Advise and Dissent

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected, if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. --Dr. Zhivago

WHEN ASKED FOR his nationality at his 1978 trial, poet Alexander Ginzburg replied "prisoner." Almost any Russian could say the same and Joshua Rubenstein's Soviet Dissidents examines those who do. They are most often those who come to politics only out of necessity and in defense of personal freedom. They are artists, religious practitioners, displaced nationals and often they are the young. In a country whose older population remains depoliticized, frozen by memories of Stalin's official terror, they are the exceptions. They are the ones who believe that ideas cannot be murdered with bullets, imprisonment or exile.

Rubenstein, New England director of Amnesty International, sets out to write a focused expose on the subject. He does not delve into the inner machinations of the Politburo, nor does he try to second-guess past and present policy-decisions. Instead, he tries to explore the roots and meaning of Soviet dissent; to show how the abuse of human rights actually affects those who do object, rebel and petition. With candid passion, Rubenstein masterfully intertwines the three major strands of Soviet dissident life--the historical, the personal and the legal--to create a three-dimmensional portrait of life under political repression.

"We are accustomed to an absence of freedom," writes one dissident in his memoirs and Rubenstein sets himself to disclosing Stalin's arctic gulags, what Solzhenitsyn called the "sewage disposal system." Over seven million more returned from these purgatories during Kruschev's "thaw". Many of the those prisoners went on to become cultural leaders and intellectuals, and thus, art and literature quickly became a barometer of freedom and provoked an intense and continual debate.

Rubentstein documents how the freedom of expressions came to be the first and foremost human rights. The publication of literary works abroad brought seven years of labor for Yuri Daniel and Andrei Sinyaksy in 1965, prompting the first public demonstrations for human rights in Soviet history. Such actions then continued; in 1966 a literary work was used for the first time as evidence in court against its writer; in 1968 the first person was arrested for distributing letters in defense of prisoners of conscience, in 1972 the first attempt was made to discredit the movement rather than individual remarks. But equally there were milestones: the first publication of a Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, the formation of the first Helsinki watch groups, the Assembly of the Committee for Human Rights.

Yet Rubenstein is not purely academic, he blends the historical with the personal for the human rights movements gained force only with the entrace of powerful personalities. Herein lies the power of his book, as he explores the development of dissent through the lives of the important activists. Rubenstein succeeds in portraying the risks involved in participation and what attracted the dissidents. He tells us they were not "ordinary cautious citizens" but often "people with eccentric personalities." But what is more interesting is that those who originally demonstrated were personally affronted, and unable to ignore attacks on their friends, values, or ideas. Very few of the original dissidents assumed their place out of a general or abstract concern.

Furthermore, these dissidents were not a uniform group; their styles and methods, background and temperament all differed. Some collected signatures, others wrote samizdat or self-published pamphlets. For some, politics became a full time job, for others dissent began only after professional work ended. Some never went public while others like Anatoly Marchenko kept his mittens, socks and toothbrush near his door in case he was sent to prison.

But despite such differences, most of those in the movement lost their personal lives to the public. They were visited by new members, or those who wanted messages smuggled to friends in the West. Many were deprived of jobs and privileges the state offered like education and health care. And for these public figures, the personal quickly coalesced with the legal. Trials became opportunities to expose the regime and law became a means to embarass the government. To some it all seemed like a charade to oppose specific violations of law but not to oppose the general absence of rights in a police state, where the law could be ignored with impunity by any government officer didn't make sense. Rubenstein makes clear there are no independent judicial institutions in Russia and--no dissident has ever been tried and found innocent--there is a total disregard for legality at all levels of the government.

At times, Rubenstein's book becomes a court calendar where we watch dissidents held in pretrial retaining centers for over a year without contact with relatives, where they are tried without defense witnesses, closed courtrooms, without cross-examinations, sometimes with the judge leaving the room (case of Yuri Orlov) or with no trial whatsoever (Andrei Sakharov). What Rubenstein reveals is that in the Soviet Union, abuses of human rights are not isolated incidents. There are day-to-day harassment, searches, interrogations, interference with phones, psychological confinement, separation of families, inhuman treatment of prisoners. Often the regime is purposely inconsistent creating an atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia as the KGB arrests those not directly involved the movement as well as the leaders to keep all off balance.

While Rubenstein writes adroitly, his style causes some minor problems. Because he writes thematically (and chronologically within each theme) he cites quotations two or three times in several cases. He also assumes that the reader already has specific knowledge of the subject, for he never clarifies what losing membership in the Communist Party or Writer's Union implies. Often, the introduction of new dissidents throughout scatters the chronology and one loses track of years. One also gets no real feeling of just how widespread the movement really is.

Those faults all result from Rubenstein's desire to list as many events and people as possible, a laudable motive. But there is a major point which Rubenstein does not make adequately: namely that the new generation of dissidents (especially those involved in Jewish emigration) makes different demands than their predecessors. They are no longer trying to change the Soviet system or to influence internal policies--they are simply asking to leave. They are not political in any oppositional sense. In fact the contradict the very philosophy of the human rights movement which is based on civil disobedience. Because they represent no direct threat to the Soviets, their captivity is difficult to defend and represents complete disregard for the rights of men.

Rubenstein describes two Russias: one of violence and deceit and one of justice and humanity. Andrei Amalrik, dissident and author of "Involuntary Journey to Siberia" writes, "I don't think Americans can understand that censorship is ingrained in Soviet life. Do you know that you can go to prison for writing something about the 10th century that is considered unpatriotic and anti-state in the 20th century?" Joshua Rubenstein understands and he makes this clear.

Since 1966, not a single arbitrary or violent act by Soviet authorities has passed without public protest. These incidents must continue to receive attention because as one letter of defense for an arrested dissident said: "(his) enemies have many ways to sentence (him) to a new term under any false pretext. They can do this secretly or slander him in the newspapers. They can deprive him of defenders or they can intimidate them. We, his friends, have only one way of helping him: publicity. May as many people as possible know of his courageous struggle and his new arrest.