmelev pointed to the contrast between Shafarevich’s Christianity and his anti-Semitism, between his past defence of religious freedom, and the work in which he offended the religious feelings of many believers, Jewish and Orthodox Christian. This insensitivity was epitomised by Shafarevich’s deployment of Old Testament citations as evidence of Jewish parasitic xenophobia. On this matter, Shmelev refuted Shafarevich’s parallel between the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre and the Purim Festival—which commemorated deliverance from enslavement, not ‘the murder of 75,000 men, women and children.’101 Against Shafarevich’s claims about the cultural legacy of King David’s cruelty, Shmelev pointed out that the monarch was an idealised figure in Russian traditional culture no less than for the Jews.102 Turning to Shafarevich’s unsubstantiated references to the ‘well-known statements’ in the Talmud and its commentaries about not regarding non-Jews as humans, Shmelev made his most damaging insinuation. Such claims, he observed, had a long history—Vladimir Solovev had demolished them in a famous essay—and they had received new circulation from Ivan Samolvin’s samizdat ‘Letter to Solzhenitsyn,’ which Mikhail Agurskii published as an addenda to his 1975 article on the ‘Neo-Nazi Danger in the Soviet Union.’103 Agurskii had traced Samolvin’s textual distortions to pre-revolutionary anti-Semites like A.Shmakov and I.Lyutostanskii. Now Shmelev demanded to know whether Shafarevich had used these originals, ‘or had he discovered new data unknown to V.Solovyov and M.Agurskii?’104 It seemed like a devastating blow, but Shafarevich later undermined Shmelev’s credibility with the revelation that they had corresponded prior to the publication of the article, and that Shafarevich had indicated his ‘sources (including a recent book by a Professor of TelAviv university, Ya.Kats), even advising in which library these books might be found,’ and received in response ‘a letter with thanks for the “clear and precise answer.”’105 Shmelev’s main line of attack was to show that Shafarevich’s case against the Jews parodied and reproduced the ‘Russophobic’ case against Russia. Shafarevich might accuse his opponents of being capable of thinking only in terms of simplistic binary oppositions, but his own work was founded upon the binary opposition of Russophobic ‘Small People’ and patriotic ‘Great People.’106 Shafarevich denounced ‘Russophobes’ for claiming, ‘with foam in their mouths,’ that democracy was alien to Russia, but then proceeded to criticise democracy as unsuitable for Russia.107 Shafarevich denounced ‘Russophobes’ for discovering Russian national sources for the Bolshevik catastrophe, but instead discovers Jewish national sources.108 Shafarevich had denounced Sinyavskii for seeking a psychological explanation for Russian anti-Semitism, and then explained ‘Russophobia’ in psychological terms, as an attempt to avoid recognising the past involvement of Jews in Bolshevik crimes.109 Avoiding similar mimicry of Shafarevich’s menaces, Shmelev concluded by wishing the scholar a long life, and suggesting that Rusofobiya was not the great work of truth that Shafarevich had said he could not die without writing. But in a postscript, Shmelev added pessimistically that ‘Shafarevich’s idea has become a fact of political life, and the accusation of “Russophobia” is now used as a political weapon.’110 Far less genteel was Zoya Krakhmalnikova, who published a scathing attack on Shafarevich in the August 1990 issue of Neva. She agreed with Shmelev on the contemporary importance of Shafarevich’s work, noting that the scholar had ‘indisputably performed no small service to his like-thinkers: to members of the Pamyat society and to writers of the so-called “right bloc.”’111 But where other critics had

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confined their criticism to Shafarevich’s ideas, Krakhmalnikova attacked his ‘selfmythologisation’ as a heroic dissident and as a devout Christian. As a former prisoner of conscience, she was not intimidated by his status as an icon of Russophile dissent. She recalled his call for self-sacrifice and his indictment of émigrés, where he lambasted ‘our comrades, whom we thought would endure this persecution together to the last,’ but suddenly packed their bags and ‘disappeared from our milieu and country.’ Acknowledging that an ignorant reader might share Shafarevich’s indignation at being left to ‘endure persecution to the last,’ she issued a scathing indictment of her own: To reproach the author of these lines for lacking the moral strength to follow those who took up his call to sacrifice and paid for it with prison, camp terms and exile, or to recall that I.R.Shafarevich did not dare even to speak out in their defence, as others did, would be cruel. And therefore we will in no way reproach him. God is his judge.112 Deriding Shafarevich’s claim to have spoken the unmentionable truth in Rusofobiya, Krakhmalnikova portrayed the book as an act of cowardice, written when it was dangerous to name the true culprits of the impending national catastrophe: ‘Of course, to struggle against the “Russophobia of the Small People” is rather easier and safer than with [Soviet] humanophobia, directed against all peoples!’113 If this was provocative, Krakhmalnikova was merciless in her attack on Shafarevich’s claims to be a Christian, noting that his book ‘expresses the anti-Christian ideology of anti-Semitism and Russian chauvinism.’ Just as Shafarevich had deployed Old Testament citations to bolster his anti-Semitic case, so now Krakhmalnikova resorted to the New Testament to portray Shafarevich as an anti-Christian and to entangle him in a net of apocalyptic associations. Thus Shafarevich’s avowal of faith was meaningless, since ‘the Anti-Christ passes himself off as Christ, and Satan “assumes the form of the Angel of Light” (2 Corinthians, 11, 14).’114 Unlike Shafarevich, true Christians did not make idols of themselves, and did not pursue scapegoats, for ‘in Christianity there is no concept of others’ guilt, there is only the concept of one’s own guilt.’115 For Krakhmalnikova, Shafarevich’s apostasy was not only the latest incarnation of the anti-Christian ethic of the inquisition, but also marked a recrudescence of paganism. The machinations of the Anti-Christ were no deterrent to the Soviet military establishment. Despite its failure to sway the electorate, the campaign against ‘Russophobia’ enjoyed tacit institutional support, particularly in the armed forces at a time when there were increasing rumours of a military coup. In early 1990 Aleksandr Prokhanov, the writer known as ‘the nightingale of the General Staff’ for his novels about Afghanistan and Nicaragua, published a programmatic article on ‘The Tragedy of Centralism,’ in which he alleged that the destruction of the state ‘is occurring in accordance with a proven algorithm, as if the entire programme had been entered on a computer punch card.’ The third phase of this programme was ‘the attack on the Russian factor’: Efforts are being made to instil an inferiority complex in Russians; a rigged trial is being staged of Russian history and the Russian character, in which they are charged with responsibility for universal disaster.

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Russophobia is a political instrument for destroying the multinational state, which is in large measure nourished by the Russian ability to unify.116 Later that year General Igor Rodionov, conservative head of the General Staff Academy and a future defence minister, denounced the ‘vicious Russophobia’ propagated by the Soviet media for weakening the values of the Slavic peoples and undermining faith in the armed forces.117 After the patriotic debacle in the RSFSR elections, the struggle against ‘Russophobia’ and the enemies of the centralised state was taken up by the All-Russian Association of Lovers of Russian Letters and Culture ‘Edinstvo’ (‘Unity’). Its founding congress in July 1990 was attended by Prokhanov and Father Dmitrii Dudko, the dissident priest who had been a great Russophile moral figure until his televised recantation in 1980.118 Yurii Bondarev, who was elected president of the association, used his keynote address to denounce those ‘ultrapolitical forces’ who used glasnost to slander those who think differently and desecrate national icons: ‘Employing the bulldozer of Russophobia, they roll over the graves of brilliant [Russian] prophets and apostles of philosophical thought, over our giants of world literature (Pushkin, Gorky, Mayakovskii, Esenin and Sholokhov).’119 Anxiety about the growing militancy of radical nationalist rhetoric was exacerbated by the murder of Archpriest Aleksandr Men on 8 September 1990, at the height of the Smirnov-Ostashvili trial. Obituaries emphasised not only Men’s status as one of the greatest contemporary Orthodox theologians, but also the fact that he ‘had used all the means available to a priest and a decent man to combat false patriotism, anti-Semitism and the infringement of people’s rights.’120 Immediate suspicion fell upon Pamyat-style fanatics.121 During the last months of Men’s life, he had received death-threats from anonymous ‘Russian patriots.’122 Although he received little attention in the official nationalist press, he was routinely vilified in samizdat publications such as Vladimir Osipov’s Zemshchina. It was Men’s criticism of Russian national chauvinism, after Osipov’s arrest in 1974, that had provoked Shafarevich into declaring that he could not liken Men’s behaviour to that of a contemporary heathen, to say nothing of a Christian. The nationalist right never forgot that interview.123 It was also outraged by Men’s ecumenism, which would be labelled ‘heresy’ in the programme of one of the radical nationalist parties of the post-Soviet era.124 Moreover, it was an open secret that Men’s circle was behind the articles in Vestnik 97, the genesis of the literature of ‘Russophobia.’ Less than one year had elapsed since Shafarevich had extolled the Islamic world’s reaction to Salman Rushdie, and warned that ‘our answer is yet to come.’ The hysteria around ‘Russophobia’ was dampened shortly afterwards by the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘How are we to Rebuild Russia?’ This long-awaited statement on the fate of the Soviet Union confounded the hopes of the emerging Communist-patriotic alliance that Solzhenitsyn would endorse the militant anti-Semitism of his former comrade Shafarevich, with whom he had once marched ‘shoulder to shoulder,’ bound by ‘our common views on Russia’s future.’125 Now those views had obviously diverged. Whilst the Letter of 74 had treated the ‘unhindered export of Zionism into the country’ and praise of ‘political figures in the fascist aggressor state of Israel’ as the cutting edge of ‘Russophobia’ and as a dire threat to Russia’s national survival, Solzhenitsyn hardly mentioned the Jewish question, except to praise Israelis who had

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resisted US cultural imperialism.126 The obvious breach between Solzhenitsyn and Shafarevich was noted by liberal commentator A.Surazhskii: Not only does [Solzhenitsyn] not proclaim any chauvinistic ideas but, on the contrary, he sharply attacks the imperial psychology…[he] does not once, either directly or indirectly, speak about such fashionable topics, which can be reduced to one thing: ‘the Jews organised the Revolution and destroyed Russia.’ He says not one word about ‘Russophobia.127 Shafarevich offered an oblique response one month later with a programmatic statement of his own titled ‘Can we Save Russia?’128 Whilst conceding that the USSR could not be preserved within its current boundaries, he identified the primary task as the preservation of Russia’s integrity. He warned that if the disintegration of Russia were not halted, ‘there would be a break-up of Russia into spheres of interest by the United States, Japan, Germany and China.’ This ‘Balkanization of Russia’ would destroy the global balance of power. To avoid this catastrophe, he called for a union between ‘Russian forces’ and the millions of Party members not directly responsible for the ‘tragic events’ of the Soviet period. He set two conditions for such co-operation: that the Communist Party recognise its historical guilt, and that it accept a new hierarchy of values, giving primacy to the salvation of the country and the people. If Shafarevich admitted the possibility of cooperation with patriotic communists, the RSFSR leadership was beyond the pale. He denounced the Yeltsin-Silaev team for encouraging separatist tendencies, and dismissed its democratic credentials as a product of electoral manipulation. In order to enable people to control not only their government, but also to regain ‘power over their minds,’ he called for restrictions on the media, such as the establishment of a ‘control commission’ to ensure its objectivity. Like Solzhenitsyn’s proposal, Shafarevich’s statement was published in Komsomolskaya Pravda, but this time the editors included not only a brief critical response from D. Muratov, but also a disclaimer that ‘the editors do not always share the viewpoint of authors participating in discussion’: testimony to the intensity of the controversy now engulfing Shafarevich. The moderation of Solzhenitsyn’s stance confirmed Shafarevich’s position as the preeminent ideologist of militant Russian nationalism. Only a few months after printing a thinly veiled death-threat against Solzhenitsyn, Molodaya Gvardiya published an article by Mikhail Lobanov, who praised Shafarevich for his divergence with Sakharov, and for his clash with Medvedev in Moscow News.129 Writing in the same journal two months later, Taisiya Napolova alluded to Shafarevich’s essay on ‘Two Roads to One Abyss’ in her title ‘Don’t Push the Country to the Abyss,’ and hailed his denunciation of Sinyavskii in ‘The Phenomenon of Emigration.’130 Shafarevich’s public profile was enhanced by Gorbachev’s shift to the right during early 1991. It was a time when Solzhenitsyn complained that his works had not really returned, and pointed to the alleged paper shortage that had stifled Novyi Mir. But there was enough paper for Aleksandr Prokhanov, the militarist novelist known as the ‘nightingale of the General Staff,’ to launch a new anti-reform weekly newspaper, Den, which featured an interview with Shafarevich in its second issue.131 There was also enough paper for Rusofobiya to be republished in an edition of 100,000 copies in the series ‘White Book of Russia.’132 Meanwhile Shafarevich was appearing with

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increasingly frequency on state television. On 15 March 1991, the first anniversary of Gorbachev’s election as Soviet president was marked by a ‘surprise tribute,’ as Moscow News reported bitterly: ‘the programme was changed to accommodate an evening with the Russian mathematician Shafarevich, a loyal pupil of the world’s first rabid patriot— Chauvin, a French soldier.’133 Extracts from his interviews were reprinted in Moskva, which commented that ‘[o]ne can say without exaggeration that the figure of I.Shafarevich is one of the greatest [figures] today in Russian culture, constantly attracting the attention of the people.’134 Clearly if the August 1991 coup had succeeded, Shafarevich and the struggle against ‘Russophobia’ would have become a major component of the new regime’s ideology, as it attempted to contain separatist movements in the republics and the burgeoning democratic movement at home. Shafarevich was not among the patriotic ideologues who joined generals and party hardliners to issue ‘A Word to the People,’ the apocalyptic manifesto that heralded the coup.135 But he would have agreed with their denunciation of leaders ‘who do not love this country, who fawn on their overseas patrons and seek advice and blessing there, overseas,’ and with their hostility towards ‘clever apostates’ who were ‘excommunicating us from the past and debarring us from the future.’136 He would also have sympathised with their warning that ‘our homeland and country, a great state that was given into our care by history, nature and our glorious ancestors, is perishing, breaking up, and being plunged into darkness and non-existence.’137 Amongst the signatories of ‘A Word to the People’ were Valentin Rasputin, the village-prose writer whom Shafarevich regarded as Russia’s greatest living philosopher, and also Vyacheslav Klykov, the sculptor who had joined Shafarevich’s ‘troika’ against Oktyabr.138 After the failure of the coup, when some liberal writers demanded that action be taken against Rasputin, Shafarevich rushed to his defence, deriding the ‘literary Chekists’ who ‘spit at a great writer’ but lack the courage to ‘denounce him openly for his love of Russia.’139 He singled out Evtushenko for special vilification, contrasting his paean to the hydroelectric ‘Bratsk Power Station’ with Rasputin’s elegy for the village destroyed by such a feat of socialist construction in Farewell to Matera. Appealing not just to Russians ‘by blood, but to everyone who stands on the soil of Russian culture and history’ to rally in defence of Rasputin, Shafarevich concluded: ‘Our temples are destroyed, the villages are devastated, the forests perish…. All this we permitted. But somewhere we must stop!’140 In the euphoric aftermath of August 1991, the mercurial ‘foremen of perestroikta’ reinvented themselves as liberal democrats, but Shafarevich made no concessions to the spirit of the times. His intransigence was exemplified by his essay ‘Ten Years since Rusofobiya’ which appeared in the December issue of Nash Sovremennik, on the eve of the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union. Here Shafarevich lamented the realisation of his prophecies about the Russophobic threat, whilst putting his own prescience on record. If in 1982 he had been forced to intuit the contours of ‘Russophobia’ in samizdat, ‘now, with complete glasnost, with the merging of our and the émigré book markets, such difficulties do not exist.’141 He claimed that ‘Russophobia’ was ‘now becoming a powerful and obvious force,’ and that ‘almost everything that I cited in the old work from samizdat and tamizdat now rushes up in mass editions.’142 At the vanguard of this onslaught were the protagonists of perestroika. Thus former Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, by endorsing a role for UN peacekeeping forces in crisis zones of the

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disintegrating Soviet Union, became a spiritual successor to Yanov as an ideologist of occupation.143 But the leading villain was Aleksandr Yakovlev, ‘the architect of perestroika,’ whose 1972 article ‘Against Historicism,’ denouncing Russian nationalism from a strictly Leninist position, had earned him the eternal enmity of Russophile intellectuals. Shafarevich linked that polemic to a more recent ‘Russophobic’ article by Yakovlev, ‘The Syndrome of the Enemy,’ which dispensed vague generalisations about the psychological legacy of tsarist militarism on the national gene-fund. In Yakovlev’s evolution, contended Shafarevich, ‘the ideology of the “Small People” merged with that of the ruling party stratum.’144 Shafarevich used this polemic not merely to rebut his critics, but also to use their arguments as ‘material for an analysis of the phenomenon described in [Rusofobiya].’145 Under the subheading, ‘The Small People reads Rusofobiya,’ he complained that he was struck by ‘the gulf of mutual misunderstanding’ and by the fact that ‘our reasoning moved on different, non-intersecting planes.’146 Nevertheless, he offered a cursory refutation of some of the most common objections to his thesis. Against those who ‘quoted a standard selection’ of ‘Russophobic’ precedents in the canon of Russian nineteenth-century literature, he argued that most of these unpatriotic lapses had occurred in personal letters and diaries that were unpublished during their authors’ lifetimes, private utterances that were no more representative of their authors’ true sentiments than ‘words erupting between a husband and wife during an argument.’ As for Lermontov’s poem ‘Nemytaya Rossiya,’ its authorship was disputed, and its frequent republication in Soviet textbooks could only reflect the prevalence of ‘Russophobia.’ An exception was Chaadaev, whose work showed ‘only the existence of Russophobia…as one component of his enigmatic world-view.’ By contrast, the ‘contemporary Small People’ was passing public and premeditated judgement upon Russia’s history and people, in analytical articles published in journals intended for the widest circulation.147 For Shafarevich, the decade since Rusofobiya provided grounds for contesting one central tenet of the Russophobic case. He argued that events had vindicated his rejection of the ‘Small People’s’ warnings about the danger of Russian fascism: It is not Russians who chant in Kishinev: ‘Chushki [a derogatory term for Russians], hold your meetings in Siberia,’ and where someone beat to death a Russian youth because he spoke Russian on the street. It is not Russians who carry placards, ‘Immigrants, out of Lithuania,’ and it was an Estonian people’s deputy who wrote that Russians are derived from women raped by Tatars. Azerbaijanis and Armenians, Georgians and Abkhazians, Georgians and Ossetians, are killing each other, Meskhetians are being slaughtered by Uzbeks, but it is unheard of that anyone is killed by Russians, whilst there were pogroms against Russians in Alma Ata, Dushanbe, Tuva. And refugees of every nationality are flowing into Russia, particularly into Moscow.148 On the contrary, argued Shafarevich, this evidence of Russian virtue confirmed his basic contention about the ‘[Jewish] national orientation of the Small People,’ which was epitomised by the hysteria of the media and left-wing intellectuals after the ‘incident’ at the Central House of Writers, and their indifference towards other, far more serious

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ethnic clashes.149 Shafarevich also implied that this orientation motivated the prevalence of accusations of anti-Semitism in the responses to Rusofobiya, whilst ignoring its central preoccupation with ‘Russia’s fate, the tragedy of a people standing between existence and non-existence under the burden of unremitting pressure on its national consciousness.’150 Despite settling scores with his polemical adversaries, Shafarevich ended the essay on a conciliatory note. He acknowledged the sincerity of one of his Jewish critics, B.Kushner, who had appealed to him to recognise that we also feel pain, like you, that we also love our children, and that it is just as difficult to watch nails being driven into their eye-sockets, as it would be for you (God forbid!) to see [this being done] to your own children. Admitting that he understood Kushner’s emotion, Shafarevich turned the quotation against his critics and against all those who identified Russian nationalism with fascism, and declared that ‘we have just as much right to speak of our pain’: We [Eastern Slavs] experienced as much of a catastrophe as you did, and it lasted for 25 years. There was a famine in Ukraine which in one year carried off 5–7 million people…. During the war, the population of Belorussia was depleted by one quarter…. The Jews during this period were freed from the Pale of Settlement…and moved from the villages to the cities, and mainly to large cities, and they overtook the other peoples of the USSR many times over in terms of level of education and number of scholarly degrees. But the Russians, by contrast, had their gentry and clergy destroyed, the Russian village was annihilated, and the birth rate fell precipitously. It is precisely the Russian and not at all the Jewish people which today faces the threat of extinction.151 It was a viewpoint that was echoed by a Jewish author in Vek XX i Mir, who had called for Jews ‘to repent first’ and who admitted that during the first quarter of the century, ‘we should have shown the greatest circumspection and tact’ towards Russians. Quoting this concession approvingly, Shafarevich concluded that ‘there is a possibility to understand each other,’ and that ‘success would be at least to understand, without reaching agreement.’152

The ideologue of the red-brown alliance When Shafarevich was finally elected Academician in January 1992, he had become a pariah in international academic circles. In April Nezavisimaya Gazeta printed a letter from US mathematicians calling on him to renounce his anti-Semitic stance.153 Asked about the letter by Literaturnaya Rossiya, Shafarevich quipped that ‘I hope you don’t suspect me of reading Nezavisimaya Gazeta?’ and proceeded to read out an admiring statement by US mathematicians during the 1970s, signed by several of his recent detractors.154 Three months later, the president of the US Academy of Sciences, Frank

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Press, wrote to Shafarevich, accusing him of anti-Semitism and insinuating that he had a role in the Steklov Institute’s discriminatory policy towards Jews. He stated that the academy would be pleased if he would resign his membership.155 That week, in what the liberal press perceived as a concession to foreign criticism, Shafarevich’s name disappeared from the list of members of the editorial college of Prokhanov’s militant nationalist broadsheet Den (though it was obviously motivated by ideological considerations).156 In August Shafarevich responded with a rebuttal of Press’s accusations as ‘mad and disgusting.’ He acknowledged that Rusofobiya contained criticism of a tendency of Jewish publicists and Jewish revolutionaries, but claimed that the text made it clear that these currents did not coincide with the entire Jewish nation, and hence ‘my work can be considered anti-Semitic only to the same degree that criticism of Russian communism is anti-Russian.’ Taking the offensive, he noted that ‘I would never allow myself to make such statements about an entire people or country, like [President Reagan’s statement on] “the evil empire,”’ and contrasted the pressure for his removal with the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ refusal to countenance discussion of Sakharov’s expulsion. Deriding Press’s allegations about his influence upon the institute’s admissions policy as ‘comical,’ Shafarevich observed that he had been ‘barely tolerated’ in his section, ‘from which people were only dismissed and never appointed,’ and cited a 1979 report to a Paris colloquium on anti-Semitism, which had extolled him as a rare exception—alongside Sakharov and Orlov—to the passively obedient majority in Soviet science.157 Yet despite scoring some telling points in his clash with Press, the damage to Shafarevich’s international reputation was irreparable, and he continued to attract foreign criticism as his political star rose in post-Soviet Russia. In early 1993 Izvestiya published an open letter to him from over 200 French scholars including Nobel laureates, who accused him of betraying his scholarly vocation and giving a quasi-scientific façade to medieval prejudices in Rusofobiya.158 Such notoriety only enhanced Shafarevich’s reputation in Russian opposition circles. As an anti-communist and a nationalist, he also benefited from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-establishment of a Russian state. In his first major article of the postSoviet era, ‘Russia at One with Itself,’ Shafarevich expressed satisfaction with the end of arguments against ‘those who loved this country and feared its demise’ and who defended communism as the only ‘clamp’ holding the multinational state together. Now he called for the country’s liberation from the power of party functionaries; epitomised by Yeltsin and his entourage, as the first step towards a ‘national policy, or even, however unusual it might sound, a Russian policy.’159 Noting that no one would have believed in the de-Nazification of Germany if the leadership consisted of people who had merely disavowed their Nazi Party membership, Shafarevich called for the creation of an Anti-Communist Committee, on the model of the Anti-Fascist Committee that was ‘rather an academic exercise’ in Russia.160 It was not a message that would have been congenial to the left-wing currents in the emerging coalition of irreconcilable opposition, though a condensed version of Shafarevich’s article was published by the banned Communist Party’s embattled flagship, Pravda.161 A few months later, Mikhail Antonov, another patriotic ideologue with a dissident past, praised Shafarevich as ‘one of the greatest scholars and thinkers of the world at the end of the twentieth century,’ but insisted that ‘one cannot accept his understanding of socialism as the striving to death of

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millions of our compatriots, who gave their lives to the cause of constructing socialism, and still believe in this idea.’162 But militants from both tendencies of the radical opposition would have welcomed Shafarevich’s scorn for the democrats’ post-August triumphalism and his inflammatory indictment of the ‘progressive media.’ Developing his critique of freedom of expression, Shafarevich declared that ‘there was no basis to evaluate the people so lowly, for all our political unpreparedness, as to ascribe to them an understanding of freedom as the possibility of feasting their eyes upon obscene photographs in newspapers or getting drunk on scathing abuse of high officials’ since ‘freedom is the possibility to influence one’s fate, and the people has been deprived of it, as before.’163 There might be a free ballot, but the real voters were ‘those who supply us with information.’164 Shafarevich also accused the media of celebrating businessmen playing the stock-market or parliamentarians travelling abroad as ‘heroes of our time,’ whilst the ordinary people ‘were in the camp of the defeated’: another echo of the eternal struggle between the Russophobic ‘Small People’ and the ‘Great People.’ According to Shafarevich, ‘the pugnacious, insulting, banal [and] scathing style of the mass media was inciting more and more bitterness and irritation.’165 As the price liberalisation and economic disarray of early 1992 eroded popular support for the reformers, the disarrayed opposition began to exploit that ‘bitterness and irritation,’ mobilising its adherents both inside parliament and on the streets. The first skirmish occurred on Armed Forces Day, 23 February, when OMON troops violently dispersed demonstrators marching to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In his habitual oracular tone, Shafarevich declared that future textbooks would mark the day as ‘a turning point,’ and discovered a new act of ‘Russophobic’ sacrilege: The day when the people were to be shown who was boss was chosen profoundly symbolically…. It was the day of remembering the sacrifices made in the Great War. The people had to be severed from this holy memory.166 He later castigated the media for its one-sided account of the confrontation, claiming that ‘elementary decency demanded that representatives of both sides be invited to the studio: both the organisers of the beatings, and those who were with the beaten,’ but instead ‘we saw and heard only one side.’167 Apparently Shafarevich saw no contradiction between such demands for even-handedness, and his celebration of the demonstrations for the suppression of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses: pluralism was not for one’s opponents. The struggle over the media erupted into new violent clashes during the summer of 1992. In June, radical agitators from Viktor Anpilov’s ‘Working Russia’ movement picketed the Ostankino state television centre, demanding changes to its management and programming policy, and alleging that it was ignoring the interests of the Russian people because it was in the hands of ‘agents of world Zionism.’168 In an article about the ‘siege at Ostankino,’ Shafarevich traced the one-sidedness of the media to the appointment of Egor Yakovlev, editor of Moscow News and a ‘foreman of perestroika,’ as the ‘political’ director of Central Television in early 1992. Observing that the demonstrators had called for ‘proportional national representation amongst Central Television employees,’ Shafarevich complained that instead of inviting them into the studio to express their

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views, ‘and perhaps change their minds,’ the press had branded them anti-Semites and reduced the Ostankino protests to ‘a struggle against Jews.’169 A few weeks later, hardline lawmakers in the Supreme Soviet launched a new bid to muzzle the media. In mid-July they voted to subordinate the newspaper Izvestiya to the parliament. They also discussed a proposal to create an oversight committee for the media.170 The pressure from the streets and the legislature took its toll. In November, Yeltsin signed a decree dismissing Yakovlev for ‘gross mistakes in the representation of ethnic conflicts,’ an ambiguous accusation apparently aimed at assuaging nationalist rage.171 As late as the summer of 1992, Shafarevich was avowing that ‘I have decided once and for all that I will never participate in any political organisation.’172 But he was inexorably drawn into political activity. At patriotic functions, he was in great demand as a speaker. The Russian National Assembly, an opposition group headed by Viktor Aksyuchits, elected him to its central committee without even asking permission.173 Amidst the former apparatchiks, generals and secret policemen who predominated in the opposition ranks, Shafarevich was unique as a visionary and prophet, as a counterweight to balance the democratic icon, Sakharov. Despite its failed predictions about democracy as an endangered species, Rusofobiya did anticipate one fundamental event of the postSoviet era: the imposition of Western models on Russia in the market reform process, as personified by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sacks. Some patriotic ideologues clearly regarded Shafarevich as a kind of secret weapon that terrified the Yeltsin regime. ‘It seems to me, Igor Rostislavovich,’ one interviewer told him, ‘that for many in power your name acts like a red rag to a bull,’ and added that ‘your conception of the “Small People,” advanced in Rusofobiya, hits…the bull’s eye.’174 It was an exaggeration, but indicative of Shafarevich’s authority in the opposition, as it emerged from its post-August wilderness. Accepting the proffered role of prophet, Shafarevich responded that: I would like to have been wrong in this situation, but we see that there are really people in power who operate on ‘this country’ like something foreign to them, as if it were not living, but some kind of mechanism. On the ‘Jewish factor,’ he observed that: again there has appeared a large number of influential people, natives of the Jewish milieu, who are continuing the old tradition: on the one hand, [holding] an attitude towards ‘this country’ as something foreign and unsympathetic; and on the other, [exerting] a very decisive influence upon it. But he emphasised that these ‘power-lovers’ should ‘in no way be regarded as representatives of the Jewish people,’ since they were not particularly concerned about the fate of the Jewish people. As evidence, he contrasted the media reaction to the ‘scandal…on the level of a restaurant brawl’ at the Central Writers’ House with the silence about the slogan, ‘We will drown Russians in Jewish blood,’ that was chanted at Kishenev demonstrations.175

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That month, June 1992, Shafarevich was a major presence at the founding congress of the Russian National Sobor, the first serious attempt to unite the patriotic and Communist opposition to the Yeltsin administra-tion. In a Spenglerian address intended to mollify communist listeners, Shafarevich declared that the USSR ‘could be compared with the Roman Empire’ and was ‘the historic creation of the Russian people.’176 The congress resolutions reflected his core idea, denouncing the ‘Russophobia and Judaeophilia of the Yeltsin team’, which was classified as ‘an administration of national betrayal.’177 As an antidote, the congress insisted that Russia’s political, cultural, and scientific life must be managed on the basis of the ‘proportional representation of Russians and people of other nationalities,’ a proposal echoing the demands of the Ostankino demonstrators and clearly directed against Jewish over-representation in these fields.178 Amongst the prominent cultural figures at the congress, film-maker Stanislav Govorukhin, who would soon absorb ‘Russophobia’ into his own political vocabulary, admitted that he was ‘in agreement with many thoughts statedhere.’179 Despite his ideological pre-eminence, it was unlikely that Shafarevich was comfortable with the election as Sobor chairman of ex-KGB General Aleksandr Sterligov, who threatened to use Andropov methods’ against the Mafia and ‘to act like the organisers of the perestroika of the 1930s.’180 Tension between the two men erupted into a public clash in early 1993 after Shafarevich made critical remarks about the KGB in Den.181 Sterligov retaliated with an attack on Shafarevich’s dissident past, castigating him for failing ‘to understand that, having joined efforts with the enemies of Russia in a struggle with the organs of state security, you made a contribution to the destruction of the country’ and warned that ‘time and history still have to present a bill for this action.’182 Nevertheless, their disagreements did not extend to the pernicious role of the Jewish ‘Small People.’ The Sobor published a series of books in ‘General Sterligov’s Library,’ which included the Protocols and other major anti-Semitic texts. In 1994, Moscow News reported the existence of a special section of the Sobor that monitored instances of ‘Russophobia, masonry and anti-national activity within Russia.’183 The extent of Shafarevich’s influence upon the Sobor became clear when Sterligov’s accusations were elaborated in the Sobor’s newspaper by Tatyana Glushkova, ‘the Brünhilda of national radicalism,’ who was obviously resentful that Shafarevich, a former dissident, was regarded as ‘truly “our” patriotic conscience and honour.’184 Asking whether that ‘our’ also meant ‘mine,’ Glushkova proceeded to take the central argument of Rusofobiya, and turn it against its author, arguing that Shafarevich was a typical representative of the ‘small nation.’ In his soul, she alleged, he remained a ‘bourgeois democrat’ and a carrier of ‘the poisonous Sakharov spirit.’ He was ‘a godfather of perestroika.’185 No accusation could be more damaging in red-brown circles. Aleksandr Kazintsev rushed to Shafarevich’s defence, noting that his influence ‘is really very strong, if Glushkova speaks of the “subordination” and even “the unification of spirits.”’186 Dismissing Glushkova’s attack on Shafarevich’s dissident past, Kazintsev extolled Shafarevich’s contribution to From under the Rubble as ‘his response to Sakharov and other Russophobes.’187 The real source of Sterligov’s hostility was undoubtedly the success of the National Salvation Front (NSF), which rapidly eclipsed the Sobor as the leading force of the ‘irreconcilable opposition.’ Shafarevich was one of the Front’s original instigators and

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guiding spirits. In June 1992, he had proposed ‘salvation’ as ‘a truly great idea’ that could unite the fractious opposition against the regime: Of course, when I speak about salvation, to a significant degree it is about salvation from them, the rulers—in some way we need to produce solidarity between our forces against the administration of people who are not in fact interested in the preservation of Russia…. I think that there, ‘up top,’ there are different people, but there are those who are consciously leading Russia to its ruin—for me this is beyond doubt.188 Five months later, Shafarevich was a member of the organising committee for the NSF’s founding congress, which excoriated Yeltsin’s ‘occupation regime.’ Shafarevich explained that ‘the current administration represents forces and interests whose centre of gravity lies outside our borders,’ yet refused to resign, and so ‘there is a need for a powerful, weighty force, capable of exerting the necessary pressure.’189 The congress also proclaimed the ‘historic reconciliation’ of ‘Reds’ (Russian Communist Party leaders like Gennadii Zyuganov and G.Saenko) and ‘Whites’ (former democrats like Ilya Konstantinov, and Mikhail Astafev, and radical nationalists like Nikolai Lysenko). For these diverse luminaries of the anti-Yeltsin opposition, the struggle against ‘Russophobia’ was a unifying cause, as Aleksandr Kazintsev explained to the readers of Nash Sovremennik: The Programme of the Front frightens those who hate the Russian revival. ‘The slanderers of Russia,’ as Pushkin called them. Only these people. For those who link their future with the motherland, the programme offers an ideal opportunity to unite, to put aside secondary disagreements in the current fatal days.190 Their cohesion was boosted further by Yeltsin’s decree banning the NSF as unconstitutional. Speaking like a ‘bourgeois democrat’ in the name of the separation of powers that he had denounced in Rusofobiya, Shafarevich accused Yeltsin of ‘usurping the function of the judiciary.’191 The Constitutional Court agreed, and quashed the decree in January 1993. That month, Shafarevich joined Russophile writers Vadim Kozhinov, Mikhail Lobanov, and Valentin Rasputin on a trip to Vologda. In one speech, Shafarevich divided the Russian people into two parts, those who consciously supported the patriotic movement and ‘the silent’ people, whilst excluding ‘those who on the wave of perestroika divided the country, because their centre is not here but somewhere in the West.’192 Insisting that the nation was not doomed to catastrophe, he claimed that ‘from here, from the depths of Russia, will come salvation, here resistance is beginning.’193 The allegiance of the ‘silent people’ was tested in March 1993, when Yeltsin made his first abortive attempt to dissolve the parliament. The resulting constitutional crisis was resolved by an agreement to hold a referendum on a vote of confidence in the president and the reform process. The compromise was a major defeat for the NSF and the hardline factions in parliament, and Shafarevich warned that the referendum might be the last chance to influence the national fate at the ballot box. To explain the danger posed by the

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democrats, Shafarevich drew a new apocalyptic scenario with Yeltsin cast in the role of aspiring dictator: I fully permit such a development of events, where future historians will write of the current referendum as the last vote, when a choice was still possible. And after coming to power, a ruler, who is acknowledged by the progressive, truly democratic part of the people, agrees to accept unlimited life powers and is rewarded with the title ‘Benefactor.’ He abolishes the destructive Congress, closes slanderous opposition papers and bans ‘red-brown’ opposition parties, whose leaders then mysteriously disappear. From that time on in elections the people unanimously express confidence in and love for the Benefactor.194 The ‘Benefactor’ was not Stalin, tyrant of a superpower, but the patriarch of a Latin American dictatorship, whose characteristic features Shafarevich discerned in contemporary Russia: the convergence of governmental and criminal structures, the subordination of foreign and economic policy to other countries, the impoverishment of the population and the separation of a rich elite.195 Shafarevich proved a poor prophet: Yeltsin would never become this tyrannical ‘Benefactor.’ But in his portrayal of contemporary Russia as a Latin American banana republic, he was vindicating a detail in his 1989 prophecy in Novyi Mir about ‘the liberal path to the abyss.’ The political crisis was exacerbated by the fate of ethnic Russians in the former union republics. For the NSF, the flood of Russian refugees from Central Asia and the Caucasus, and discrimination against those who remained, epitomised ‘Russophobia’ in action. After Estonia and Latvia deprived ethnic Russians of citizenship and voting rights, Shafarevich likened their fate to blacks in South Africa under apartheid.196 When civil war erupted in Moldova in mid-1992, he insisted that Transdniester was pure Russian soil.197 In May 1993 he visited Sevastopol, an ethnic Russian enclave in the Crimea and the base for the Black Sea fleet, and saw ‘how painfully the rupture [with Russia] was reflected in the population of the town.’198 An NSF appeal in support of the demands of Black Sea fleet sailors and Sevastopolers inspired a Supreme Soviet resolution reaffirming the Russian status of Sevastopol on 9 July 1993, which caused outrage in Ukraine.199 As a leading member of the ‘Russian Sevastopol’ Public Committee, Shafarevich pressed ahead with the campaign even after the demise of the Supreme Soviet. When the head of the Black Sea fleet’s press-service was murdered in suspicious circumstances in December 1993, Shafarevich’s name headed an appeal from the committee to the Russian General Prosecutor, demanding action.200 A few weeks later, in early 1994, the committee addressed a submission to the new Duma, arguing that the Supreme Soviet resolution remained in force and that a Russian Sevastopol was not an incitement but a barrier to instability. This geopolitical fact, according to the Russian Sevastopol committee, was recognised by all but ‘a small number of Galician fanatics, who are trying to infect Orthodox Ukraine with Russophobia.’ The Russophobic aggression of these fanatics was only a ‘consequence of the connivance of the Russian leadership, which is engaged in economic and political charity towards those who betray and humiliate Russia.’201

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Nor did the carnage and atrocities unleashed by the Yugoslav civil war serve as a salutary illustration of the need for caution in ethnic and territorial disputes. In January 1993, Shafarevich joined Vladimir Osipov and NSF leaders in an appeal to the Russian people to support Serbia against ‘intervention in the Slavic world’, not only morally, but also by sending volunteers to fight for the Serbian cause. They also demanded the removal of the ‘anti-Slav’ Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev (who had already provoked nationalists with his comparisons of post-Soviet Russia to Weimar Germany, ‘when part of the democrats started passing over to nationalist positions’).202 The connection between ‘Russophobia’ and the Yugoslav civil war was made explicit by Mikhail Lobanov, who praised the Serbs for understanding that their religion was the ‘main enemy of world government, of Zionism’: And the Zionists themselves openly tell us this: their main enemy now is Orthodoxy. This has been repeated by the famous author of the maxim ‘Russia is a bitch,’ A.Sinyavskii, who cries out that the main danger to the world is Orthodox fascism.203 In turn, Serbian nationalist intellectuals flattered the prejudices of their Russian supporters. In Literaturnaya Rossiya, Dragos Kalajic emphasised their common struggle against the (non-Orthodox) West by recalling photographs of the meeting of the smiling and ‘deeply satisfied’ Pope John Paul II with Sakharov and ‘the main preacher of Russophobia (Bonner).’204 It was an ironic conjuncture, for Kalajic was normally a pedlar of Westerniser rather than Slavophile prejudices. He was in the habit of denouncing Bosnian Muslims for ‘not belonging to the European family of nations.’ For Kalajic, the ‘semi-Arab’ Bosnian’s main shortcoming was that he was ‘not capable of understanding the essence of one of the basic traits of the European, namely the institution of the uniqueness of personal freedom which is fundamentally above any collectivity.’205 It was precisely the same shortcoming that Custine and many ‘Russophobes’ found in the ‘semiTatar’ Russians. Shafarevich’s 70th birthday in June 1993 was fêted by the patriotic press. Under a front-page photograph, captioned ‘Knight of Truth,’ Sovetskaya Rossiya praised Shafarevich for ‘doing a lot to make us understand that under conditions of national-state catastrophe there is no place for ideological and political disagreements.’206 Nash Sovremennik described Shafarevich’s works as ‘landmarks in the national and social selfconsciousness of Russia’ and claimed that he had ‘with complete precision predicted the events that became realities at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s.’207 The most extensive panegyric appeared in Literaturnaya Rossiya, where village-prose writer Vasilii Belov lamented that Shafarevich’s works remained inaccessible to many, but recalled that such neglect was also the fate of his great Slavophile predecessors: ‘Neither Dostoevskii, nor Leontev, nor Pobedonostsev or Father Ioann Kronshtadtskii were heard by their contemporaries [who] believed Chernyshevskii and Pisarev.’ In similar fashion ‘the books and voices of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn were considered completely sufficient’ by Shafarevich’s contemporaries. Belov, however, put Shafarevich on a higher pedestal than both of them. To a patriot, Shafarevich’s supremacy over Sakharov was obvious, ‘particularly now, when, not without the help of Shafarevich, the mask of people’s intercessors has been ripped off the Russophobes.’ A contributor to

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From under the Rubble could not have ‘called for the dismemberment of his country into a multiplicity of small states, as was done by the late Academician Sakharov.’ As for Shafarevich’s former collaborator Solzhenitsyn, Belov pointed out that he was living in ‘the quiet prosperity of the state of Vermont,’ and was making pro-Yeltsin statements that ‘greatly disappointed me,’ whilst Shafarevich lived in ‘seething Moscow.’208 During the summer of 1993, the crisis in ‘seething Moscow’ approached critical mass, and Shafarevich found himself at the epicentre of the power struggle. In an interview with Pravda, he praised Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi, who had just promised the restoration of the Soviet Union, as a fine leader whom he would like to see as head of state.209 He also celebrated the red-brown parliamentary leaders Sergei Baburin, Nikolai Pavlov, and Ilya Konstantinov as ‘wonderful orators.’210 Attempts to transform the Front into a disciplined party produced a split at its second congress on 24–5 July 1993, resulting in the departure of Baburin and Pavlov. But Shafarevich’s ideological influence was still obvious. In phrases bearing the hallmarks of his thought, the congress’s concluding declaration accused the ‘ruling clique, infected with the virus of betrayal and corruption, [of] carrying out the social and political fiat of the West, openly proAmerican, and blatantly Russophobic.’ Echoing a second apocalyptic Shafarevich theme, it stated that ‘only the people can decide their fate: either they lose their motherland and become enslaved, or they turn their back on the decaying regime and bring order into their own house.’211 But the congress declaration was overshadowed by the rhetorical menaces of Konstantinov, who warned that ‘we must cease playing according to the rules by which our political opponents bind us’ and that ‘either we go over to decisive action and sweep away the criminal regime or we lose Russia.’212 Behind the façade of unity, the NSF was riven by internal conflicts, which would erupt in bitter recriminations after the defeat of the parliament and the arrest of its hardline leaders in October 1993. In a post-mortem to the political crisis, Aleksandr Kazintsev implied that Viktor Anpilov and Ilya Konstantinov were provocateurs, and recalled an NSF evening devoted to Sevastopol in July 1993, when everyone was enthusiastically applauding Konstantinov, but treating Shafarevich coldly.213 The signal for that coldness was Glushkova’s denunciation of Shafarevich as a ‘bourgeois democrat’ typical of the ‘Small Nation.’ Kazintsev lamented this ill-timed attack on a patriotic idol: Dear readers, one cannot act in this way! They hear the call: Long live Shafarevich! They hear the whistle: Down with Shafarevich! The point is that if a person with such services before Russia can be compromised in your eyes, that means that you can be convinced of anything.214 For Kazintsev, the ferocity of Glushkova’s attack was testimony to Shafarevich’s stature as a thinker whose works were ‘on the level of traditional Russian culture.’ Precisely because Shafarevich was not a politician competing for power, he was a threat to those with designs upon Russia: The object of the struggle is Russian man. Subordinate his spirit and the riches of the earth will fall into the hands of our enemies. They want to sever us from the heritage of Rublev and Pushkin, Dostoevskii and

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Tolstoy. To lumpenise not only externally, but also spiritually. They are trying to drive [us] into a spiritual ghetto. Please, scream there, it is even welcomed—yell hysterically. Only thinking is forbidden… Igor Shafarevich by his very existence, by his scale, by the profundity and charm of his thoughts interferes with the implementation of these plans.215 It was an astute observation. Shafarevich’s power lay in his apparent moderation, in his ability to denounce by argumentation, rather than argue by denunciation. He incarnated militant nationalism with a scholarly face. Despite Glushkova’s anathema, Shafarevich’s ideological authority reached new heights as the political crisis approached its violent dénouement. In September 1993, a fortnight before the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet, the red-brown parliamentary opposition paid homage to him by holding hearings on ‘Russophobia: Fact or Fiction’ in the Blue Room at the White House. It was originally assumed that Shafarevich would chair the proceedings, but according to Russkaya Mysl, ‘although Igor Rostislavovich sat on the presidium, he limited himself to his own report, and the rest of the time smiled into space, only sometimes nodding his head approvingly when one of the speakers cited one of his works.’216 Shafarevich’s speech began with nineteenth-century Westernisers, and continued through Lenin and Trotskii to his contemporary adversaries. He was followed by the press-secretary of the notorious anti-Semite, Metropolitan Ioann of St Petersburg and Ladozh, who declared that ‘the Israeli people ended its existence with the terrible crime of god-murder’ and that ‘after this it ceased to exist as a constructive spiritual community.’217 Even more ominous was the address by patriotic ideologue and Doctor of Philosophy Eduard Volodin, who offered a definition of ‘Russophobia’ of such turgid scholasticism that it reminded one observer of Marxist-Leninist textbooks: Russophobia is a way of relating to the Russian person and to the Russian nation, in accordance with which the basic features of the national character, national spiritual and cultural values, traditions and methods of management are assessed negatively. Russophobia is simultaneously practical activity for flouting the rights, for discrediting, for discriminating against the nation or its representatives, leading ultimately to the exclusion of the nation or its representatives from public life and participation in the historical process.218 Volodin offered a list of seven examples of ‘Russophobia as a state policy’ They ranged from the destruction of the nation’s military potential and the criminalisation of its political structures to ‘the struggle against the Orthodox Church initiated by the law on freedom of conscience.’ But the list was headed by the secession of Chechnya, which epitomised the ‘Belovezh anti-Russian actions of the regime.’219 A fortnight later, Yeltsin threw down the gauntlet to the NSF by dissolving the Supreme Soviet to pave the way for elections and a new constitution. During the twoweek standoff, the House of Soviets became a haven for paramilitary neo-fascist groups. The most prominent was Aleksandr Barkashov’s Russian National Unity (RNE), which combined a raised arm salute, a swastika-like insignia, and virulent anti-Semitism, yet the

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adversaries of Russophobia seemed unconcerned about this obvious identification with the Nazi invader. The ensuing eruption of violence, climaxing in the attack on Ostankino television complex and various newspaper offices by pro-parliament militants, marked not only the apogee of the constitutional crisis and the eclipse of moderate voices. It was also the logical culmination of the vilification of the media, the ‘Sixth Monarchy,’ in the opposition press. It was the last ‘grandiose demonstration’ against ‘Russophobia.’ But the bloodshed evoked no regrets from Shafarevich. Following his habitual identification of Yeltsin-era democrats and Bolshevik revolutionaries, he argued that these events ‘copied the basic landmarks of the events of the beginning of 1918: the dissolution of parliament, the shooting of demonstrations, hundreds of victims’—though those who had demonstrated for the Constituent Assembly in 1918 had not been armed with grenade launchers. Without considering his own culpability or that of the NSF, Shafarevich warned that ‘from the blood of the dead has been born a new generation of Russians, who will think differently,’ since ‘paths that seemed forbidden, turned out to be possible: it was discovered that one can fire with machine guns at crowds, and shoot at the parliament with tanks.’ But he also lamented that if only the anti-Yeltsin forces had shown more preparedness and far-sightedness, they would have been victorious.220 In the dark weeks that followed the suppression of the rebellion, while Moscow languished under martial law, while forty-two prominent writers called for the banning of communist and fascist organisations and publications, while Shafarevich’s NSF colleagues were in prison or on the most-wanted list, the beleaguered Russophiles were confronted with an unexpected spectacle. The paragon of ‘Russophobia,’ Andrei Sinyavskii, issued a statement denouncing Yeltsin and defending the right of his ‘irreconcilable opponents’ to freedom of expression. Recalling that ‘for many years I conducted a polemic against Russian nationalists, against “Pamyat,” against Shafarevich,’ Sinyavskii declared that ‘today I am prepared to intercede for my enemy, because my most beloved woman—freedom of speech—is in danger.’221 Predictably pro-Yeltsin liberals were affronted. One admirer of Sinyavskii’s prose, Mikhail Pozdnyaev, asked whether the writer had not dreamt of the consequences of his call, and conjured up an apocalyptic scenario that testified to Shafarevich’s continuing role as the demon of the liberal intelligentsia: [A]n amnesty for Rutskoi and Khasbulatov, the reanimation of their Supreme Soviet, the resignation and trial of Yeltsin, the death penalty for all those who support him, the authorisation of Mr. Prokhanov’s Den, and the awarding of the right to pogroms to the champions of the ‘Russian Order’ [i.e. Barshakov’s fascist RNE] nurtured by Shafarevich—and all for the sake of a ‘most beloved woman—freedom of speech.222 A reconciliation between the radical opposition and dissident rights-defenders, between the leading ‘Russophobe’ and the author of Rusofobiya, would have been a ironic twist of fate for Shafarevich, twenty years since his membership of Sakharov’s Committee on Human Rights. It was a time of bizarre convergences. The prevailing political disorientation was exemplified by an opposition ‘Constitutional Assembly’ attended by leading NSF luminaries, who were addressed by Yalerii Zorkin, the former chief justice of the suspended Constitutional Court, and Oleg Rumyantsev, secretary of the defunct

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parliamentary constitutional commission. After their legalistic speeches, Vladimir Osipov rose to denounce the impending ‘dictatorship of a Russophobic mafia,’ which ‘to the joy of masons, on the directives of the USA, deprived us of our orthodox faith’ in the draft constitution. Another radical orator lamented the ‘premeditated genocide of the Russian people.’ A liberal journalist commented that ‘understandably, after such speeches, Shafarevich had nothing to do on the tribune—he did not take the opportunity to speak when it was given to him.’223 But Shafarevich himself had already formulated the grievances that made the gulf unbridgeable. By the time of the ‘Constitutional Assembly,’ the ‘chimera of a patriotrights-defence bloc’ had been dispelled by Ksenia Myalo, who hurled invective against the rights-defence movement as the epitome of ‘Russophobia.’ Myalo was a major Russophile ideologue, whose work on the Russian peasantry as a civilisation in its own right had influenced Shafarevich.224 Now she claimed that the rights-defence movement ‘was consolidated on three pillars: anti-derzhavnost’, anti-nationality (Russophobia), antimemory,’ which meant ‘the popular, national memory, with its holy relics, which was regularly and even ritually smashed by and desecrated by rights-defenders.’225 Myalo even added a new image, ‘mice in the relic case,’ to the rhetorical arsenal of patriotic publicists: The method [of the rights-defenders] was letting ‘mice into the relic case’ as described by Dostoyevskii in The Possessed, it was the public abuse and mockery of sacred values and traditions. In the period when rightsdefence activity reached its peak, that ‘relic case’ was undoubtedly the Great Patriotic War, and ‘mice’ were let in regularly and in enormous numbers.226 She gave no examples of such ‘mice,’ though presumably Vladimir Voinovich’s Chonkin would have headed the list of sacrilegious rodents. What she forgot was that the ‘chimera of a patriot-rights-defence bloc’ had existed for the first half of the 1970s, when Osipov had declared that the national-patriotic movement saw the human rights movement as an ally, and when the idea of Rusofobiya was still forming in the imagination of a Russophile member of the Committee on Human Rights.227 In the end, the Russophiles did snatch a kind of victory from the jaws of defeat. Most NSF candidates performed poorly in the elections. Mikhail Astafev, Kadet Party leader and one of the leaders of the parliamentary opposition, formed a bloc with candidates from the RSFSR Writers’ Union and the Slavic Union.228 As Moskovskii Komsomolets reported, its list was headed ‘not coincidentally by the world-famous fighter against Russophobia, Igor Shafarevich, and [banned television journalist] ‘Iron Shurik’ Nevzorov.’229 The bloc was unsuccessful, but in a distorted form, its ideas were brought into the new Duma by Vladimir Zhirinovskii, the populist leader of the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, which scored the largest vote on the proportional party lists. Zhirinovskii’s main campaign slogan had been a promise ‘to defend Russians wherever they live.’ It had been a central commitment of Shafarevich and the mainstream patriotic movement, but they must have regarded Zhirinovskii’s ascendancy with suspicion, and not only because of well-founded rumours about his links to the security apparatus and his Jewish ancestry. Despite Zhirinovskii’s habit of praising him, Solzhenitsyn derided

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the demagogue as ‘a caricature of a Russian nationalist,’ and a creature of ‘Russophobic’ designs: ‘It is as if someone has deliberately created such a figure to arouse hatred for Russian patriotism throughout the world and hatred for Russian national consciousness.’230 An equally suspect exponent of Shafarevich’s doctrines was Russian Communist Party leader Gennadii Zyuganov, the paragon of National Bolshevism, who had shared chairmanship of the NSF with Shafarevich, but now went his own way. Appealing to the NSF’s nationalist constituency, Zyuganov traced Russia’s ills not only to Gorbachev’s betrayal of socialism, but also to the concomitant eruption of Russophobia. In ‘Russia over the Abyss,’ a programmatic statement published in the December 1993 issue of Nash Sovremennik, Zyuganov proposed a history of perestroika in which the Soviet Union was not a perpetrator but a victim of Russophobia: Precisely [during perestroika] the attack on communism in the media became clearly linked with attacks on statehood as such. Provocational slogans resounded at full voice: ‘USSR—the empire of evil,’ ‘Patriotism—a trait of scoundrels,’ ‘Russian history—a history of slavery,’ and the like. The propaganda of open Russophobia, [and] furious slander of Russian writers acquired unprecedented scale, and ‘the watch dogs of perestroika’ at the same time choked from outrage on the matter of ‘Russian antisemitism’ and went hysterical in expectation of mythical Jewish pogroms.231 Although Zyuganov ignored Shafarevich’s account of the Jewish role in the October Revolution, this Philippic against ‘Russophobia’ marked a striking convergence between Russia’s leading Communist and the dissident who had not only interpreted socialism as a will-to-death, but had demanded the creation of anti-Communist committees as recently as 1992. Closer to Shafarevich’s position was Stanislav Govorukhin, the film-maker who directed The Russia we Have Lost and conducted a widely publicised series of interviews with Solzhenitsyn during 1992. Now elected to the Duma on the lists of Nikolai Travkin’s Russian Democratic Party, Govorukhin became a vociferous critic of the Yeltsin regime and the ‘Westernisation’ of Russia. In ‘The Great Criminal Revolution,’ he denounced the presence of a ‘fifth column’ that employed ‘Russophobia’ to pave the way for the free market’s assault upon Russian values, for the influx of foreign words and mass culture: The ‘golden pens’ screech, hurrying to create an ideology facilitating the foreign invasion…. The main thing is to inculcate a general directive: Russia is a useless country, its people are coarse and ignorant, it is a country of fools; there was no history in Russia (history of which one might be proud), it was always beaten; what happened in 1917 was not a national tragedy, not the coming of the Anti-Christ, but historically natural; the old Russia was poor and ignorant; its current inhabitants are simply cattle, just look at this parliament; nothing sensible can happen in

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this country, the only thing is to impose Western-style democracy upon it.232 In this fleeting synopsis of Shafarevich’s treatise—adorned with obvious allusions to the transgressions of dissident ‘Russophobes,’ such as Shragin’s claim that Russia had no history—the media criticism of the old parliament became the latest instance of ‘Russophobia.’ Govomkhin also paid homage to Shafarevich in a section of the work titled ‘Does Russia Have a Future?’—the title of his closing article in From under the Rubble.233 Reeling from the shock of the election debacle, the Yeltsin administration tried to come to terms with the voters’ apparent endorsement of ultra-nationalism. A rumour that part of the presidential entourage was ‘secretly learning to pronounce speeches in the style of Pamyat and Russian National Unity’ was reported by no less an authority than Valerii Zorkin, former chairman of the Constitutional Court and now a regular contributor to the opposition press.234 The allegation was not entirely absurd, and its plausibility could be measured by the increasing frequency of references to ‘Russophobia’ by people close to the president. On 23 January 1994, the Chairman of the new Duma’s press committee, Mikhail Poltoranin, once a confidant of the president and a vitriolic opponent of the NSF, gave an interview to Ostankino television in which he denounced journalists for writing in ‘camp Hebrew, an explosive mixture of Russophobia, hatred for traditions, lies and contempt for human dignity.’235 In June, Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, who had defined his career in opposition to the redbrown tendency, warned a conference on ‘the development of tolerance’ that the mass media was being used to propagandise Russophobia and anti-Semitism, and to stir up national hatred, ‘a dangerous disease which cannot be left unnoticed.’236 In 1992, Kozyrev had warned against the Weimar syndrome, when part of the democrats went over to nationalist positions: few then could have suspected that he would embody this fatal slippage, and ultimately become a leading apologist for the war in Chechnya. The post-October ban on the NSF and the defeat of its leading candidates ended Shafarevich’s political career. In the introduction to a 1994 interview with Literaturnaya Rossiya, he was described merely as ‘the head of the Algebra Department of the Steklov Mathematics Institute.’237 But his status as the ideological eminence grise of the patriotic movement was unassailable. A two-volume set of his collected publicistic works appeared in mid-1994, and he contributed regularly to the opposition press.238 As a member of the Committee for the Restoration of Christ the Saviour Cathedral, he denounced the organisers of an avant-garde art exhibition and performance at the site of the demolished church, a public swimming pool. Evidently as a prank, the organisers had invited him to participate in their show. In advance, Shafarevich accused them of blasphemy, and his criticism was vindicated by the subsequent arrest of one of the ‘artists’ for public indecency.239 He also participated in a Nash Sovremennik tour to Irkutsk and Lensk, and deputy editor Kazintsev referred to him as the journal’s ‘pride’ in an address to a ‘congress’ of the rump Russian Writers’ Union.240 This gathering of opposition writers also saw a new tirade against anti-Soviet Russophiles by Tatyana Glushkova, who approvingly cited Aleksandr Zinoviev’s bizarre claim that the leaders of the dissident movement, ‘Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, [and] Shafarevich, (whatever they say now) were put in place and appointed in the West.’241

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She massively elaborated this thesis in a cycle of articles in Molodaya Gvardiya, where she hurled sloganeering abuse against the dissident ‘authorities of betrayal’ like Shafarevich and Solzhenitsyn, and their fellow-travellers, ‘the advocates of betrayal’ like Kozhinov and Kunaev. Complaining that she was not being published by patriotic journals, which were now dominated by former dissidents and émigrés, Glushkova proceeded to discover in their activity the intrigues of Cochin’s ‘Small People’: The psychology of the ‘Small People’ is so clearly evident in the publicistic works, in all the activity of anti-Soviet dissidents (in the wide spectrum, from L.Borodin, Shafarevich, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn ‘here’, to the émigrés M.Nazarov, E.Vagin or Sinyavskii), that one might write an entire separate book about this dissident-émigré ‘Small People’ of Russia. In this connection, Shafarevich’s hurriedly exalted Rusofobiya appears to be merely an accident or even a diversionary maneuver. Or—as a kind of ‘internal dismantling’ of the antisoviet dissident-émigré army, all its ‘legionaries’ having been defeated, [and] which is suffering consciously or subconsciously from Russophobia and to this day stubbornly opposes the GREAT PEOPLE of our country.242 Whilst Shafarevich remained aloof, the ‘advocates of betrayal’ struck back against this ‘Brünhilda of National Bolshevism.’ One could not impugn the reputation of the idol of the Russophiles, and expect to emerge unscathed. Nash Sovremennik editor Stanislav Kunaev acknowledged that after Glushkova’s September 1993 denunciation of Shafarevich as a ‘Russophobe’ and a Mason, he had concluded that it would be improper to publish her.243 Later, he traced her bitterness to his rejection of her proposal, shortly after his appointment as editor in August 1989, that he make her a member of the editorial committee, as a counterweight to Shafarevich.244 Even more vociferous was deputy editor Kazintsev, who found a characteristic antidote to Glushkova’s venom. Virtually accusing her of complicity with the ‘Small People,’ he denounced her failure to join the struggle against ‘Russophobia’: In any case, in [Glushkova’s] articles of recent years—the time of the sharpest confrontation between patriots and the forces of Russophobia. From the middle of the 80s, we were flooded with the ‘denunciations’ of V.Voinovich, V.Grossman, A.Rybakov. But Glushkova did not mutter a word about them.245 In Shafarevich’s defence, Kazintsev pointed to the recent study of Russian nationalism by Sovietologist Walter Lacqueur, whom he identified as an American Jew’ and a ‘Russophobe.’ According to Kazintsev, Lacqueur wrote ‘with special hostility (and understandably so) about the ideologues of the Russian movement—I.Shafarevich, V.Kozhinov,’ and highlighted ‘with vengeful satisfaction’ the ‘internal arguments’ within the extreme right, whilst acknowledging that the attacks on the duo seemed ‘completely unjust—for indeed these people have given much to the patriotic movement.’246 ‘Russophobia’ had many uses.

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Meanwhile the gradual encroachment of nationalist slogans in the stricken Yeltsin administration finally produced an attempt to match its rhetoric and its deeds, with the launching of a destabilisation campaign and then a full-scale invasion of the break-away republic of Chechnya in late 1994. It was the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union that Shafarevich found himself in agreement with the policies of the ‘anti-patriotic regime.’ This convergence was expressed in a programmatic article on ‘the Russian state,’ whose restoration and preservation he regarded as ‘the basic task of the Russian people.’ This task entailed: above all the preservation of the integrity of that accidental fragment of Russia in which we live, and then—the restoration on its basis of an organic state, including the basic lands inhabited by Russians and peoples seeking to live alongside them. The irredentist project was to begin in Chechnya, where according to Shafarevich, ‘the question of Russia’s integrity is now being decided.’ Appealing to patriots not to exploit the regime’s military debacle for political ends, on the model of Lenin and Vlasov, he insisted that ‘in Chechnya, it is not Yeltsin’s tanks, but the Russian army’ that was fighting, and that the memory of October 1993 should not prevent patriots from rallying behind it: Can a few bribed tank crews by their evil deeds of 4 October make our army alien and hostile to us? Of course patriots experience discomfort if even on one question they share the position of Yeltsin and Grachev. But the point is that to take the opposite position, we would find ourselves in the same ranks as Gaidar and Novodvorskaya!247 It was better to be allied with the ‘anti-patriotic regime’ than with the ‘Russophobes.’ For Shafarevich, the lesson of Chechnya was not about the danger of ethnic strife, which he had warned against two decades earlier in From under the Rubble, but about the potential role of the patriotic intelligentsia. In many of the smaller peoples of the former USSR, a decisive contribution was made by intellectuals who ‘were particularly intensely saturated with national emotion.’ In power, they ‘jealously upheld the rights of their nation, sometimes to the point of sharp aggression towards other peoples.’ By contrast, Russia was ruled by an ‘anti-patriotic elite,’ whose policies were aimed at the ‘economic destruction and political weakening of the country,’ whilst the patriotic intelligentsia was ‘disorganised and ideologically disoriented.’248 Shafarevich’s commitment to Russia’s statehood and territorial integrity went beyond rhetoric. In mid-March 1995, after Russian forces finally subdued Grozny, Shafarevich organised a fact-finding expedition to Chechnya with deputies Sergei Baburin and Nikolai Bezborodov, and film director Anton Vasiliev.249 The trip to a war-zone earned him new panegyrics in the patriotic press. Declaring that Shafarevich was ‘especially dear to him,’ Nash Sovremennik ideologue Aleksandr Kazintsev claimed that the academician had earned the right not to participate in such dangerous ventures. Kazintsev proceeded to recall ‘what a vile slander campaign was unleashed against this outstanding patriot…who placed all his enormous authority at the service of the Russian cause, [and

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whom] some suspected almost of treachery.’250 In late May, Shafarevich testified before the parliamentary commission into the origins of the crisis situation in Chechnya, headed by Stanislav Govomkhin. With a typical, almost algebraic reversal of terms, Shafarevich likened the exodus of ethnic Russians from Chechnya under the Dudaev regime to the deportation of Chechens by Stalin during the Second World War. In its report, the government news agency RIA-Novosti did not mention his ultra-nationalist credentials, merely describing him as a ‘human rights champion.’251 Nevertheless, Shafarevich castigated the fourth estate in his address, claiming that ‘the ideology of the mass media is that Russia is an empire, an evil empire…that this empire must be destroyed, and it has not yet been razed to its foundations.’252 A more plausible ‘human rights champion,’ Sergei Kovalyov, the presidential human rights commissioner who had spent Christmas under Russian bombardment in Grozny, was vilified in the patriotic press as the treasonous destroyer of this empire, as the new propagandist of ‘Russophobia.’ According to Aleksandr Prokhanov, ‘by his pharisaic declarations, Kovalyov has given Russophobes of the world a brilliant cause for hatred.’253 Nationalist publicists were particularly incensed by Kovalyov’s readiness to contest their claims to the national heritage. When Kovalyov declared on television that Pushkin and Tolstoy would have been on his side in opposing the war, Vadim Kozhinov issued a rebuttal in the government broadsheet Rossiiskaya Gazeta. Echoing the campaign against Sinyavskii’s Strolling with Pushkin, Kozhinov stated that: I will not address all of the deputy’s judgments about patriotism, but it is impossible to be silent about one of his declarations, for what is at stake is the dignity of Pushkin himself, whom the deputy is trying to sever from patriotism, claiming that the patriot of his era was not Pushkin, but the chief of police, Venkendorf. Obviously alluding to Kovalyov’s appeals to Western public opinion, Kozhinov cited a letter from Pushkin to Venkendorf, composed in 1831 at the height of the Polish rebellion, in which he excoriated ‘embittered Europe’ for attacking Russia ‘not with arms, but with daily furious slanders’ and called upon Russian writers ‘to repel the shameless and ignorant attacks of foreign newspapers.’ Pointing to Pushkin’s poems against ‘palace martyrs’ and ‘slanderers, enemies of Russia,’ Kozhinov concluded that Kovalyov might have difficulty finding predecessors amongst Pushkin’s contemporaries, because ‘Russia has either forgotten them, or remembers them, to put it mildly, unflatteringly.’254 A different angle against the ‘slanderers of Russia’ was taken by Mikhail Kolosov, who claimed that there was a ‘striking similarity’ between the Chechen events and the break-up of the USSR, when democrats cultivated the popular fronts, ‘although it was already clear that these crops were pure thistles, separatism and nationalism, mixed with open Russophobia.’255 According to Kolosov, Kovalyov had returned to Moscow not to tell the truth about Chechnya and the expulsion of native Russians, but ‘to pour oil on the anti-Russian hysteria’ and to earn his Nobel Prize. Just as Gorbachev had received the prize for destroying the USSR, ‘now there is already a candidate for the destruction of Russia.’256 In a similar anti-Russophobic vein, Anatolii Kuzmin described Kovalyov as ‘the most typical hero of our time,’ who, in his passionate advocacy of the human rights

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of Chechens and his failure to defend ethic Russians in Chechnya, ‘so selectively makes an assessment of who is a ‘human being’ and who is ‘non-human’.’257 When Kovalyov and Memorial activists exposed the massacre by Interior Ministry forces at the Chechen village of Samashki, Govorukhin thundered in parliament that the reports of atrocities ‘could only have been composed in a drunken ecstasy of Russophobia.’258 One month after the destruction of Grozny, Kovalyov told a conference that ‘to all of us, the link between the Chechen war and the danger of fascism in Russia is intuitively obvious.’ The mistake of the democrats, he argued, was that they focused upon the danger of fascism ‘from below,’ but the real danger ‘comes not from the streets and squares, but from the cabinets, it is expressed not in declarations, but in decrees and resolutions.’259 The danger was dramatised in March 1995, when Aleksei Vedenkin, a shady figure linked to Aleksandr Barkashov’s fascist Russian National Unity, threatened on television that he would personally execute Kovalyov when he came to power. The resulting scandal provided a pretext for Yeltsin to issue a decree on the struggle against fascism on 23 March. It made little impression upon the patriotic opposition, which promptly announced the creation of its own ‘Anti-Fascist Patriotic Centre,’ whose sponsors included Sergei Baburin’s Russian Public Union, Boris Mironov’s Russian Patriotic Party, and Leonid Petukhov’s Moscow Officers’ Assembly.260 At its launching in May 1995, Baburin described fascism as ‘a form of international Russophobia,’ which was ‘mainly an external danger for Russia, but unfortunately was compounded by the work of a fifth column inside the country.’261 The Centre released a list of ‘fascist influences,’ which ignored authoritarianism and anti-Semitism, but identified the International Monetary Fund, President Yeltsin, the liberal press, the new world order, and an unnamed ‘non-indigenous nation’ that ‘has a country of its own outside Russia,’ an obvious allusion to Israel.262 As he became more convinced of the fascist danger ‘expressed in decrees and resolutions,’ Kovalyov outraged Russophiles with his strident criticism of the heritage of Russian statehood. Shafarevich had condemned the Soviet leadership for being conscious only of their own regime, created by the October Revolution, whilst ignoring the 1,000year history of Russian state-building.263 It was not a reproach that could be levelled against Kovalyov. After being returned to the Duma in the December 1995 elections, he told Izvestiya that ‘the most serious danger for Russia has roots which come out of the pre-revolutionary past,’ and particularly ‘in the traditions of Russian statehood as such.’ The danger was encapsulated by the concept of ‘derzhavnost’,’ a word that was untranslatable into European languages, but which Kovalyov defined as ‘the Asiatic apotheosis of the state as a self-sufficient force, standing outside society and over it.’264 For Ksenia Myalo, Kovalyov’s ‘historiosophy’ was no coincidence, but ‘completely consistent with his practice.’ Writing during the 1996 presidential election campaign, she asserted that anti-Communism was only ‘one of the forms of that unchanging Russophobia, where a freakish dialectic links the militant Marxist-Leninist bugbear “prison of the nations,” Trotskii, Hitler, Allen Dulles, Brzezinski, the “foremen of perestroika” and the “democratic” deputies.’ According to her, this ‘Russophobic’ hatred for the traditions of Russian statehood paradoxically united democrats like Sakharov and Kovalyov and communist publicists, who were ‘playing a game “with two-hands” in which Russia is destroyed.’265

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The patriots had their greatest chance to reassert those ‘traditions of statehood’ in the 1996 presidential elections and their confused aftermath. In Gennadii Zyuganov’s campaign, backed by a ‘Popular Patriotic Bloc,’ the struggle against ‘Russophobia’ was an intermittent theme. One characteristic Zyuganov speech, where the founders of scientific socialism were replaced by the Book of Revelation, excoriated the media for filling the airwaves with ‘a storm of slander, unprecedented in its insolence and obscenity, against the communists and patriots.’ He was particularly outraged that state television had ignored ‘the birth of the luminary of Russian culture, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin,’ whilst persuading Russians ‘that we should celebrate Lucifer’s birthday.’266 Shafarevich was unperturbed by Zyuganov’s apocalyptic sentiments, so symptomatic of the chiliastic socialism he had exposed in The Socialist Phenomenon. Addressing an audience of ethnic Russians in Latvia, Shafarevich declared that one should not fear the establishment of a dictatorship in Russia, since it might even be useful ‘for the concentration of all forces’: The question is what kind of dictatorship? Will it be pro-Russian or proWestern. My position is this: let it be red, white, monarchical, but let one thing live: Great Russia.267 When Yeltsin was re-elected, patriotic publicists blamed not Zyuganov’s rhetorical excesses, but the sinister machinations of the Jewish bankers and media magnates, Gusinskii and Berezovskii.268 Certainly the Communists’ longing for a ‘Great Russia’ was undiminished. In August Zyuganov joined Govorukhin and Rutskoi to launch a ‘Popular-Patriotic Union of Russia,’ in appearance a kind of resurrected NSF, except that this time the Communists were unquestionably the dominant force.269 As the author of The Socialist Phenomenon, Shafarevich was not to play the crucial role he had assumed in 1992–3, but his ideas still embellished the rhetoric of communist orators. At the CPRF congress in the spring of 1997, delegate Yurii Belov of St Petersburg made a new clarion call for a crusade against ‘Russophobia’: Can we not see that a government has been created that has ceased to reflect national and state interests? It reflects the national and state interests of the United States, Israel, and other states, but not Russia’s. It is blatant. Can we not see Zionism being dispensed in covert forms on the TV screen? Can we not see and feel that we are being inculcated with the ideals and way of life of other countries and even of Israel, where Zionism is the state ideology? Yes, we have had our first encounter with this new form of Russophobia.270 When this declaration was broadcast during a television interview, Zyuganov claimed that the quotation had been taken out of context, but proceeded to warn the viewers: ‘Today Russophobia has gained incredible, simply mind-boggling proportions in the country. It’s amazing! It’s humiliating.’ As an example, he recalled a television programme about the disputed authorship of Sholokhov’s works, and then complained that village-prose icon Rasputin ‘is not being shown.’271

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‘Russophobia’ was also implied in the doctrine of national security advanced by General Aleksandr Lebed, who ran third in the first round of the presidential poll. After being co-opted by Yeltsin, who appointed him National Security adviser and Security Council chairman, Lebed warned about the threats posed to Russia’s security not by foreign armies but by Western advertising and Mormon missionaries. Amid the political paralysis that followed Yeltsin’s re-election, whilst the ailing president awaited heart surgery and a succession struggle was being waged between Lebed and rivals in the power ministries, the former KGB set in motion a trial that might have been a prototype for a crackdown against ‘Russophobia’ in Shafarevich’s idealised ‘pro-Russian’ dictatorship. The target was Valeriya Novodvorskaya, the controversial and vociferous leader of the Democratic Union. As a victim of psychiatric repression, as a relentless agitator of the perestroika years, and as a provocative journalist in the liberal press, Novodvorskaya had long been the bête noire of the patriotic opposition.272 Although her defenders described her as a satirist ‘standing somewhere between Saltykov-Shchedrin and Zhvanetskii,’ Novodvorskaya seemed to incarnate ‘Russophobia’ at its most bizarre. Her reputation was such that when a television reporter had offered to arrange a debate with her, Zyuganov had calmly declared that Novodvorskaya was ‘a medical case, and I am not a doctor.’273 Not untypical of her blasphemous hyperbole was this 1990 comment on Russia’s literary heritage: In general I don’t know who can receive aesthetic pleasure from Russian literature, and if it happens, we are dealing with sado-masochism. You become ill from it. After it you go out, as if drunk, and either want to have a long sleep or to hang oneself…. This literature is incompatible with normal human life… Russian literature does not so much describe life as kill it.274 Now she was charged with inciting ethnic discord (article 74–1 of the Russian Criminal Code).275 According to the indictment, she had ‘systematically expressed judgments and propagandised ideas about the inadequacy of the Russian people and its representatives, which undermined respect for them [and] insulted the national dignity of the Russian people.’276 In particular, she was incriminated with statements during 1994 about the ‘laziness, poverty and spinelessness of Russians’ in an interview with Estonian television and disparaging articles about Estonia’s Russian community in the newspaper Novyi Vzglyad. The prosecution had been launched by Moscow FSB chief Yurii Trofimov, a career officer of the KGB’s fifth directorate who had played a notable role in the trials of prominent dissidents like Sergei Kovalyov and Yurii Orlov. ‘Expert’ evidence was provided by Stanislav Roshchin, a KGB employee for twenty years and an avowed Communist, whose credibility was demolished by Novodvorskaya’s lawyer, the prominent human rights barrister Genri Reznik.277 According to the Russian PEN centre, the trial represented ‘the latest touch-stone in the attempted offensive of nationalbolshevism and communists against the intelligentsia, which cannot imagine itself without the right to self-expression.’278 Actually the patriotic press took an ambivalent attitude towards Novodvorskaya’s misfortunes, suspecting a provocation and unwilling to assume the role of persecuting an obvious underdog. Recalling the tendency of perestroika-era officials to link Pamyat and the Democratic Union, Zaftra’s

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correspondent mused that Smirnov-Ostashvili, the Pamyat activist who staged the incident at the Central House of Writers and then died in the camps, was summoning Novodvorskaya from the grave—but then suggested that patriots would maintain their silence about the trial.279 It was sound advice. In the aftermath of Lebed’s fall, the case stalled, with the judge sending it back to the prosecutor for further investigation.280 It was finally quashed in 1997, soon after Trofimov was dismissed for corruption. But Novodvorskaya was undoubtedly correct in her claim that the case had been prepared in anticipation of a Zyuganov presidency. If Shafarevich had been disregarded by the Yeltsin regime, he had obviously found admirers in the security apparatus. Another insight into the future that Russia lost was the apotheosis of Serbian nationalism during the Yugoslav civil war, when Shafarevich’s Serbian radical nationalist counterparts had access to the corridors of power in Belgrade and Pale. The origins of ethnic cleansing can be traced to the publication in September 1986 of The Serbian Memorandum, a statement of Serbian grievances prepared in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and analogous to Rusofobiya in its scholarly pretensions and its warnings of imminent national cataclysm. Eight months later, a second stage took place: nationalist ideologue Dobrica Cosic and members of the radical nationalist Committee of Serbs and Montenegrans were received in parliament by Serbian president Dusan Ckrebic, who told them: ‘This is where you should be.’281 That meeting marked the official embrace of militant nationalism by the Serbian leadership, and the beginning of the rise of Slobodan Milosevic and of the derangement of the Serbian public mind. Shafarevich was never granted such recognition in the Kremlin. The problem was not that Shafarevich shared the hostility towards politicians and men of violence that was innate to many former dissidents. Consider his panegyric to indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, whom Shafarevich extolled as Republika Srpska’s ‘spiritual leader’ after their meeting in 1996: He is a true leader, he sees beyond immediate events. And in his words there was not only no shade of defeat, but one sensed faith in the future of the Serbs.282 Shafarevich claimed that the main aim of his pilgrimage to Serbia had been to discover ‘what gives them strength for the struggle’ against the New World Order, and ‘what we lack, in order to rise at last in the struggle for the future of our country and our people.’283 The answer, for him, was to declare Russia a ‘national Russian and Orthodox state,’ and the model was not only the Republika Srpska: How many times have Jewish intellectuals explained to us what we must do in History and what we must do now. It is now time at last to learn from the Jews—not what they say, but what they are building at home in Israel: a national state with a state religion.284 He even claimed that the ‘overwhelming majority’ of Russians would reacquire their Orthodox allegiance, ‘in the beginning at least as their state religion.’ But the true obstacle to such theocratic dreams, and to the irredentist ethnic cleansing that made Karadzic a war criminal, was not to be found in the faith of Shafarevich’s compatriots. It

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was in the Russian leadership and its erratic commitment to Sakharov’s ideal of a liberal democracy. No ‘true leader’ like Karadzic had reached the pinnacle of power, and embraced Shafarevich’s ideology. ‘Russophobia’ remained an instrument of opposition invective rather than the motive of government policy, or a justification for crimes against humanity. The destructive potential of ‘Russophobia’ remained latent. It would be wrong to dismiss Shafarevich as a complete failure. He played a unique role in Russia’s transition to democracy. He did not merely give his name to illiberalism. He contributed ideas to its ideological arsenal. He provided the opponents of Russian democracy with a post-Leninist lexicon, a version of history, a rogues’ gallery of ‘Russophobes’, and a new justification for irrational prejudices. What Shafarevich theorised became a leitmotif in the works of patriotic intellectuals like Aleksandr Kazintsev and Vadim Kozhinov, and in the speeches of opposition politicians like Stanislav Govorukhin, Aleksandr Rutskoi, Sergei Baburin, and Gennadii Zyuganov. As their world collapsed around them, they turned to ‘Russophobia’ as the explanation for every defeat and every catastrophe, and as a justification for their repeated failure at the polls. The disintegration of the empire and the predicament of ethnic Russians in former republics, the impoverishment caused by Gaidar’s market reforms, the breakdown of order and the rise of the Mafia, the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet and the imposition of a ‘Western-style’ constitution, the eruption of the war in Chechnya and the betrayal of the army in the peace settlement, all became manifestations of the ‘Russophobia’ of the democrats in the Kremlin. The pervasiveness of ‘Russophobia’ in opposition discourse and its success as a mobilising idea can be attributed to its superficial plausibility, its timeliness and its versatility. It was plausible because Shafarevich was responding to provocative stereotypes that were offensive to many more Russians than the core adherents of militant nationalism, and the very existence of these stereotypes about Russian culture provided a precedent for Shafarevich’s own case against Jewish culture. ‘Russophobia’ was timely because it filled a vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bipolar world. For the hacks of the nationalist gutter press, the term became a convenient all-purpose successor to ‘anti-Soviet.’ And it was versatile because the only criteria for ‘Russophobia’ was alleged hostility towards Russia, yet it concealed a specific antiSemitic dimension. Even more than Anti-Zionism, the term became an effective screen for the vilification of Russia’s Jewish minority. For Shafarevich, the road from human rights activism to the abyss of anti-Semitic ideology was complex and arduous, but not without its own logic. Shafarevich exemplified the perilous slippage from the advocacy of human rights to national rights to national chauvinism that threatened every East European society emerging from totalitarianism.285 His trajectory also demonstrated that the national movements in postSoviet societies were not simply a resurgence of dark pre-revolutionary forces that had been contained by Communism. Rather, militant nationalism was engendered by the death throes of the system, by the struggle of dissidents and the regime to assume the mantle of patriotism. The terrain of this struggle shifted constantly as the regime entered its terminal crisis. Shafarevich began as a defender of Russian culture against vast generalisations dispensed by shallow historians; he ended as a pedlar of far more pernicious generalisations about Jewish culture. In the process, Shafarevich became the exemplar of the vices that he

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denounced others for seeing in Russia: xenophobic nationalism, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism. Ultimately, he reached the point where he agreed with the Russophobes on one essential point: multiparty democracy was alien to Russia. The inventor of Russophobia became one of the best reasons for being a Russophobe.

Conclusion Larisa Bogoraz: Back then there was a feeling of hopelessness. Interviewer: There was even a toast… Bogoraz: ‘We drink to the success of our hopeless cause!’ It is time to make that toast again. Interviewer: Have you won? Bogoraz: Yes.1 One thing is certain: dissidents did not come to power in Russia. By 1997, a decade since the release of prisoners of conscience, even the most renowned heroes of the rightsdefence movement were out of favour. Sergei Kovalyov, once the symbol of Yeltsin’s commitment to democracy, was again a lonely voice of defiance in a hostile State Duma. According to one Western commentator, ‘these days, Kovalyov is hardly a presence in public life—he appears more often and more prominently in The New York Review of Books than he does in Izvestiya.’2 In 1996, Kovalyov informed his US readers that ‘what Russia needs is another Havel,’ but that ‘the train has already left the station and I just don’t think that the people of Russia are ready to vote for a democrat like Havel.’ They certainly weren’t ready to vote for Kovalyov, who disparaged suggestions that he stand for the presidency: ‘no one has made me an offer, and I’m not about to nominate myself.’3 Yet, as Aleksandr Daniel has argued, ‘the question of why dissidents did not come to power makes no sense.’4 With their emphasis on morality and their consistent renunciation of political struggle, most dissidents were singularly lacking in the unscrupulousness and the thirst for power that marked the successful post-Soviet politician. On a purely pragmatic level, the dissidents had little experience in working in political structures, and could not compete with the established networks of the nomenklatura. As a political force, the dissidents were also, as we have seen, profoundly divided amongst themselves, and these divisions were exacerbated by the winding down of repression and by the political struggles made possible by democratisation. No plausible political party could unite a Sergei Kovalyov and an Igor Shafarevich, who became symbolic figures of diametrically opposed tendencies in post-Soviet politics. But power and influence are very different qualities. If the dissidents were ill suited to compete in the political arena, they were in a unique position to exert influence. During the two decades of stagnation, between Khrushchev’s ouster and Gorbachev’s accession, they were the only Russians conducting a serious public debate about revolution and reform, about the claims of individual liberty and the nation, about the need for glasnost and legality. Dissident ideas had been conceived and tested in free debate, and were thus superbly suited to the conditions of a democratic society. By contrast, the designs of the architects of perestroika were the product of compromise with the official ideology, and were doomed to rapid obsolescence as that ideology crumbled. Unlike the heroes of perestroika, dissidents did not ‘hesitate with the party line.’ Their declarations, appeals, and proposals were not astute career moves, calculated to win the favours of the reformer

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in Kremlin, but acts of courage that were punishable by prison, psychiatric torture, and exile. Dissident ideas possessed the authority of conviction. The impact of this authority has not been unambiguous. In their struggles to disengage Russian nationalism from Bolshevism, to transform glasnost into press freedom, and to create institutional safeguards for human rights, dissidents helped to lay the foundations of Russian democracy. But dissidents have also played a conspicuous role in the genesis of the new Russian nationalism. None of the inflammatory diatribes of official antiZionist propaganda ever achieved the notoriety and the influence of Shafarevich’s Rusofobiya. But the obvious dangers of this tendency should not obscure the fact that it is immeasurably less aggressive than the National Bolshevik currents that flourished under the aegis of the Soviet regime’s military-patriotic propaganda: its principal preoccupation is the defence of Russian culture, not the celebration of the repressive impulses of the security apparatus. Its vilification of the Jewish role in the October Revolution nevertheless entailed a repudiation of the idea of revolutionary violence. Its rejection of ‘Russophobic’ stereotypes about Russian history as a continuum of despotism may even have created space for the discussion of democratic values in the patriotic milieu. Its prejudices about other cultures became the subject of open debate. The history of the dissident movement in Russia shows that peaceful dissenting citizens under dictatorial regimes matter. They matter because their ideas and their debates are a rehearsal for the democratic future, and provide insights into the possibilities and the perils of that future. They matter because their struggle against persecution helps to consolidate the ideas of tolerance and human rights in the most inhospitable climates. They matter because they produce heroes who, like Sakharov, can become a rallying point for the embryonic democratic opposition, and then the raw materials of democratic traditions. They matter because they establish networks and solidarities capable of resisting the repressive apparatus during the dangerous transition years, when constitutional upheaval, social atomisation, and ethnic tension undermine fragile democratic institutions and threaten to resurrect the dictatorship on a new ideological basis. The lesson of the Russian dissidents is the lesson of patience. Their ‘hopeless cause’ has had profound repercussions for Russia and for the world, but decades elapsed between the first protests and the realisation of what Sovietologists long derided as the ‘impossible dream’ of democracy in Russia. Those decades were filled with persecution and human suffering, but they were also productive years: they provided time for ideas to evolve, time for information to be disseminated, time for the consolidation of the structures of resistance, time for the emergence of a pantheon of heroes. Those decades saw the sowing of the seeds of liberty in Russia. The long wait for the democratic harvest has important implications for those Western leaders who reject human rights diplomacy because it does not bring instant results. But it is also a warning to all students of non-Western societies. Instead of contemplating the possibilities generated by the Russian dissidents, many Sovietologists employed their knowledge of the tyrannical past to rule out future emancipation.5 Experts on dictatorship, they ignored the heralds of democracy. Perhaps their counterparts in other disciplines will show greater understanding of the human yearning for freedom.

Notes Introduction 1 Lev Timofeyev, Referendum, issue 3, January 1988; reprinted in Referendum: Zhurnal Nezavisimykh Mnenii, Vilnius, Moscow: Vest, 1992, p. 29. 2 According to Archie Brown:

The post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument which sees the overt dissidents of the pre-Gorbachev era as the prime instigators of the changes of the second half of the 1980s ignores the fact that in the later Brezhnev years and under Andropov and Chernenko the Soviet dissident movement was at its lowest level of activity in two decades and had, to a large extent, been crushed. (The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996, p. 8) 3 V.Potapov, ‘Seyatel’ slovo seet,’ Znamya, 1990, No. 3, p. 208. 4 W.D.Connor, ‘Differentiation, Integration and Political Dissent,’ in Rudolf Tokes (ed.), Dissent in the USSR, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975, p. 155. 5 Presidential Archive, Fond 3, Op. 80, D. 640, pp. 11–28 (Sakharov Archive PA 56). 6 David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, New York: Random House, 1993, p. 283. 7 Cohen and Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost, New York: W.W.Norton, 1989, p. 179. On the use of this argument by KGB interrogators, see Kovalyov’s speech to the DVR conference on 27 April 1996, in Lev Aleinik, ‘Demokraticheskii vybor Rossii sdelal svoi vybor,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 2–8 May 1996, p. 2. 8 Alec Nove, Glasnost in Action: Cultural Renaissance in Russia, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989, p. 159. 9 Central Television, 1 June 1991, cited by John Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987, p. 174. 10 Vek XX i mir, 1991, No. 11, p. 22. 11 Liudmila Alekseeva, The Thaw Generation, Boston: Little, Brown, 1990, p. 7. 12 Andrei Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization, New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990 (Russian edition published in 1988), p. 238. 13 Ibid., p. 270. 14 A.Ginzburg, ‘Nas priglashayut k razgovoru,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 29 January 1993, pp. 1–2. 15 ‘Mikhail Gorbachev: Andropov ne poshel by daleko v reformirovanii obshchestva,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 11 November 1992, p. 5. 16 ‘The People’s Vital Creativity, Report by Comrade M.S.Gorbachev,’ Pravda, 11 December 1984, pp. 2–3; translation in CDSP, 1984, No. 50, p. 4. 17 Yegor Yakovlev, ‘To the point of absurdity,’ Moscow News, 1987, No. 13, p. 11. 18 Alexander J.Motyl, Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality, New York: Columbia UP, 1989, pp. 159, 147. 19 Literaturnaya Gazeta, 14 December 1994, p. 11. 20 Len Karpinsky, ‘It’s ridiculous to waver before an open door,’ Moscow News, 1987, No. 9, p. 11. 21 Latynina, ‘Solzhenitsyn i my,’ Novyi Mir, 1990, No. 1, p. 252.

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22 Moscow News, Special Issue, 1989, No. 52, p. 8. 23 Aleksandr Daniel, ‘Pochemu ne ‘perestroilis’ dissidenty?’ Novoe Vremya, April 1995, No. 15, p. 15.

1 Children of terror 1 Lidiya Chukovskaya, ‘Ne kazn’, no mysl’, no slovo,’ Otkrytoe Slovo, Moscow: YMCA Press, 1991, p. 32. 2 Pamyat’, volume 1, pp. v–ix, cited by Liudmila Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent, Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1985, p. 353. 3 Reported by Russkaya Mysl’, 25 November 1988; cited by John Dunlop, Radio Liberty Report, 1989, No. 407. 4 J.Arch Getty, Gábor T.Rittersporn, and Viktor N.Zemskov, ‘Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence,’ American Historical Review, October 1993, Vol. 98, No. 4, p. 1,024. 5 Ibid., p. 1,018. 6 ‘State and Revolution,’ in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert Tucker, New York and London: W.W.Norton & Co., 1975, p. 326. 7 ‘Fright at the Fall of the Old and the Fight for the New,’ ibid., p. 424. 8 Ibid., p. 425. 9 ‘How to Organise Competition,’ ibid., p. 431. 10 Aleksandr M.Nekrich, The Punished Peoples: the Deportation and Fate of Soviet Minorities at the end of the Second World War, New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 1978. 11 For a nationalist account of the clash over Molodaya Gvardiya, Mikhail Lobanov, ‘Posleslovie,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1988, No. 4, pp. 154–8; for a liberal account of the discussion of ‘We and the Classics,’ see Poiski No. 3, and for the transcript, Moskva, 1990, No. 1, pp. 183–200. 12 Edith Frankel, Novy Mir: A Case Study in the Politics of Literature, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1981, p. 14. 13 Novyi Mir, 1953, No. 12. 14 Anne Applebaum, Gulag. A History of the Soviet Camps, London: Penguin Press, 2003, pp. 435–53; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, 1989, Vol. 3, p. 281–332. 15 Zhores Medvedev, Andropov, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983, p. 143. 16 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Letter to the Soviet leaders,’ AS. 1600. 17 According to Roy Medvedev, cited by Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve, Moscow: Kniga, 1990, p. 38. 18 Yakovlev, A.N. (ed.), Reabilitatsiya: Politicheskie protsessy 30–50-x godov, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1991, p. 23. 19 Ibid. 20 Pravda, 2 July 1959, cited by Abraham Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1972, p. 27. 21 Paul Goldberg, The Final Act, New York: Walter Morrow, 1988, pp. 53–4. 22 Yurii Orlov, Opasnye Mysli: Memuary iz russkoi zhizni, Moscow: Argumenty i Fakty, 1992, p. 115. 23 Ibid., p. 117. 24 Pravda, 3 April 1956, cited by Liudmila Alexeyeva, The Thaw Generation, Boston: Little, Brown, 1990, p. 85. 25 Novyi Mir, 1956, Nos 8–10.

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26 Mark Popovskii, ‘Ideal’nyi sovetskii pisatel’,’ Kontinent, No. 24, 1980, p. 309. 27 Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve, p. 38. 28 Robert Chandler, Introduction to Life and Fate, London: Flamingo, 1986, p. 9. In a 1989 interview the former head of State Security, V.E.Semichastnyi, denied that Grossman’s novel was ‘arrested,’ claiming that it was simply delivered by the censors to Khrushchev. Ogonek, 1989, No. 24, pp. 24–6. 29 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, London: Collins, Harvill, 1980, p. 14. 30 L.Lazarev, ‘Dukh Svobody,’ Postscript to V.Grossman, Zhizn’ i Sud’ba, Moscow, 1990, pp. 844–5. 31 Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev: Krizisy i Rakety, Moscow: Novosti, 1994, Vol. 2, pp. 408–9. 32 Alla Latynina, ‘Solzhenitsyn i my,’ Novyi Mir, 1990, No. 1, p. 243. 33 Petr Grigorenko, interviewed September 1983, Bremen Archive, Cassette 24, p. 3; and German Fey-Andreev, Bremen Archive, Cassette 30, pp. 1–2 (Moscow Memorial). 34 Varlam Shalamov, ‘Iz literaturnogo naslediya,’ Znamya, 1990, No. 7, p. 67. 35 Ibid., pp. 63, 67. 36 Cited in Leopold Labedz (ed.), Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd edn, 1974, p. 46. 37 Izvestiya, 18 November 1962. 38 Pravda, 23 November 1962, cited by Labedz, Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, p. 45. 39 Zvezda, 1963, No. 3; cited by Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, p. 113. 40 Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 6 October 1963; cited by Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, pp. 113– 15. 41 Khrushchev on Culture. An Encounter Pamphlet, London: William Clowes, 1963, p. 36. 42 Ibid. 43 Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, New York: W.W.Norton, 1985, p. 494. 44 G.Brovman, ‘Zhivaya zhizn’ i normativnost”, Moskva, 1964, No. 7, pp. 193–4. 45 N.G.Egorychev in Kommunist, 1965, No. 3, p. 15; cited by Zhores Medvedev, Ten Years since Ivan Denisovich, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, p. 55. 46 Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, pp. 102–3. 47 ‘To the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR on behalf of the surviving children of the innocent Communist victims of Stalin,’ 24 September 1967; translation in George Saunders (ed.), Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition, New York: Monad Press, 1974, pp. 248–50. 48 Petr Yakir, Letter to the journal Kommunist; translation in Stephen Cohen (ed.), An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union, New York: W.W. Norton, 1982, pp. 56– 61. 49 Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1971, p. xxv. 50 Ibid., p. 82. 51 Ibid., p. xxviii. 52 Interview with Roy Medvedev and Dmitrii Volkogonov, Moskovskie Novosti, 12 February 1989, No. 7, p. 8. 53 KGB. 24948, 4 August 1968, n. 2095, Ts. K, KPSS; cited by Roy Medvedev, Gensek s Lubyanki: Yu.V.Andropov. Politicheskii Portret’, Nizhni Novgorod: LETA, 1993, pp. 59–60. 54 Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1990, p. 272. 55 Zhores Medvedev, interviewed by D.Bairau, 4 December 1984, Bremen Archive, p. 25; Pyotr Grigorenko concurred, Bremen archive, Cassette 24, p. 3 (Moscow Memorial). 56 AS. 547, p. 10. 57 For Sholokhov’s speech, see Tsena metafory, ili prestuplenie i nakazanie Sinyavskogo i Danielya, Moscow: Yunona, 1990, pp. 500–1. 58 N.Peskov, ‘Delo Kolokola,’ Pamyat’, 1978, Vol. 1, p. 269. 59 Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, p. 9.

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60 Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, Vol. 3, p. 571. 61 Andrei Amalrik, Notes of a Revolutionary, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982, p. 22. 62 Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, p. 8. 63 Shalamov’s letters to Solzhenitsyn are published in Shalamov, ‘Iz literaturnogo naslediya,’ Znamya, 1990, No. 7, pp. 62–90. 64 Ibid., p. 87. 65 Varlam Shalamov, ‘Iz zapisnykh knizhek,’ Znamya, 1995, No. 6, p. 144. 66 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Ob etoi knige,’ Arkhipelag Gulag, 3, p. 571. 67 Evgeniya Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, London: Collins, Harvill, 1967, pp. 315–16. 68 Alexeyeva, The Thaw Generation, p. 66. 69 Ibid., p. 76. 70 Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle, London: Andre Deutsch, 1978, pp. 85–6. 71 Scammell, Solzhenitsyn, pp. 496–8. 72 Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, p. 90. 73 Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, p. 203. 74 Ibid., pp. 221, 235. 75 Ibid., pp. 209–12. 76 Ibid. p. 214–5. 77 Julia Wishnevskaya, ‘Grossman’s expose of Lenin to be published in the USSR,’ RL. 1988,No. 349, p. 1. 78 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 565. 79 Grossman, Forever Flowing, p. 80. 80 Chukovskaya, Otkrytoe Slovo, p. 34. 81 Ibid., p. 35. 82 Georges Nivat, Solzhenitsyn, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, 1992, p. 20. 83 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Nobel Lecture,’ in Labedz, Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, p. 308. 84 Ibid., p. 322. 85 K.Zhitnikov, ‘The decline of the democratic movement,’ Vestnik RSKhD 106; English translation in Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin (eds), The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1977, pp. 233–55. 86 Ibid., p. 239. 87 For the KGB report recording Solzhenitsyn’s conversation on The Gulag Archipelago, see Kremlevskii samosud: sekretnye dokumenty politbyuro o pisatele A.Solzhenitsyne, Moscow: Rodina, 1994, p. 13; on the death of Voronyanskaya, ‘Solzhenitsyn links a suicide to his work,’ New York Times, 7 September 1973, p. 3; and Kremlevskii samosud, pp. 250–1. 88 Labedz, Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, p. 369. 89 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 2, p. 7. 90 V.Novikov, ‘Raskreposhchenie: vospominaniya chitatelya,’ Znamya, 1990, No. 3, p. 211. 91 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 2, Chapter 11, p. 322. 92 Ibid. p. 329. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. p. 346. 95 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 2, p. 7. 96 Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1990, p. 406. 97 Novikov, ‘Raskreposhchenie: vospominaniya chitatelya,’ p. 212. 98 Cited by Alla Latynina, ‘Solzhenitsyn i My,’ Novyi Mir, 1990, No. 1, p. 244. 99 ‘Iz rabochei zapisi zasedaniya politbyuro TsK KPSS,’ in Kremlevskii Samosud, p. 352. 100 Ibid., p. 353. 101 On Reshetovskaya, New York Times, 6 February 1974, p. 5; On Vitkevich, New York Times, 4 February 1974, p. 1. 102 New York Times, 25 January 1974, p. 9.

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103 ‘Soviet terms new book by Solzhenitsyn slander,’ New York Times, 3 January 1974, p. 1. 104 New York Times, 17 January 1974, p. 14. 105 See, for instance, Chronicle of Current Events, No. 51, p. 42. 106 The Times (London), 21 January 1974. 107 ‘In defence of Solzhenitsyn,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 10 January 1974; translation in Labedz, Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, pp. 362–3. 108 Lidiya Chukovskaya, ‘Breaking the Barrier of Silence,’ 4 February 1974, in Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, pp. 534–5. 109 Roy Medvedev, New York Times, 7 February 1974; reprinted in Labedz, Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, pp. 372–3. 110 ‘Moscow Appeal,’ Chronicle of Current Events, No. 32, p. 11. 111 Lidiya Chukovskaya, Protsess Isklyuchenie, Moscow: Novoe Vremya, 1990. 112 ‘Letter to the Government of the USSR concerning the expatriation of Solzhenitsyn,’ Moscow, 17 February 1974, reprinted in The Oak and the Calf, p. 538. 113 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 32, p. 92. 114 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 36, p. 213. 115 Interview with Irena Voinovich, 16 June 1984, Bremen Archive, Transcript of Cassette 31, p. 2 (Moscow Memorial). 116 For the excerpts, see Kontinent, Nos 4–7. 117 Pamyat’, Volume 1, p. viii. 118 Pamyat’, Volume 1, pp. v–ix, cited by Liudmila Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent, Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1985, p. 353. 119 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 46, pp. 93–5. 120 Kronid Lyubarskii, ‘Valun na Lubyanke,’ Novoe Vremya, 1994, No. 44, p. 36; Chronicle of Current Events, No. 33, pp. 108–9. 121 Lyubarskii, Ibid., p. 34. 122 Aleksandr Daniel interview with author, May 1994; on Gamsakhurdia’s repentance, Chronicle of Current Events, No. 50, p. 22. 123 Natalya Pokrovskaya interviewed by Raisa Orlova, Bremen Archive, cassette 10, p. 5. 124 Referendum (samizdat), issue 21, November 1988; reprinted in Lev Timofeev, Referendum: Izbrannie materialy, Moscow and Vilnius: Vest, 1992, p. 207. 125 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 35, p. 136. 126 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 34, p. 70. 127 Ibid., p. 25. 128 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 35, pp. 118–19, and No. 36, p. 189. 129 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 38, p. 82 (on Sergei Kovalyov); No. 50, pp. 5, 40 (on Orlov and Ginzburg); No. 53, p. 60 (on Morozov); No. 60, p. 5 (on Lavut); No. 62, pp. 10, 21, 52 (on Osipova, Koryagin, and Altunyan); No. 64, p. 2 (on I. Kovalyov). 130 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 50, p. 40. 131 AS. 4910, p. 3. 132 Valeriya Novodvorskaya, ‘Zayavlenie,’ October 1983, AS. 5193, pp. 1–3. 133 V.Potapov, ‘Seyatel’ slovo seet,’ Znamya, 1990, No. 3, p. 208. 134 Feliks Svetov, ‘S tochki zreniya romanticheskogo patriotizma,’ Grani, 1980, No. 117, p. 263. 135 Sovetskaya Kul’tura, 5 March 1983; cited by Julia Wishnevskaya, ‘The thirtieth anniversary of Khrushchev’s secret speech,’ Radio Liberty Report, 1983, No. 76, p. 3. 136 Julia Wishnevskaya, ‘Treatment of Stalin in Soviet propaganda thirty years after the 20th Congress,’ Radio Liberty Report, 1986, No. 70, p. 2. 137 Robert Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992, p. 97. 138 See C.Fairbanks Jr, ‘The Nature of the Beast,’ The National Interest, spring 1993, Vol. 31, p. 48, who cites Zhdanov’s report on ‘Perestroika of Party-Political Work’ at the February– March 1937 Central Committee meeting (Ts.P.A, F. 17, O. 2, D. 612).

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139 V.Glagolev, ‘Iz pokoleniya bol’shevikov: k 90-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya A.A. Zhdanova,’ Pravda, 24 February 1986, p. 8. 140 ‘Rech’ tovarishcha El’tsina B.N.,’ Pravda, 27 February 1986, pp. 2–3. 141 ‘M.S.Gorbachev answers questions from the newspaper L’Humanité,’ Izvestiya and Pravda, 8 February 1986; translation in CDSP, 1986, No. 6, p. 10. 142 ‘Kabychengonivyshlisty,’ Pravda, 9 September 1985. 143 Evgenii Evtushenko, ‘Fuku!’ Novyi Mir, 1985, No. 9, pp. 3–58. 144 V.I.Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, Moscow: Politizdat, 1965, pp. 265–6, cited by Radio Liberty Report, 1987/91, p. 4. 145 Oktyabr’, 1988, Nos 1–4. 146 Pravda, 4 July 1988, and Izvestiya, 25 June 1988, cited by J.Wishnevskaya, ‘Grossman’s expose of Lenin to be published in USSR,’ Radio Liberty Report, 1988/349, p. 1. 147 Anatolii Bocharov, Oktyabr’, 1988, No. 1, p. 130, 1988, No. 2, p. 104. 148 Everything Flows is not mentioned in the extensive biographical introduction and epilogue to the 1988 and 1989 Russian edition of Life and Fate, published by Knizhnaya Palata, Moscow. 149 See, e.g., Ekspress-Khronika, 13 March 1988, p. 15. 150 B.P. ‘A Plague on Both your Houses,’ Referendum, No. 2, December 1987, p. 2. 151 Znamya, 1988. No. 1, pp. 1–53. 152 G.Gerasimenko, O.Obichkin, B.Popov, ‘Neposudna tol’ko pravda,’ Pravda, 15 February 1988. 153 Sovetskaya Rossiya, 13 March 1988. 154 Pravda, 5 April 1988; cited by Baruch Hazan, Gorbachev and his Enemies, 1990, p. 318. 155 Vadim Kozhinov, ‘Pravda i istina,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1988, No. 4, pp. 160–75. 156 Ibid., p. 161. 157 Ibid., p. 163. 158 Ibid., p. 170. 159 Ibid., p. 165–6. 160 Ibid., p. 164. 161 Vladimir Lakshin, ‘V Kilvatere,’ Ogonek, 1988, No. 26, pp. 10–11. This argument was anticipated by Dmitrii Kazutin, ‘Vozrozhdenie politicheskogo samosoznaniya,’ Moskovskie Novosti, 8 May 1988, No. 19, p. 4. 162 Latynina, ‘Solzhenitsyn i my,’ Novyi Mir, 1990, No. 1, p. 252. 163 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Logika Istorii?’ Moskovskie Novosti, 12 June 1988, pp. 12–13. 164 Ibid. 165 Ibid. 166 Julia Wishnevskaya, ‘Roy Medvedev’s figures on victims of collectivization cited in Novy Mir,’ Radio Liberty Report, 1988, No. 155, p. 3. Note also Roy Medvedev’s first published interview in Sobesednik, 29 April 1988. 167 Ibid. 168 Ibid. 169 V.Selyunin, ‘Istoki,’ Novyi Mir, 1988, No. 5, pp. 162–89. 170 On praise of Lenin, ibid., p. 170. 171 Ibid., pp. 177–8. 172 Lev Voskresenskii, ‘Zdravstvuite, Ivan Denisovich,’ Moskovskie Novosti, 7 August 1988, p. 11. 173 Radio Liberty Report, 1988, No. 350, p. 13. 174 The clash between Astafev and Eidelman is discussed in chapter 5. On Astafev’s statement on Solzhenitsyn, J.Wishnevskaya, ‘Nash Sovremennik talks to Soviet TV viewers,’ Radio Liberty Report, 1988, No. 346; on Eidelman, Report on the USSR, 8 September 1989, p. 9. 175 Oktyabr’, 1988, No. 7, backcover; Literaturnaya Gazeta, 1988, No. 30, p. 7. 176 Pravda, 5 October 1988, cited by Radio Liberty Report, 1988, No. 455, p. 6.

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177 Referendum, No. 19, October 1988; reprinted in Timofeev, Referendum, p. 190. 178 Reported by Russkaya Mysl’, 25 November 1988; cited by John Dunlop, Radio Liberty Report, 407/1989. 179 AS. 6312, p. 3; also printed in Referendum, No. 20; Russkaya Mysl’, 25 November 1988. 180 Sovetskaya Molodezh’, 3 December 1988; cited by A.Serebrennikov, Vybor, No. 8, 1989, p. 231. 181 A.Serebrennikov, Letter to Sovetskaya Molodezh’, reprinted in Vybor, 1989, Issue 8, pp. 231–5, and Glasnost’. 182 Ibid. 183 Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Istoriya: ob’edinyayushchaya ili pazobshchayushchaya,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1988, No. 11, pp. 151–62. 184 The most important letters and telegrams were published by Russkaya Mysl’, 9 December 1988, pp. 8–9. 185 Index on Censorship, 1989, No. 2, p. 41; New York Times, 13 December 1988. 186 Selected speeches in ‘Slovo o Solzhenitsyne,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1990, No. 1, pp. 58–67. 187 Ibid., p. 59. 188 Ibid., p. 64. 189 Ibid., p. 66. 190 Yu.Shchekochikin, ‘Vspomnit’ i ne zabyvat’,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 20 January 1988; cited by Kathleen E.Smith, ‘The Politics of the Past in the Soviet Union: Coming to Terms with Stalin’s Repressions’ (PhD dissertation, 1994), p. 167. 191 Solzhenitsyn’s letter is reprinted in Ekspress-Khronika, 11 September 1988/37, p. 37; see also Radio Liberty Report, 1988, No. 401, pp. 9–10. 192 Andrei Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1991, p. 58. 193 Vladimir Soloukhin, ‘Pochemu ia ne podpisalsya pod tem pis’mom,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1988, No. 12, p. 186. 194 Ibid. 195 Ibid., pp. 186, 189. 196 Vedomosti Memoriala, 28 January 1989, p. 3. 197 Smith, ‘The Politics of the Past’, p. 174. 198 Ogonek, 1988 Nos 41 and 42; Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1988, No. 47, p. 1; Moskovskie Novosti, 1988, No. 48, p. 14; on Solzhenitsyn’s portrait, Nivat, Solzhenitsyn, p. 27. 199 AS. 6310. 200 Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 1 December 1988. 201 Sovetskaya Kul’tura, 10 December 1988. 202 Trud, 17 December 1988. 203 Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, p. 60. 204 Ibid. 205 Sovetskaya Rossiya, 27 December 1988. 206 APRF, Politburo Minutes for 27–8 December 1988, pp. 246, 528; cited in Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, London: HarperCollins, 1998, p. 518. 207 Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, p. 62. 208 Ibid., p. 62. 209 Stenogram of Memorial Press Conference, 29 January 1989 (Memorial Library), p. 25. 210 Ibid., p. 151. 211 Ibid., p. 162. 212 Ibid., p. 190. 213 Ibid. 214 Ibid., p. 192. 215 Ibid., 216 Text of Anatolii Strelyani’s speech in Timofeev, Referendum, p. 199–205.

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217 Zalygin’s description of his meeting with Gorbachev, David Remnick, ‘Soviet journal to publish Gulag,’ Washington Post, 21 April 1989, pp. C1, C9. 218 Moscow News, 16 July 1989/29, p. 13. 219 Bill Keller, ‘KGB chief says new legislature should ride herd on his agency,’ New York Times, 2 June 1989, p. 8. 220 APRF, Politburo Minutes, 29 June 1989, pp. 200–8; cited by Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, p. 520. 221 Korotich’s attack on Solzhenitsyn in Litso Nenavisti, 1983, p. 168. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Matrenin dvor,’ Ogonek, 1989, No. 23, pp. 12–13 and Semichastnyi interview, ‘Ya by spravilsya s lyuboi rabotoi,’ Ogonek, 1989, No. 24, p. 25. See also John Dunlop, ‘Solzhenitsyn begins to emerge from the political void,’ Report on the USSR, 8 September 1989, p. 4. 222 Ogonek, 1989, No. 23, p. 12. 223 For an aggressive nationalist’s identification of Solzhenitsyn with Stalin (and Trotskii!), see V.Zaburin, ‘Razgovor s mukhami: Stalin, Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn… Rossiya,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1990, No. 8, pp. 216–18. 224 Znamya, 1990, No. 1, p. 235. 225 Ibid., p. 236. 226 Potapov, ‘Seyatel’ slovo seet’, Znamya, 1990, No. 1, p. 209. 227 S.Zolotsev, ‘Ispytanie Rossii: kogda otkryvayutsya shlyuzy,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1990, No. 7, pp. 252–3. 228 Znamya, 1990, No. 1, p. 237. 229 Moskva, 1990, No. 2, p. 196. 230 The principal Russophile rebuttal of Grossman was that of M.Antonov, L. Klykov, and I.Shafarevich, Literaturnaya Rossiya, 4 August 1989. 231 Zolotsev, ‘Ispytanie Rossii,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1990, No. 7, p. 253. 232 APRF, Politburo Minutes, 29 June 1989, pp. 200–8; cited in Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, p. 520. 233 Yakovlev, ‘The Great French Revolution and the Present Day,” Sovetskaya Kul’tura, 15 July 1989, pp. 3–4, translation in CDSP, 1989, No. 33, p. 14. 234 Serge Schmemann, ‘Yeltsin extolls 1921 rebellion, denouncing its repression by Lenin,’ New York Times, 11 January 1994, p. 3. 235 Sovetskaya Molodezh’, 7 July 1989; cited by E.Teague ‘Gorbachev criticizes leaders of Parliamentary Group,’ Report on the USSR, 27 October 1989, p. 6. On Afanasev’s 12 January 1988 call for the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, see Radio Liberty Report, 1988, No. 45, p. 12. 236 Iouri Afanassiev, Ma Russie fatale, Paris: Editions Calmann-Lévy, 1992, p. 157. 237 V.Aksyuchits, ‘Zapadniki i pochvenniki segodnya,’ Vybor, Issue 8 (samizdat edition, 1989), p. 166. 238 Ibid., p. 167. 239 V.Soloukhin, ‘Chitaya Lenina,’ Rodina, 1989, No. 10, pp. 66–70. First published in Grani, 1989, No. 151, pp. 5–35. 240 Ibid., p. 69. 241 Ibid., p. 66; on Osipov, Glasnost’ Press-Reliz, 14 July 1989 (samizdat manuscript, Lenin Library). 242 G.Bordyugov, V.Kozlov, V.Loginov, ‘Kuda idyot sud?’ Rodina, 1989, No. 10, pp. 71–6. 243 Moscow News, 1989/51, p. 12; Lobanov expanded the criticism in M.Lobanov, ‘V Serdtsevine Russkoi Mysli,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1990, No. 10, p. 281. 244 Sakharov, Memoirs, p. 426, citing My Country and the World, pp. 100–2. 245 Novikov, ‘Raskreposhchenie: vospominaniya chitatelya,’ p. 210. 246 M.Gorbachev, ‘Sotsialisticheskaya ideya i revolutsionnaya perestroika,’ Kommunist, December 1989, No. 18, p. 5.

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247 Roy Medvedev, ‘O knige A.I.Solzhenitsyna Arkhipelag Gulag,’ Pravda, 18 December 1989, p. 7, and ‘S tochki zreniya istorika,’ Pravda, 29 December 1989, p. 4 248 ‘The Congress of USSR People’s Deputies,’ Izvestiya, 4 June, pp. 1–8; translation in CDSP, 1989, No. 28, p. 17. 249 Ales Adamovich, Literaturnaya Gazeta, 1990, No. 29, p. 2. 250 Moskovskie Novosti, 1989, No. 45, p. 2. 251 Kronid Lyubarskii, ‘Valun na Lubyanke,’ Novoe Vremya, 1994, No. 44, p. 36. 252 ‘Pobeda! Svoboda! no budem bditelny,’ Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 23 August 1991, p. 1. 253 Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 17 June 1992, p. 2. 254 Boris Slavin, ‘Nyurnberg ili Leiptsig’, Pravda, 6 June 1992, p. 2. 255 A.N.Yakovlev, ‘Zlo, poseyannoe bolshevizmom, vzbesilos’, Pravda, 22 October 1992, p. 4. 256 Interview with Aleksandr Zinoviev, ‘Kakaya Raznitsa?’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 22 May 1993, p. 4. 257 Eduard Limonov, ‘Imperskii instinkt,’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 3 June 1993, p. 7. 258 On Solzhenitsyn’s visit, see Moscow News, 1993, No. 36, p. 2; ‘French Revolution erred, Solzhenitsyn says,’ New York Times, 27 September 1993, p. 10. 259 Serge Schmemann, ‘Yeltsin extols 1921 rebellion, denouncing its repression by Lenin,’ New York Times, 11 January 1994, p. 3. 260 ‘Deputies back call to restore statue of Soviet secret police chief,’ Agence France Presse, 4 December 1998. 261 Gleb Pavlovsky, Moscow News, 1991, No. 21, p. 6.

2 ‘Honest and total glasnost’ 1 Julia Voznesenskaya, ‘Introduction’ to her Letters of Love: Women Political Prisoners in Exile and the Camps, London, New York: Quartet Books, 1989, p. i. 2 Vladimir Bukovskii, Pis’mo Russkogo Puteshestvennika, (1981); in I Vozvrashchaetsya Veter’, Moscow: NIIO ‘Demokraticheskaya Rossiya,’ 1990, p. 327. 3 Walter Laqueur, The Long Road to Freedom: Russia and Glasnost, London, Unwin Hyman, 1989, p. 23. 4 Ibid., p. 311. 5 Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1996, p. 125. 6 Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966, p. 103. 7 ‘Chto znachit sud’ bez glasnosti,’ Kolokol, 1 January 1858, Moscow, Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1962, p. 56. 8 ‘Pis’mo v’ redaktsiyu kolokola,’ Kolokol, 1 April 1860, Ibid. p. 565. 9 ‘Gonenie glasnosti i studentov,’ Kolokol, 1 January 1860, p. 495. 10 Mikhail Gorbachev, Letter to Kovalyov, 29 December 1994 (Moscow Memorial archive). 11 Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs, London: Doubleday, 1996, p. 148. 12 Vera Toltz, ‘A chronological overview of Gorbachev’s campaign for Glasnost,’ Radio Liberty Report, 1987, No. 66, p. 1. 13 V.I.Lenin, ‘Original Version of the Article The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government’,’ Collected Works, Vol. 27, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965, pp. 203–4. 14 V.I.Lenin, ‘The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,’ Pravda, 28 April 1918; Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 260. 15 ‘Zhivoe tvorchestvo naroda. Doklad tovarishcha M.S.Gorbacheva,’ Pravda, 11 December 1984, pp. 2–3. 16 M.S.Gorbachev, ‘Politicheskii doklad tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS XXVII s’ezdu kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soyuza,’ Pravda, 26 February 1986, p. 10.

Notes

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17 Ibid., p. 7. 18 ‘Rech’ tovarishcha El’tsina B.N.,’ Pravda, 27 February 1986, p. 2. 19 Ibid., p. 3. 20 Alekseyeva, The Thaw Generation, p. 120. 21 Ibid., p. 109. 22 A.Volpin interview with N.Kravchenko (Memorial Oral History Programme, 1994), p. 112. 23 Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle, London: Andre Deutsch, 1978, p. 131. 24 Volpin interview, op. cit., p. 111. 25 ‘Letter from Galina Gabai to the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR,’ in Pavel Litvinov (ed.), The Demonstration in Pushkin Square, London: Harvill Press, 1969, p. 41. 26 ‘To the Procurator-General of the USSR,’ 30 November 1967; in Pavel Litvinov (ed.), The Trial of the Four, New York: Viking Press, 1972, p. 37. 27 ‘Declaration,’ 8 December 1967, Ibid., pp. 37–8. 28 Kyril Tidmarsh, ‘Ex-general in Moscow trial protest,’ The Times (London), 10 January 1968, p. 1. 29 ‘Appeal to world opinion by Litvinov and Bogoraz,’ The Times (London), 13 January 1968, p. 8. 30 P.Grigorenko, ‘Otkrytoe pis’mo k Budapeshtskomu soveshchaniyu s pros’boi dat’ emu i A.Kosterin vozmozhnost’ vystupit’ na soveshchaniye,’ 13 February 1968, AS. 132, p. 11. 31 ‘Letter to Consultative Meeting of Communist Parties in Budapest,’ 24 February 1968, signed by A.Kosterin, L.Bogoraz, P.Litvinov, Z.Asanova, P.Yakir, V. Krasin, I.Gabai, B.Shragin, A.Levitin-Krasnov, Yu.Kim, Yu.Glazov, P. Grigorenko. Cited by A.E.LevitinKrasnov, Rodnoi Prostor, Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag, p. 166. 32 Ilya Gabai, ‘Before the Closed Doors of the Open Court,’ in Red Square at Noon, ed. Natalya Gorbanevskaya, London: Andrei Deutsch, 1970, pp. 237–53. 33 Volpin interview with Natalya Kravchenko (Moscow Memorial Oral History Programme, 1994), p. 133. 34 A.S.Volpin, ‘Glasnost’ sudoproizvodvsta,’ Obshchestvennye Problemy, Issue 7, September– October 1970, AS. 657a, p. 15. 35 Ibid., pp. 25, 34, 41. 36 Ibid., p. 6. 37 Solzhenitsyn letter to Secretariat of RSFSR Writers’ Union, 12 November 1969, reprinted in The Oak and the Calf, p. 494. 38 Andrei Sakharov, ‘Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,’ Sakharov Speaks, London: Collins, 1974, p. 113. 39 Andrei Sakharov, ‘Manifesto II,’ ibid., p. 117. 40 Ibid., p. 123. 41 Ibid., p. 143. 42 ‘Postscript to Memorandum,’ ibid., p. 153. 43 Yurii Orlov, ‘Pis’mo Brezhnevu,’ 16 September 1973; reprinted in Ogonyok, 1989, No. 35, pp. 20–1. 44 Andrei Sakharov, ‘O strane i o mire,’ in Trevoga i nadezhda, Moscow: Inter-verso, 1991, p. 145. 45 Valery Chalidze, ‘Important Aspects of Human Rights in the Soviet Union: A Report to the Human Rights Committee,’ in Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin (eds), The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, p. 218; Russian text in AS. 657. b. 46 Ibid. 47 ‘Interview with Olle Stenholm,’ 3 July 1973, Sakharov Speaks, p. 175. 48 Ibid., p. 176. 49 ‘Interview with Mikhail P.Malyarov,’ 16 August 1973, ibid., p. 183.

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50 Ibid., pp. 186–7. 51 ‘Interview with Western correspondents,’ 21 August 1973, ibid., p. 205. 52 ‘A Letter to the Congress of the United States,’ 14 September 1973, ibid., p. 213. 53 Andrei Sakharov, ‘Peace, Progress, and Human Rights’, in Alarm and Hope, New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1979, p. 11. 54 Amalrik and Turchin, Washington Post, 17 June 1978. 55 Andrei Sakharov, ‘Statement of January 27, 1980,’ Memoirs, p. 675. 56 Andrei Sakharov, ‘The Dangers of Nuclear War,’ published in Foreign Affairs; and Memoirs, pp. 669–70. 57 Andrei Sakharov, ‘Nadzornaya zhaloba,’ dated 9 November 1984, AS. 5501, p. 2. 58 Petro Grigorenko, Memoirs, London: Harvill, 1983, p. 2. 59 Amalrik interviewed by Mel’nikov, Radio Liberty, 1976, No. 368, p. 3. 60 ‘Dr Sakharov trusts in world opinion to save him,’ The Times (London), 8 September 1973, p. 5. 61 Andrei Sakharov, ‘Open Letter to Academician V.A.Engelgardt,’ Chronicle of Current Events, No. 32, p. 101. 62 Ibid. 63 Chronicle of Human Rights, No. 35, p. 50. 64 ‘Time of Anxiety,’ Chronicle of Current Events, No. 57, p. 78. 65 Kenneth Adelman, ‘Speaking of America: Public Diplomacy in Our Time,’ Foreign Affairs, spring 1981, Vol. 59, No. 4, p. 914. 66 Excerpts from the transcript in Efim Etkind, Notes of a Non-conspirator, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978, pp. 94–104, 247–63. 67 Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, p. 19. 68 Bukovsky, To Build a Castle, p. 31. 69 Petr Grigorenko, Memoirs, London: Harvill, 1983, p. 414. 70 Ibid., p. 425. 71 ‘M.S.Gorbachev answers questions from the newspaper L’Humanité,’ Izvestiya and Pravda, 8 February 1986, pp. 1–2; translation in CDSP, 1986, No. 6, pp. 8–10. 72 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 50, p. 15. 73 Andrei Sakharov, ‘Otvetstvennost’ uchenykh,’ in Trevoga i nadezhda, Moscow: Inter-verso, 1991, p. 207. 74 Grigorenko, Memoirs, p. 451. 75 Ibid., p. 318. 76 Pavel Litvinov, The Demonstration in Pushkin Square, p. 95. 77 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 32, p. 105. 78 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 34, p. 3. 79 Sakharov, Alarm and Hope, p. 20. 80 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Smatterers,’ in From under the Rubble, London: Collins, Harvill Press, 1975, p. 257. 81 Roy Medvedev, ‘Open Letter to Raisa Lert’ in ‘Controversy: Dissent among Dissidents,’ Index on Censorship, 1979, No. 3, p. 34. 82 ‘Controversy: Dissent among Dissidents,’ p. 36. 83 Chronicle of Human Rights, No. 42, p. 11. 84 Ibid., p. 7. 85 ‘Soviet dissident gets 10 year sentence,’ New York Times, 3 April 1982, p. 5. 86 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 56, p. 108. 87 Cited by V.Abramkin, ‘Netraditsionnoe chelovecheskoe deistvie,’ Vek XX i Mir, 1994, Nos 1–2, p. 42. 88 On Gefter’s institutional career, see Roger Markwick, ‘Catalyst of Historiography, Marxism and Dissidence: The Sector of Methodology of the Institute of History, Soviet Academy of Sciences, 1964–68,’ Europe-Asia Studies, 1994, Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 581–7.

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89 Vek XX i Mir, August 1987. 90 Andrei Sakharov, ‘Otvetstvennost’ uchenykh,’ in Sakharovskii sbornik, Moscow: Kniga, 1991, p. 40. 91 Vladimir Kryuchkov, report to Gorbachev, ‘O politicheskoi deyatel’nosti A.D. Sakharova,’ 8 December 1989, n. 2482-k/ov, KPSS, published in Literaturnaya Gazeta, 14 December 1994, p. 11. 92 See, e.g., ‘Is glasnost a game of mirrors?’ New York Times, 22 March 1987, IV, p. 27. 93 ‘Let Gorbachev give us proof,’ Moscow News, 1987, No. 13, p. 10. 94 ‘The crisis of conscience: they chose to leave their home,’ Moscow News, 1987, No. 15, pp. 8–9. 95 Yegor Yakovlev, ‘To the point of absurdity,’ Moscow News, 1987, No. 13, p. 11. 96 ‘Ubezhdennost’—opora perestroiki,’ Pravda, 14 February 1987, p. 1. 97 On Sakharov’s statements, see his Moscow and Beyond, p. 5; On the KGB transcripts, Centre for Contemporary Documentation, Moscow, Fond 89, P. 18, D. 114, especiallyp. 12. 98 ‘Perestroika—volya, muzhestvo i otvetsvennost’,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 27 March 1987, p. 3; translation from CDSP, 1987, No. 21, p. 19. 99 ‘Trial of Grigoryants,’ Chronicle of Current Events, No. 38, pp. 98–9. 100 Tamara Grigoryants, ‘Obrashchenie k M.S.Gorbachev,’ 24 October 1986, AS. 5849. 101 Khronograf, 1988, No. 1, AS. 6315, p. 5. 102 Sasha Bogdanov, ‘Glasnost’ i kon’junktura,’ Glasnost’ [typescript at Moscow Memorial], issue 8, p. 76. 103 Bill Keller, ‘Two Soviet editors clash on Glasnost,’ New York Times, 11 August 1987, p. 3. 104 Ibid. 105 N.Petrov and R.Topolev, ‘Loudmouths on the Sidelines: the Bulletin Glasnost, its editor and company,’ Vechernaya Moskva, 7 August 1987, p. 3; translation in CDSP, 1987, No. 37, pp. 5–6. 106 Rusovskii quotation in Celestine Bohlen, ‘Soviet journal’s publisher assailed,’ Washington Post, 11 August 1987, p. 17; and David Remnick, ‘Dissident sees Glasnost ironies,’ Washington Post, 23 May 1988, p. 19. 107 Glasnost, No. 2, p. 10. 108 ‘On measures for the localisation of the provocational activity of the so-called seminar on Human Rights,’ 28 December 1987, n. 2594-Ch, Fond. 89, P. 18, D. 121, Centre For Contemporary Documentation, Moscow. 109 Lev Timofeev, Referendum, No. 3, January 1988; reprinted in Referendum: zhurnal nezavisimykh mnenii, Vilnius, Moscow: Vest, 1992, p. 29. 110 Nina Andreeva, ‘Ne mogu postupat’sya printsipami,’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 13 March 1988, p. 3; translation in CDSP, 1988, No. 13, p. 1. 111 Ibid., p. 6. 112 On Andronov’s links to the KGB, see ‘Maski Iony: o deputate, kotoryi v svoe vremya byl naznachen korrespondentom v svyazi ‘s neobkhodimost’yu usilit’ rabotu po linii KGB”, Izvestiya, 29 May 1993, p. 5. 113 Iona Andronov, ‘Peshki v chuzhoi igre: ‘Glasnost’ iz orkestra podryvnykh golosov,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 23 March 1988, p. 14. 114 Kevin Coogan and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, ‘U.S. funds for Soviet dissidents,’ The Nation, 19 March 1988, pp. 361–81. 115 Richard Bernstein, ‘Exiled Soviet dissidents’ group in dispute over threat to dissenters,’ New York Times, 12 April 1988, p. 22. 116 ‘The principles of restructuring: the revolutionary nature of thinking and acting,’ Pravda, 5 April 1988, p.2; translation in CDSP, 1988, No. 14, pp. 5, 20. 117 Remnik, ‘Dissident sees Glasnost ironies,’ p. 1. 118 Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, pp. 51, 56.

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119 Martin Walker, ‘Hardliners ‘could hijack’ Gorbachev’s key meeting,’ The Guardian, 11 May 1988, p. 8. 120 Yu.Baturin, (ed.), Glasnost’: mneniya, poiski, politika, Moscow: Yuridicheskaya Literatura, 1989. 121 Viktor Yasman, ‘Law on Glasnost in preparation,’ Radio Liberty Report, 1988, No. 151 pp. 1–3. 122 Press-conference, 5 December 1995, Moscow Memorial (author’s recording). 123 ‘Yeltsin nominates Fedotov for Constitutional Court,’ OMRI Daily Report, 14 February 1997. 124 ‘Mnenie spetsialistov,’ Moskovskie Novosti, 19 June 1988; reprinted in Baturin, Glasnost’: Mneniya, Poiski, Politika, pp. 86–88. 125 Ibid., pp. 341–64. 126 Mikhail Fedotov, ‘Media Law for Russia,’ Moscow News, 1991, No. 22, p. 4. 127 Bill Keller, ‘Kremlin leader lashes at press, raising its fears,’ New York Times, 17 October 1989, p. 1. 128 Vera Tolz, ‘The implications for Glasnost’ of Gorbachev’s attack on reformists,’ Radio Liberty Report, 1989, No. 490. 129 Radio Liberty Daily Report, 6 November 1989. 130 V.Vologdin, ‘First summer of the new Oktyabr,’ Izvestiya, 2 August 1990, p. 3; in CDSP, 5 September 1990. 131 Vera Tolz, ‘USSR: the impact of the new press law,’ Radio Liberty Report, 29 October 1990. 132 ‘Dolgii srok apolitichnogo cheloveka,’ Stolitsa, 1991, No. 17, p. 14. 133 Glasnost’, No. 32; cited in Radio Liberty Daily Report, 16 August 1991. 134 ‘Glasnost tumbles down on TV or a “new course” towards an old objective,’ Moscow News, 1991, No. 3, p. 14. 135 On Gorbachev’s enduring resentment about the liberal press’s coverage of the Baltic crisis, see Gorbachev, Memoirs, pp. 580–1. 136 ‘Time to send glasnost on a well-earned rest: President wants to suspend the law on the press,’ Moscow News, 1991, No. 4, p. 6. 137 ‘Chto znaet M.Gorbachev takogo, chego ne znaem my,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 17 January 1991, p. 1. 138 Elena Bonner, Sergei Kovalev, ‘My—s vami, bud’te—s nami!’ Russkaya Mysl’, 25 January 1991. 139 Sovetskaya Rossiya, 26 August 1990; cited in Radio Liberty Daily Report, 9 October 1990. 140 G.Zyuganov, ‘Arkhitektor u Razvalin,’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 7 May 1991, p. 2; see also the discussion in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 12 May 1991, p. 1. 141 Vladimir Kryuchkov, ‘Posol bedy,’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 13 February 1993, p. 1. 142 ‘Prigovoren k prezreniyu,’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 25 February 1993, p. 1. 143 Transcripts of the interrogations are included in Pyatoe Dekabrya 1965 Goda, Moscow: Memorial, 1995, pp. 61–79. 144 Ruslan Khasbulatov, ‘Referendum: false interpretations and reality,’ Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 30 April 1993 (FNS). 145 ‘Power of Soviets decreed at state television by resolution of 9th Congress,’ RIA, 28 March 1993. 146 Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 20 March 1993, p. 1. 147 Irina Petrovskaya, ‘Televidenie, igrayushchee na politku gosudarstva,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 24 February 1993, p. 1. 148 ‘Pisateli trebuyut ot pravitelstva reshitelnykh deistvii,’ Izvestiya, October 5 1993, p. 3. 149 Andrei Sinyavskii, ‘Vse eto uzhe bylo: pochemu ya segodnya protiv Yeltsina,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 13 October 1993, p. 5.

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150 V.Maximov, A.Sinyavskii, P.Egides, ‘Pod sen’ nadezhnuyu zakona,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 16 October 1993, p. 1. 151 A.Ginzburg, ‘Nas priglashayut k razgovoru,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 29 January 1993, pp. 1–2. 152 Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 8 June 1991, p. 6.

3 The rights-defenders 1 Vladimir Todres, ‘Delat’ vmeste to, chto delal Sakharov v odinochku,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 25 May 1991, p. 2. 2 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 60, pp. 33–4. 3 Cited by Gordon B.Smith, Reforming the Russian Legal System, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996, pp. 64–5. 4 Walter Connor, ‘Differentiation, Integration, and Political Dissent,’ in Rudolf Tokes (ed.), Dissent in the USSR, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975, p. 155. 5 Richard Pipes, Survival is not Enough, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984, p. 166. 6 Samuel P.Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 142. 7 Revolt Pimenov, ‘The immortal soul saved by individuals,’ New Times, 1991, No. 2, p. 36. 8 Boris Shragin, The Challenge of the Spirit, New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1982, p. 184. On Kistyakovskii’s importance for perestroika-era liberal reformers, see the introduction by Valerii Zorkin and Rostislav Zolotarev to excerpts from the essay in New Times, 1990, No. 21, p. 40. 9 Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1990, p. 6. 10 Dina Kaminskaya, Final Judgment, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982, p. 16. 11 Walter Duranty, ‘Soviet will edit new constitution,’ New York Times, 2 December 1936, p. 23. 12 Liudmila Alexeyeva, The Thaw Generation, Boston: Little, Brown, 1990, p. 108. 13 Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle, London: Andre Deutsch, 1978, pp. 190–1. 14 Interview with Oleg Vorob’ev in Pyatoe Dekabrya 1965 goda, Moscow: Memorial, 1995, p. 50. 15 Interview with Volpin, ibid., p. 38. 16 ‘To the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR,’ in Pavel Litvinov (ed.), The Demonstration in Pushkin Square, pp. 15–16. 17 Ibid., p. 17. 18 Ibid., p. 93. 19 Ibid. 20 Sofia Kalistratova, ‘It was a very difficult time,’ Moscow News, 1989, No. 32, p. 13. 21 Pavel Litvinov (ed.), The Trial of the Four, p. 204. 22 Peter Reddaway, (ed.), Uncensored Russia, London: Jonathan Cape, 1972, pp. 84–5. 23 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 43, p. 37. 24 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 48, p. 150. 25 ‘Law comes first,’ New Times, 1990, No. 49, p. 31; on the programme’s reception, see also the interview with Kaminskaya, ‘Konechno Usiliya Tschetny?’ Ogonek, 5 January 1991, p. 17. 26 Sofia Kalistratova, ‘It was a very difficult time,’ Moscow News, 6 August 1989, No. 32, p. 13. 27 Andrei Amalrik, Notes of a Revolutionary, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982, p. 50. 28 ‘To the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations,’ 20 May 1969; translation in In Quest of Justice, ed. Abraham Brumberg, London: Pall Mall Press, 1970, pp. 458–61.

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29 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 14; also translated in Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition, New York: Monad Press, 1974, pp. 373–4. 30 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 17, p. 46. 31 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 18, p. 127. 32 Joshua Rubenstein, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, Boston, Beacon Press, 1980, p. 127. 33 Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, p. 360. 34 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 6; Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, pp. 359–60; See also Andrei Amalrik, Notes of a Revolutionary, p. 118. 35 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 27, p. 324. 36 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 25, pp. 213–14. 37 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 17, p. 46. 38 A.E.Levitin-Krasnov, Rodnoi prostor: demokraticheskoe dvizhenie, Vospominaniya, Chast’ IV, Frankfurt/Main: Possev-Verlag, p. 397. 39 Ibid., p. 401. 40 Valerii Chalidze, ‘Important Aspects of Human Rights in the Soviet Union: A Report to the Human Rights Committee,’ 10 December 1970, reprinted in ‘The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian Samizdat’, p. 198. 41 Ibid., p. 204. 42 Stat’ya 17–2, Konstitutsiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow: Yurid. Lit, 1993, p. 9. 43 Liudmila Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights, Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1985; Valery Chalidze, To Defend these Rights, New York: Random House, 1974, pp. 199–208. 44 Sakharov, Memoirs, p. 502. 45 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, p. 372. 46 Hedrick Smith, ‘Physicist accuses Soviet in passport case but suggests collusion,’ New York Times, 18 January 1973, p. 2. 47 Pavel Litvinov, ‘O dvizhenii za prava cheloveka v SSSR,’ in Samosoznanie: sbornik statei, eds P.Litvinov, M.Meerson-Aksyonov and B.Shragin, New York: Khronika, 1976. 48 On the polemics, see R.Gul, ‘Vse li bylo blagopoluchno v Datskom Korolevstve?’ Novyi Zhurnal, 1975, No. 121, pp. 274–8; V.Pirozhkova, ‘Dissidenty i kommunizm,’ Novyi Zhurnal, 1977, No. 127, p. 229–32. 49 Gul, ‘Vse li bylo blagopoluchno v Datskom Korolevstve?’ p. 277. 50 David Shipler, ‘KGB fails to kill off human rights movement,’ The Times (London), 31 December 1977, p. 4. 51 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 46, p. 101. 52 F.J.M.Feldbrugge, (ed.), The Constitutions of the USSR and the Union Republics, Alphen and den Rijn, the Netherlands: Sijthoff & Noordhoff, 1979, p. 95. 53 Letter from V.Bakhmin, T.Velikanova, P.Grigorenko, A.Lavut, V.Turchin, G. Yakunin, et al., cited in Chronicle of Current Events, No. 46, p. 102. 54 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 46, pp. 102–3. 55 On the strained relations, see Yurii Orlov, Opasnye Mysli, Moscow: Argumenty i Fakty, 1992, pp. 174–5. 56 Izvestiya, 1 August 1975; cited by William Korey, The Promises we Keep, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1993, p. 3. 57 Valentin Yaroslavtsev in New Times, November 1975, cited ibid., p. 11. 58 Ekspress-Khronika, 1989, No. 25. 59 On the move, see Sakharov, Memoirs, p. 476. 60 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 50, p. 85. 61 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 58, pp. 59–60. 62 Ibid., p. 4. 63 Ibid., p. 11.

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64 Cited by Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1990, p. 796. 65 Valery Chalidze, ‘To Andropov, Chairman of the KGB CM USSR,’ 13 May 1972, in To Defend These Rights, p. 197. 66 Roy Medvedev and Georgi Vladimov, ‘Controversy: dissent among dissidents,’ Index on Censorship, 1979, No. 3, p. 36. 67 Yurii Andropov, ‘Communist Conviction is the Great Strength of the Builders of the New World,’ Pravda, 10 September 1977, pp. 1–2; CDSP, 1977, No. 35, p. 3. 68 ‘Restructuring and the work of the Chekists,’ Pravda, 2 September 1988, pp. 1, 3; CDSP, 1988, No. 35, p. 69 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Will the KGB ever emerge from the underground?’ New Times, 1990, No. 16, p. 31. 70 Yurii Andropov, ‘Communist conviction is the great strength of the builders of the new world,’ Pravda, 10 September 1977, pp. 1–2; CDSP, 1977, No. 35, p. 3. 71 Ibid., p. 4. 72 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University, June 8 1978, New York, Harper & Row, 1978, p. 20. 73 V.Fedorchuk, ‘On guard over law and order,’ Pravda, 10 August 1983, p. 3; CDSP, 1983, No. 32, p. 1. 74 Robert Rand, ‘US State Department says new Soviet laws open door to Stalinism,’ Radio Liberty, 1984, No. 310, p. 1. 75 APRF, f. 3, op. 73, d. 1113 1.252, cited by Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, London: Harper Collins, 1998, p. 353. 76 ‘Under the banner of October, to new frontiers in the improvement of socialism,’ Pravda, 7 November 1985, pp. 1–2; CDSP, 1985, No. 45, p. 7. 77 Chebrikov, ‘Sveryas s Leninym, rukovodstvuyas’ trebovaniyami partii,’ Kommunist, 1985, No. 9, p. 49. 78 Chebrikov, ‘A great example of service to revolutionary ideals,’ Pravda, 11 September 1987, p. 3. 79 Andrei Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1991, p. 6. 80 New York Times, 20 February 1987, p. 10. 81 Glasnost, No. 2, p. 115. 82 Lyubarskii Archive, F-180, untitled samizdat typescript, p. 139 (Moscow Memorial). 83 Glasnost, No. 2, p. 116. 84 Kryuchkov speaking at December 1989 reception for women journalists, quoted in Yevgeniya Albats, KGB: State within a State, London: I.B.Tauris, 1995, p. 206. 85 See the interview with Aleksandr Sukharev, ‘We are putting things in order in our juridical house,’ Moscow News, 1987, No. 14, p. 7. 86 ‘Law in the court of time,’ Moscow News, 1987, No. 34, p. 13. 87 Viktor Chebrikov, ‘Restructuring and the work of the Chekists,’ Pravda, 2 September 1988, pp. 1, 3. 88 Viktor Chebrikov, ‘A great example of service to revolutionary ideals,’ Pravda, 11 September 1987, p. 3. 89 I.F.Stone, ‘The K.G.B.’s lofty humanist,’ New York Times, 24 October 1988, p. 17. 90 Viktor Chebrikov, ‘The Party Campaign Platform is the real path to the deepening of restructuring,’ Izvestiya and Pravda, 11 February 1989, p. 2; CDSP, 1989, No. 6, pp. 12–13. 91 Mikhail Gorbachev, ‘The Political Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,’ Pravda, 26 February 1986, pp. 2–10; CDSP, 1986, No. 8, p. 26. 92 ‘Sozdaetsya komitet po pravam cheloveka,’ Izvestiya, 30 November 1987, p. 3; see also ‘An official human rights organization in the USSR: ‘new thinking’ or propaganda?’ Radio Liberty, 1988, No. 10, p. 1.

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93 Stephen F.Cohen and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers, New York: W.W.Norton, 1989, p. 181. 94 See his contribution to the discussion, ‘Prava cheloveka: sut’ spora, sut’ problemy,’ Novyi Mir, 1978, No. 10, pp. 185–216. 95 Fedor Burlatskii, ‘Uchit’sya demokratii,’ Pravda, 18 July 1987, p. 3. 96 Valerii Senderov, ‘Burlatskii ukhodit v podpol’e,’ Ekspress-Khronika, 9 January 1990. 97 ‘On making changes in and additions to the USSR law ‘On Criminal Liability for State Crimes’ and certain other USSR legislative acts,’ Pravda, 11 April 1989, p. 1; CDSP, 1989, No. 15, p. 11. 98 See, for example, Aleksandr Yakovlev, ‘The difficulties of law making,’ Moscow News, 1989, No. 16, p. 2. 99 N.V.Petrov, Report at Memorial Conference, August 1992. 100 Vladimir Kryuchkov, ‘Velikii oktyabr’ i obnovlenie sovetskogo obshchestva,’ Izvestiya, 5 November 1989, pp. 1–2. 101 ‘Valeria Novodvorskaya accused of insulting the president,’ Moscow News, 1990, No. 39, p. 1. 102 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Will the KGB ever emerge from the underground?’ New Times, 1990, No. 16, p. 31. 103 Report from Major General E.F.Ivanov, chief of the Directorate to Protect the Soviet Constitutional Order, and Major General N.A.Savenko, chief of the Sixth Directorate, dated 3 June 1990, quoted in Albats, KGB: State within the State, pp. 241–2. 104 ‘Linii Generala Kalugina,’ Vechernaya Moskva, 30 January 1992, cited by John Dunlop, The Rise of Russia, p. 46. 105 ‘Kakoi parlament my poterali,’ Kuranty, 19 November 1993, pp. 8–9. 106 Ogonek, 3 November 1990, No. 45, p. 6. 107 On Saushkin’s skills as interrogator, see Chronicle of Current Events, No. 46, p. 21. 108 Aleksandr Ginzburg interviewed by Alla Latynina, ‘Portret Dissidenta,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 18 July 1990, No. 29, p. 7. 109 Demokraticheskaya Rossiya, 3 August 1991, No. 19, p. 12; See also Mikhail Gokhman, ‘Chistaya Rabota,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 28 June 1991, p. 6. 110 ‘To the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic,’ Izvestiya, 10 January 1991, p. 1; CDSP, 1991, No. 2, p. 2. 111 Literaturnaya Gazeta, 13 January 1991, No. 3, p. 3. 112 Quoted in Albats, KGB: State within the State, p. 264. 113 ‘Decree of the President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,’ Pravda, 28 January 1991, pp. 1–2; translation in CDSP, 1991, No. 4, p. 3. 114 ‘Decree of the President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: on cooperation between the police and units of the USSR armed forces in ensuring law and order and combatting crime,’ Pravda, 30 January 1991, p. 1; translation in CDSP, 1991, No. 5, p. 7. 115 ‘Appeal to the Soviet People,’ Izvestiya and Pravda, 20 August 1991, p. 1; translation in CDSP, 1991, No. 33, pp. 4–5. 116 Dunlop, The Rise of Russia, p. 208. 117 Ibid., p. 209. 118 New Times, 1991, No. 35, pp. 14–17. 119 Moscow News, 1989, No. 52, p. 9. 120 Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, p. 44. 121 See Kovalyov’s speech in Andrei Dmitrievich: Vospominaniya o Sakharove, Moscow: Knizhnoe Obozrenie, 1990, p. 38. 122 Ibid., p. 7. 123 Andrei Sakharov, ‘Neizbezhnost’ Perestroiki,’ in Inogo ne dano, ed. Yurii Afanas’ev, Moscow: Progress, 1988, p. 125.

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124 Aleksandr Podrabinek, ‘S kem segodnya Akademik Sakharov,’ Ekspress-Khronika, 1988, No. 38. 125 Yet in 1998, Sergei Kovalyov would defend the validity of Sakharov’s claims, see Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Andrei Sakharov: Ovetstvennost’ pered razumom,’ Izvestiya, 21 May 1998, p. 5. 126 Aleksandr Podrabinek, ‘Kremlevskoe shou s demokraticheskimi effektami,’ EkspressKhronika, 1989, No. 23. 127 Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, p. 118. 128 Ibid., p. 128. 129 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 13, p. 60. 130 Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, p. 129. 131 Interview with Aleksandr Sukharev, ‘Law—convenient and inconvenient,’ Moscow News, 1989, No. 23, p. 13. 132 Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, p. 125. 133 Francis X.Clines, ‘Sakharov draws wrath in stormy Congress,’ New York Times, 3 June 1989, p. 6. 134 Ibid., p. 134. 135 Yuri Vlasov, ‘Under attack,’ Moscow News, 11 June 1989, No. 24, pp. 8–9. 136 Anatoly Sobchak, For a New Russia, New York: Macmillan, 1992, p. 35. 137 Clines, ‘Sakharov draws wrath in stormy Congress’. 138 ‘The Congress of USSR People’s Deputies,’ Izvestiya, 4 June 1989, pp. 1–8; CDSP, 1989, No. 28, pp. 12–19. 139 Leonid Batkin, ‘Two worlds meet at the Congress of Deputies,’ Moscow News, 1989, No. 29, p. 9. 140 Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, p. 149. 141 Ibid., pp. 152–3. 142 Ibid., p. 155. 143 Bill Keller, ‘Soviet Congress ends with one last spat,’ New York Times, 10 June 1989, p. 3. 144 Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs, New York: Doubleday, 1990, p. 299. 145 Keller, ‘Soviet Congress ends with one last spat,’ p. 3. 146 Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 295. 147 ‘Schism? No, Dialogue!’ Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya, 1 August 1989, p. 2; CDSP, 1989, No. 31, pp. 1–2. 148 Vladimir Kryuchkov, ‘Tovarishchu Gorbachyovu M.S. O politicheskoi deyatelnosti A.D.Sakharova.,’ n. 2482-k/ov, KPSS, 8 December 1989, printed in Literaturnaya Gazeta, 14 December 1994, p. 11. 149 Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1989, No. 40; in Vera Tolz (ed.), The USSR in 1989: A Record of Events, Boulder: Westview Press, 1990, pp. 548–9. 150 Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Chetyre protsenta i nash narod,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1989, No. 10, p. 152. 151 Nina Andreeva, Nepodarenne Printsipy ili kratkii kurs istorii perestroiki (izbranne stat’i, vystupleniya) (1993), p. 46. 152 Vladimir Bushin, ‘My ne raby, raby nemy,’ Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal, 1989, No. 11, pp. 3–12. 153 Ibid., p. 3. 154 Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal, 1989, No. 12, p. 23. 155 ‘Nuzhna ‘zheleznaya ruka’?’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 16 August 1989, p. 10. 156 Igor Klyamkin, ‘What lies ahead?’ Moscow News, 2 July 1989, No. 27, pp. 12–13. 157 ‘Poka ne pozdno…’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 14 February 1990, p. 7; CDSP, 1990, No. 9, p. 7. 158 ‘Pisateli trebuyut ot pravitelstva reshitel’nykh deistvi,’ Izvestiya, 5 October 1993, p. 3. 159 Bill Keller, ‘Gorbachev calls for strike ban, New York Times, 3 October 1989, p. 1. 160 ‘The deputies disagreed,’ Moscow News, 1989, No. 43, p. 4.

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161 Interview with Larisa Bogoraz, Moscow News, 1989, No. 42, p. 13. 162 Larisa Bogoraz, Yurii Orlov, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, Aleksei Smirnov, Lev Timofeev, Boris Zolotukhin, ‘O neobkhodimosti zakona SSSR ‘O chrezvychainom polozhenii,” Russkaya Mysl’, 11 August 1989, p. 5. 163 Sergei Kovalyov speech at Sakharov Reading, January 1990, in Andrei Dmitrievich: Vospominaniya o Sakharove, Moscow: Terra, 1991, p. 38. 164 Washington Post, 17 October 1989; cited by Tolz, The USSR in 1989, p. 552. 165 Argumenty i fakty 1989, No. 40; Vera Tolz, ‘The implications for glasnost of Gorbachev’s attack on Reformists,’ Radio Liberty, 1989, No. 490, p. 6. 166 Viktor Yasman, ‘Afghanistan comes up, Glasnost goes down,’ Radio Liberty, 1989, No. 512. 167 AP, 18 October 1989; cited by Tolz, The USSR in 1989, p. 552. 168 ‘Razgovor A.D.Sakharova i chlena stachkoma shakhty “Vorgashorskaya” Petra Belomystseva,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 17 November 1989, p. 1; see also Kryuchkov’s report to Gorbachev, ‘O vliyanii Sakharova A.D.na zabostovochnoe dvizhenie v Vorkute,’ 14 November 1989, n. 2292-K/OVER, TsK, KPSS, published in Literaturnaya Gazeta, 14 December 1994, p. 11. 169 Tolz, The USSR in 1989, pp. 641, 655. 170 F.X.Clines, ‘Gorbachev says the party should wait before sharing power,’ New York Times, 10 December 1989, p. 30. 171 F.X.Clines, ‘Gorbachev blocks debate on ending party supremacy,’ New York Times, 13 December 1989, p. 20. 172 Sakharov, Moscow and Beyond, p. xv. 173 Moscow News, Special Issue, 1989, No. 52, p. 8. 174 Ibid., p. 9. 175 Ales Adamovich, ‘Sakharov and people like him,’ Moscow News, 1990, No. 1, p. 8. 176 Leonid Batkin, ‘Chto nas zhdet posle smerti Sakharova,’ Knizhnoe Obozrenie, 22 December 1989, No. 51, p. 16; cited by Dunlop, The Rise of Russia, p. 88. 177 Aleksandr Nikishin ‘Pokhoron Akademika A.D.Sakharova,’ Znamya, 1990, No. 5, p. 187. 178 Doverie (Noginsk-Tartu), No. 1, January 1990; cited by Dunlop, The Rise of Russia, p. 113. 179 ‘O zavershenii traurnykh meropriyatii v svyazi s konchinoi A.S.Sakharova,’ 20 December 1989, N. 2568, TsK KPSS, published in Literaturnaya Gazeta, 14 December 1994, p. 11. 180 Yurii Burtin, ‘Velikii russkii intelligent,’ Oktyabr’, 1990, No. 1, p. 4. 181 Moscow News, 1990, No. 31, p. 2. 182 ‘Coup or Operetta?’ Moscow News, 1990, No. 45, p. 6. 183 Elena Bonner in Wall Street Journal, 14 December 1990; Kovalyov in Moscow News, 1990, No. 45, p. 6. 184 Moscow Times, 21 May 1994, p. 2; for a description of the founding conference, see Aleksandr Ginzburg, ‘Vesti s Rodiny,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 18 May 1990, p. 2. 185 Vladimir Zaburin, ‘Razgovor s mukhami, ili monolog na kukhne,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1990, No. 8 p. 212. 186 Ibid., p. 217. 187 Yurii Oklyanskii, ‘K portretu natsional’nogo kommunizma,’ Demokraticheskaya Rossiya, 1991, No. 14, p. 6. 188 V.Samoilov, ‘Razgul Sakharovshchiny,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1990, No. 9, pp. 260–3. 189 V.Glotov, ‘Oktyabr’ ‘Demokraticheskoi Rossii”, Ogonek, 1990, No. 45, p. 6. 190 Elena Bonner interviewed by G.Zhavoronkov, Moscow News, 1991, No. 19, p. 7. 191 Roy Medvedev, ‘Pokushenie na chuzhuyu slavu,’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 8 June 1991. 192 ‘Roy Medvedev: provokator ili dissident,’ Demokraticheskaya Rossiya, 5 July 1991, No. 15, p. 15. 193 Gleb Pavlovskii, ‘O svobode v epokhu liberalizatsii,’ Vek XX i Mir, 1992, No. 4, p. 35. 194 Ibid.

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195 V.Bulgakov, N.Nim, A.Simonov, A.Smirnov (eds), Ne znat’, ne slyshat’, ne ponimat’, khronika—pozitsiya—mnenie (press release, 17 December 1994), p. 9. 196 Andrei Kozyrev, Preobrazhenie, Moscow: Novosti, 1994, p. 94. 197 David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb, p. 283. 198 Ibid., p. 286. 199 ‘O chem on ne uspel skazat’,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 27 December 1989, p. 2. 200 ‘Konstitutsiya Soyuza Sovetskikh Respublik Evropy i Azii,’ in Sakharov, Trevoga i nadezhda, Moscow: Inter-verso, 1991, p. 267. 201 Leonid Batkin, ‘O konstitutsionnom proekte Andreya Sakharova,’ Oktyabr 1990, No. 5,p. 150. 202 A.A.Mishin, ‘Nekotore mysli o Konstitutsii A.D.Sakharova,’ in M.P. Vyshinskii, (ed.) Pravo i vlast’: chelovek, pravo, gosudarstvo, Moscow: Progress, 1990, pp. 231–40. 203 ‘Sozdan izbiratel’nyi blok “Demokraticheskaya Rossiya,” Ogonek, 1990, No. 6, p.17. 204 Ibid. 205 Mary Dejevsky, ‘300,000 join protest march in Moscow,’ The Times (London), 5 February 1990, p. 1. 206 Francis X.Clines, ‘100,000 at rally in Moscow urge democratic changes,’ New York Times, 5 February 1989, p. 1. 207 Sobchak, For a New Russia, pp. 87–8. 208 Ibid., p. 89. 209 Elena Bonner, ‘Ikh naputstvoval Sakharov,’ Argumenty i Fakty, 3 March 1990, No. 9, p. 5. 210 Ibid. 211 Francis X.Clines, ‘A Sakharov heir is back in the arena,’ New York Times, 8 March 1990, p. 14. 212 Sergei Kovalyov interviewed by Lev Timofeev, ‘Dissident s parlamentskim mandatom,’ Referendum, No. 35, April 1990; reprinted in Referendum: Zhurnal nezavisimykh mnenii, Moscow: Vest, 1992, pp. 174–6. 213 Sergei Kovalyov interviewed by Vladimir Emelyanenko, Moscow News, 11 April 1993, No. 15, p. 11. 214 Evgeniya Albats, ‘Chuzho,’ Izvestiya, 25 August 1995, p. 3. 215 ‘Strana nakonets izbavilas’ ot illyuzii,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 25 April 1991, p. 8. 216 Express-Chronicle, (English edition), issue 23, part 2. 217 Vek XX i Mir, 1991, No. 6, pp. 9–11. 218 Express-Chronicle, 6 August 1991, No. 33 (English edition). 219 Sergei Kovalyov interviewed by Vladimir Emelyanenko, Moscow News, 11 April 1993, No. 15, p. 11. 220 Express-Chronicle, 21 August 1990, No. 34 (English edition). 221 ‘K intsidentu v aeroportu Stepanakerta,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 26 January 1991, p. 3. 222 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Is the law as harsh as ever?’ Moscow News, 1991, No. 49, p. 6. 223 Author interview with Yurii Shikhanovich, 1995. 224 Sergei Kovalyov interviewed by G.Lazutina, ‘Osleplenie Polifema,’ Narodnyi Deputat, 1992, No. 11, p. 107. 225 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Is the law as bad as ever?’ Moscow News, 1991, No. 49, p. 7. 226 ‘VS RSFSR prinyal zakon o militsii,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 20 April 1991, p. 1. 227 ‘Sergei Kovalyov: Verkhovnyi Sovet pokryl sebya pozorom,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 18 May 1991, p. 1. 228 Sergei Kovalyov interviewed by G.Lazutina, ‘Osleplenie Polifema,’ Narodnyi Deputat, 1992, No. 11, p. 106; see also Kovalyov’s comments in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 12 November 1991, p. 1. 229 Boris Zolotukhin and Sergei Pashin, ‘Before the verdict is in…’ New Times, 1991, No. 46, p. 30.

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230 Boris Zolotukhin, ‘First Steps to Judicial Reform,’ September 1992, Perspective, Vol. 3, No. 1, http://www.bu.edu/iscip/vol3/Zolotukhin.html [accessed 10 June 2002]. 231 Argumenty i Fakty, 23 July 1990, No. 25, p. 1. 232 Moscow News, 1990, No. 42, p. 4. 233 Ruslan Khasbulatov, The Struggle for Russia: Power and Change in the Democratic Revolution, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 57. 234 Viktor Sheinis, ‘New constitution: priority for the individual,’ Moscow News, 1991, No. 40, p. 7. 235 Bruce Clark, ‘Russia defies the KGB with draft charter to uphold human rights,’ The Times (London), 12 October 1990, p. 11. 236 East European Constitutional Review, spring 1992, p. 6; for the text of the first draft, see Argumenty i Fakty, 1990, No. 47, pp. 1–8. 237 Evgeny Ambartsumov, ‘Attacked from the very start,’ Moscow News, 1990, No. 50, p. 6. 238 ‘Kazhdyi mozhet stat’ agentom,’ Novoe Vremya, 1991, No. 18, p. 44. 239 Boris Yeltsin, ‘Pravovuyu pregradu khaosu i raspadu,’ Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 5 November 1991,p. 1. 240 Julia Wishnevskaya, ‘Party diehards reject human rights for new Russian constitution,’ Radio Liberty Daily Report, 21 March 1992. 241 Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 13 July 1991, p. 1. 242 Kovalyov, ‘Is the law as bad as ever?’ 243 ‘Pobeda! Svoboda! No budem bditel’ny,’ Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 23 August 1991, p. 1. 244 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘The wise state opens its borders,’ New Times, 1991, No. 39, p. 25. 245 Leonid Belekhov, ‘Rossiya vystupaetsya za prava kubintsev,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 12 February 1992, p. 2. 246 Leonid Kanneberg, ‘Prava cheloveka ne est’ vnutrennee delo gosudarstv,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 2 April 1992, p. 1. 247 Mikhail Karpov, ‘V KS prodolzhayut razoblachat’ KPSS,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 29 July 1992, p. 1. 248 Yulia Goryacheva, ‘Zaklyuchenie osnovatel’no podoshli k aktsii protesta,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 16 November 1991, p. 1. 249 Yulia Goryacheva, ‘Deputaty Rossii reshayut byt’ amnistii ili net,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 24 March 1992, p. 1; A.Golubev, ‘Ostorozhno: opasnaya zona,’ Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 4 December 1991, p. 4. 250 Sergei Kovalev, ‘Pravdolyubets ostanetsya na narakh,’ Novoe Vremya, 1992, No. 33, p. 36. 251 ‘O reabilitatsii zhertv politicheskikh repressii,’ Vedomosti S’ezda Narodnykh Deputatov RSFSR i Verkhovnogo Soveta RSFSR, 1991, No. 44, pp. 1, 428, and 1,992, No. 28, p. 1,624; full text reprinted in Sbornik zakonadatel’nykh i normativnykh aktov o repressiyakh i reabilitatsii zhertv politicheskikh repressii, Moscow: 1993, pp. 194–204. 252 M.Ratner, ‘Vstrecha byvshikh politzaklyuchennikh,’ Ekspress-Khronika, 10 December 1991, p. 6. 253 ‘VS RF: Prinyat Zakon o Prokurature,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 18 January 1992, p. 2. 254 Evgeniya Albats, ‘The parliament KGB hearings,’ Moscow News, 1992, No. 6, p. 2; on the closure of the commission, see Ogonek, 1992, No. 18–19, pp. 12–13. 255 Ibid. 256 Dunlop, The Rise of Russia, p. 190. 257 ‘Are we once again imperialist agents? Resumption of witch-hunt against Moscow News authors,’ Moscow News, 1992, No. 44, p. 1. 258 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Letter to the President,’ (undated, Moscow Memorial); on the Cherkesov affair, see also Aleksandr Ginzburg, ‘Teni nad gorodom,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 22 January 1993, p. 3. 259 Sergei Kovalyov interviewed by G.Lazutina, Narodnyi Deputat, 1992, No. 11, p. 108.

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260 On the expulsions, see Burtin, ‘Vazhnye gosudarstvennye dela,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 21 April 1992, p. 5. 261 ‘Zayavlenie Komiteta Verkhovnogo Soveta Rossiiskoi Federatsii po pravam cheloveka,’ 3 March 1992 (Moscow Memorial). 262 On the measures against Filatov, ‘Khasbulatov prepares for new parliamentary session,’ Moscow News, 1992, No. 36, p. 2. 263 A.Zuychenko, ‘Oppozitsiya spikeru rasshiryaetsya,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 9 September 1992, p. 1. 264 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Front otstupaet i vyigryvaet,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 4 November 1992, No. 45, p. 10. 265 Sergei Kovalyov, Boris Zolotukhin, ‘Tam, gde s’ezd proshel, ostalis’ ruini,’ Novoe Vremya, 1993, No. 2–3, p. 16. 266 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Tikhaya rabota po svertyvaniyu demokratii,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 23 December 1992, No. 52, p. 1. 267 Julia Wishnevskaya, ‘Constitutional crisis deepens after Russian Congress,’ Radio Liberty Report, 26 March 1993, p. 7. 268 ‘Russian parliament human rights committee makes statement,’ RIA, 23 March 1993; ‘Parliamentary human rights committee supports Yeltsin,’ Radio Liberty Daily Report, 24 March 1993. 269 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Tri voprosa i odno napominanie Valeriyu Zorkinu,’ Novoe Vremya, 1993, No. 13, pp. 8–9. 270 Sergei Kovalyov interviewed by Vladimir Emelyanenko, Moskovskie Novosti, 11 April 1993, No. 15, p. 11. 271 ‘Russian parliament must be decent enough to resign, says reformer MP,’ RIA, 26 April 1993; ‘All-Russia voters’ association to be set up to support president and government reform policy,’ RIA, 7 June 1993. 272 New Times, 1993, No. 18, p. 4; for the text, see ‘Yeltsin’s draft constitution,’ Izvestiya, 30 April 1993, pp.3–5; CDSP, 1993, No. 20, pp. 10–19. 273 ‘Prezident prinyal reshenie sozvat’ konstitutsionnoe soveshchanie 5 iunya,’ Izvestiya, 22 May 1993, p. 1. 274 Andrei Kozyrev, ‘Sakharovskoe nasledie i sub’by Rossii v mire,’ Izvestiya, 22 May 1993, p. 5. 275 On the assembly, see Kronid Lyubarskii, ‘Improvizatsiya kak stil’ politiki,’ Novoe Vremya, 1993, No. 26, p. 12. 276 ‘Kto uchastvyuet v konstitutsionnom soveshchanii,’ Rossiiskie Vesti, 5 June 1993, p. 2. 277 ‘Deputies propose amendments to constitution,’ RIA, 11 March 1993. 278 ‘Group of representatives of local self-government favours granting all subjects of federation equal rights,’ RIA, 9 June 1993. 279 Leonid Volkov, ‘Communist revanche in the Russian Parliament,’ New Times International 1993, No. 29, p. 6. 280 Elena Viktorova, ‘Sergei Kovalyov is defending the wrong people,’ Segodnya, 9 July 1993, p. 2; translation in CDSP, 1993, No. 27, p. 23. 281 Memorial-Aspekt, October 1993, Nos 2–3, p. 1. 282 Ekspress-Khronika, 24 September 1993, p. 138. 283 Ibid. 284 Kronid Lyubarskii, ‘Raschistka Razvalin,’ Novoe Vremya, 1993, No. 42, p. 7. 285 ‘Sozdan Fond Evroaziatskogo sotrudnichestva,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 20 February 1993, p. 2. 286 Fedor Burlatskii, ‘Uiti s mirom—eto uiti s dostoinstvom!’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 25 September 1993, p. 2. 287 ‘Yeltsin signs decree on human rights commission,’ RIA, 26 September 1993. 288 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘On the new Russia,’ New York Review of Books, 18 April 1996, p. 12.

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289 Sergei Kovalev, ‘Parlament umer, da zdravstvuet parlament!’ Moskovskie Novosti, 1993, No. 40, p. 2. 290 Andrei Sinyavskii, ‘Vse eto uzhe bylo: pochemu ya segodnya protiv Yel’tsina,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 13 October 1993, p. 5. 291 Pavel Litvinov, ‘Yel’tsin podmenyaet uvazhenie k pravu pravom sil’nogo,’ Izvestiya, 1 December 1993, p. 4. 292 Yan Rachinskii, ‘Posmertnaya Pravota Kommunisticheskoi Propagandy,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 29 October 1993, p. 5. 293 A.Buzgalin and A.Kolganov, Bloody October in Moscow: Political Repression in the Name of Reform, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994, p. 204. 294 Dmitrii Pushkar, ‘Levozashchitniki,’ Moscow News, 1993, No. 51, p. 2; and Vadim Belotserkovskii’s rebuttal, ‘Pravozashchitniki Vozrazhayut,’ Moscow News, 1993, No. 52, p. 6. 295 Aleksei Pyatikovskii, ‘Udarim Zorkinym po konstitutsii,’ Stolitsa, 1993, No. 50, p. 4. 296 Kuranty, 15 December 1993, p. 2. 297 ‘Belyi Dom snitsya po nocham,’ Kuranty, 2 November 1993, p. 4. 298 ‘Sergei Kovalyov: ‘Human rights violations in Russia are widespread and flagrant’’, Novaya Ezhednevnaya Gazeta, 15 December 1993, p. 3; CDSP, 1993, No. 50. 299 Ibid. 300 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘On the new Russia,’ New York Review of Books, 18 April 1996, p. 12. 301 ‘Podoidet li ono Rossii?’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 17 November 1993, No. 46, p. 1. 302 Elena Bonner, ‘Vinovata demokraticheskaya intelligentsiya,’ Kuranty, 14 December 1993, p. 1. 303 Yan Rachinskii, ‘Usmeshka Il’icha,’ Novoe Vremya, 1993, No. 45, p. 17. 304 Nauchno-prakticheskaya konferentsiya posvyashchennaya 73-ei godovshchine so dnya rozhdeniya A.D.Sakharova, Moscow: Yuridicheskaya Literatura, 1994, p. 11. 305 Ibid., p. 38. 306 Evgeniya Albats, ‘Are eggs the only things that will be broken?’ Izvestiya, 17 June 1994, p. 5; CDSP, 1994, No. 24, p. 5. 307 Ibid. 308 ‘Sergei Kovalyov thinks the president’s decree is dangerous,’ Izvestiya, 24 June 1994, p. 2; CDSP, 1994, No. 25, p. 10. 309 ‘Boris Yeltsin has no intention of suspending the decree on combatting gangsterism,’ Izvestiya, 24 June 1994, p. 2; CDSP, 1994, No. 25, p. 10. 310 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Punitive agencies are given carte blanche,’ Moskovskie Novosti, 1994, No. 26, p. A6; CDSP, 1994, No. 25, p. 11. 311 ‘Massove narusheniya prav cheloveka v Rossii: vlasti khoteli by skryt’ ot obshchestvennosti doklad Sergeya Kovaleva na etu temu,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 22 July 1994, p. 1 312 Indira Dunaeva, ‘U nas budut svoi ombudsmeny,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 22 July 1994, p. 1. 313 Segodniya, NTV, cited in Ne znat’, ne slyshat’, ne ponimat’, II, p. 13. 314 ‘Security Council meets in session at Kremlin to consider situation in Chechnya,’ RIA, 26 December 1994. 315 ‘Kovalev obvinyaet,’ Argumenty i Fakty, 1995, No. 29, p. 3; on the same theme, see Kovalyov’s speech to ‘Peace initiative in the Caucasus’ conference, Russkaya Mysl’, 13–19 April 1995, p. 4. 316 ‘Dissidents: Memorial holds a vigil on Staraya Square,’ Segodnya, 27 December 1994, p. 2; CDSP, 1994, No. 52, p. 11. 317 Larisa Bogoraz, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pavel Litvinov, Viktor Fainberg, Statement on 20 December 1995, Ne znat’, ne slyshat’, ne ponimat’, II, p. 22. 318 Ne znat’, ne slyshat’, ne ponimat’, II, p. 9.

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319 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Appeal,’ 24 December 1994; reprinted in Ne znat’, ne slyshat’, ne ponimat’, II, p. 23. 320 Aleksandr Lavut, ‘Fragment Stenogrammy press-konferentsii “‘Missiya S.A. Kovaleva v Groznom,”’ 29 December 1994, (disc from Moscow Memorial). 321 See, for instance, ‘The Russian Government’s Press Center is Lying!’ Izvestiya, 24 December 1995, p. 4; CDSP, 1994, No. 51, p. 6. 322 Evgeniya Al’bats, ‘Dubinkoi i matom po pravam cheloveka,’ Izvestiya, 28 January 1995, pp. 1,4. 323 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘Appeal,’ 24 December 1994, in Ne znat’, ne slyshat’, ne ponimat’, II, p. 23. 324 Elena Bonner, ‘Declaration to the President of Russia,’ 18 December 1994; reprinted in Ne znat’, ne slyshat’, ne ponimat’, II, p. 22. 325 Lev Aleinik, ‘Resignation: Boris Zolotukhin leaves presidential structures,’ Segodnya, 29 December 1994, p.2; CDSP, 1994, No. 52, p. 10. 326 Elena Bonner, ‘Your Foros has succeeded!’ Izvestiya, 30 December 1994, p. 2; CDSP, 1994, No. 52, pp. 9–10. 327 ‘Memorial, DPR rebuff Yeltsin’s “public” initiatives,’ OMRI Daily Digest, 7 February 1995. 328 ‘Boris Yeltsin forms provisional observation commission on constitutional rights and freedoms in Chechnya,’ RIA, 30 December 1994. 329 ‘Prigovoren k prezreniyu’, Sovetskaya Rossiya, 25 February 1993, p. 1. 330 Yelena Bonner, ‘A letter to Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin,’ dated 28 December 1994, New York Review of Books, 2 February 1995. 331 ‘Prezident bol’she doveryaet Valentinu Kovalevu, chem Kovalevu Sergeyu,’ Izvestiya, 5 January 1995, p. 3. 332 ‘Sergei Kovalyov is the Man of the Year,’ Izvestiya, 31 December 1994, p.1; CDSP, 1994, No. 52, pp. 14–15. 333 Ogonek, 1994, No. 52, p. 11. 334 ‘Spisok deputatov, podpisavshikh obrashchenie v komitet Nobelevskoi premii mira v podderzhku kandidatury Sergeya Kovaleva,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 2–8 February 1995, No. 4,063, Spetsial’noe prilozhenie, p. II. 335 G.A.Arbatov, D.S.Danin, Yu.F.Karyakin, D.S.Likhachev, B.V.Raushenbakh, L.E.Razgon, A.E.Sheindlin, A.L.Yanshin, ‘Tikhii golos pravozashchitnika ne zaglushila kanonada varvarskoi voiny,’ Izvestiya, 5 January 1995, p. 3. 336 ‘Democrats consider Kovalyov for president,’ OMRI Daily Digest, 19 April 1995. 337 ‘Yavlinskii sees no problem in democratic disunity,’ OMRI Daily Digest, 12 July 1995. 338 ‘Kovalyov to refuse parliamentary immunity,’ OMRI Daily Digest, 24 April 1995. 339 ‘Fraktsiya V.Zhirinovskogo stremitsya stat’ glavnoi oporoi prezidenta,’ Izvestiya, 27 January 1995, p. 2. 340 ‘Gosudarstvennaya Duma obsuzhdaet ‘personal’noe delo’ deputata Kovalyova,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 2–8 February 1995, Special Supplement, pp. 1–2. 341 ‘Zhazhda politicheskoi mesti zavela deputatov v lovushku,’ Izvestiya, 14 March 1995, p. 1; Aleksei Kirpichnikov, ‘The Duma goes after individuals: Sergei Kovalyov is no longer human rights commissioner,’ Segodnya, 11 March 1995, p. 1; translation in CDSP, 1995, No. 10, p. 10. 342 ‘Duma removes Kovalyov as human rights commissioner,’ OMRI Daily Digest, 13 March 1995. 343 ‘Kovalyov to refuse parliamentary immunity,’ OMRI Daily Digest, 24 April 1995. 344 Natal’ya Kravchenko, Aleksandr Lavut, ‘Pravozashchitniki trebuyut zavesti ugolovnoe delo na tekh, kto razvyazal voinu v Chechne,’ Izvestiya, 7 March 1995, p. 2. 345 Kronid Lyubarskii, ‘Duel’ s Novodvorskoi: Il’yushenko okazalos’ malo “Kukol”’, Novoe Vremya, 1995, No. 34, pp. 12–13

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346 ‘Kovalev testifies in Chechnya case,’ OMRI Daily Digest, 14 July 1995. 347 Konstantin Katanyan, ‘Rossiiskaya Femida vzyalas’ za “chechenskoe delo,”’ Russkaya Mysl’, 20–6 July 1995, p. 4. 348 Ibid. 349 Valerii Rudnev, ‘Konstitutsionnyi sud ushyol dumat’,’ Izvestiya, 15 July 1995, p. 2. 350 ‘Kovalev obvinyaet,’ Argumenty i Fakty, 1995, No. 29, p. 3. 351 Kronid Lyubarskii, ‘Shemyakin Sud,’ Novoe Vremya, 1995, No. 32, p. 10. 352 Marina Pavlova-Sil’vanskaya, ‘Kremlevskaya kvadril’ vokrug Sergeya Kovaleva,’ Novoe Vremya, 1995, No. 32, p. 12. 353 Mikhail Gokhman, ‘O neprinyatom zakone,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 20–6 April 1995, p. 3. 354 ‘Spetssluzhby stanovyatsya samostoyatel’noi politicheskoi siloi,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 6–12 April 1995, No. 4,072, p. 8. 355 Ibid. 356 Christian Lowe, ‘Court OKs Chechnya campaign,’ The Moscow Tribune, 1 August 1995, pp. 1–2. 357 Christian Lowe, ‘Kovalyov insult may kill group,’ The Moscow Tribune, 2 August 1995, p. 1. 358 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘An open letter to B.Yeltsin,’ Izvestiya, 24 January 1996, p. 2; CDSP, 1996, No. 4, p. 10; reprinted as ‘A letter of resignation’ in New York Review of Books, 29 February 1996, p. 29. 359 Aleksei Kirpichnikov, ‘Defense of human rights will serve the state,’ Segodnya, 6 November 1996, p. 3. 360 Aleksei Kiva, ‘Union of the obsessed,’ Izvestiya, 11 May 1991, p. 3; CDSP, 1991, No. 19, pp. 4–5. 361 Aleksei Kiva, ‘The splendour and poverty of the human rights movement,’ Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 20 February 1997, p. 5; CDSP, 1997, No. 8, p. 8. 362 Kiva, ‘The splendour and poverty of the human rights movement,’ Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 21 February 1997, pp. 4–5; CDSP, 1997, No. 8, p. 9. 363 ‘Human rights activists unhappy with presidential commission,’ OMRI, 21 March 1997. 364 Aleksei Kiva, ‘From dissidents to imposters,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta-Tsenarii, 29 April 1997, p. 8; CDSP, 1997, No. 18, pp. 16–17. 365 Ivan Rodin, ‘Duma passes law on human rights commissioner,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 18 April 1996, p. 1; CDSP, 1996, No. 16, pp. 16–17; Mariya Rybakova, ‘Zakon prinyat: Vremya iskat’ upolnomochennogo,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 25 April–1 May 1996, p. 2. 366 Ivan Rodin, ‘Law is not passed,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 11 July 1996, p. 1; CDSP, 1996, No. 28. 367 Evgeny Yuryev, ‘Declaration of the rights of man and the oppositionist,’ Kommersant Daily, 26 December 1996, p.3; CDSP, 1996, No. 52, pp. 12–13. 368 Phil Reeves, ‘ldealism expires as a Communist becomes Russia’s rights monitor,’ The Independent, 23 May 1998. 369 Moskovskii Komsomolets, 28 May 1998.

4 The invention of Russophobia 1 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, p. 406. 2 John Dunlop, ‘The sad case of Igor Shafarevich,’ East European Jewish Affairs, summer 1994, Vol. 24, No. 1, p. 27. 3 Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia, New York: Harper Perennial, 1994, p. ix.

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4 Ibid., p. 161. 5 Ibid. p. 165. 6 Dunlop ‘The sad case,’ p. 27. 7 E.g. Alla Latynina, ‘Inflammable,’ Moscow News, 1989, No. 48, p. 3. 8 Smilka Zdravkovska ‘Listening to Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich,’ Mathematical Intelligencer, 1989, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 16. 9 Ibid. 10 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, p. 405. 11 Ibid. 12 Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, p. 327. 13 I.R.Shafarevich, Zakonadatel’stvo o religii v SSSR, Paris: YMCA Press, 1975. 14 Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, p. 327. 15 Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, p. 404. 16 Ibid. 17 I.R.Shafarevich, ‘Obraz Rossii’, Moskva, 1991, No. 11, p. 11. 18 For the text of the appeal, see Cornelia Gerstenmaier, Voices of the Silent, New York: Hart Publishing Company, 1972, pp. 408–10. 19 Ibid. 20 I.R.Shafarevich, Sotsializm kak yavlenie mirovoi istorii, Paris: YMCA Press, 1975; English translation, The Socialist Phenomenon, New York: Harper & Row, 1975. 21 Ibid., pp. 194–201. 22 It was disparaged by Dunlop, ‘The sad case,’ pp. 21–2; and by Laqueur, Black Hundred, p. 99. 23 Sakharov, Memoirs p. 23; on Kostava, Chronicle of Current Events, No. 53, p. 21. 24 Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, No. 45, p. 25. 25 Ibid. 26 Vasilii Belov, ‘Vyberemsya!’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1993, No. 23, p. 6. 27 Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Pridvornye dissidenty i “pogibshee pokolenie,”’ Nash Sovremennik, 1991, No. 3, p. 172. 28 Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, p. 407. 29 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 34, pp. 29–30. 30 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 35, p. 147. 31 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 34, p. 30. 32 Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, p. 407. 33 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 35, p. 150; ‘Pis’mo k Shafarevichu,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 13 February 1975; reprinted in Yuli Daniel, Govorit Moskva, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1991, pp. 277–80. 34 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 35, p. 150. 35 See Solzhenitsyn’s statement, dated 14 October 1975, in Vestnik RKhD, No. 166, p. 258. 36 Zdravkovska, ‘Listening to Igor Rostislavovich Shafarevich,’ p. 23. 37 Chronicle of Current Events 34, p. 74. 38 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 46, pp. 24–5. 39 On Shafarevich’s hesitation, Sakharov, Memoirs, p.466; for text of the appeal see Sakharov, Alarm and Hope, London: Collins, Harvill Press, pp. 148–9. 40 F.Svetov, I.Khokhlushkin, I.Shafarevich, V.Borisov, and Z.Krakhmal’nikova, Chronicle of Current Events, No. 39, pp. 201–2. 41 I.Shafarevich, ‘Television interview with the BBC on 26 September 1976,’ Chronicle of Current Events, No. 47, pp. 177–81 42 Chronicle of Current Events, No. 46, p. 108. 43 Broadcast on the programme Everyman, 2 October 1977; reprinted in Vestnik RKhD, No. 125, pp. 207–13.

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44 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1978; Chronicle of Current Events, No. 51, pp. 211– 12; Vestnik RKhD, No. 126, pp. 222–30. 45 Z.Krakhmal’nikova, ‘Rusofobiya, khristianstvo, antisemitizm’, Neva, 1990, No. 8, p. 168. 46 Igor Shafarevich ‘Ar’ergardnye boi Marksizma (O rabotakh R.A.Medvedeva),’ Vestnik RKhD, No. 125, pp. 160–81; Intervyu radiokompanii Bi Bi Si’ pp. 207–13; ‘D.D.Shostakovich,’ pp. 232–73. 47 Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, No. 45, p.11. 48 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Rusofobiya: desyat’ let spustya,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1991, No. 12, p. 124. 49 Ibid. 50 O.Altayev, ‘The Dual Consciousness of the Intelligentsia and Pseudo-Culture,’ in M.Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin (eds), The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, p. 116; A.Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Smatterers,’ in From under the Rubble, p. 229. 51 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Fenomen Emigratsii,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 8 September 1989, p. 5. 52 Andrei Sinyavskii, ‘Pamflet ili paskvil’?’ Novyi Mir, 1964, No. 12, p. 228. 53 Dm. Eremin, ‘Turncoats,’ Izvestiya, 13 January 1966, p.6; Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 1966, Vol. 18, No. 2, p. 11. 54 Zoya Kedrina, ‘The Heirs of Smerdyakov,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 22 January 1966, in Leopold Labedz and Max Hayward, On Trial, London: Collins, Harvill, 1967, p. 106. 55 Thomas W.Wolfe, Soviet Power and Europe, 1945–1970, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970, pp. 250–6. 56 Mikhail Lobanov, ‘Obrazovannye lavochniki,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1968, No. 4, p. 299. 57 Pravda, 25 May 1968; cited by H.Gordon Skilling, Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1976, p.739. 58 Viktor Chalmaev, ‘Neizbezhnost,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1968, No. 9, pp. 259–89. 59 V.I.Lenin, ‘Critical Remarks on the National Question,’ in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C.Tucker, New York and London: W.W.Norton & Co., 1975, pp. 654–8. 60 A.Dement’ev, ‘O traditsiyakh i narodnosti,’ Novyi Mir, 1969, No. 4, pp. 225–6; cited by Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right, Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California Press, 1978, p. 49. 61 Ogonyok, 26 July 1969, No. 30, signed by Mikhail Alekseev, Sergei Vikulov, Sergei Voronin, Vitalii Zakrutkin, Anatolii Ivanov, Sergei Malashkin, Aleksandr Prokof’ev, Petr Proskurin, Sergei Smirnov, Vladimir Chivilikhin, and Nikolai Shundik. Cited in Yanov, Russian New Right, p. 50. 62 Aleksandr Yanov, Voprosy Literatury, 1969, No. 5, Vadim Kozhinov, Voprosy Literatury, 1969, No. 10. 63 Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, pp. 245–6. 64 Altayev, ‘The Dual Consciousness of the Intelligentsia and Pseudo-Culture’; V. Gorskii, ‘Russian Messianism and the New National Consciousness’; M. Chelnov ‘How to be?’ Vestnik RSKhD, 97. Altayev’s and Gorskii’s articles are translated in Meerson-Aksenov and Shragin (eds), The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, pp. 116– 47 and pp. 353–93. 65 On Men’s circle as the source of the articles, see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Bodalsya telenok s dubom: pyatoe dopolnenie. Nevidimki,’ Novyi Mir, 1991, No. 12, p.47. 66 Gorskii, ‘Russian Messianism,’ pp. 371, 373, 372. 67 Altayev, ‘Dual Consciousness,’ pp. 131, 134. 68 N.N., Metanoia, cited by Meerson-Aksenov and Shragin, The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, p. 347. 69 Gorsky, ‘Russian Messianism,’ p. 355. 70 Ibid., p. 356. 71 Ibid., p. 357. 72 Ibid., p. 365.

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73 Ibid., p. 366. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., p. 375. 76 Altayev, ‘Dual Consciousness,’ pp. 117–18. 77 Ibid., p. 127. 78 Ibid., pp. 130–1. 79 Ibid., p. 137. 80 Ibid., p. 147. 81 Dunlop, ‘The sad case’, p. 23; on Chaadaev’s impact, see Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, pp. 83–117; for the text of the letter, see Petr Chaadayev, Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman, Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1969. 82 Yanov, Russian New Right, p. 102. 83 Leonid Borodin, ‘Vestnik R.S.Kh.D. and the Russian Intelligentsia,’ Veche 8. Translation with excerpts reprinted in John Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983, p. 347. 84 Ibid., p. 350. 85 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘Repentance and Self-Limitation,’ in From under the Rubble, p. 126. 86 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Separation or Reconciliation,’ in From under the Rubble, p. 96 87 Solzhenitsyn, ‘Repentance and Self-Limitation,’ pp. 115–17. 88 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Does Russia Have a Future?’ in From under the Rubble, pp. 292–4. 89 Solzhenitsyn, ‘Repentance and Self-Limitation,’ p. 124. 90 Ibid., p. 121. 91 Ibid., p. 125. 92 Anonymous, ‘The Struggle against So-Called Russophilism, or the Path to National Suicide,’ translated in Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism, p. 433. 93 Ibid., p. 304. 94 Solzhenitsyn, ‘The Smatterers,’ p. 254. 95 Ibid., p. 261. 96 Ibid., p. 262. 97 Shafarevich, ‘Separation or Reconciliation,’ p. 97. 98 Alexander Yanov, The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, p. 144. 99 Mikhail Agurskii, ‘The Intensification of the Neo-Nazi Dangers in the Soviet Union,’ in The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, p. 418. 100 Ivan Samolvin, ‘A Letter to Solzhenitsyn,’ in ‘The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, pp. 421, 423. 101 Ibid., pp. 426, 427. 102 ‘Critical comments of a Russian regarding the patriotic journal Veche’ in The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, p. 442; also published in Novyi Zhurnal, 1975, No. 118, p. 227. 103 ‘Razgovor po telefonu s Moskvoi,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 16 January 1975, p. 2. 104 Yanov, The Russian Challenge, p. 258. 105 V.Emelyanov, Dezionizatsiya, Paris: Free Palestine Press, 1979, cited by Julia Wishnevskaya ‘The Origins of Pamyat,’ Survey, October 1988, p. 91. 106 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Otkliki na interv’yu prot-A.Menya,’ 20 October 1976, Vestnik RKhD, No. 120, p. 100. 107 Aleksandr Men’, ‘Evrei i khristianstvo,’ Vestnik RKhD, No. 117, pp. 112–17. 108 Shafarevich, ‘Otkliki na intervyu prot-A.Menya,’ p. 100. 109 Ibid., p. 101.

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110 Aleksandr Men’, ‘Po povodu otklika na interv’yu,’ Vestnik RKhD, No. 122, pp. 98–91. 111 I.R. ‘Poza zmei: po povodu sbornika “Mnogaya leta,”’ Vestnik RKhD, No. 134, pp. 271–6. 112 On the KGB’s persecution of Men’, see A.B., ‘O khrame, gde sluzhil otets Aleksandr,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 14 September 1990, p. 7. 113 For the articles in Vek XX, see The Samizdat Register, ed. Roy Medvedev, London: Merlin Press, 1977, and in particular: Lev Kopelev ‘A Lie is Conquered Only by Truth,’ pp. 205– 38; Sergei Elagin ‘Repentance: Its Theory, History and Prescription for Today’, pp. 239–68; and German Andreev ‘The Christianity of L.N.Tolstoy and of the Contributors to “From under the Rubble”,pp. 269–316. 114 Igor Shafarevich, Rusofobiya, Moscow: Tovarishchestvo Russkikh Khudozhnikov, 1991, pp. 16, 55. 115 Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1984, p.295. 116 On Russophile derision, see V.Borisov, ‘V poiskakh propavshei istorii,’ Vestnik RKhD, 1978, No. 125, p. 128. 117 Roman Gul, ‘Progulki khama s Pushkinym,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 30 June 1989, No. 26, pp. 18–19; originally published in Novyi Zhurnal, 1976, No. 124; see also Vladimir Rudinskii, ‘Poruganie Pushkina,’ Novyi Zhurnal, 1976, No. 122, pp. 251–3. 118 Andrei Sinyavsky, ‘In Memory of the Fallen: Arkady Belinkov,’ Kontinent 2: The Alternative Voice of Russia and Eastern Europe, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978, p. 138; for a Russophile attack on Belinkov, see Zhitnikov, ‘The Decline of the Democratic Movement’, (January 1973), translation in The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, p. 249. 119 Ibid. 120 ‘Andrei Sinyavsky on dissidence,’ Encounter, April 1979, p. 94. 121 Ibid. 122 On the Herzen article, see Chronicle of Current Events, No. 34, pp. 72, 85. 123 Aleksandr Yanov, ‘Kompleks Groznogo,’ Kontinent, 1976, No. 9, pp. 131–344, and 1976, No. 10, pp. 265–308. 124 Yanov, Russian New Right, p. 8. 125 Ibid., pp. 105–12. 126 Nikita Struve, ‘Spor o Rossii,’ Vestnik RKhD, 1978, No. 125, p. 3. 127 Ibid., p. 4. 128 I.Dubrovskii, ‘“Novye intelligenty” o Moskovskom Tsarstve’, Vestnik RKhD, No. 125, pp. 108–21; Borisov, ‘V poiskakh propavshei istorii,’ Vestnik RKhD, No. 125, pp. 122–59. 129 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Ar’ergardnye boi Marksizma (O rabotakh R.A.Medvedeva)’, Vestnik RKhD, No. 125 pp. 160–81; ‘Interv’yu radiokompanii Bi Bi Si.’ p. 232–73; ‘D.D.Shostakovich’, pp. 232–73. 130 Vestnik RKhD, No. 125, pp. 274–91; English translation, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University, June 8 1978, New York: Harper & Row, 1978. 131 Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, pp. 19–20. 132 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 133 Ibid., pp. 34–5. 134 Ibid., p. 33. 135 Valerii Chalidze in Novoe Russkoe Slovo, New York, cited by N.Struve, ‘O demokratii i avtoritarizme,’ Vestnik RKhD, No. 130, p. 247; complete text published as Valerii Chalidze, ‘O nekotorykh tendentsiyakh v emigrantskoi publitsistike,’ Kontinent, 1980, No. 23, pp. 151–75. 136 Andrei Sakharov, Open Letter to Kontinent, 18 January 1980, Kontinent, 1980, No. 23, pp. 200–1. 137 Andrei Sinyavsky, ‘Solzhenitsyn and Russian Nationalism,’ New York Review of Books, 22 November 1979.

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138 See E.Etkind in Le Monde, 11 June 1979; Die Zeit, 28 August 1979. 139 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ‘I am no Russian Ayatollah,’ Encounter, February 1980, pp. 34–5. 140 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Our Pluralists,’ Survey, 1985, Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 5–14. 141 Ibid., p. 2. 142 Ibid., p. 15. 143 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ‘Misconceptions about Russia are a Threat to America,’ Foreign Affairs, 1980, Vol. 58, pp. 797–834. 144 Ibid., p. 797. 145 Ibid., p. 801. 146 Ibid. 147 Washington Post, 16 May 1982; reprinted in Chronicle of Human Rights, No. 46, p. 44. 148 Richard Pipes, Survival is not Enough, p. 175. 149 New York Times, 12 November 1985, Part C, p. 21. 150 Interview with Der Spiegel; cited by Georges Nivat, Solzhenitsyn, p. 27. 151 Andrei Sinyavsky, ‘Russophobia,’ Partisan Review, 1990, No. 3, p. 343. 152 See, e.g., the account of Pomerants’s criticism of Solzhenitsyn’s statement on the abundance of ‘Latvians, Poles, Jews, Hungarians and Chinese’ in the Cheka, Igor Shafarevich, Rusofobiya, p. 67. 153 Ibid., p. 4. 154 Ibid., p. 5. 155 Ibid., p. 6. 156 Ibid., p. 7. 157 Ibid., p. 9. 158 Ibid., p. 10. 159 Ibid., p. 11. 160 Ibid., p. 12. 161 Ibid., p. 13. 162 Ibid., pp. 15, 18. 163 Ibid., p. 19. 164 Ibid., p. 24. 165 Ibid., p. 26. 166 Ibid., p. 25. 167 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 168 Ibid., p. 27. 169 Ibid., pp. 28–9. 170 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 171 Ibid., p. 30. 172 Ibid., p. 32. 173 Ibid., p. 33. 174 Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1962, pp. 503, 560. 175 Shafarevich, Rusofobiya, ibid., p. 37. 176 Ibid. 177 Ibid., p. 38. 178 Ibid., p. 39. 179 Ibid., p. 45. 180 Ibid., pp. 39–42. 181 Ibid., p. 44. 182 Ibid., p. 45, 47. 183 Ibid., p. 48. 184 Ibid., pp. 49–50. 185 Ibid., p. 57.

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186 Ibid., p. 57. 187 Ibid., p. 58. 188 Ibid., p. 58. 189 Ibid., p. 59. 190 Ibid., pp. 60–1. 191 Ibid., p. 63. 192 Ibid., p. 65. 193 Ibid., pp. 67–8. 194 Ibid., p. 71. 195 Ibid., pp. 63–4. 196 Ibid., p. 71. 197 Ibid., p. 72. 198 Ibid., p. 73. 199 Ibid. 200 Ibid., p. 75. 201 Ibid., p. 74. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid. 204 Ibid., pp. 77–8. 205 Ibid., p. 81. 206 Ibid., p. 81. 207 Ibid., p. 82. 208 Ibid., p. 83. 209 Ibid. 210 Ibid., pp. 83–6. 211 Ibid., p. 86. 212 Ibid., p. 89. 213 Ibid., p. 91. 214 Ibid., p. 92. 215 Ibid., p. 92. 216 Ibid., p. 93. 217 Ibid., p. 94. 218 Ibid., p. 95. 219 Ibid., p. 95.

5 The politics of Russophobia 1‘Obraz Rossii,’ Moskva, 1991, No. 11, p. 5. 2 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Byla li “perestroika” aktsiei TsRU,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1995,No. 7, p. 153. 3 Julia Wishnevskaya, ‘The Origins of Pamyat,’ Survey, October 1988, p. 80. 4 Konstantin Katanyan, ‘Delo KPSS v konstitutsionnom sude,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 9 October 1992, p. 6. 5 Wishnevskaya, ‘The Origins of Pamyat,’ p. 86; for Yeltsin’s account of the meeting, see Boris Yeltsin, Against the Grain, London: Jonathan Cape, 1990, pp. 99–100. 6 Nash Sovremennik, 1987, No. 8, pp. 188–91, cited by Wishnevskaya, ‘The Origins of Pamyat,’ p. 90. 7 N.Ya.Eidel’man, V.P.Astaf’ev, ‘Perepiski iz dvukh iglov,’ Sintaksis, 1987, No. 17, pp. 80–9. See also the discussion by Lev Timofeev in Glasnost’, No. 1 (samizdat typescript), June 1987, p. 33.

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8 Zoya Krakhmal’nikova, ‘Rusofobiya, khristianstvo, antisemitizm,’ Znamya, 1990, No. 8, p. 166. 9 See, e.g., the discussion of Anishchenko’s article in Alexander Segen, ‘In the Lair of “Pamyat,” Soviet Literature, 1990, No. 6, p. 159. 10 L.Anishchenko, ‘Kto Vinovat?’ Glasnost’ (samizdat) February 1988, No. 15; cited in Sergei Lezov, ‘Natsional’naya ideya i khristianstvo,’ Oktyabr’ 1990, No. 10, pp. 157–9. 11 Ibid., p. 158. 12 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Logika Istorii?’ Moskovskie Novosti, 12 July 1988, pp. 12–13. 13 Vadim Kozhinov, ‘Pravda i istina,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1988, No. 4, pp. 160–75. 14 Roy Medvedev, ‘Korni yavleniya,’ Moskovskie Novosti, 12 July 1988, pp. 12–13. 15 Struve cited by Yefim Etkind, ‘Bez maski,’ Vremya i My, 1989, No. 104, p. 178. 16 On Shturman’s pro-Solzhenitsyn position, see her study of the writer, D. Shturman, Gorodu i Miru, New York and Paris: Tret’ya volna, 1988. 17 Dora Shturman, ‘National phobias,’ Dvadsat’ Dva, 1989, No. 68; cited by Dunlop ‘The sad case’ p. 26. 18 Shafarevich, Rusofobia, p. 83. 19 Etkind, ‘Bez maski,’ p. 175. 20 V.Senderov, Russkaya Mysl’, 20 January 1989; cited by Dunlop, ‘The sad case,’ p. 26. 21 ‘Slovo o Solzhenitsyne,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1990, No. 1, p. 59. 22 Ibid., pp. 58–66. 23 Tatyana Glushkova, “Elita i chern” russkogo patriotizma,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1995, No. 6, p. 186. 24 ‘Slovo o Solzhenitsyne,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1990, No. 1, p. 61. 25 Ibid., pp. 61–3. 26 Ibid., p. 63. 27 Ibid., p. 64. 28 Ogonek, 1989, No. 23, p. 12. 29 Vladimir Bondarenko, ‘Sterzhnevaya slovesnost’. O proze Aleksandra Solzhenitsyna,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 26 May 1989, pp. 10–11. 30 Boris Kagarlitskii, Knizhnoe Obozrenie, 1988, No. 36, cited in Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Novaya Mifologiya,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1989, No. 5, p. 164. 31 P.Karp, ‘Vzaimnost”, Knizhnoe Obozrenie, 14 April 1987; cited by Arsenii Gulya, ‘Russkii Vopros’, Nash Sovremennik, 1990, No. 1, pp. 171–2. 32 Ibid. 33 Arsenii Gulya ‘Russkii Vopros,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1990, No. 1, p. 171. 34 Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Novaya Mifologiya,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1989, No. 5, p. 152. 35 Ibid., p. 162. 36 Sinyavskii, ‘Russophobia,’ Partisan Review, 1990, No. 5, p. 340. 37 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Dve dorogi—k odnomu obryvu,’ Novyi Mir, 1989, No. 7, pp. 147–65. 38 Valentin Rasputin, ‘Vystuplenie na s’ezde narodnykh deputatov SSSR,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1989, No. 8, p. 135; on Shafarevich’s failure to win nomination, see Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Maskony,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1989, No. 7, p. 152. 39 ‘Revolution: disease or recovery?’ Moscow News, 1989, No. 51, p.13. 40 Ibid., p. 12. 41 Announcement of impending publication of works by Sinyavskii, Yanov, and Grossman’s Everything Flows in Oktyabr’, 1989, No. 1, p. 208; Abram Terts, ‘Progulki s Pushkinym,’ Oktyabr’, 1989, No. 4, pp. 192–9; Vasilii Grossman, ‘Vse techet’,’ Oktyabr’ 1989, No. 6, pp. 30–108. 42 M.Antonov, V.I.Klykov, and I.R.Shafarevich, ‘Pis’mo v sekretariat pravleniya soyuza pisatelei RSFSR,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 4 August 1989, p. 4. 43 Ibid. 44 A.Anan’ev, ‘Kritika ili obvinenie?’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1 September 1989, p. 14.

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45 ‘Ot redaktsii,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1 September 1989, p. 14. 46 ‘V sekretariat pravleniya SP SSSR, V redaktsiyu ‘Literaturnoi gazety” Literaturnaya Gazeta, 13 September 1989, p. 7. 47 Knizhnoe Obozrenie, 22 September 1989, No. 38, p. 4; cited by John Dunlop, The Rise of Russia, p. 87. 48 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Rusofobiya: desyat’ let spustya,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1991, No. 12, p. 134. 49 Nash Sovremennik, 1989, No. 11, pp. 162–72. 50 Shafarevich, ‘Fenomen Emigratsii,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 8 September 1989, p. 4. 51 Alla Latynina, ‘Inflammable,’ Moscow News, 1989, No. 48, p. 3. 52 Ibid. 53 ‘Sixth Plenary session of the Board of the Russian Republic Writers’ Union,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1 December 1990, No. 48, pp. 2–13; translation in CDSP, 1990, No. 4, p. 17. 54 Ibid., p. 16. 55 Ibid. 56 Index on Censorship, 1990, No. 4, p. 21. 57 V.Vologdin, ‘First Summer of the new Oktyabr’,’ Izvestiya, 2 August 1990, p. 3; translation in CDSP, 5 September 1990, p. 3 58 Vladimir Vigilyanskii, Oleg Khlebnikov, Andrei Chernov, ‘Deti Sharikova,’ Ogonek, 1990, No. 5, pp. 2–3. 59 ‘Pogromshchiki v TsDL,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 24 January 1990, p. 2. 60 ‘Deti Sharikova,’ Ogonek, 1990, No. 5, pp. 2–3. 61 Ibid. 62 Laqueur, Black Hundred, pp. 214–16. 63 ‘Kto mutit vodu? Zayavlenie obshchestvennykh organizatsii, deyatelei kul’tury i narodnykh deputatov SSSR.’ Signed by the ‘United Council of Russia Association,’ the ‘Fellowship of Russian Artists,’ and ‘the Fund to Restore the Church of Christ the Saviour, and a group of USSR people’s deputies,’ in Literaturnaya Rossiya, 5 February 1990, No. 5, p. 10. 64 Vyacheslav Dolganov, ‘Mitingi: demokratiya ili ekstremizm?’ Izvestiya, 22 February 1990, p. 1. 65 ‘Zayavlenie sekretariata Antisionistkogo komiteta sovetskoi obshchestvennosti,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 7 February 1990, p. 1. 66 ‘Protiv razzhiganiya natsional’noi rozni,’ Izvestiya, 20 February 1990, p. 2. 67 Ibid. 68 V.Malukhin, ‘Sostoitsya li peremirie? Posleslovie k press-konferentsii v Soyuze pisatelei Rossii,’ Izvestiya, 13 February 1990, p. 8. 69 ‘Poka ne pozdno…’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 14 February 1990, p. 7. 70 ‘Letter from the Writers of Russia to the USSR Supreme Soviet, the Russian Republic Supreme Soviet and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.’ Signed by 74 writers, including A.Prokhanov, P.Proskurin, L. Leonov, K.Rash, V.Kozhinov, T.Glushkova, M.Lobanov, and I.Shafarevich, Literaturnaya Rossiya, 2 March 1990, pp. 2–4; translation in CDSP, 1990, No. 19, pp. 7–11. 71 Ibid. p. 7; for the reference to Bulgakov, see ‘Deti Sharikova’, Ogonek, 1990, No. 5, pp. 2–3. 72 Ibid.p. 8. 73 Ibid. 74 For example, ‘V podderzhku ‘pis’ma pisatelei Rossii’,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 16 March 1990, p. 3; 23 March 1990, p. 14. 75 ‘Schitaem neobkhodimym skazat’,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 16 March 1990, p. 3. 76 ‘Poka ne pozdno,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 23 March 1990, p. 14. 77 ‘Natsional’naya gordost’, no ne imperskoe chvanstvo,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 7 March 1990, p. 2. 78 John B.Dunlop, ‘Moscow voters reject conservative coalition,’ Report on the USSR, 20 April 1990, pp. 16–17.

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79 V.I.Isakov, G.I.Litvinova, V.G.Bryusova, A.I.Kazintsev et al., ‘Grimasy demokratii,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 23 March 1990, p. 15. 80 ‘VII plenum pravleniya,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 30 March 1990, pp. 8–9. 81 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 82 Roman Solchanyk, ‘Ukraine, Russia, and the national question: an interview with Aleksandr Tsipko,’ Report on the USSR, 17 August 1990, pp. 23–4 [interview dated 23 July]. 83 Valery Chalidze, ‘Don’t burn your bridges,’ Moscow News 1990, No. 29, p. 5. 84 Andrei Sinyavsky, Soviet Civilization, New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990, p. 276. 85 Ibid., p. 274. 86 Sinyavskii, ‘Russophobia,’ Partisan Review, 1990, No. 3, p. 342. 87 Alla Latynina, ‘Inflammable,’ Moscow News, 1989, No. 48, p. 3. 88 Alla Latynina, ‘Solzhenitsyn i my,’ Novyi Mir, 1990, No. 1, p. 257. 89 Ibid. 90 ‘Slovo o Solzhenitsyne,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1990, No. 1. 91 Alla Latynina, ‘Ne meshaite konyu sbrosit’ vsadnika,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 18 April 1990, p. 4 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid. 94 Vyacheslav Karpov, ‘Starye dogmy na novyi lad,’ Oktyabr’, 1990, No. 3, p. 151. 95 Ibid., p. 150. 96 Ibid., p. 153. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., p. 154. 99 Ibid., p. 157. 100 Ibid., pp. 157–8. 101 Aleksei Shmelev, ‘Po zakonam parodii? I.Shafarevich i ego “Rusofobiya,”’ Znamya, 1990, No. 6, p. 213. 102 Ibid. 103 Mikhail Agurskii, ‘Neonatsistkaya opasnost’ v Sovetskom Soyuze,’ Novyi Zhurnal, 1975, No. 118. 104 Shmelev ‘Po zakonam parodii?’ p. 214. 105 Shafarevich, ‘Rusofobia: desyat’ let spustya,’ p. 135. 106 Shmelev, ‘Po zakonam parodii?’ p. 217. 107 Ibid., p. 218. 108 Ibid., p. 223. 109 Ibid., p. 225. 110 Ibid. 111 Zoya Krakhmal’nikova, ‘Rusofobia, khristianstvo, antisemitizm. Zametki ob antirusskoi idee,’ Neva, 1990, No. 8, p. 136 112 Ibid., p. 165. 113 Ibid., pp. 166, 172. 114 Ibid., p. 167. 115 Ibid., pp. 172, 174. 116 Aleksandr Prokhanov, ‘Tragediya Tsentralizma,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 5 January 1990, pp. 4–5; translation in CDSP, 1990, No. 4, p. 17. 117 ‘General hits “new thinking,”’ RFE-RL Daily Report, 21 September 1990. 118 John Dunlop, ‘New National Bolshevik organisation formed,’ Report on the USSR, 14 September 1990, pp. 7–9. 119 Ibid., p. 8. 120 V.Itkin, ‘Aleksandr Men slain,’ Izvestiya, 10 September 1990, p. 6; translation in CDSP, 10 October 1990, p. 28.

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121 Irina Ilovaiskaya, ‘Pastyr’, ispovednik, muchenik,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 14 September 1990, p. 8; Grigorii Pomerants, ‘Semero protiv techeniya,’ Oktyabr’, 1991, No. 2, p. 175. 122 Aleksandr Tarasov, ‘Pochemu imenno on, pochemu imenno seichas?’ Russkaya Mysl’, 1 February 1991, supplement, p. iv. 123 See, e.g., ‘Monarkhist pozdneromanovskoi skladki,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1993, No. 1, p. 154. 124 Vladimir Sirotin, ‘The Russian National Council,’ Moscow News, 1994, No. 26, p. 6; see also Aleksei Vedenkin’s attack on Men in his article ‘Ya-ne fashist,’ Zavtra, 1995, No. 19, p. 5. 125 Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, p. 404. 126 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia, London: Harvill, 1991, pp. 40–1; ‘Kak nam obustroit’ Rossiyu?’ Komsomol’skaya Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta, 18 September 1990. 127 A.Surazhskii, ‘Face to face with the Fatherland,’ Nedelya, 1990, No. 40; cited by John Dunlop, ‘Russian reactions to Solzhenitsyn’s brochure,’ Report on the USSR, 14 December 1990, p. 7. 128 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Mozhno li eshche spasti Rossiyu?’ Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 18 October 1990, p. 2; see also the discussion in Dunlop, ‘Russian reactions to Solzhenitsyn’s brochure’. 129 Mikhail Lobanov, ‘V Serdtsevine Russkoi Mysli,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1990, No. 10, p. 281. For the death threat, see Vladimir Zaburin, ‘Razgovor s mukhami, ili monolog na kukhne,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1990, No. 8, p. 228. 130 Taisiya Napolova, ‘Ne tolkaite stranu k obryvu,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1990, No. 12, p. 277. 131 Viktor Trostnikov, ‘A simply normal person,’ Den’, 1991, No. 2; cited by Dunlop ‘The sad case’. 132 See the advertisement for this edition, published by the ‘Tovarichestvo russkikh khudozhnikov,’ in Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1991, No. 21, p. 9. 133 Lydia Polskaya, ‘Change of faces’, Moscow News, 1991, No. 13, p. 4. 134 ‘Obraz Rossii,’ Moskva, 1991, No. 11, p. 5. 135 Sovetskaya Rossiya, 23 July 1991; translation in Alexander Dallin and Gail Lapidus, The Soviet System: From Crisis to Collapse, Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1995, pp. 574–7. 136 Ibid., p. 574. 137 Ibid. 138 For Shafarevich’s views on Rasputin, see I.Shafarevich, ‘Obraz Rossii,’ Moskva, 1991, No. 11, p. 7. 139 For attacks on Rasputin, see Valentin Oskotskii, ‘Navodchiki,’ Ogonek, 1991, No. 38, pp. 28–9. 140 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Ne budem molchat’,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 6 September 1991, p. 4. 141 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Rusofobia: desyat’ let spustya,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1991, No. 12, p. 125. 142 Ibid. 143 Ibid., p. 128. 144 Ibid., p. 130. 145 Ibid., p. 124. 146 Ibid., p. 132. 147 Ibid., p. 133. 148 Ibid., p. 129. 149 Ibid., p. 136–7. 150 Ibid., p. 136. 151 Ibid., p. 138; translation by J.Dunlop. 152 Ibid., p. 139. 153 Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 28 April 1992, p. 8.

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154 I.Shafarevich, ‘Ili predatel’stvo, ili ravnodushushie,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 5 June 1992, p. 4. 155 ‘Academy asks ouster of member in Russia,’ New York Times, 29 July 1992, cited in RFERL Daily Report, 31 July 1992; and J.Dunlop ‘The sad case’ p. 24. 156 Literaturnaya Gazeta, 5 August 1992, p. 1; For Shafarevich’s explanation of his departure from the Den editorial college, see Literaturnaya Rossiya, 14 August 1992, p. 3. 157 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Schitayu obvineniya nelepymi i vozmutitel’nymi,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 14 August 1992, p. 3. 158 Yurii Mann, ‘Zachem natsional’-patriotam nuzhen obraz “Masona,” Izvestiya, 20 February 1993, p. 10. 159 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Rossiya naedine s soboi,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1992, No. 1, p. 7. 160 Ibid. 161 I.Shafarevich, ‘Rossiya naedine s soboi,’ Pravda, 2 November 1991, pp. 1, 3. 162 Mikhail Antonov, ‘Na uzkoi doroge sektanstva,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1992, No. 20, p. 3. 163 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Rossiya naedine s soboi,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1992, No. 1, p. 4. 164 Ibid., p. 5. 165 Ibid., p. 6. 166 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Ili predatel’stvo, ili ravnodushie…’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 5 June 1992, p. 3. 167 I.Shafarevich, ‘Pravda okazalas’ nuzhnee khleba,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 3 July 1992, p. 3. 168 Elizabeth Teague and Vera Tolz, ‘The civic union: the birth of a new opposition in Russia?’ Radio Liberty Report, 14 July 1992. 169 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Pravda okazalas’ nuzhnee khleba,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 3 July 1992, p. 3. 170 Kathryn Brown, ‘The Russian media defend freedom of speech and their independence,’ Radio Liberty Report, 27 August 1992. 171 Moscow News, 29 November 1992, p. 2. 172 Shafarevich, ‘Ili predatel’stvo, Ili ravnodushie…’ p. 3. 173 Ibid. 174 Ibid. 175 Ibid. 176 Teague and Tolz, ‘The civic union’. 177 Vladimir Todres, ‘Rossiya dolzhna stat’ normal’noi velikoi derzhavoi,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 16 June 1992, p. 3. 178 Teague and Tolz, ‘The civic union,’ Radio Liberty Report, 14 July 1992; citing Moscow News 1992, No. 25. 179 Todres, ‘Rossiya dolzhna stat’ normal’noi velikoi derzhavoi,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 16 June 1992, p. 3. 180 Ibid. 181 Den’, 1993, No. 1; cited by Dunlop ‘The sad case’, p. 29. 182 Den’, 1993, No. 4; cited by Dunlop ‘The sad case’, p. 29. 183 Vladimir Sirotkin, ‘The Russian National Council,’ Moscow News, 1994, No. 26, p. 6. 184 On the description of Glushkova as Brünhilda, see Alla Latynina, ‘Ne meshaite konyu sbrosit’ vsadnika,’ Literaturnaya Gazeta, 18 April 1990, p. 4. 185 Tatyana Glushkova, ‘Truden put k “bolshomu narodu,”’ Russkii Sobor, 1993, No. 6; cited by Dunlop ‘The sad case’ p. 30; reprinted in Molodaya Gvardiya, 1993, No. 9, pp. 123–38. 186 Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Samoubiistvo pod kontrolem,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1993, No. 9, p. 161. 187 Ibid., p. 162. 188 Shafarevich, ‘Ili predatel’stvo ili ravnodushie…’ p. 3. 189 ‘Chest’ imeem,’ Den’, 25–31 October 1992, No. 43, p. 3. 190 Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Vasilevskii Spusk,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1993, No. 1, p. 170.

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191 Sovetskaya Rossiya, 31 October 1992, cited in Wendy Slater, ‘Russia’s National Salvation Front “on the offensive,”’ Radio Liberty Report, 15 September 1993. 192 Tat’yana Okulova, ‘Byla by tol’ko rossiya,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1993, No. 5, p. 5. 193 Ibid. 194 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Poslednyi referendum,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1993, No. 16, p. 3. 195 Ibid. 196 Den’, 1993, No. 1; cited by Dunlop ‘The sad case’ p. 29. 197 Put’, July 1992, No. 7; cited by Dunlop ‘The sad case’ p. 29. 198 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Oborona Sevastopolya Prodolzhaetsya’, dated 28 May 1993, in Literaturnaya Rossiya, 4 June 1993, No. 22, p. 2. 199 ‘Russian parliament reaffirms Russian status of Sevastopol,’ RIA, 9 July 1993. 200 I.Shafarevich, M.Astaf’yev, K.Stol’bov, K.Myalo, L.Borodin, V.Osipov, et al., ‘Obrashchenie komiteta “Russkii Sevastopol” k General’nomu prokuroru RF’, Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1993, Nos 50–1, p. 2. 201 I.Shafarevich, M.Astaf’ev, K.Stolbov, K.Myalo, L.Borodin, V.Osipov, et al., ‘“Russkii Sevastopol”—garantiya mira,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1994, Nos 1–2, p. 3. 202 Pravda, 21 January 1993; cited by Alexander Rahr, ‘Russian nationalists support Serbia,’ Radio Liberty-Radio Free Europe Report, 25 January 1993; On Kozyrev’s Weimar statement, see Valerii Vyzhutovich, ‘Liberal jitters,’ Moscow News, 1992, No. 29, p. 6. 203 Mikhail Lobanov, ‘Ne umeret’, pobezhdennym,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1993, No. 7, p. 10. 204 Dragosh Kalaich (Belgrade), ‘Sovremennyi Vatikan,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1993, No. 5, pp. 14–15. 205 Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing, College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1995, p. 26. 206 ‘Rytsar’ Istiny,’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 3 June 1993, p. 2. 207 ‘K 70-letiyu Igorya Rostislavovicha Shafarevicha,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1993, No. 6, pp. 3– 4. 208 Vasilii Belov, ‘Vyberemsya!’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1993, No. 23, p. 6. 209 Pravda, 4 June 1993. 210 Put’, July 1992, No. 7; cited by Dunlop ‘The sad case’ p. 29. 211 Galina Orekhanova, ‘Splachivaet trevoga,’ Sovetskaya Rossiya, 21 July 1993, p. 1. 212 ITAR-TASS, 24 July 1993; ‘Vesti,’ Russian Television, 24 July 1993; and Izvestiya, 27 July 1993; cited in Wendy Slater, ‘Russia’s National Salvation Front “on the offensive.”’ 213 Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Pereotsenka,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1993, No. 12, p. 137. 214 Ibid. 215 Ibid., p. 138. 216 Mikhail Gokhman, ‘Patrioticheskaya oppozitsiya: legendy i fakty,’ Russkaya Mysl’, 16–22 September 1993, p. 9. 217 Ibid. 218 Ibid. 219 Eduard Volodin, ‘Rusofobiya kak gosudarstvennaya politika,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1993, Nos 34–5, p. 3; Volodin’s speech was also reprinted in Molodaya Gvardiya 1994, No. 2, pp. 14–18. 220 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Tak nachinaetsya grazhdanskaya voina?’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 3 December 1993, p. 2. 221 Andrei Sinyavskii, ‘Vse eto uzhe bylo: pochemu ya segodnya protiv Yel’tsina,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 13 October 1993, p. 5. 222 Mikhail Pozdnyayev, ‘Autsidenty,’ Stolitsa, 1993, No. 44, p. 3. 223 Aleksei Pyatikovskii, ‘Udarim Zor’kinym po konstitutsii,’ Stolitsa, 1993, No. 50, p. 4. 224 For Myalo’s influence, see Shafarevich, ‘Dve dorogi—k odnomu obryvu,’ Novyi Mir 1989, No. 7, p. 151. 225 Ksenia Myalo, ‘Na osennei rasprodazhe,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1993, No. 46–7, p. 2.

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226 Ibid. 227 Vladmir Osipov, ‘On the Question of the Goals and Methods of Legal Opposition,’ (samizdat, May 1974), cited in Meerson-Aksenov and Shragin, The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, p. 350. 228 RIA, 1 November 1992. 229 Aleksandr Mitrofanov, ‘Natsional-respublikantsy ne krichat “Zig Hail,”’ Moskovskii Komsomolets, 27 October 1993, p. 1. 230 Vladimir Zhirinovskii, ‘Za menya golosovala tselaya Shveitsariya,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 12 July 1991, p. 3; ‘Conversations with Solzhenitsyn,’ Moscow News, 1994, No. 30, p. 13. 231 Gennadii Zyuganov, ‘Rossiya nad bezdnoi,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1993, No. 11, p. 187. 232 Stanislav Govorukhin, ‘Velikaya Kriminal’naya Revolutsiya,’ Nash Sovremennik 1994, No. 5,p. 129. 233 Ibid., p. 126. 234 Valerii Zor’kin, ‘Proshchanie s mifami,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1994, No. 14, pp. 4–5. 235 RL/RFE daily report 22, 2 February 1994; on Poltoranin’s earlier involvement with Pamyat, see ‘U Mikhaila Poltoranina chto-to s “Pamyat’yu,”’ Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 12 May 1993, p. 3. 236 ‘Andrei Kozyrev: “human rights do not exist without the freedom of speech and of the mass media,”’ RIA, 20 June 1994. 237 ‘Katastrofa i ee tvortsy,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1 July 1994, p. 2. 238 Ibid. 239 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Koshchunstvo,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1994, No. 20, p. 4. 240 On the trip to Irkutsk, A.Kazintsev, ‘Provintsiya. Eto i est’ Rossiya,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1994, No. 45, p. 6; on the writers’ congress, Trevogi i nadezhdy pisatelei Rossii’, Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1994, No. 27 p. 8. 241 ‘Trevogi i nadezhdy pisatelei Rossii’, Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1994, No. 27, p. 11. 242 Tatyana Glushkova, ‘Elita i chern’ russkogo patriotizma,’ Molodaya Gvardiya, 1995, No. 2, p. 181. 243 Stanislav Kunayev, ‘Blesk i kleveta “Kozhinovedki,” Literaturnaya Rossiya, 1994, No. 29, p. 5. 244 Stanislav Kunayev, ‘Volk i muravei,’ Zavtra, 1995, No. 34, p. 5. 245 Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Bluzhdayushchie ogon’ki,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1995, No. 2, p. 179. 246 Ibid., p. 184. 247 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Russkoe Gosudarstvo,’ Zavtra 1995, No. 1, p. 5. 248 Ibid. 249 Galina Filippova, ‘Chechnya: federal advance was justified, say Russian community activists,’ RIA, 22 March 1995. 250 Aleksandr Kazintsev, ‘Chechnya: okonchanie,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1995, No. 5, p. 167. 251 Galina Filippova and Valerii Asriyan ‘Parliamentary commission regards violations of human rights in Chechnya,’ RIA, 29 May 1995. 252 Komissiya Govorukhina, Moscow: Laventa, 1995, p. 102. 253 Aleksandr Prokhanov, ‘A na grudi ego svetilos’ medal’ za gorod gudermes,’ Zavtra, 1995, No. 21, p. 3. 254 Vadim Kozhinov, ‘Pushkin vam ne soyuznik,’ Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 31 January 1995. 255 Mikhail Kolosov, ‘Znakomyi tsenarii razvala: snachala SSSR, teper’—Rossii,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 20 January 1995, p. 3. 256 Ibid. 257 Anatolii Kuz’min, ‘Kavkazskie brat’ya i ikh moskovskie dyadi i teti,’ Literaturnaya Rossiya, 7 April 1995, p. 3. 258 ‘Stanislav Govorukhin protiv Sergeya Kovaleva,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 20 April 1995, p.1. 259 Mezhdunarodnyi Forum ‘Fashizm v totalitarnom i posttotalitarnom obshchestve: ideinye osnovy, sotsial’naya baza, politicheskaya aktivnost’ Moskva, 1995, 20–22 January 1995, Moscow: 1995, pp. 5–6.

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260 ‘Patriotic parties establish anti-fascist center,’ OMRI Daily Report, 5 May 1995. 261 ‘Fighting fascism the radical nationalist way,’ Moscow Times, 5 May 1995, p. 1. 262 Ibid. 263 Shafarevich, ‘Rusofobiya: desyat’ let spustya,’ p. 130. 264 Valerii Vyzhutovich, ‘Sergei Kovalev: demokraty ne sumeli otvetit’ na vyzov vremeni,’ Izvestiya, 19 December 1995, p. 5. 265 Ksenia Myalo, ‘Zalozhniki,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1996, No. 3, p. 174. 266 ‘Speech by G.A.Zyuganov at the ‘Congress of People’s-Patriotic Forces’ in Moscow on 8 June: we will move not into the past but into the future,’ Rossiiskaya Gazeta, 11 June 1996; cited in Johnson’s Russia List, 27 June 1996. 267 Igor Shafarevich, ‘Zhivi, velikaya Rossiya,’ Zavtra, 1996, No. 24, p. 7. 268 See, e.g., Vladimir Bondarenko, Zavtra, 1996, No. 51, p. 6. 269 Ivan Rodin, ‘Obshcherossiiskoe oppozitsionnoe dvizhenie sozdano,’ Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 8 August 1996, p. 1. 270 ‘Geroi dnya,’ NTV, 21 April 1997. 271 Ibid. 272 See, e.g., Ksenia Myalo, ‘Zalozhniki,’ Nash Sovremennik, 1996, No. 3, p. 169; and the front-page caricature in Zavtra, 1996, No. 13. 273 ‘Gennadii Zyuganov: Rossii—strana slova,’ Zavtra, 1996, No. 17, p. 3. 274 Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 21 December 1990; cited in Literaturnaya Gazeta, 6 February 1991, p. 10. 275 ‘Final Stage of Novodvorskaya Case,’ Express-Chronicle Weekly Digest, 17 October 1996. 276 Valerii Vyzhutovich, ‘Valeriya Novodvorskaya kak vrag naroda,’ Izvestiya, 27 September 1996, p. 2. 277 Konstantin Zazhoiskii, ‘The Novodvorskaya case,’ Express-Chronicle Weekly Digest, 27 September 1996. 278 ‘PEN centre declaration on Novodvorskaya case,’ Express-Chronicle Weekly Digest, 27 September 1996. 279 Aleksandr Titov, ‘Ostashvili zovet Novodvorskuyu,’ Zavtra, 1996, No. 44, p. 5. 280 Valerii Vyzhutovich, ‘Sudu ne vse yasno: delo Valerii Novodvorksoi napravleno na dosledovanie,’ Izvestiya, 23 October 1996, p. 2. 281 Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, BBC Books, 1995, pp. 29–34. 282 Igor Shafarevich, ‘V strane belogo angela,’ Zavtra, 1996, No. 49, p. 6. 283 Ibid. 284 Ibid. 285 See the discussion of this phenomenon in the Serbian context, in Jasna Dragovic-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation’. Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism, London: Hurst, 2002.

Conclusion 1 Ogonek, 19–26 May 1993, p. 19. 2 David Remnick, Resurrection, New York: Random House, 1997, p. 358. 3 Sergei Kovalyov, ‘On the new Russia,’ New York Review of Books, 18 April 1996, p. 12. 4 Aleksandr Daniel, ‘Pochemu ne ‘perestroilis’ dissidenty?’ Novoe Vremya, April 1995, No. 15, p. 15. 5 See, for instance R.Byrnes, (ed.), After Brezhnev: Sources of Soviet Conduct in the 1980s, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983, p. xvii; Darrell P.Hammer, ‘Alternative Visions of the

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Russian Future: Religious and Nationalist Alternatives,’ Studies in Comparative Communism, autumn/winter 1987, Vol. 20, Nos 3–4, pp. 265–75.

Bibliography Archival sources The samizdat archive of Moscow Memorial. Fond 89 of the Centre for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation (Ts.Kh.S.D.) in Moscow. The Sakharov Archive, at the Andrei Sakharov Public Centre in Moscow.

Newspapers and magazines Argumenty i Fakty Den’ The Independent (London) Index on Censorship Izvestiya Komsomol’skaya Pravda Kuranty Literaturnaya Gazeta Literaturnaya Rossiya Moscow News Moscow Times Moscow Tribune New Times New York Review of Books New York Times Nezavisimaya Gazeta Ogonek Pravda Rossiiskaya Gazeta Russkaya Mysl’ (Paris) Segodnya Sovetskaya Rossiya Stolitsa The Times (London) Vek XX i Mir Zavtra

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Samizdat and other dissident sources Arkhiv Samizdata, published by Radio Liberty. Chronicle of Current Events, published by Amnesty International. Ekspress-Khronika, edited by Aleksandr Podrabinek. Glasnost’, edited by Sergei Grigoryants. Referendum, edited by Lev Timofeev. Vybor’, edited by Viktor Aksyuchits and Gleb Anishchenko. Miscellaneous samizdat documents in the archive of Moscow Memorial.

Oral sources Interviews with Aleksandr Daniel, Leonid Vul’, Malva Landa, Natalya Kravchenko, Yurii Shikhanovich. Transcripts of interviews conducted in Memorial’s Oral History Programme. Interviews from Bremen Archive (at Memorial).

Monographs and journal articles Agurskii, Mikhail, ‘Neonatsistkaya opasnost’ v Sovetskom Soyuze,’ Novyi Zhurnal, 1975, No. 118, pp. 119–227. Aksyuchits, V., ‘Zapadniki i pochvenniki segodniya,’ Vybor (samizdat), No. 8, 1989. Albats, Yevgeniya, KGB: State within a State, London: I.B.Tauris, 1995. Alexeyeva, Liudmila, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1985; Russian edition, Inakomysliya v SSSR, Moscow: Vest, 1992. ——The Thaw Generation, Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. Altayev, O. ‘The Dual Consciousness of the Intelligentsia and Pseudo-Culture,’ in M. MeersonAksenov and B.Shragin (eds) The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian ‘Samizdat’, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1977. Amalrik, Andrei, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? Harmondsworth: Penguin: 2nd edn, 1980. ——Notes of a Revolutionary, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982. Andrei Dmitrievich: Vospominaniya o Sakharove, Moscow: Knizhnoe Obozrenie, 1990. Andreeva, Nina, Nepodarennye printsipy ili kratkii kurs istorii perestroiki (izbrannye stat’i, vystupleniya), Sovetskaya Sibir’, 1993. Batkin, Leonid, ‘O konstitutsionnom proekte Andreya Sakharova,’ Oktyabr’, 1990, No. 5, pp. 3–4. Borisov, V., ‘V poiskakh propavshei istorii’, Vestnik RKhD, 1978, No. 125. Brovman, G., ‘Zhivaya zhizn’ i normativnost’, Moskva, 1964, No. 7, pp. 193–4. Brown, Archie, The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford, New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Brumberg, Abraham (ed.), In Quest of Justice, London: Pall Mall Press, 1970. Bukovsky, Vladimir, To Build a Castle, London: Andre Deutsch, 1978. ——I vozvrashchaetsya veter, Moscow: NIPO Demokraticheskaya Rossiya, 1990. Burtin, Yurii, ‘Velikii Russkii Intelligent,’ Oktyabr’, 1990, No. 1, pp.3–4. Bushin, Vladimir, ‘My ne raby, raby nemy,’ Voenno-istoricheskii Zhurnal, 1989, Nos 11 & 12.

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Index Abovin-Egides, Petr 48, 80 Abramkin, Valerii 67, 94, 100 Adamovich, Ales 42, 115 Afanasev, Yurii 38, 39, 45, 73, 76, 112, 116, 121, 193 Afghan War, dissident criticism of: 109–10,112,114 Agurskii, Mikhail 28, 156, 166, 203 Akhmatova, Anna 193 Akhromeev, Sergei 109 Aksakov, Konstantin 163 Aksyonov, Vasilii 69 Aksyuchits, Viktor 40, 46, 186, 214 Alekseev, Sergei 135 Alekseev, Mikhail 99 Alekseeva, Ludmila 3, 23, 55, 132 Altaev (pseudonym) 159, 161–3, 166 Altshuler, Boris 107 Altunyan, Genrikh 31 Amalrik, Andrei 61, 87, 175 Amnesty International 93 Ananev, Anatolii 38, 77, 191, 192, 195 Andreeva, Nina 35, 74, 112, 187 ‘Andrei Sakharov Union of Democratic Forces’ 99, 104, 116, 117 Andronov, Iona 74 Andropov, Yurii 19, 27, 96–8, 215 Anishchenko, Gleb 186 Anpilov, Viktor 213, 220 Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public 98, 196 Antonov, Mikhail 192, 212 April (writers’ group) 195, 197 Arbatov, Georgii 142 Astafev, Mikhail 216, 223 Astafev, Viktor 37, 186, 193 Baburin, Sergei 143, 219, 228, 230, 234 Bakhmin, Vyacheslav 31, 100 Barkashov, Aleksandr 221, 229 Barranikov, Viktor 127, 128 Batkin, Leonid 109, 112, 116, 120, 193 Baturin, Yurii 76 Bek, Aleksandr 33 Belinkov, Arkadii 169, 170 Belotserkovskii, Vadim 169, 177

Index

255

Belov, Vasilii 156, 219 Berezovskii, Boris 231 Bezborodov, Nikolai 228 Bocharov, Anatoly 33 Bogatyrev, Konstantin 61 Bogoraz, Larisa 28, 29, 40, 56, 57, 73, 107, 236 Bondarenko, Vladimir 189, 199 Bondarev, Yurii 71, 197, 206 Bonner, Elena 3, 28, 42, 78, 104, 116, 117, 121, 132, 137, 140, 141, 186 Borodin, Leonid 39, 148, 158, 164, 226 Borisov, Vadim 43, 156, 157, 171, 190 Borshchev, Valerii 139 Brezhnev, Leonid 27 Brodskii, Iosif 62, 184 Brovman, G. 17 Bukharin, Nikolai 34 Bukovskii, Vladimir 23, 48, 50, 55, 62, 64–5, 69, 82, 85, 86, 88, 122 Bulgakov, Mikhail 196 Bulgakov, S.N. 163 Bulletin V 71 Bunin, Ivan 189 Burlatskii, Fedor 2, 102, 132, 141 Bushin, Vladimir 112 Chalidze, Valerii 57, 58, 59, 88, 90, 91, 96, 154, 171, 200 Chaadaev, Petr 164, 209 Chalmaev, Viktor 160, 161 Chebrikov,V. 96, 99–101, 186 Chechnya 7, 123, 138–47, 227, 228 Chekhov, Anton 189 Chelnov (pseudonym) 162, 165 Cherkesov, Viktor 128 Chernyshevskii 52 Christian Committee for the Defence of the Rights of Believers 158 Chronicle of Current Events 22, 62, 63, 66, 89, 93, 158 Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR 92 Chukovskaya, Elena 43 Chukovskaya, Lidiya 9, 24, 28, 37 Cochin, Augustin 178, 184 Committee on Human Rights (‘Sakharov Committee’) 88, 154, 157, 167, 222 Committee on Human Rights (parliamentary) 129, 131, 132 Constitutional Court: Communist Party case 48 127; 1993 crisis 129; and Chechnya 144–5 Coogan, Kevin 74 Cosic, Dobrica 233 Daniel, Aleksandr 6, 42, 106, 236 Daniel, Yulii 18 Dedulin, Sergei 29

Index

256

Dementev, A. 160, 161 Democratic Movement of the Soviet Union 90 Democratic Russia 104, 120, 121, 142, 200 Democratic Union 75 Dobroshtan, Igor 40 Dobrovolskii, Yurii 57, 153 Dolinin, Vycheslav 128 Dostoevskii, Fedor 179, 223 Dubrovskii, I. 171 Dudintsev, Vladimiwr 14–5 Dudko, Dmitrii 20, 157, 158, 206 Dunlop, John 152 Dyakov, Boris 17 Dzemilev, Mustafa 87 Efremov, Oleg 70 Efros, Anatolii 161 Eidelman, Natan 37, 186 Ekspress-Khronika 34, 122 Eksler, Natalya 30 Emelyanov, Vladimir 167, 186, 201 Ermilov, Vladimir 17 Esenin-Volpin, Aleksandr 55, 85, 89, 91, 155 Etkind, Efim 28, 172, 187, 188 Evdokhimov, Rostislav 128 Fedorchuk, V. 98 Fedotov, Mikhail 6, 76, 79 FSB and FSK: see KGB Filatov, Sergei 146 From under the Rubble anthology 164–6, 169–71, 179 Furman, Dmitrii 134 Gabai, Galina 56 Gabai, Ilya 57 Gaidar, Egor 142, 227, 234 Galanskov, Yurii 90 Galich, Aleksandr 28, 157 Gamsakhurdia, Zviad 29 Gastev, Yurii 156 Gefter, Mikhail 68 Gershuni, Vladimir 100 Ginzburg, Aleksandr 31, 62, 65, 66, 87, 90, 104 Ginzburg, Evgeniya 20 glasnost, 50–80; attacks on 80; dissident demand for judicial glasnost 55, 56; legislation 76–7 Glasnost (journal) 71–2, 74, 77 Glasnost Defence Foundation 80

Index

257

Glazunov, Ilya 158 Glushkova, Tatyana 189, 215, 226 Gorbachev, Mikhail: 41, 43, 45, 51, 53–4, 63, 70, 78, 79, 101, 105; and dissidents: 3, 32, 52, 75, 80, 110–1, 115, 116, 185, 186, 207, 208 Gorbanevskaya, Natalya 29, 62 Gorskii (pseudonym) 162, 164, 165, 190 Govorukhin, Stanislav 143, 215, 224, 228, 229, 234 Grachev, Pavel 143 Granin, Daniil 33 Grigoryants, Sergei 71, 73–4, 77, 105, 186 Grigorenko, Petr 25, 56, 57, 61, 63, 64 Grossman, Vasilii 12, 15, 16, 23–4, 33, 38, 44, 189, 192, 193, 194, 198, 227 ‘Group 73’ 93 Gudzenko, Aleksandr 17 Gul, Roman 192 Gulag 20–2, 26, 27, 47; see also Solzhenitsyn Gusinskii, Vladimir 231 Hayward, Max 92 Helsinki Process 60, 71, 93, 126, 127 Herzen, Aleksandr 52 Huntington, Samuel 82–3 Igrunov, Vyacheslav 7, 31, 42, 134 Ilyukhin, Viktor 125, 146 Initiative Group on Human Rights 65, 87, 93 International League for Human Rights 93 Interregional Group 111–2 Ioann, Metropolitan 221 Iskander, Fazil 44 Ivan the Terrible 175 Izvestiya (newspaper) 79, 213 judicial reform 124, 126 Kagarlitskii, Boris 134, 190 Kalajic, Dragos 218 Kalistratova, Sofia 86–7, 91, 92 Kaminskaya, Dina 83, 86–7 Karadzic, Radovan 233–4 Karp, R. 190 Karpinskii, Len 4, 70 Karpov, Vyacheslav 202 Kartashkin, Vladimir 146 Karyakin, Yurii 5, 39, 42, 47, 115 Kazintsev, Aleksandr 112, 156, 190, 199, 215, 216, 226, 227, 234 KGB 4, 47, 48, 77, 96, 100, 103–5, 111, 116,127,128, 137, 215; FSK: 141, 146; FSB 232

Index

258

Khasbulatov, Ruslan 79, 123, 124, 128, 129, 222 Khazanov, Boris 181 Khodorovich, Tatyana 66 Khronika Press 92 Khrushchev, Nikita 13, 17, 159, 160 Kistyakovskii, Bogdan 83, 133 Kiva, Aleksei 147–8 Klebanov, Vladimir 100 Klimov, E. 76 Kline, Edward 92 Klyamkin, Igor 113, 190–1 Klykov, A. 192, 208 Kolosov, Mikhail 229 Konstantinov, Ilya 216, 219, 220 Kopelev, Lev 20, 153 Korotich, Vitalii 39, 43 Koryagin, Anatolii 31, 99 Kosterin, Aleksei 87 Kovalyov, Ivan 67 Kovalyov, Sergei 2, 5, 30, 31, 48, 66, 73, 78, 81, 87, 90, 97, 100, 103–8, 116, 119, 123, 125–7, 137, 156, 236; as parliamentarian 121, 128, 129, 133; on constitution 130, 133, 136; as Ombudsman 136, 143; opposition to Chechnya war 7, 138–47, 228, 230 Kovalyov, Valentin 141, 145 Kozhinov, Vadim 35, 36, 161, 170, 187, 216, 226–9, 234 Kozyrev, Andrei 118, 131, 132, 139, 218, 225 Krakhmalnikova, Zoya 157, 158, 204–5 Krasin,Viktor 20, 28, 90 Kravchenko, Natalya 144 Krupin, Vladimir 194 Krylenko, Nikolai 84 Kryuchkov, Vladimir 69, 77, 78, 97, 100, 103–5, 111, 116 Kukobaka, Mikhail 99 Kulikov, A. 143 Kunaev, Stanislav 194, 199, 226 Kushner, B. 210 Lakshin, Vladimir 17, 36, 39, 187 Laqueur, Walter 51, 151, 227 Latynina, Alla 5, 36, 194, 201 Lavut, Aleksandr 31, 87, 90, 139, 144 Lebed, Aleksandr 231 Lenin, V.I. 10, 33, 36; and glasnost 52–4; criticism of 23, 38, 45, 46, 164, 227 Leonov, Dmitrii 41, 134 Lermontov, Mikhail 209 Lert, Raisa 169 Levine, I.D. 191

Index

259

Levitin-Krasnov, Anatolii 20, 90 Ligachev, Egor 43 Likhachev, Dmitrii 142, 193 Litvinov, Pavel 28, 56, 62, 65, 92, 133, 169 Lobanov, Mikhail 46, 160–1, 207, 216, 218 Lukyanov, Anatolii 78, 108, 110, 144 Luzhkov, Yurii 135 Lyubarskii, Kronid 93, 131, 132, 141, 145 Lyubimov, Yurii 69 Maksimov, Vladimir 28, 31, 80, 153 Mandelshtam, Nadezhda 21,181 Marchenko, Anatoly 1, 22, 23, 28, 62, 122 Medvedev, Roy 2, 12, 18, 28, 36, 37, 39, 47, 48, 58, 66, 93, 118, 155, 158, 169, 171, 187 Medvedev, Vadim 9, 38, 41, 43 Medvedev, Zhores 12, 169 Meerson-Aksenov, M. 169, 171 Memorial Society 5, 39–43, 47, 106, 123, 132, 134, 141, 144, 229 Men, Aleksandr 152, 167–9, 206 Migranian, Andranik 113 Mironov, Boris 230 Mironov, Oleg 149 Mizulina, Elena 148 Molostvov, Mikhail 121, 139 Morozov, Mark 31 Moscow Appeal 28 Moscow Helsinki Group 65, 87, 93, 94, 114,148 Mozhaev, Boris 44 Myalo, Ksenia 223, 230 Nabokov, Vladimir 189 Nagorno-Karabakh 123 National Salvation Front 128, 150, 216–9, 225 Nazarov M. 226 Nevzarov, Aleksandr 223 Nikitin, Aleksei 128 Nivat, Georges 27 Nove, Alec 2 Novikov, Vladimir 27 Novodvorskaya, Valeriya 31, 103, 122, 144, 227, 232 October Revolution: 161; critique of 23, 25, 27, 34, 35, 45, 49, 162, 164–5, 181–3 Odintsov, V. 194 Oguridnikov, A. 100, 131 Ombudsman 91, 136, 138, 145–6, 148 Orlov, Oleg 139 Orlov, Yurii 14, 23, 28, 31, 58, 63, 69, 93, 94, 121, 156, 157, 169, 212 Osipov, Vladimir 134, 153, 156, 164, 165, 167, 168, 187, 206, 218, 222, 223 Osipova, T. 31

Index

260

Pamyat (samizdat journal) 9, 29 Pamyat society 29, 32, 185, 195, 196, 204, 206, 222, 225, 233–4 Pasternak, Boris 15, 159, 193, 199 Paustovskii, Konstantin 15 Pavlov, Nikolai 219 Pavlovskii, Gleb 31, 49, 68, 118, 134 People’s Labour Union (NTS) 90, 103, 105 perestroika: and authoritarianism 113; and Leninist revival, 33; relationship to dissidents 2–4; and Stalinism, 32–3; Sakharov role 115 Peter the Great 165, 175–6 Petrovskii, Leonid 139 Petukhov, Leonid 230 Pimenov, Revolt 83, 121 Pipes, Richard 82, 169, 173, 175–7 Plyushch, Leonid 87, 169, 177 Podrabinek, Aleksandr 34, 94, 107, 122, 139 Podyapolskii, Grigorii 91 Pokrovskii, Mikhail 165 Poltoranin, Mikhail 80, 225 Pomerants, Grigorii 20, 166, 175, 179, 183, 190 Ponomarev, Lev 69, 121, 127 Popov, Gavriil 73, 106, 112 Popov, Oleg 81 Potapov, Vladimir 1, 44 Presidential Human Rights Commission 133, 135, 137, 140–1, 146, 148 Press, Frank 211 Press Club Glasnost 73 Project Group on Human Rights 107, 114, 123, 125 Prokhanov, Aleksandr 3, 205, 206, 208, 211,222,228 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 151–2 psychiatry: misuse of 66, 107 Pushkin, A.S. 229, 230 Rachinskii, Yan 134 radio broadcasts (foreign) 27, 33, 61, 62 Rasputin, Valentin 32, 191, 208, 216, 231 Razgon, Lev 189 Reagan, Ronald 173, 211 Referendum (samizdat journal) 34 Regelson, Lev 28 Reznik, Genri 232 Rodionov, Igor 108, 205 Roginskii, Arsenii 29, 42, 139 Rostropovich, Mstislav 29 Rozhdestvenskii, Robert 195

Index

261

Rudenko, Roman 12 Rumyantsev, Oleg 134, 222 Rushdie, Salman 172, 194, 201, 206, 213 Russian National Sobor 214–5 Russian Social Fund (Solzhenitsyn Fund) 30, 66, 157 ‘Russophobia’ 134 Rutskoi, Aleksandr 219, 222, 234 Rybakov, Anatoly 32, 33, 35–6, 39, 40, 189, 227 Rybakov, Yulii 146 Sakharov, Andrei 25, 26, 28, 29, 45, 55, 58, 59, 66, 76, 83, 86, 91, 93, 119, 153, 164, 167, 191, 193–4, 202, 212, 219, 226, 230; on glasnost 59–61, 63, 68; as Memorial chairman 5, 40, 42, 106; and opposition 115–6; as parliamentarian 106–20, 122; dialogue with Gorbachev 5, 111; as icon of democratic movement 115–9, 139; draft constitution 119–20, 124; use by Yeltsin 136–7, 234 Samashki massacre 140, 143–4, 229 Samolvin, Ivan 203 Sarnov, Benedikt 44, 189, 201 Selyunin, Vasilii 37 Senderov, Valerii 102, 105, 188 Serebrennikov, Aleksandr 39 Sevastopol 218 Shabad, Anatolii 121 Shafarevich, Igor 6, 28, 36–7, 236; link to Solzhenitsyn 154, 188, 189, 201–2, 206, 219; The Socialist Phenomenon 155–6; and Russophobia 150–235 Shakhrai, Sergei 144 Shalamov, Varlam 16, 21 Shatrov, Mikhail 32, 34, 39, 76 Sheinis, Viktor 124 Shevardnadze, Eduard 208 Shevtsov, Ivan 159 Shikhanovich, Yurii 123 Shimanov, Gennadii 168 Shmelev, Aleksei 203–4 Sholokhov, Mikhail 20, 231 Shostakovich, Dmitrii 171 Shragin, Boris 28, 83, 92, 153, 169, 171, 177, 181, 193 Shturman, Dora 187, 188, 201 Sinyavskii, Andrei 3, 18, 80, 133, 153, 157, 160–1, 169, 170, 172, 174, 179, 190, 192, 193, 194, 199, 200, 204, 222, 226, 228 Sirotkin, Sergei 136 Skuratov-Ivanov, Yurii 153, 158 Skurlatov, Valerii 104, 105 Smirnov-Ostashvili, Konstantin 195, 196, 206

Index

262

Sobchak, Anatolii 109 Soloukhin, Vladimir 39–40, 46, 188 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 40, 48, 57, 66, 91, 97, 150, 154–6, 164, 166, 169–70, 189, 192, 200, 219, 224, 226; Gulag Archipelago 20, 21, 24–31, 155, 158–9; Ivan Denisovich 16–18; Harvard Address 171; ‘How are We to Rebuild Russia?’ 125, 206; ‘Our Pluralists’ 172 Sovietology: marginalisation of dissidents 2–4, 50–1, 82, 151–2 Stalin, I.V. 12, 175 Stalinism 32, 36, 170, 187; and Russian nationalism 11, 159 Stankevich, Sergei 109 Staravoitova, Galina 142 Starkov, Vladislav 77, 114 Stepashin, Sergei 137 Sterligov, Aleksandr 215 Strauss, Leo 4 Strelyanii, Anatolii 43 Struve, Nikita l70, 187 Stus, Vasyl 1 Sukharev, Aleksandr 108, 119 Suslov, Mikhail 16 Svetov, Feliks 31, 157 Timofeev, Lev 1, 34, 40, 73, 105, 119 Transdniester 217 Travkin, Nikolai 224 Tretyakov, Vitaly 3, 80 Trofimov, Yurii 232 Tsipko, Aleksandr 199, 200 Tsukerman, Boris 89, 91 Turchin, Valentin 58, 156 Tvardovskii, A. 16, 33 Tverdokhlebov, Andrei 58, 93 Ubozhko, Lev l00, 131 Ulam, Adam 173 Ulyanov, Mikhail 70 United Nations 88, 126 Vagin, Evgenii 187, 226 Vanden Heuvel, Katrina 74–5 Vasiliev, Dmitrii 185 Vedenkin, Aleksei 229 Vekhi anthology 159, 162, 164 Velikanova, Tatyana 66, 87, 90, 94, 99 Vigdorova, Frida 62 Vitkovskii, Dmitrii 21

Index

263

Vladimov, Georgii 66–7, 96 Vlasov, Yurii 109 Vodolazov, G. 192 Voinovich, Vladimir 223, 227 Volodin, E. 199,221 Voronin, Vladimir 116, 117 Vyshinskii, Andrei 12 Voinovich, Vladimir 28, 29 Voronyanskaya, E. 25 Working Group to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes 31, 65, 87 Yabloko movement 7 Yakir, Petr 18, 20, 25, 28 Yakovlev, A.N. 35, 45, 48, 78, 131, 165, 209 Yakovlev, Egor 9, 70, 79, 213, 214 Yakunin, Gleb 121, 127, 158 Yanov, Aleksandr 153, 161, 164, 169–71, 176, 177, 180, 190, 192, 208 Yavlinskii, Grigorii 142 Yeltsin, Boris 2, 32, 48, 79, 125, 129, 132, 214, 216, 217, 227, 229; dissident support for in 1993 132–235; and Kovalyov: 138, 140, 144–5; and Sakharov: 118–9, 131, 136–7, 186 Yevtushenko, Evgenii 33, 39, 44, 208 Yugoslavia 176, 218, 233–4 Zaburin, Vladimir 117 Zalygin, Sergei 38, 43 Zheludkov, Sergei 28 Zhirinovskii, Vladimir 99, 135, 143, 223, 224 Zhitnikov, K (pseudonym) 25 Zinoviev, Aleksandr 48, 193, 226 Znamenskii, A. 194 Zolotsev, Stanislav 44 Zolotukhin, Boris 6, 86–7, 106, 121, 124, 125, 126, 127, 131, 132, 133, 137, 140, 146 Zolotusskii, Igor 44 Zorkin, Valerii 129, 222, 225 Zyuganov, Gennadii 78, 134, 224, 230–2, 234