Soviet Dissent: Genesis and Heirs

The writers in happier times. Back row: Larisa Bogoraz, Marina Domshlak-Gerchuk, Maria Rozanova-Sinyavskaya, Andrei Sinyavsky. Front row: Yuli Daniel and Yuri Gerchuk.

Каждый пишет, что он слышит.
Каждый слышит, как он дышит.
Как он дышит, так и пишет, не стараясь угодить.
Так природа захотела. Почему – не наше дело.
Для чего – не нам судить.

Everyone writes what he hears.
Everyone hears his own breath.
He breathes the same way he writes, not trying to please.
It’s simply as nature intended. Ours is not to ask why.
The why is not for us to judge.

Bulat Okudzhava, “I’m Writing a Historical Novel”

Fifty years ago, on February 10, 1966, a four-day trial in Moscow brought a decisive end to the Soviet Union’s cultural Thaw. Yet it also initiated a generation of societal upheaval and spawned a dissident movement that would change everything. For a time, at least.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, two authors and friends, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, began separately sending their short stories abroad to be published. Sinyavsky wrote under the pseudonym Abram Tertz, Daniel under the name Nikolai Arzhak. Their stories were satirical, fantastical, and avowedly anti-Stalinist (in Daniel’s “This is Moscow Speaking,” a Public Murder Day is announced over the radio; Sinyavsky’s “The Trial Begins,” dealt with the Doctor’s Plot). While neither publishing abroad nor the use of pseudonyms was illegal, “slandering the Soviet state... with the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime” was. The authorities were serving notice that they no longer recognized the separation between authors and their literary characters, and henceforth the characters’ creators would be held criminally responsible.

“It became a clear watershed between Khrushchev’s Thaw and Brezhnev’s stagnation,” said Nina Khrushcheva, great granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, who had been ousted in 1964. “For the first time, writers were prosecuted for the views of their fictional characters, and that was a great shock to society, which saw it as an end to liberalization and an attempt to return to Stalinism, even though these attempts were not voiced until the late 1960s.”

Outside the Soviet Union, the trial was met with virtually unanimous condemnation, even from European leftist parties and other staunch supporters of Soviet communism. It ushered in a wave of political dissidence throughout the Eastern Bloc, the rise of Soviet counterculture and samizdat, and, several years thereafter, the seminal moment in human rights known as the Helsinki Final Act. Yet the pushback took time to develop.

Yuri Feofanov, the Izvestia journalist who covered the proceedings (foreign press was not allowed in, but family members smuggled out notes to The New York Times) and later co-wrote a book about Russia’s landmark trials, recalled that the government held enormous sway over public opinion. “The concept of ‘enemy’ was deeply rooted in public morals and even now has an impact on popular legal consciousness,” Feofanov wrote in 1995. “People in the Brezhnev times who rebelled against the system were courageous and principled, but only a small portion of the public felt any sympathy for them.”

It took the KGB a few years to discover the true identities of Tertz and Arzhak, but Sinyavsky and Daniel were finally arrested on September 12 and 13, 1965. The news of their detention broke in Europe about a month later, yet Soviet citizens didn’t find out anything until January 1966, when the press condemnations began. Brezhnev approved their prosecution after consulting with Konstantin Fedin, the elderly head of the Union of Writers, who perhaps saw a chance to settle a score with Sinyavsky, who had criticized him in an essay. The powers that be may have wanted to make an example of the writers. Instead they made them martyrs.

Daniel had published four stories abroad, and prosecutors used all four at trial, while only three of Sinyavsky’s illegal works factored into the indictment. As if the fact of the prosecution weren’t incredible enough, the writers shocked the court by pleading not guilty, an almost unheard-of act. Of course, a guilty verdict was a fait accompli. Only one defense witness was allowed, and no written statements for the defense were entered into evidence.

Sinyavsky and Daniel on trial.

Feofanov dutifully recounted the events for Izvestia with the requisite condemnation of the accused and florid paeans about the judge and the prosecutors. Of Sinyavsky and Daniel, he wrote, “their complete loss of civic, patriotic feelings has engendered a hatred for our state system… and for the lifestyle of the Soviet people.” Then he turned his attention to the proceedings. “The public accusers Arkady Vasiliev and Zoya Kedrina made their presentations. In the name of writers in general, they held up to shame the vile acts of the accused and demanded that the defendants be given severe sentences…

“The trial of the two turncoats was coming to an end. The time had come for them to pay.”

And pay they did. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years hard labor, Daniel to five. Both did their time in separate camps in Mordovia, where both fell ill within months. “Nothing… can justify the punishment that was handed down,” Feofanov wrote in 1995, when it had become safe to say such a thing about Russian justice.

The international repercussions were swift, among them ruptures with communist parties in the West. Yet what was most impressive was the domestic outcry from other writers and intellectuals: 63 members of the Union of Writers openly expressed their outrage in a letter to the Communist Party; 25 intellectuals addressed an open letter to Brezhnev. But of course such sympathies were not universal. The loyalist writer Mikhail Sholokhov called the duo “werewolves” and “thugs with a black conscience” who would have been far worse off in an earlier era.

Daniel served out his full term and lived first in Kaluga and then in Moscow. He died there on December 31, 1988, not quite three years before the fall of the country that had taken his freedom. After six years in a labor camp, Sinyavsky immigrated to Paris and joined the faculty of the Sorbonne. He did live long enough to see the end of the Soviet Union, dying in 1997 at the age of 71. He is buried in France, and his son, Yegor Gran, carries on his legacy, having authored a dozen novels and writing a column for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

“Daniel died too early to have a widely known legacy except for the actual trial,” Khrushcheva said. “Since he didn’t emigrate, his body of work after the trial has not [become] very [widely] known. As for Tertz [Sinyavsky], I consider him one of the most important writers and philosophers of Russian culture, much in the Pyotr Chaadayev vein. In fact, I believe Tertz is so crucial to understanding Russia’s definition of itself I dedicated one of my books to him, Imagining Nabokov.”

The past is prologue, especially in Russia, and the threads laid down by the Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial became entwined in history’s unfolding.

When the Russian Federation hatched from its Soviet shell, it did so in an incubator constructed by Alexander Yakovlev, a politician whose disavowal of the old ways earned him the sobriquet Alexander the Liberator. Yet back in 1965, Yakovlev had projected the same stance as Feofanov and Sholokhov, and he had a key role in the trial.

“As the deputy head of the propaganda department, he organized the disinformation campaign around the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel,” wrote David Satter in It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway. “He determined in detail how the trial would be covered, who would be allowed in, and what they could write.”

Nonetheless, Yakovlev went on to criticize Russian nationalism in the early 1970s, for which he was “banished” to the ambassadorship of Canada. Ironically, it was in this post that, in 1983, he accompanied rising party luminary Mikhail Gorbachev during his tour of Canada. During a three-hour hiatus on the tour, the two bared their souls about how the Soviet state needed to be reformed, and they found much in common.

Yakovlev was recalled from his Canadian exile and became the “godfather” and architect of Gorbachev’s reforms – and one of the few to predict the August 1991 coup, which came two days after he was ousted from the Communist Party by conservatives.

But this historical link to the Sinyavsky-Daniel Trial does not end there. A decade after the coup, Yakovlev told a Russian journalist that “there is no future for Russia unless we learn a simple lesson: If you sin, you have to repent.” In the 1990s and 2000s, Yakovlev was an active member of the opposition, head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, and an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin’s antidemocratic reforms. He died in 2005. Two years earlier, he told Satter that people often deny having committed crimes or having anything to repent for:

“I say to such a person, ‘You voted?’ He says, ‘I voted.’ You did not object?’ ‘I did not object.’ ‘You attended meetings?’ ‘I attended meetings.’ ‘This means you participated and should repent.’ In the final analysis, this is the only path to a new future for this tortured country.”

Seven years after Yakovlev’s death, three Russian musicians were tried on a charge of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” for staging a brief anti-Putin rant in Savior’s Cathedral. Two of the women in the band, Pussy Riot, went to prison. The third received a suspended sentence.

Liberal writer Dmitry Bykov drew a parallel with the 1966 trial, invoking Sinyavsky and Daniel by name. Gazeta.ru journalist Alexander Bratersky, however, disagreed with Bykov’s assessment. “A full-on comparison like that is not at all correct,” he said. “Sinyavsky and Daniel were authors protesting censorship. The Pussy Riot [women] are jerks who offended religious believers with their behavior. That’s a horse of a different color. The harsh sentence only made them into icons.”

Yet there were echos of 1966 in 2012. To begin with, in both cases a huge groundswell of foreign support for the defendants and an outcry by some of the Soviet intelligentsia contrasted with widespread disdain among the domestic populace – mirroring Bratersky’s assessment. And in both cases the artists went beyond accepted norms to protest state impingement, and the state struck back vigorously, prosecuting the artists for an intangible, antisocial crime so as not to have to grapple with the message of their artistic expression. Since 2012, artists who stray from the “mainstream” have endured repeated crackdowns and retaliatory actions.

Notably, it was also in 2012 that President Putin signed a law recriminalizing libel and slander, less than one year after his anointed placeholder, Dmitry Medvedev, had signed a law revoking such criminality. That same year, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights ruled that criminalization of libel violates freedom of expression and is inconsistent with Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Comparing the Sinyavsky-Daniel and Pussy Riot cases, one sees the evolution of where legality and morality overlap in the popular consciousness. A profane anti-establishment musical performance, even nowadays, marks the artists as reprobates, whereas Sinyavsky and Daniel are judged in the light of post-Soviet morality and considered heroic examples of civil disobedience. As writers, Sinyavsky and Daniel were heirs to a tradition that has conferred on great scribes the stature of being the people’s moral compass. Their profession afforded them a certain moral gravitas that has accrued in hindsight. It is easy to forget that this is not how most of the public thought of them back in 1966.

“Their sacrifice was that they were the first victims of a wave of repression of a new type,” Feofanov wrote. “They conducted themselves with dignity, given the circumstances that prevailed in the court and in the society as a whole… But would I personally, to myself, have thus evaluated their behavior (back then)? No… On a moral plane, I considered them unquestionably culpable.”

The first victims of recent crack-downs are harder to identify, because the artistic playing field is now so vast and amorphous. Furthermore, the creative class of today produces in an environment of heightened crass commercialism, which looks askance on idealist notions of the creator’s craft.

“There are no actual dissidents, and the creative class is more driven by fame and money,” said Khrushcheva. Of course there are notable exceptions, like Bykov, Vladimir Voinovich and Boris Akunin, to name a few of the more prominent writers who have made principled stands against the state. But a few gadflies are hardly a match for repeated and relentless appeals to the statist ethic, an emotional magnet that authorities have exerted repeatedly since tsarist times.

And there is something else. In his statement during the trial, Daniel defended his actions as an attempt to warn of the revival of Stalinism (in Brezhnevist form) that does not seem out of place today, 50 years on:

“I – and not only I, but any person who thought seriously about the situation in our country – was convinced that a new cult of personality was about to be established... I saw all the symptoms: there was again one man who knew everything, again one person was being exalted, again one person was dictating his will to agricultural experts, artists, diplomats and writers. Again we saw one single name in the newspapers and on posters, and every utterance of this person, however crude or trivial, was again being held up to us as a revelation as the quintessence of wisdom...” RL