Russians finally examine the gulag years
By Michael Johnson
Michael Johnson, a former Moscow correspondent, is at work on a history of the Soviet dissidents.

Are the Russians finally ready to face the horrors of their history during the years of the gulag? If television ratings can be believed, it would appear so.

One of the great novels of the 20th century, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle", drew large audiences during is 10 episodes on Russian state television recently. The novel was banned when it appeared in 1968 during my posting there as an AP reporter, and, although long since available in book form, was thought to be irrelevant to modern Russia.

But suddenly here it is, broadcast to great acclaim. The first installment, according to the New York Times, held the nation in thrall, even attracting a larger audience than "Terminator 3" that ran against it on another channel. It lost some viewers in later episodes but continued to score high ratings.

Several other once-banned works, including Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago", are coming to Russian television in the next few months.

What makes this so important is the truism that remembering history might help us avoid repeating it.

Russian dissidents, mostly writers and scientists, seemed until now to have lost their place in their country's history as greater events subsumed them. Furthermore, their values such as democratic governance come fourth or fifth in pollsters' lists of priorities among the general population. Employment, food and political stability naturally score higher.

Even in the West - except for academic specialists - we pay too little attention to the swings in Russia's momentous recent history. A couple of years ago, I conducted an informal poll among university graduates in London to see who could remember how the Soviet Union came apart. Most of them had heard of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin but Solzhenitsyn? He was unknown and unread. One history graduate student, 30 years old, couldn't understand the name. She asked: "Soldier who? Soldier Nitsin?"

Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov, known as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, died in 1989 after decades of KGB harassment and a brief role as a Soviet parliamentarian under Gorbachev. But to many of the educated younger set in the West he might as well have never existed. Leading dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky, Valery Chalidze, Alexander Yesenin-Volpin and Pavel Litvinov have all slipped from the public scene.

Edward Kline covers the era in his well-documented recent book translated into Russian by Lev Timofeyev, "The Moscow Human Rights Commttee" (Moskovskii komitet prav cheloveka), Izadelstvo "Prava cheloveka".

But it is Sakharov who deserves the most attention, for he brought gravitas to the ragtag dissident movement and he worried the authorities like no one else. His widow, Dr. Elena Bonner, now lives in Boston and continues her work on his papers, a great legacy from a major human rights defender.

Yale University Press also deserves credit for continuing its series on "The Annals of Communism", a recent volume of which sheds new light on the Sakharov case. "The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov" provides the first English language translation of 146 KGB memos detailing the activities of Sakharov and Dr. Bonner during the tense days of the movement in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

I have read the memos and was struck by the degree to which KGB prose resembled the thinking of any supreme authority. While grammatically impeccable, even intelligent, on the surface, every fact is selected and shaded, every event stretched to fit the case against the subject under scrutiny.

There are lessons here for any society in danger of creating excessive police powers by default or design.

The KGB memos are constructed with carefully wrought logic, dense information and a collection of wooden euphemisms. At one point, summing up the Sakharov problem, the KGB explained deadpan that Sakharov "does not enjoy the trust of the investigative organs, since his personal behavior does not correspond to the norms of our society".

This book puts to rest the contention by some analysts that the Soviet dissident movement was a minor irritant controlled by routine police action. We did not know it at the time, but this book makes it clear that the movement was the talk of the Communist Party Central Committee and the Politburo. Most of these memos went to the Central Committee.

Reading this material, and the excellent commentary by editors Joshua Rubinstein and Alexander Gribanov, one begins to understand the extent of telephone taps, postal intercepts and physical surveillance that were employed to detect signs of ideological drift in the Soviet population.

Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB at the time, kept the pressure up at Politburo level, arguing that it would be a mistake to "renounce the criminal prosecution of people who oppose the Soviet system". He got his way most of the time, and his men temporarily subdued the movement in the 1970s with a wave of arrests and expulsions.

Rubenstein pinpoints Sakharov's moment of truth as early as July 1961 when his warnings against atmospheric atomic testing went unheeded by Party Chairman Nikita Khrushchev. Sakharov later acknowledged that he felt bitter, humiliated, impotent and ashamed by being ignored on such a crucial issue. Five years later he made his first appearance at an unauthorized public demonstration and the KGB never let him out of their sight again.

"Over the next decade," Rubenstein writes, "Sakharov stood vigil outside closed courtrooms, wrote appeals on behalf of more than 200 individual prisoners and continued to write carefully composed essays about the need for democratisation."

I was part of a crowd of Western journalists standing vigil when he made his first courtroom appearance in support of a group of accused dissidents, the appeal hearing of Eduard Kuznetsov and his fellow would-be hijackers. We all felt a frisson as this great man emerged into the snowdrifts around the courthouse to announce to us that Kuznetsov's death sentence had been reprieved. The movement had just been elevated to new heights.

Perhaps Russian television will get around to the Sakharov story one day. It is stranger than fiction.