FERMENT
January 18, 1994 Roy Lisker Author/Editor
Volume VIII, # 6 197 Franklin Street
Cambridge, Ma. 02139
Alexander Yesenin-Volpin
Russian mathematician -dissident (Part 3)
The Glorious ' 60's - Soviet Style
"Like black lightning the stormy Petrel
Ascends, pierces the clouds like an arrow,
Plucks the foam of the waves with his wing.
Now, he bears himself, like a demon -
Proud, a black demon of the tempest -
He laughs and sobs .... He laughs
Above the storm clouds and sobs from joy!
` - Maxim Gorky
The West's decade of revolution had its counterparts in the Soviet
Union - but who has written about it from this point of view? When was
the last time we've seen the Russian 60's memorialized in novel, romance,
pop songs, plays, musicals? Why haven't the reams of propaganda scaled
the heights of hyperhype attained by our own brief experiment with anarchism?
In this period of Russian history , it is true, there are no phenomena
comparable to the Beatles; no Woodstock; no Green Revolution; no "drug
revolution" ( an article in today's Boston Globe describes Timothy Leary
as a mathematical philosopher! ) ; no "sexual revolution"; no beatniks,
no hippies, no yippies or yuppies; no communes, crash pads, be-ins , love-ins;
no Marches on Moscow; no nationally organized movements of draft resistance;
no grape and lettuce boycotts; no proliferation of exotic religions, cults,
food fads, New Age therapies, etc..
What did emerge was a civil rights movement of national - even international
importance . Little known to the general public - though all the books
are in the libraries- yet, within the world formerly contained behind the
Iron Curtain it is rightly regarded as the equivalent of Gandhi's and our
own civil rights movement. Furthermore, although the force and energy of
our civil rights movement rapidly dissipated at the end of the 60's, leaving
us a landscape littered with several quaint publicity seekers like Louis
Farrakhan and the Reverend Al Sharpton, the Russian movement sustained
its dedicated heroism for 30 years: from the death of Stalin in 1953 to
the ascent of Gorbachev in 1988. Neither Glasnost, nor Perestroika, nor
the long chain of miraculous developments in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Empire, could have happened without the foundation of three decades
of great sacrifice, suffering and idealism. Any Russian schoolchild of
today knows the names of Galanskov, Ginzburg, Bakhstein, Kuznetsov, Bukovsky,
Chalidze, Sinyavski, Daniel , Tverdokhlebov, Khaustov, Orlov, Marchenko,
Sakharov, Grigorenko, Solzhenitsyn, Yesenin-Volpin.......*
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(* Sakharov: Memoirs, pg. 579: "When speaking in behalf of victims
of illegality and brutality, many of whom I know personally, I have tried
to convey the full measure of my pain and outrage and the depth of my concern
[.....]: Anatoly Marchenko, Anatoly Shcharansky, Yuri Orlov, Sergei Kovalev,
Ivan Kovalev and his wife, Tatyana Osipova; Viktor Nekipelov; Leonard Ternovsky;
Merab Kostava; Tatyana Velikanova; Vasyl Stus; Mart Niklus; Viktoras Petkus;
Levko Lukyanenko; Ivan Kandyba; Mikhail Kokabaka; Rostislav Galetsky; Malva
Landa; Ida Nodel; Alexander Lavut; Vyacheslav Bakhmin; Genrikh Altunian;
Gleb Yakunin; Yuri Fyodorv; Alexei Murzhenko; Raisa & Mykola Rudenko;
Olga & Mykola Matusevich; Valery Abramkin; Mustafa Dzhemilev; Alexei
Smirnov; Anatoly Kuryagin; Sergei Khodorovich; Vladimir Shelkov and Bidia
Dandaron".. )
To the logician Alexander Yesenin-Volpin belongs the honor of having
forged, in the early 60's, the basic strategy that was to predominate in
the Russian civil rights movement through the 60's and 70's . He was also
a particularly tough dissident, often the first to show by the boldness
of his example, the political effectiveness of his theoretical convictions.
Since September I've been writing about the modern Russian equivalent
of Thomas Paine without knowing it. For several months I was misguided
by the largely derisory opinions of academic mathematicians and "philosophers"
( I put quotation marks about their professional designation because I
regard most of the wise men in our philosophy departments as at about the
level of Carl Sandburg. ) It was they who told me that his ideas , indeed
the very subject of super-finitistic intuitionism, was so weird as to be
both incomprehensible and pointless. They knew almost nothing about his
record in the Russian civil rights movement.
To listen to so many of these persons , educators who had encountered
him in the mathematics and philosophy departments of Boston University,
Tufts, Northeastern University or M.I.T., he was some combination of lunatic,
alcoholic and fraud. Granted that after 5 years of punitive medicine in
special psychiatric hospitals one does not emerge in a state that may be
considered, by conventional standards, normal. The legend of his alcoholism,
surprisingly durable, also does not seem to be based on very much hard
evidence. Although so many in contemporary America are terrified of a horrible
perishing at the age of 25 through merely inhaling the bouquet of a cognac,
that does not mean that someone who drinks one or more glasses of vodka
a day is an alcoholic.
As for his being a fraud: his work goes entirely against the grain
of modern credentialized mathematical logic, which regards modal logic
as dark superstition. Since the golden days of Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein,
Carnap, etc., sententious doubt has been all the rage, and one is more
likely to garner the maximum number of merit badges by proving that some
odd grammatical form - Oh, something like : 'Should I say I could do X
,if I would not do X unless X existed in some canonical form, with appropriate
qualifications, despite the suspicion of evidence that , etc., etc..........?'
- analyzed to tedious exhaustion does not contain a quarkino of Ultimate
Reality.
I have my own reasons for believing why this is so - the materialism
of the West and all that jazz - but that really is "neither here nor there"
( Think of the philosophical quibbles in that pregnant idiom! ). There
are two points to be made. The first is that Volpin's work is not fraudulent.
The second is that his activities in the Russian civil rights movement
are beyond censure, and admirable from any enlightened standpoint ; yet
most of the people who denigrate him know about it only by hearsay. I am
not claiming that the clarity of his political vision does not prove that
his mathematical logic is equally clear. Yet it must be the case that anyone
who understanding of the Russian political context was so acute that he
was able to lay down the fundamental strategy of a 30-year movement for
justice against one of the worst tyrannies in history, must have a very
good mind. One suspects that when this mind turns to logic it also has
some important things to say. I happen to find his ideas provocative; so
does Judson Webb, mathematical philosopher ( not the Timothy Leary kind)
at Boston University; so does Jim Geiser, prominent logician and computer
scientist; Gabe Stolzenberg of the Harvard math department; and others
whose ideas in this area are worth listening to.
But let us rather pass over the learned ignorance of his colleagues
in the faculties of the universities of Boston with an embarrassed silence
, and turn to an examination of the record.
The Russian Civil Rights Movement.
"The wolfhound century leaps at the throat" -Osip Mandlestam
In November of 1953, Joseph Stalin, like Francoise Duvalier, Mao Tse-Tung,
Franco, and other successful unnatural tyrants of the modern world died
in Moscow of natural causes. To this day, the powerful stability of his
sprawling Empire, combined with the ideology, Marxist-Leninism that stitched
up its diverse parts into an indestructible unity, remains a deep mystery.
40 years of peace enforced by the Russian terror has been superseded by
chaos and ethnic violence in much of its former territories: Bosnia , Croatia,
Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikhstan, Moldavia, .......Despite this,
the verdict of history will continue to judge him as one of the evil presences
of the 20th century, which, for other deeply mysterious reasons, have been
so numerous.
Signs of new life pushing up beneath the Stalinist glacier were apparent
almost immediately, though for some time it was not clear what direction
organized resistance was going to take.
The Poetry Readings in Mayakovsky Square
"I'll go out on the Square
And into the city's ear
I'll hammer a cry of despair
This is me
Calling to truth and revolt
Willing no more to serve
I break your black tethers
Woven of lies..... " (Manifesto of Man , Yuri Galanskov, died in the
camps in 1972 at the age of 33 from untreated peritonitis .)
In the spring of 1958, a statue of the poet Mayakovsky was unveiled
in Mayakovsky Square, near the center of Moscow . The official ceremony
included a poetry reading presented by Komsomol organizations. A kind of
spontaneous combustion turned the event into an open reading that went
onto into late in the night.
Without any sort of planning, a precedent was set for daily open readings
in the vicinity of the Mayakovsky statue. In our American tradition, open
poetry readings are usually mediocre, and at least as boring as first-year
logic or communal house meetings. But poets of caliber with something to
say, began to show up in Mayakovsky Square. Poetry has always been far
more popular in Russia than in most other places, and they came, bringing
work that had been hidden for decades, under floorboards, or behind chimneys,
or buried in the grounds.
"The poetry reading, right there on the square, in the center of Moscow,
created an extraordinary atmosphere. Hundreds came to the readings, which
were usually held in the evenings and on Saturdays and Sundays. Many of
the readers were excellent professional actors and others were first-class
original poets: Anatoly Shchukin, Kovshin, Mikhail Kaplan, Victor Klugin,
Alexandrovsky, Shucht, and others."
" We were fighting for the concrete freedom to create , and it was
no accident that many of us - people like Yuri Galanskov, Victor Khaustov,
Vladimir Osipov and Edward Kutznetsov, later merged with the movement for
human rights. We all got to know one another in Mayakovsky Square.(Bukofsky,
pg. 146)
The authorities, realizing that they had made a mistake, quickly put
an end to the open readings in Mayakovsky Square ; but the seed of an idea
had been planted. They were revived in September of 1960 by a number of
writers already active in the samizdhat movement - the clandestine publication
on home typewriters of writings critical of the regime, informally distributed
outside of the literary industry of officially approved writers, publishers,
and bookstores.
( Under far less oppressive conditions, Ferment is American samizdhat
) . The readings were continued, despite harassment , physical attacks
and arrests for about 2 months.
During the revival of these readings, Alexander Yesenin- Volpin was
released from yet another spell in the Leningrad 'special' pseudo-psychiatric
hospital. Arriving in Moscow, Volpin went immediately to Mayakovsky Square.
According to Bukovsky's account, it was there, in 1960, that he delivered
his first lecture on the " Strategy of Legality " which was to become the
underlying methodology for 3 decades of confrontation with the Soviet government.
This is what makes Alexander Y. -Volpin, logician son of the much beloved
poet Sergei Esenin, famous in Russia: Volpin is the architect of "legality"
as a strategy. It is rather strange, but not all that surprising, that
he should have this honor , since he is far from being your typical political
organizer or leader of mass movements, like Gandhi, Martin Luther King
, Cesar Chavez or others.
" Alik 's permanently disheveled look, total impracticality, inability
to adapt to his surroundings, and absolute indifference to his appearance,
[made] him an exemplar of the eccentric professor." ( Bukofsky, pg. 234)
Volpin's idea was simply this: one could effectively combat a lawless
government by insisting that it obey its own laws. Ludmilla Alexeyeva writes,
( pg. 275)
"Volpin had been a pioneer in judicial education. He would explain
to anyone who cared to listen a simple but unfamiliar idea to Soviets:
all laws ought to be understood as they are written and not as they are
interpreted by the government....."
Valery Chalidze confirms this :
" Another activity in the defense of rights has been the study of Soviet
laws and international law. Not many have been engaged in this. But since
it involves not only research but also the legal education of samizdhat
readers, the work has had an influence on the whole movement. This is all
the more true since, from its inception the movement has been somewhat
law-oriented- in part because of the long-standing program of legal education
vigorously carried on by Professor Volpin, which he began even before the
movement developed."
Bukovsky, for one, thought him simply a madman for even suggesting
such a strategy.
" I was astonished by the serious way he discoursed on rights in the
country of legalized coercion. Not more than ten years before it had been
revealed that these same laws could coexist with the murder of almost 20
million innocent people. What sense was there in expounding on laws? It
was like expounding humanitarianism to a cannibal. Alik himself had twice
been committed to prison for reading his verse, and this not even in Mayakovsky
Square, but at home, in a circle of friends.
The central concept in his arguments was the position of a citizen
. [ I had been told that] I was required to be a "Soviet man", someone
enthusiastically building communism, endorsing the policies of the government
and angrily condemning world imperialism. This concept of "Soviet man"
was really the starting point for all the illegality in the country ( Emphasis
added) . Every ruler that came along filled it with anything he wanted
to put into it.
Alik Volpin argued, however, that there was no law obliging us to be
"Soviet people". A citizen of the USSR ,on the other hand, was quite a
different matter. There was no law obliging all the citizens of the USSR
to believe in communism or to help build it. ......Volpin's idea, therefore,
came down to this. We reject the regime, not because it calls itself socialist-
there's 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 everybody
to lie and be hypocrites. We wish to live in a state ruled by law. ( Emphasis
added) . We are obliged to submit to nothing but the law.
"But they can't get by without using coercion", we objected to Alik:
"If they were to introduce a strict observance of the law, they would simply
cease to be a communist state."
" Actually I agree with you". Alik would say in a conspiratorial whisper,
and everybody burst out laughing. (Bukovsky, pg. 234)
Volpin, in other words, agreed completely that the Soviet Union was
in fact a lawless state. Under the grinding weight of Stalinism, contempt
for legality and the law had thoroughly permeated every class of society:
the politicians, the intellectuals, the police, the media, the judicial
and prison systems, and even the proletariat who, despite their 'dictatorship',
had come to regard the mention of 'work' as a sick joke. True revolution
then could only begin with the reconstruction of a new kind of human being:
a Soviet citizen , neither a slave, nor flunky, nor informer, or congenital
liar or accomplice, the qualities of which had seeped into the behavior
of virtually everybody owing to the impossibility of surviving in any other
way. Volpin taught that the creation of a new Russian identity could be
accomplished through two means:
( i ) Obedience to the laws ( At this stage, he did not discuss the
possibility of civil disobedience to unjust laws, the touchstone of the
Gandhian philosophy. Obedience, even to bad laws, was necessary in a state
that did not even recognize the authority of law.)
( ii ) The organizing of a systematic program of calling the government
to task whenever it ignored its own laws - ( obviously a very dangerous
tactic but one which, when used properly, could and did, cause chaos throughout
the Soviet bureaucracy. I refer the reader once again to Bukofsky's book,
which describes how this could be done even from inside the prison system.
)
In fact, the law books of the former Soviet Empire were filled with
many perfectly acceptable, even rather good laws. They contained most of
the provisions of the Bill of Rights and the French declaration of the
Rights of Man. Russia had also been a co-signer of the UN Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1948 , and would later be a co-signer of the Helsinki
Accords in 1976.
" An article on the right to emigrate written by Professor Alexander
Volpin recalls that when [the right to emigrate] came up during a discussion
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Soviet representative
stated that in the USSR there was no one who wished to leave the county,
but that if such a person should appear he would be able to emigrate, although
he would have to comply with a few legal formalities. And Volpin adds,
' In the meantime, quite a few people arrested on the border have, because
of these few legal formalities, served long terms of imprisonment, sometimes
amounting to fifteen or even twenty-five years." (Chalidze, pg. 35)
The Trial of Ginzburg, Bakhstein,
Kutznetsov & Osipov
"For every chopping block
was once a good pine tree,
A curly pine.
The block is only bad because
It's used to chop off people's heads
Such is the state and its government" -
( V. Khlebnikov )
Volpin soon provided a graphic illustration of the kinds of effective
tactics possible through the use of his strategy of legality. The government
rounded up the persons they considered the organizers of the Mayakovsky
Square readings and used them to stage the first prominent show-trial of
the 60's : the trial of Alexander Ginzburg ,Ilya Bakstein, Edward Kutznetsov
and Vladimir Osipov. They were accused of having conspired in an assassination
plot, an invented fairy tale that even the prosecutors didn't take seriously:
the real reason was their organization of the Mayakovsky Square readings.
As was customary in these things, the trial was removed to a venue difficult
of access to the general public, to whom it was, in any case, closed.
Volpin breached the walls of the courtroom for the first time in Soviet
history. To quote Bukofsky:
He showed up at the doors of the courthouse, brandishing a copy of
the Criminal Code. The guards naturally tried to prevent him from entering;
but by a persistent harangue, he was actually able to convince them that
it was against the law to refuse him entry. They might even get into trouble
by keeping him out if he should choose to register a complaint with the
right people.
"Little did we realize that this absurd incident, with the comical
Alik Volpin brandishing the 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." (Bukofsky, pg. 163)
It must be admitted that it never has been easy to best Volpin in an
argument:
"... given that in real life the truth of any judgment is always conditional,
all of Alik's arguments became encrusted with digressions, reservations,
parentheses, exceptions and qualifications, and he invariably ended up
with the problem of whether and how much a word corresponds to what it
denominates, terminating in such a semantic jungle that nobody had the
slightest idea any longer of what was being said..."
( Bukofsky, pg. 234)
Constitution Day, December 5th, 1965
" The human rights movement is considered to have a specific birth
date - December 5, 1965 " ( Ludmilla Alexeyeva, pg. 9)
Most historians of this period do not agree with Bukofsky's opinion
that the civil rights movement began with Volpin's forced entrance into
the trial of the organizers of the Mayakovsky Square readings. That turns
out to have no real effect on Volpin's reputation -- since the event that
is generally accepted as the inauguration of that movement is universally
credited to Volpin as well!
" December 5, 1965 may be considered the birthday of the human rights
movement. On that day the first demonstration in the history of the Soviet
regime that was accompanied by human rights slogans. took place in Moscow's
Pushkin Square . " (Alexeyeva, pg. 269 )
"The first demonstration in the Soviet Union since 1927 took place
on December 5, 1965..." (Grigorenko, pg. 338)
" On December 3 or 4, 1966, , I found an envelope in my mailbox containing
two sheets of onionskin paper.[ ......] The second sheet announced a silent
demonstration on December 5, Constitution Day. It proposed that interested
persons arrive at Pushkin Square a few minutes before 6 PM, assemble near
the monument, and then at the stroke of the hour remove their hats and
observe a minute of silence as a sign of respect for the Constitution and
support for political prisoners, [......] I learned much later that Alexander
Esenin-Volpin was the author of this Constitution Day appeal, and of several
other original and effective ideas to promote respect for human rights.
( Sakharov , Memoirs, pg. 273)
( Here Sakharov is referring to the second year of Constitution Day
demonstrations. As far as I know they are still an annual event.)
Original and effective! One often discovers that the ideas of logicians,
philosophers and other scholastics are original, but how often are they
effective! Isn't it assumed that "philosophy", a woolly-headed subject
taught by sinecured casuists ,usually on the top floor of the stuffiest
building on the college campus, can have no 'practical' applications? No
light-bulbs; organ transplants; transistor radios; space shuttles; Cruise
missiles; cures for cancer? No junk-bond schemes; ideas for the storage
of nuclear wastes; genome projects; NAFTA treaties?
But not only is Volpin a philosopher, he is a specialist in a particularly
arid branch of modern philosophy, the foundations of logic, set theory
and arithmetic! And of a particularly useless and arid sub-branch of that
subject, Intuitionism! And yet, from his deep study of the questions at
the foundations of cognition, he draws forth demonstrations that launch
civil rights movements; tactics that open court rooms; strategies that
shape many different forms of protest; mental strength that rises above
repeated incarceration in psychiatric hospitals designed to destroy the
soul; moral strength that causes him to throw himself back into the fray,
over and over again as soon as he is released! Until the 'authorities'
have no choice but to send him, in 1972, to the United States, where he
wanders around in the mathematics and philosophy departments of Boston
and Cambridge for a few years, surrounded by pigmies who denigrate him
because they are unable to grasp the stature of the man.
The Trial of Andrei Sinyavski and Yuli Daniel
"May your smarting calluses
Remind you of others being mutilated
You are submerged in human destiny
From now on your destiny is pain"
...Y. Daniel, 1966, awaiting sentencing.
The immediate inspiration for the Constitution Day demonstrations lay
in the arrests and trials of the two dissident writers, Andrei Sinyavski
and Yuli Daniel. Some of theirsamizdhat fiction smuggled to the West had
been published under the pseudonyms of "Tertz and Arzhak"; for this they
were arrested in September of 1965. In the Stalinist era, writers out of
favor had been systematically put on trial, sent to the camps or executed,
but they had never been charged for the contents of their works. Instead
they were tried for espionage, conspiracy, assassination plots, and so
on. This was the first trial in Soviet history in which writers were being
tried for the ideas expressed in their works. It is ironic that this evidence
of a relative 'liberalization' of the regime, was enough of a window into
the tyranny to create the national movement that led to its overthrow in
the late 80's. Ludmilla Alexeyeva goes on to say:
" A few days prior to December 5th, which is celebrated as Constitution
Day, typed leaflets containing a "civic plea" appeared around Moscow University
and other liberal-arts institutes:
'A few months ago KGB agents arrested two citizens: the writers A.
Sinyavsky and Yu. Daniel. Under the circumstances there is reason to fear
violations of the law with regard to the public nature of court proceedings.
As is well known, all sorts of illegalities may take place behind closed
doors, and a closed trial is itself an illegal act ( article 3 of the constitution
and article 18 of the RSFSR criminal code). It is unlikely that the works
of writers constitute a crime against the state.
In the past illegal acts of the government cost the lives and freedom
of millions of Soviet citizens. It is easier to sacrifice one day of peace
than to suffer the consequences of unchecked arbitrary authority for years
to come.
Citizens have the means to struggle against judicial arbitrariness:
public meetings, during which one well-known slogan is chanted: " We demand
an open trial for ( insert the names of the defendants), " or is displayed
on placards. Any shouts or placards going beyond the limits of a strict
observance of legality are definitely dangerous and may possibly serve
as a provocation. They must be stopped by the participants in the meeting
themselves.
It is essential that everything be orderly during the meeting. At the
first official request to disperse, it is necessary to disperse after having
informed the authorities of the purpose of the meeting.
You are invited to a public meeting on December 5 and six o'clock in
the evening at Pushkin Square near the statue of the poet. Invite two more
citizens using the text of this plea.'
The author of this leaflet and a remarkable man in many respects was
Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin....... Those who belonged to the same age and
social group as Volpin did not support the idea of a demonstration, and
many tried to dissuade him from it. Young outsiders from the SMOGists and
their friends helped distribute the leaflets. Three of these were detained:
the sixteen year old school girl Yuliya Vishnevskaya, twenty-four year
old Vladimir Bukofsky, and nineteen year old Leonid Grubanov. They were
all hidden away in a psychiatric ward. Vishnevskaya and Grubanov were released
after a month, but Bukofsky was held for about eight months."
It comes as no surprise to this author that the members of Volpin's
social group, 43-year old academic mathematicians, gave him no support,
but that he was enthusiastically supported by SMOG ,a group of teen-agers
inspired by the beat movement in poetry. (Bukofsky's account of his ordeal
in the psychiatric hospital makes for fascinating reading - like the rest
of his book. )
Events moved swiftly after that: On the 16th of September, 1966, two
laws directly threatening the civil rights of Soviet citizens were passed
- already a marked divergence from the promulgation of excellent laws protecting
those rights which were systematically ignored. Evidently the strategy
of legality was already beginning to make its mark. These were:
Article 190- 1, providing sentences from 1 to 3 years, and/or a fine
of 100 rubles, for criticizing the Soviet state or social system.
Article 190- 3 , providing identical sentencing for the formation of
groups or organizations without the approval of the government.
This was too much even for the prominent intelligentsia, people like
Sakharov, Romm and Shostakovich, who with several others, co-authored a
letter to the government protesting these laws. Volpin expressed similar
reservations.
The Trial Of The Four
" But why do you, state, feed on people
Why has the fatherland become a cannibal?" - V. Khlebnikov
In February, 1966, after the sentencing of Sinyavski and Daniel ( 7
and 5 years at hard labor), Alexander Ginzburg compiled the "White Book",
an informal transcript of this trial which was smuggled out to the West.
For this his co-workers, Galanskov, Dobrovolsky, Lashkova and Radziesky
were arrested in January, 1967. Radziesksy was released in a few days after
turning state's evidence. Ginzburg was arrested a year later. The trial
of Galanskov, Ginzburg, Dobrovolsky and Lashkova has become known as "The
trial of the four".
In February of 1967, V. Khaustov, and in August Bukofsky, Delaunay
and Kushev were arrested for organizing protests against these arrests.
Ginzburg's arrest in February, 1968, was coordinated with a tidal wave
of repressive measures taken against all persons involved in protests related
to the trial and condemnation of Sinyavski and Daniel. The following is
from the Chronicle of Current Events, the amazingly thorough and accurate
chronicle, compiled and distributed by civil rights activists, of all human
rights violations by the Soviet government throughout the 60's and 70's:
" On 14 February A.S. Volpin was taken from his home by the police
and the duty psychiatrist of the Leningrad district [of Moscow] , Albert
Matyukov. The reason given was that Volpin had not reported for a long
time to the psychiatric out-patients' department where he was registered,
[ (!!! ) - What potential for black humor ! ] - ( and to which he had not
once been summoned during the past four years.) He was put in ward 3 of
the Kaschenko hospital, where he was roughly handled by the ward supervisor
A.A. Kazarnovsky, and the house doctor, Leon Khristoforovich.. On 16 February,
on an order signed by I. K. Yanushevsky, chief psychiatrist of Moscow,
Volpin was transferred to the No. 5 hospital at Stolbovaya Station, fifty
kilometers from Moscow. (this is a hospital mainly for chronically ill
patients and for petty criminals sent for compulsory treatment). ..Only
after an appeal addressed to the USSR Minister of Health, Academician B.V.
Petrovsky, initially by Academicians A.N. Kholmogorov and P.S. Aleksandrov
and then by a further ninety-nine academics...... was some improvement
made in Volpin's situation....
.....The only official basis for such actions could be the instruction
'On the immediate hospitalization of mentally ill persons who constitute
a danger to society' ... In the first place, however, this is only official
and not legal, since the very fact of compulsory hospitalization conflicts
with articles 58-60 of the Russian Criminal Code, according to which compulsory
measures of a medical nature are prescribed by a court. Moreover, the hospitalization
of 'socially dangerous' persons directly conflicts with a fundamental principle
of legality- that of the presumption of innocence, since it is a person
who has actually committed an offense who is recognized as socially dangerous
and this can only be decided by a court verdict.
Secondly, even this rather cruel and illegal instruction was flagrantly
disregarded..... " (Chronicle of Current Events, No. I, 30, April 1968.)
The citation goes on to list the numerous infractions of legality in
the incarceration of both Volpin and Natalya Gorbanevskaya, first editor
of the Chronicle of Current Events. She was imprisoned again in August
for her participation in the demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
She is the author of "Red Square at Noon" and now, like so many of the
actors of these dramatic times, now lives in the West.
Now the heads began to roll even in the elite and relatively protected
world of the scientific academies : every single signer of the petition
to free Volpin was subject to some kind of harassment: demotions, cuts
in salary, loss of employment, the acquiring of non-person status, ( A
peculiarity of the Soviet system . A good description is given in the biography
of the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya) , and in some cases, such as that
of Yuri Shikanovich , arrest . It also seems to have been the occasion
for the launching of a new campaign of anti-Semitism directed against scientific
professionals.
Volpin was quietly released in May of 1968. The government's zeal in
stamping out all of the consequences of the Sinyavski-Daniel trial seemed
to have spent itself, not to flare up again until August 1968, when a new
round of trials began, of persons connected with the demonstrations in
Pushkin Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
On November 11, 1970, Volpin , together with the physicists Valery
Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, announced the formation of the Committee
for Human Rights in the Soviet Union. It seems to have been primarily an
organization of scientists: Sakharov joined it, as did Orlov and Shaferevich,
all physicists. It committed a blunder by antagonizing Solzhenitsyn through
including him in its membership without asking for his permission. Eventually,
too, Sakharov and Shaferevich were turned off by its excessively legalistic
bias , while they were more pre-disposed to direct action. Despite these
differences, it did a lot of good work in the 3 years of its existence,
compiling reports on the mistreatment of deported minorities, the right
to travel, to live wherever one wished, or to emigrate, and on the mistreatment
of persons confined in the psychiatric hospitals.
By the year 1970, Volpin had spent 6 of his 48 years in prisons , and
about as many years in special psychiatric hospitals. In their fanatical
determination to break his uncompromising spirit of rebellion, the Soviet
authorities seem to have rather created, ( from their point of view), a
monster. Evidence of the incurable character of Volpin's mental illness
is seen in the fact that he alone, among all the dissidents who were allowed
to emigrate to the West, gave a farewell speech from the window of his
train, stressing the importance of campaigning for the right to return.
An Invidious Comparison
" It is well-known that the majority of those who protested re-Stalinization
and the "trial of four" in 1968 were scientists" ( Alexeyeva, pg. 307)
It is instructive, and extremely embarrassing, to contrast the reaction
of the Russian scientific establishment to the events of the 60's and 70's,
with that of our own scientific establishment to the events of the same
period. During the periods of the civil rights movement and the Vietnamese
War, our established scientists, apart from a barren handful, did little
more than avail themselves of a fashionable rhetoric to condemn the actions
of our government. Our scientists never risked even 1% of the punitive
sanctions leveled against their Soviet colleagues; yet with a few notable
exceptions, they chose to invest the major part of their energies into
advancing their careers and feathering their own nests. A typical home-bred
'intellectual' might sign a petition calling for an end to the bombing
of Cambodia, then go around boasting about it for the next year.
Herein the pre- and post- Stalinists overlooked an important truth,
which they could have learned from us. It is pointless and self-defeating
to incarcerate, imprison or otherwise persecute elite professionals working
in the fields of scientific research, academic education and so forth.
There is a much better way to silence them: One first loads them down with
privileges, perks, prestige , status, economic security and comforts. It
is not hard to convince them that all of these things are indispensable
prerequisites for the extremely important work that they are doing for
the advancement of mankind and the betterment of society. Having done this,
one then threatens to withdraw these privileges, perks, etc.
They will shut up like clams.
Our scientific establishment is riddled with this kind of careerism.
Once in awhile someone may be turned down for some lucrative post because
he voices some unpopular political opinion, but it is usually the case
that the 'second best' job will allow him to live better than 99% of the
rest of the world.
But how many of them would have risked the demotion with a 50% cut
in salary that Sakharov earned in 1967 for writing a letter to Brezhnev?
Or the two decades or so that Israel Gelfand, one of the world's greatest
mathematicians, had to wait to be accepted into the Academy of Sciences,
because he signed the "petition of 90"? Or Orlov's years in prison for
his role in the Helsinki Watch Committees ? Or Bukofsky's dismissal from
the university, despite his heroic efforts to accomplish all of his scholastic
requirements? Or the ordeal of Zhores Medvedev, imprisoned for opposing
the insanity of Lysenkoism? Or the long, savage persecution of Petro Grigorenko?
(It is ironic that, although he was a decorated general when he developed
his very original path in the civil rights movement, he was a teacher of
Cybernetics at the Frunze Military Academy, and thus technically a scientist.
) . Or the repeated imprisonments of the mathematician, Revolt Pimenov?
Or the valiant struggle of the person depicted in these pages, the legalist
logician Alexander Yesenin-Volpin?
"The full impact of weapons research on American higher education cannot
be measured simply by federal and university budgets... In many disciplines,
the military set the paradigm for postwar American science.... the military-driven
technologies of the Cold War ...virtually redefined what it meant to be
a scientist or an engineer." (Stuart W. Leslie, "The Cold War and American
Science" )
It is foolish and wrong to ask people to go out and be martyrs. I would
not counsel anyone in that direction and I would not do it myself. I am
not asking that persons should die in labor camps like Yuri Galanskov or
Anatoly Marchenko. Or totally destroy their careers like Petro Grigorenko?
Or wander about, homeless vagabonds, for 20 years like Vladimir Bukofsky?
Or, like the poet Anatoly Lupynos , spend decades in the dreadful Dniepopetrovsk
Psychiatric Hospital for the crime of reciting a poem in which a single
line, taken out of context, could be interpreted as equating the Ukrainian
national flag with a cleaning rag.
I encourage you to examine the illuminating study by Stuart Leslie,
" The Cold War and the Military-Industrial Academic Complex", cited in
the Bibliography. Leslie concentrates on M.I.T. and Stanford, ( with some
attention given to Cal Tech) . His thesis is that the extensive funding
of our engineering schools by the Department of Defense and other military
agencies since 1946, has lead to the creation of several generations of
engineers and inventors unable to work in any other areas but those of
weapons research, development and production. One of the primary reasons
for the lightning advance of the Japanese in dominating the areas of domestic
and civilian technology must certainly be this, that most of our creative
engineers today are military engineers.
"[The Department of Defense] ' s share of the MIT engineering research
budget climbed back to 36 percent by 1984, accounting for 50 percent of
the sponsored support for electrical engineering, 46 percent for aeronautics,
and 18 percent for materials science. For some laboratories the figures
were higher..." ( Leslie, pg. 252)
And there is the wastefulness and destructiveness of the nuclear power
program. And the use of human guinea pigs in nuclear radiation experiments,
which has been known within the physics community for decades but which
is just "surfacing" ( how much irony can one pack into quotation marks?
) today. And the politics that ties together oil, weapons production, and
the balance of payments ( Ferment V, # 14." The Cripple Factor September
10th, 1989 ) which has led to one war already and is bound to lead to many
others. And , ( though I am an enthusiast of space exploration ) , the
cost-overruns and corruption of NASA. And many, many abuses in science
education in the schools ,and the formation of new generations of de-socialized,
morally anaesthetized scientists. (Ferment III, # 38 "The Schwarz Proposal"
April 15, 1986 )
How many scientists go to jail , for even one day, protesting scandals
like these ? How many accept a 50% cut in salary, a demotion down to janitor,
universally derogatory and ignorant coverage in the media, the hypocritical
disrespect of colleagues? The threat of not finding a job within their
narrow specialty?
But when renewed funding for the Supercollider project was killed in
Congress this year, the faces of physicists everywhere carried more injury
than those of Telegraph Avenue panhandlers who have been spurned in their
demands for quarters. One is supposed to believe that their objective was
nobler, not only nobler than panhandlers'
, but of the rest of us as well. What civilized being could dispute
the immense scientific advances to be achieved by this billion dollar boondoggle?
Yet the Supercollider was designed to make but a single experiment;
it is useless for anything else. That one experiment is, to discover the
Higgs boson which, by a certain theoretical model which is now fashionable
( but not with everyone - see Roger Penrose , NY Review of Books ,, October
21, 1993 : "Nature's Biggest Secret " ) unites all the forces of nature
. If it is not discovered, that does not mean that it does not exist. It
only means that the physicists will call for another trillion dollar boondoggle
to search for it again.
At the same time, because of the glamour of these unbelievably costly
projects using teams of hundreds of physicists , and high-tech deployments
over the size of several football stadiums, an large amount of important
low-cost research in physics, (and in all the other sciences) , has not
been funded over the past four decades. One should not be fooled by the
claim that persons outside the physics community don't have the technical
competence to judge the significance of their work. Technical language
is the first refuge of a sophist.
Think about it: how many real political organizers came out of our
scientific elite in the 60's? Ellsberg, certainly, Benjamin Spock, and
a number of elder statesmen like Linus Pauling and George Wald who never
risked more than some ignorant red-baiting in a small town local newspaper.
Can you imagine Richard Feynman marching for civil rights in Selma? Eugene
Wigner in the March on the Pentagon in 1967? Freeman Dyson in jail for
burning draft records in Baltimore?
And consider our one highly publicized MacDonald's Big Mac in the international
intellectual scene - Noam Chomsky! Sure he's done a few good things, but
how does he fare in the company of Shaferevich, Orlov, Shcharansky, Pimenov,
Chalidze, Shikanovich, Sakharov, Khaustov, Alikhanov, Volpin? Our "prime
rib of intellectual" never spent a day in jail, never lost a job, never
skipped a promotion, never took even a pay cut in his long and great radical
career! Our politicians are smarter than the Russians ones. Our Military-Industrial-Academic
complex keeps our scientists smothered in baby fat; and it is much loved
in return . It is really so easy for anyone to say, "I protest!" , as long
as he continues to dance around the fatted calf.
I could give many more examples of the close collaboration of American
science with the worst aspects of capitalism and imperialism, but this
would necessitate the researching and writing of another long article.
For the most part, their careers are bound up with the system, which from
their point of view gives them little to complain about. In the USSR, it
must be admitted that, for any scientist with the least bit of respect
for the scientific method, co-operation with the system was synonymous
with lunacy.
One should not, however, imagine that Russian physicists, by some miracle,
have any innate moral superiority over their counterparts here or in Western
Europe. Under Stalinism, the physics community was the only segment of
the entire society that was allowed even token freedom of speech. Stalin
was too much in need of their intellectual originality to muzzle them entirely
. They benefited from a grim moral trade - off: unlike writers, historians,
or even biologists, physicists could, within narrow limits, say what they
believed, provided that they continued to supply the motherland with bigger
and better H-bombs.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
12. Vladimir Bukovsky: "To Build A Castle"VIKING, 1977
13. Andrei Sakharov: "Memoirs"; KNOPF, 1990
14. Ludmilla Alexeyeva: "Soviet Dissent" WESLEYAN U.P. 1985
15. Valery Chalidze:" To Defend These Rights" RANDOM HOUSE , 1975
16. Max Hayward: "On Trial" W. MORROW 1991
17. Pavel Litvinov: "The Trial of the Four" VIKING 1972
18. Pavel Litvinov: "Demonstration in Pushkin Square" HAVILL 1969
19. Natalya Gorbanevskaya: "Red Square at Noon" WINSTON 1972
20. Yuri Orlov: "Dangerous Thoughts". W MORROW, 1991
21. George Reavey: "New Russian Poets1953-68" CALDER & BOYERS 1968
22. Martin Gilbert : "Shcharansky" VIKING, 1986
23. Petro Grigorenko: "Memoirs" tr. Whitney, W.W. NORTON, 1982
24. Stuart W, Leslie : "The Cold War and American Science"COLUMBIA
93
25. "Twentieth Century Russian Poetry- Silver and Steel" Selected by
Yevgeny Yevtushenko. DOUBLEDAY 1993
26. Seminar of Gennady Gorelik, historian of the Russian Academy of
Sciences , on Sakharov and the H-bomb, Boston University Philosophy &
History of Science Colloquium, January 20th, 1994