The Inconvenient Citizens

When Nikita Khrushchev opened the gates of Stalin's concentration camps and set free hordes of political prisoners, he proudly boasted that "only lunatics" could object to life in Russia. So it seemed only logical for Nikita to deal with the intellectual critics of his own regime by locking them up not in harsh prisons--but in lunatic asylums. As men in white coats largely replaced the policemen, hundreds of writers, artists and other outspoken objectors to Communism vanished from the Moscow scene, to reappear in psychiatric hospitals as "mental cases."

The first detailed account of this process is in Ward 7, a remarkable novel by Valeriy Tarsis, which was smuggled out of Russia last year and has now been published in London. It is at once a searing indictment of the Communist system and an eloquent witness to the fervor for freedom that nearly 50 years of Marxist indoctrination have not been able to extinguish.

One Patient. Tarsis' book is, in fact, more a documentary than a novel, for its hero. Valentine Almazov, and Author Tarsis are one and the same. Al mazov, a writer, is being treated in Ward 7 of a large Moscow mental hospital for the anti-state offense of smuggling manuscripts to the West. Tarsis himself spent six months in Kashchenko psychiatric hospital in 1962 and 1963 for sending The Bluebottle, a novel portraying the plight of intellectuals in Khrushchev's Russia, to a British publisher via a tourist. When he was released, Tarsis, now 59, went right to work on the story of his remarkable experience. Ward 7, which Tarsis insisted on having published under his real name, is the result.

Ward 7's Almazov finds that among the 150 men in the ward, there is just one "genuine patient," the only one who is the "victim of anything except his lot as a Soviet citizen." The rest of the inmates fall into three categories: 1) "the failed suicides, classified as lunatics because it was assumed (by doctors and politicians, writers and ideologists) that anyone dissatisfied with the socialist paradise must be a lunatic"; 2) the "Americans"--Russians who had tried to get in touch with a foreign embassy or with tourists, usually to emigrate; and 3) "the less clearly defined category of young people who had failed to find their proper place in our society and who rejected all [Soviet] standards."

The Yardstick. Both the inmates and the hospital staff well knew "there were neither patients nor doctors but only jailers in charge of inconvenient citizens." As Almazov explains to a bewildered new arrival: "The reason you and I and all of us here are persecuted is that we don't conform, we haven't the mentality of serfs."

Unlike Chekhov's Ward 6 in the clas sic of that name, from which Tarsis drew his title and which was an attack on the abysmal physical conditions in Czarist asylums. Ward 7 seemed almost heaven to some of the inmates by comparison with the wretchedness of Russian life outside. "Personally I'm very happy," explained one of them to Almazov: "I'm fed. I'm clothed. Nobody preaches Communism at me. Do you realize? No propaganda, and you can say what you like! Where else can you do that?"

Almazov heaps contempt on such a "vegetable" response to imprisonment. Instead, "he--like all the more sensible of his compatriots--possessed an inexhaustible spring of life in himself: his imagination, which had sustained him throughout the darkest years of his country's captivity, kept before him, day and night, the vision of the full, untrammeled, seething life in the free world. For him as for his friends, the yardstick of beauty was freedom." Personal freedom, he says, "is the one unarguable good on earth. The Communists have put forward another: not man, but the collectivity, not the individual, but the herd. What the West and the whole free world are trying to prevent is man being turned back into a communized, anthropomorphic ape."

Not the Ape. Like his real-life counterpart, Almazov had once been a fervent party member, until he realized that "so far from being socialist, the system that had finally become established in Russia was a particularly vicious form of fascism." Through one of the youthful patients, Tarsis bitterly asks: "What is Communism?" His answer: "The apotheosis of drabness, the negation of personality, life on semolina gruel in a one-room flat with a bathroom-lavatory and a combination divan-bed-cupboard-desk-bookcase!"

For Almazov, however, the curse of Communism upon the land he loves bites much deeper. "There has never been anything like it in the world, and I want to forget it, force it never to have been, for fear of cursing my country, the mother who gave me birth on an autumn day in Kiev." But his hope is as large as his grief: "I firmly believe that man will triumph, and not the ape. I believe that Russia will enter the new century liberated and renewed in spirit, and that by then. Communism will only be a nursery bogey to frighten our grandchildren." As Tarsis proclaims through another character: "Haven't you noticed there are more and more of us? We are thousands today, we'll be millions tomorrow. We don't advertise our presence, but we are there. We'll get together and we'll light such a blaze that no policeman on earth can put us out."

Nearly as remarkable as Tarsis' courage is the fact that the author apparently has gone unpunished for his latest literary sin; at last report, he was living with his wife and daughter in a Moscow flat--and continuing to write. A further sign of the post-Khrushchev leadership's gentler treatment of artists and writers was the scheduled departure for Italy last week of controversial Poet Evgeny Evtushenko, who plans a month's poetry-reading tour. It was the first time he had been allowed outside the Soviet Union since 1963, when he roamed through France and West Germany, delighting Western literary circles with his outspoken views, or, as the Kremlin later put it, his "cheap sensationalism."

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