Gulag (81 page)

Eventually, the issue galvanized scientists in the Soviet Union. When Zhores Medvedev was condemned to a psychiatric hospital, many of them wrote letters of protest to the Soviet Academy of Scientists. Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who was, by the late 1960s, emerging as the moral leader of the dissident movement, made a public statement on Medvedev’s behalf at an international symposium at the Institute of Genetics. Solzhenitsyn, by now in the West, wrote an open letter to the Soviet authorities protesting Medvedev’s incarceration. “After all,” he wrote, “it is time to think clearly: the incarceration of free-thinking healthy people is SPIRITUAL MURDER.”
⁸¹

The international attention probably played a part in persuading the authorities to release a number of prisoners, among them Medvedev, who was then expelled from the country. But some in the upper echelons of the Soviet elite felt this had been the wrong response. In 1976, Yuri Andropov, then the chief of the KGB, wrote a secret memo, describing fairly accurately (if you ignore the snide tone and the anti-Semitism) the international origins of the “anti-Soviet campaign”:

Recent data testify to the fact that the campaign has the character of a carefully planned anti-Soviet action . . . at the present time, the initiators of the campaign are trying to draw in international and national psychiatric organizations as well as specialists of good reputation, to create a “committee” designed to monitor the activity of psychiatrists in various countries, above all in the USSR . . . An active role in building up the anti-Soviet mood is being played by the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Great Britain, which is under the influence of Zionist elements.
⁸²

Andropov carefully described the efforts to get the World Psychiatric Association to denounce the USSR, and revealed quite extensive knowledge of which international seminars had condemned Soviet psychiatry. In response to his memo, the Soviet Ministry of Health proposed to launch a massive propaganda campaign in advance of the upcoming congress of the World Psychiatric Association. They also proposed to prepare scientific documents denying the charges, and to identify “progressive” psychiatrists in the West who would back them up. These “progressives” would, in turn, be rewarded with invitations to the USSR, where they would be taken on tours of specially designated psychiatric hospitals. They even named a few who might come.
⁸³

Rather than retreating from the political abuse of psychiatry, in other words, Andropov proposed to brazen it out. It was not in his nature to concede that any aspect of Soviet policy might be wrong.

Chapter 27

THE 1980s: SMASHING STATUES

The statue’s sundered plinth is being smashed,
The steel of drills is sending up a howl.
The special hardest mixture of cement
Was calculated to endure millennia . . .
All handmade things in the world we live in
Can be reduced to scrap by hands of men.
But the main point is this:
Stone in its essence can
Be never either good or bad.

—Alexander Tvardovsky, “The Statue’s Sundered Plinth”
¹

BY THE TIME Yuri Andropov took over as the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1982, his “crackdown” on the asocial elements in the Soviet Union was in fact well under way. Unlike some of his predecessors, Andropov had always believed that the dissidents, despite their small numbers, should be treated as a serious threat to Soviet power. Having been Soviet Ambassador to Budapest in 1956, he had seen how quickly an intellectual movement could turn into a popular revolution. He also believed that all of the Soviet Union’s many problems— political, economic, social—could be solved through the application of greater discipline: stricter camps and prisons, heavier surveillance, and more harassment.
²

These were the methods Andropov had advocated while head of the KGB, from 1979 on, and these were the methods he continued to pursue during his short reign as the Soviet Union’s leader. Thanks to Andropov, the first half of the 1980s are remembered as the most repressive era in post-Stalinist Soviet history. It was as if the pressure within the system had to reach a boiling point, just before the system itself broke down altogether.

Certainly, from the late 1970s, Andropov’s KGB had made large numbers of arrests and re-arrests: under his direction, recalcitrant activists often received new sentences right at the end of their old ones, as had happened in Stalin’s time. Membership of one of the Helsinki monitoring groups—dissident organizations which tried to monitor the Soviet Union’s observation of the Helsinki Treaty—became a surefire route to prison. Twenty-three members of the Moscow group were arrested between 1977 and 1979, and seven were expelled abroad. Yuri Orlov, leader of the Moscow Helsinki group, remained in prison throughout the first half of the 1980s.
³

Nor was arrest Andropov’s only weapon. Because his aim was to frighten people away from joining dissident movements in the first place, the scope of repression became much wider. Those even suspected of sympathizing with the human rights, religious, or nationalist movements stood to lose everything. Suspects and their spouses could be deprived not only of their jobs, but also of their professional status and qualifications. Their children could be denied the right to attend university. Their telephones could be cut off, their residence permits revoked, their travel restricted.
⁴

By the end of the 1970s, Andropov’s multilayered “disciplinary measures” had succeeded in dividing both the dissident movement and its foreign supporters into small, hardened, and sometimes mutually suspicious interest groups. There were human rights activists, whose fate was closely monitored by groups like Amnesty International. There were Baptist dissidents, whose cause was supported by the international Baptist Church. There were nationalist dissidents—Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Georgians—who were supported by their compatriots in exile. There were Meskhetians and Crimean Tartars, deported in Stalin’s time, who wanted the right to return home.

In the West, probably the most prominent group of dissidents were the refuseniks, Soviet Jews who had been refused the right to emigrate to Israel. Raised to prominence by Congress’s 1975 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which had linked U.S.-Soviet trade to the emigration issue, the refuseniks remained a central concern for Washington right up to the end of the Soviet Union. In the autumn of 1986, at his meeting with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, President Reagan personally presented the Soviet leader with a list of 1,200 Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate.
⁵

Now kept firmly apart from the criminals, all of these groups were well-represented within Soviet camps and prisons, where they organized themselves, like the politicals of eras past, according to their common causes.
⁶
By this time, it might even be said that the camps served as a sort of networking facility, almost a school of dissent, where political prisoners could meet others with similar ideas. At times, they celebrated one another’s national holidays, Lithuanian and Latvian, Georgian and Armenian, and argued lightly over whose country would be the first to free itself from the Soviet Union.
⁷
Contacts were cross-generational too: Balts and Ukrainians had the opportunity to meet a previous generation of nationalists, the anti-Soviet partisans who had been given twenty-five-year sentences and never released. Of the latter, Bukovsky wrote that because “their lives had come to a halt when they were about twenty,” the camps had somehow preserved them. “On summer Sundays they would crawl out in the sun with their accordions and play tunes that had long since been forgotten in their native regions. Truly, being in the camps was like having entered a land beyond the grave.”
⁸

The older generation often had trouble understanding their younger compatriots. Men and women who had fought with guns in the forest could not understand dissidents fighting with bits of paper.
⁹
But the old were still able to inspire the young with their example. Such encounters helped to form people who would, later in the decade, organize the nationalist movements that ultimately helped to destroy the Soviet Union itself. Looking back on the experience, David Berdzenishvili, a Georgian activist, told me he was glad that he had spent two years in a 1980s labor camp rather than two years in the 1980s Soviet army.

If the personal networks had hardened, so too had the links with the outside world. An edition of the
Chronicle
published in 1979 illustrates this perfectly, as it contains, among other things, a day-by-day account of life in the Perm-36 punishment cells:

September 13: Zhukauskas found a white worm in his soup.

September 26: He found a black insect 1.5 cm long in his bowl. The discovery was immediately reported to Captain Nelipovich.

September 27: In punishment cell No. 6 the temperature was officially measured as 12 degrees centigrade.

September 28: The morning temperature in the cells was 12 degrees. Second blankets and padded trousers were issued. Heaters were placed in the rooms of the duty guards. In the evening the temperature in the cells was 11 degrees.

October 1: 11.5 degrees.

October 2: A 500-watt heater was put in cell No. 6 (Zhukauskas, Gluzman, Marmus). The temperature, both morning and evening, was 12 degrees. Zhukauskas was asked to sign a document in which his output was stated to be ten times lower than it was. He refused . . .

October 10: Balkhanov refused to attend voluntarily a meeting of the camp Education Commission. On the orders of Nikomarov he was taken by force.

And so on.

The authorities seemed powerless to stop this sort of information from flowing—or to prevent it from instantly appearing on Western radio stations, broadcasting in the USSR. The 1983 arrest of Berdzenishvili was announced on the BBC within two hours of its occurrence.
¹⁰
Ratushinskaya and her barrack mates in the women’s camp in Mordovia sent Reagan a congratulatory message after he won the U.S. elections. Within two days he had received it. The KGB, she wrote gleefully, were “beside themselves.”
¹¹

To most sensible outsiders peering through the looking glass at the strange world of the Soviet Union, such cleverness seemed somewhat beside the point. For all practical purposes, Andropov appeared to have won the game. A decade’s worth of harassment, imprisonment, and forced exile had kept the dissident movement small and weak.
¹²
Most of the better-known dissidents had been silenced: in the middle of the 1980s, Solzhenitsyn was in exile abroad, and Sakharov was in internal exile in the city of Gorky. KGB policemen sat outside Roy Medvedev’s door, monitoring all of his movements. No one in the USSR seemed to notice their struggle. Peter Reddaway, probably the leading Western academic specialist on Soviet dissent at the time, wrote in 1983 that dissident groups “have made little or no headway among the mass of ordinary people in the Russian heartland.”
¹³

The goons and the warders, the crooked doctors and the secret police, all seemed safe and secure in their chosen professions. But the ground was moving beneath their feet. As it turned out, Andropov’s strict refusal to tolerate dissent would not last. When he died in 1984, that policy died with him.

When Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985, the character of the new Soviet leader at first appeared mysterious, to foreigners and countrymen alike. He seemed as slick and as smooth as other Soviet bureaucrats—yet there were hints of something different. During the summer after his appointment, I met a group of Leningrad refuseniks who laughed at the West’s naïveté: how could we believe that Gorbachev’s alleged preference for whiskey over vodka, and his wife’s admiration for Western clothes, meant he was more liberal than his predecessors?

They were wrong: he was different. Few knew, at the time, that Gorbachev came from a family of “enemies.” One of his grandfathers, a peasant, had been arrested and sent to a labor camp in 1933. His other grandfather had been arrested in 1938 and tortured in prison by an investigator who broke both of his arms. The impact on young Mikhail had been enormous, as he later wrote in his memoirs: “Our neighbors began shunning our house as if it were plague-stricken. Only at night would some close relative venture to drop by. Even the boys from the neighborhood avoided me . . . all of this was a great shock to me and has remained engraved on my memory ever since.”
¹⁴

Nevertheless, the refuseniks’ suspicions were not wholly ill-founded, for the early months of the Gorbachev era were disappointing. He threw himself into an anti-alcohol campaign, which angered people, destroyed the ancient vineyards of Georgia and Moldavia, and might even have provoked the economic crash that followed some years later: some believe that the collapse in the sales of vodka destroyed the country’s delicate financial balance for good. Only in April 1986, after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear complex in Ukraine, was Gorbachev ready to make genuine changes. Convinced that the Soviet Union needed to speak openly about its troubles, he came up with another reform proposal: glasnost, or “openness.”

At first, glasnost, like the anti-alcohol campaign, was essentially an economic policy. Apparently, Gorbachev hoped that open discussion of the Soviet Union’s very real economic, ecological, and social crises would lead to quick resolutions, to the restructuring—the perestroika
—
he had begun talking about in his speeches. Within an amazingly short period of time, however, glasnost began to be about Soviet history.

Indeed, when describing what happened to public debate in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, one is always tempted to use flood metaphors: it was as if a dam had broken, or a dike had burst, or a water main had given way. In January 1987, Gorbachev told an intrigued group of journalists that the “blank spots” in the Soviet Union’s history would have to be filled in. By November, so much had changed that Gorbachev became the second Party leader in Soviet history to refer openly to the “blank spots” in a speech:

. . . the lack of proper democratization of Soviet society was precisely what made possible both the cult of personality and the violations of the law, arbitrariness, and repressions of the 1930s—to be blunt, crimes based on the abuse of power. Many thousands of members of the Party and non-members were subjected to mass repressions. That, comrades, is the bitter truth.
¹⁵

Gorbachev was actually less eloquent than Khrushchev had been—but his impact on the broad Soviet public was probably greater. Khrushchev’s speech had, after all, been made to a closed meeting. Gorbachev had spoken on national television.

Gorbachev also followed up on his speech with far more enthusiasm than Khrushchev had ever shown. In its wake, new “revelations” began appearing in the Soviet press every week. Finally, the Soviet public had the chance to read Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Anna Akhmatova’s
Requiem
, Boris Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago
, even Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita.
After a struggle,
Novyi Mir
, now under new editorship, began publishing installments of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
¹⁶
One Day in the
Life of Ivan Denisovich
would soon sell millions of copies, and authors whose works had previously circulated only in samizdat, if at all, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of their Gulag memoirs too. Some became household names in the process: Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Anatoly Zhigulin, Varlam Shalamov, Dmitri Likhachev, and Anna Larina.